He hadn’t seen the old woman since Luna, but he could picture her. Her grandmotherly face and contempt-filled eyes. She projected a weariness and amusement as part of being ruthless, and he could tell Bobbie liked her. More, that she trusted her.
“In the meantime, you stay out of trouble. You’re no good to anybody dead. And if that idiot Holden’s plucking another thread in the same knot, God alone knows how he’ll fuck it up. So. Report in when you can.”
The recording ticked and went silent.
“Well,” Alex said. “She sounds the same as ever.”
“Give her that,” Bobbie agreed. “She’s consistent.”
Alex turned his couch to look back at her. Bobbie made hers look small, even though it was the same size as his own. The pinnace was doing a fairly gentle three-quarter-g burn. Over twice the pull of Mars, but Bobbie still trained for full g just the way she had when she was an active duty marine. He’d offered less in deference to her wounds, but she’d just laughed. Still, he didn’t need to burn hard.
“So when you said you were working with her?” Alex said, trying not to make it sound like an accusation. “How different is that from working for her?”
Bobbie’s laugh was a cough. “I don’t get paid, I guess.”
“Except for the ship.”
“And other things,” Bobbie said. Her voice was carefully upbeat in a way that meant she’d practiced hiding her discomfort. “She’s got a lot of ways to sneak carrots to me when she wants to. My job is with veterans’ outreach. This other stuff…”
“Sounds complicated.”
“It is,” Bobbie said. “But it all needs doing, and I’m in a position to do it. Makes me feel like I matter, so that’s something. Still miss being who I was, though. Before.”
“A-fucking-men,” Alex said. The lift of her eyebrows told him he’d said more than he’d meant to. “It’s not that I don’t love the Roci. She’s a great ship, and the others are family. It’s just… I don’t know. I came to it out of watching a lot of people I knew and kind of liked get blown up. Could have lived without that.”
Bobbie’s expression went calm, focused, distant. “You still dream about it sometimes?”
“Yeah,” Alex drawled. It felt like confession. “You?”
“Less than I used to. But sometimes. I’ve sort of come to peace with it.”
“Really?”
“Well, at least I’m more comfortable with the idea that I won’t come to peace with it. That’s kind of the same thing.”
“You miss being a marine?”
“I do. I was good at it.”
“You couldn’t go back?”
“Nope.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Me neither.”
“The Navy, you mean?”
“Any of it. Things change, and they don’t change back.”
Bobbie’s sigh was like agreement. The vast emptiness between Mars and the Belt, between the two of them and the distant stars, was an illusion made by curved screens and good exterior cameras. The way the space contained their voices was more real. The two of them were a tiny bubble in a sea immeasurably greater than mere oceans. It gave them permission to casually discuss things that Alex normally found hard to talk about. Bobbie herself was in that halfway space between a stranger and a shipmate that let him trust her but not feel a responsibility to protect her from what he thought and felt. The days out from Mars to Hungaria were like sitting at a bar, talking to someone over beer.
He told her his fears about Holden and Naomi’s romance and the panic attacks he’d had on the way back to Earth from New Terra. The times he’d killed someone, and the nightmares that eventually replaced the guilt. The stories about when his father died, and his mother. The brief affair he’d had while he was flying for the Navy and the regret he still felt about it.
For her part, Bobbie told him about her family. The brothers who loved her but didn’t seem to have any idea who or what she was. The attempts she’d made at dating since she’d become a civilian, and how poorly they’d gone. The time she’d stepped in to keep her nephew from getting involved with the drug trade.
Rather than trying to fold into the bunk, Bobbie slept in her couch. Out of unspoken solidarity, Alex did the same. It meant they wound up on the same sleep cycle. Bad for rotating watches, good for long meandering conversations.
They talked about the rings and the protomolecule, the rumors Bobbie had heard about the new kinds of metamaterials the labs on Ganymede were discovering based on observation of the Ring and the Martian probes reverse engineering what had happened on Venus. In the long hours of comfortable silence, they ate the rations that they’d packed and watched the scopes as the other ships went on their own ways: a pair of prospectors making for an unclaimed asteroid, the little flotilla escorting the Martian prime minister to Luna, a water hauler burning back out toward Saturn to gather ice for Ceres Station, making up for all the oxygen and hydrogen humanity had used spinning the rock into the greatest port city in the Belt. The tracking system generated tiny dots from the transponder data; the actual ships themselves were too small and far away to see without magnification. Even the high albedo of the Hungaria cluster only meant the sensor arrays picked them up a little easier. Alex wouldn’t have identified that particular centimeter of star-sown sky as being different from any other if the ship hadn’t told him.
The intimacy of the Razorback and shortness of the trip was like a weekend love affair without the sex. Alex wished they’d thought to bring a few bottles of wine.
The first sign that they weren’t alone came when they were still a couple hundred thousand klicks out from Hungaria. The Razorback’s external sensors blinked and flashed, the proximity reading dancing in and out. Alex closed down the false stars and pulled up tactical and sensor data in their place.
“What’s the matter?” Bobbie asked.
“Unless I’m reading this wrong, this is the time when a military ship would be telling us that someone out there’s painting us.”
“Targeting lasers?”
“Yup,” Alex said, and a creeping sensation went up his spine. “Which is a mite more provocative than I’d have expected.”
“So there is a ship out here that’s gone dark.”
Alex flipped through the databases and matching routines, but it was just standard procedure. He hadn’t expected to find anything and he didn’t.
“No transponder signal. I think we’ve found the Pau Kant. I mean, assuming we can find her. Let’s just see what we see.”
He started a sensor sweep going in a ten-degree arc and popped open the comms for an open broadcast. “Hey out there. We’re the private ship Razorback out of Mars. Couldn’t help noticing you’re pointing a finger at us. We’re not looking for any trouble. If you could see your way to answering back, it’d ease my mind.”
The Razorback was a racing ship. A rich kid’s toy. In the time it took her system to identify the ship that was targeting them, the Roci would have had the dark ship’s profile and specs and a target lock of her own just to make the point. The Razorback chimed that the profile data had been collected and matches were being sought. For the first time since they’d left Mars, Alex felt a profound desire for the pilot’s chair in the Rocinante.
“They’re not answering,” Bobbie said.
“They’re not shooting either,” Alex said. “As long as they think we’re just some yahoo out joyriding, we’ll be fine. Probably.”
Bobbie’s couch hissed on its gimbals as she shifted her weight. She didn’t believe it either. The moments stretched. Alex opened the channel again. “Hey out there, unidentified ship. I’m going to cut thrust here until I hear from you. I’m just letting you know so I don’t startle anyone. I’d really appreciate a ping back, just so we all know we’re good here. No offense meant.”
He cut the drive; the grip of acceleration gravity loosened its hold on him. The gel of the couch launched him gently against his restraints. He could feel his heartbeat in h
is neck. It was going fast.
“They’re deciding what to do about us,” Bobbie said.
“That’s my guess too.”
“Taking them a while.”
The Razorback announced a visual match, but it wasn’t with the data Holden had sent them. The ship with its sights on them wasn’t any of the colony ships that had gone missing out in the gates. With an eighty-nine percent certainty, it was a Martian naval corvette, floating dark. Behind him, Bobbie saw the same thing and drew the same conclusions.
“Well,” she said. “Fuck.”
Profile match completed, the Razorback returned to its scanning arc. Another passive contact. If the corvette was the Pau Kant, it wasn’t out here alone. And then two more. And then six. The Razorback picked the nearest one and cheerfully started matching its profile. By reflex, Alex went to activate his point defense cannons. Only, of course, he didn’t have any.
“Maybe they’ll talk,” Bobbie said. He could hear it in her voice that she didn’t expect them to. He didn’t either. Half a second later, the Razorback announced two fast-movers coming from the corvette.
He spun the pinnace away from the missiles and punched the drive. The couch slammed into his back like a blow. Behind him, Bobbie grunted. With a mental apology to her, he pushed them to ten g, and the pinnace leaped forward eagerly.
It wasn’t going to be enough.
As light as the Razorback was, the missiles were an order of magnitude less mass to accelerate. And they didn’t carry anything as fragile as a human body. They could pull a much heavier burn and close the gap to target in a matter of hours. He didn’t have countermeasures to shoot them down, and there was nothing to hide behind. He didn’t even have a load of cargo to drop out the back in hopes the missiles might blunder into it.
His vision started to narrow, darkening at the edges and dancing gold and fractured in the center. He felt the couch’s needles slide into his thighs and neck, the juice like pouring ice water into his veins. His heart labored and he was fighting to breathe, but his vision was clear. And his mind. He had to think. His ship was fast, as ships went, but nothing compared to a missile. There was no cover he could reach in time, and if the missiles were half as good as the ship that fired them, they’d be able to guide themselves right up his drive cone, no matter what he tried to huddle behind.
He could run away, draw the attackers into a line behind him, and then drop core. The vented fusion reaction would probably take out at least the first one. Maybe more. But then they’d be on the float, and at the mercy of a second volley.
Well. A bad plan was better than no plan at all. His finger twitched on the controls. The layout was unfamiliar and the fear that he was coding in the wrong information just because he wasn’t on his own damned boat was like a stake in his heart.
Bobbie grunted. He wasn’t strong enough to look back at her. He hoped it wasn’t pain. High g wasn’t a good thing for someone who’d had a bunch of holes pushed through her recently. He told himself it was just the needles feeding her the juice.
An alert popped onto his screen from Bobbie’s console. PRIME MINISTER. GUARD SHIPS.
Between the drugs and the panic and the compromised blood flow in his brain, it took Alex a few seconds to understand what she meant. The Razorback didn’t have point defense cannons or interceptor missiles, but the flotilla heading for Luna did. Alex pulled the data into the plotting system. There was no way they could reach the Martian ships before the missiles caught up with them, but it was just possible – barely – to get inside the range of their antimissile defenses. If he turned course now. If the Martians figured out what was going on and launched almost immediately. And the burn was going to be at the outer limit of what he or Bobbie could handle.
Almost without thinking, he engaged the maneuvering thrusters and the crash couches clicked to match the new vector. The missiles seemed to leap closer, correcting for the new course and anticipating where the pinnace would be. He sent an emergency signal, broadcast on all standard frequencies, and hoped whoever saw it on the flotilla was a quick thinker. The two spheres – time-to-collision and Martian antimissile range – didn’t overlap, but there were only a few hundred klicks between them. Barely an eyeblink at their relative speeds. He shifted to medical control and switched Bobbie from juice to life support protocol.
Sorry, Bobbie, he thought. I’d warn you if I had time, but you’re gonna need to take a little nap if we don’t want you bleeding out. He watched her vital signs spike and then drop, her blood pressure and core temperature falling like a stone in the ocean. He pushed the ship to fifteen g.
His head hurt. He hoped he wasn’t having a stroke, but it’d be fair if he did. Sustained fifteen g was a stupid, suicidal thing to do. He felt the air pressed out of his chest under the weight of his ribs, his skin. The sound of his gasping was like gagging. But the spheres touched now. Minutes stretched. Then fast-movers from the Martian flotilla. It had taken damned long enough, but the defenses were on the way. He tried to type in a message, warning the Martians that there were more ships out there, a dark fleet. He couldn’t keep hold of the thought long enough to send it. His consciousness kept blinking, like the universe stuttering.
The medical system flashed up a warning, and he thought it was Bobbie, her old wounds reopening after all. But it was tagged for him. Something in his gut had ripped free. He canceled the alert and went back to watching death get closer.
They weren’t going to make it. The lead missile was too close. It was going to take out the Razorback before the rescuers could come. Hadn’t he had an idea about that? Something…
He wasn’t aware of changing course. His fingers just did it. The spheres didn’t touch anymore, until he switched to collision to track the second missile. Then, maybe. Maybe.
He waited. The lead missile closed. Five thousand kilometers. Four thousand. He vented the core.
Two hundred kilometers —
The crush of gravity vanished. The Razorback, still hurtling through space, stopped accelerating. Behind him, the lead missile died in the nuclear furnace of the rapidly diffusing core. The second missile jittered and turned to avoid the expanding cloud of superhot gas, and four lights burned before him, streaking across his screens so quickly he only knew them by their afterimages.
A fraction of a second later the Martian antimissile defenses destroyed the pursuing torpedo, but he had already lost consciousness.
Chapter Twenty-one: Naomi
“Bist bien, Knuckles?” Karal asked.
The thin, slapped-together galley was too big for so small a crew. Bad design, waste of space. It wasn’t worn; it was cheap. She looked at him from behind the veil of her hair and smiled. “Fine, things being,” she said, making a joke. “Como sa?”
Karal shrugged with his hands. His hair had gotten gray over the years. And the stubble of his beard. It had been as black as the space between the stars once.
He looked at her eyes and she didn’t flinch. “Something to say, me.”
“No secrets between us now,” she replied, and he laughed. She smiled back. The prisoner flirting with the turnkey, hoping a kind thought in his head would help her later. Maybe it would.
The thing that frightened her most was how well she knew how to play it. From the moment she’d come back to consciousness, she talked when people talked to her, laughed when someone told a joke. She acted like her abduction was just one of those things that happens, like using someone’s tools without asking first. She pretended to sleep. Ate as much as she could past the tightness in her gut. And they all treated her like she was the girl she’d been, like they could all ignore the years and the differences, fold her back in as though she’d never gone away. As if she’d never been anyone else. Hiding her fear and her outrage slipped back on so easily, it was as if she’d never stopped.
It made her wonder whether perhaps she hadn’t.
“So I was one,” he said. “Helped with Filipito. Took care.”
“Goo
d.”
“No,” Karal said. “Before that. Sometimes, he was with me.”
Naomi smiled. She’d been trying not to remember those desperate days after she’d told Marco she was leaving. The days after he’d taken Filip. To keep the boy safe, he’d said. Until she got her emotions under control, he’d said. A knot filled her throat, but she smiled past it.
“Those days. You had him?”
“Immer, no. But sometimes. Hijo moved, yeah? Night here, two nights there.”
Her baby passed around among the people she knew. The manipulation of it was brilliant. Marco using his child as a marker of how much trust he placed in them and at the same time painting her as the crazed one. The dangerous one. Making sure the story in their community was about how solid he was and how close to cracked she’d come. She had the sudden powerful memory of Karal looking in from the kitchen while she broke down in his wife’s arms. Souja, her name had been. What must her tears and profanity have looked like to him then?
“Kept it quiet,” Naomi said, “and I wouldn’t have known. So why say it here?”
Karal’s hands shrugged again. “New day. New start. Looking to scrape off some old rust.”
She tried to read from his face whether that was true, or if this was just another little cruelty in a form she couldn’t call out without looking like the crazy one. If it had been back on the Roci, she would have known. But here, now, the balance between fear and anger and trying to control herself swamped little things like truth. It was the beauty of the way Marco had set her against herself. Tell her she was broken as a way to break her, and here they were a decade and a half past, and it still worked.