Eight long seconds there and back again. “I’m just worried that if she is in there and the ship’s out of control, we’re going to be sitting out here dithering while she needs us. I can’t stand the idea that we’ve come this close, and now we’re going to lose her. I know it’s a little crazy, but I’m a little crazy right now. I keep thinking of her being smashed up against the wall by the spin, and me out here where I can’t do anything.”
“Yeah, thruster misfires don’t work like that,” Alex said. “You don’t get any sideways impulse unless the thruster’s actually going. After that, you’ve got a little spin station action pushing the folks behind the center of spin down and the folks forward of it up, but all that is gonna be in line with the thrust from the drive, so all you actually get is —”
“Alex!” Bobbie said. “We’ve got something.”
He twisted on his couch, then turned it to face her. Bobbie’s eyes were on the wall screen. A panel was there, opened to the view from the upper camera. The Chetzemoka was still in its mad spin, but something had come off, floating now across the clear, empty void, stars behind it like the glittering pupil of a vast eye. The eye of the storm. Bobbie tried to zoom in on it the same moment Alex did, and the system made a confused, upset chime, the focus fluctuating wildly before coming to rest. A figure in an EVA suit. There were no lights on the suit, and its back was turned to them, the intense sunlight making the gray material shine almost too brightly to make out details.
“Is she alive?” Alex said.
“She’s moving.”
“How long ago did she come out?”
“Not long,” Bobbie said. “Seconds.”
The figure in the EVA suit lifted her arms, crossing them over her head. The Belter signal for danger. Alex felt his heart speed up.
“Alex!” Holden said, from four seconds ago. “What’s going on?”
“Someone came out of the ship. Let me figure this out, and I’ll be back with a report,” Alex said, then cut the connection. On Bobbie’s screen, the figure had shifted to a time signal. Five minutes.
“What have we got?” Alex said.
“She’s making the same signs,” Bobbie said. “Here we go. ‘Danger. Do not approach. Explosion hazard.’ But then here’s ‘Low air,’ and ‘five’… shit, ‘four minutes.’ ”
“Is it her?” Alex said, knowing there wasn’t an answer for that. Even if the figure turned its face to them, Alex wasn’t certain between glare and the suit’s helmet if he’d have been able to identify Naomi. It was just a person in an EVA suit, running out of air and warning them over and over again that it was a trap.
But Alex thought that whoever it was, they sure moved like Naomi. And they’d both been calling the figure “she.” They might not know, but they were both pretty certain. The body of the Razorback felt suddenly claustrophobic. Like the appearance of Naomi right there where he could see her required more room to move. Enough space to reach her. Alex set the pinnace’s system to the diamond-bright suit and started it calculating.
“Where’s she going to go?” Bobbie asked.
“Looks like she’s set to drift across into the path of the ship again,” Alex said. “If it don’t hit her, maybe she gets past and the drive plume gets her.”
“Or we watch her suffocate?” Bobbie said.
“I can take the ship in,” Alex said.
“And crisp her decelerating?”
“Well… yeah.”
“Get your helmets on,” Bobbie yelled loud enough to carry into the back cabin. “I’m going in.”
“That suit’s got enough thrust to do a fifty-klick flip-and-burn in under four minutes?” Alex asked, but he was already sealing his suit as he said it.
“Nope,” Bobbie said, reaching for her helmet with one hand and a spare bottle of air with the other. “But it’s got really good mag boots and gloves.”
Alex checked his seals and got ready to open the Razorback to the void. “Don’t see how that’s going to help.”
The prime minister’s cabin showed it was sealed. On the monitor, the figure – Naomi – signaled Danger. Do not approach. Explosion hazard. Bobbie yelped, took a deep shuddering breath. Her voice was coming through the EVA suit’s radio now. “God damn, it’s been a long time since I was on the juice. This is some powerfully unpleasant shit.”
“Bobbie, we’re running out of time here. How are mag boots going to get you to Naomi?”
Behind her helmet’s visor, Bobbie grinned. “How good’s your control on those missiles?” she asked.
Chapter Forty-seven: Naomi
Leaving the airlock this one last time was the most peaceful thing Naomi could imagine doing. As soon as she’d cleared the outer door, the sun and stars had stopped their gut-sickening whirl. She had taken her tangent from the whirling circle of life, and now her path was a line. Well, not a tangent, really. A secant, and doomed to cross paths with the ship again, only maybe not in her lifetime.
For a moment, she let herself enjoy drifting. The sun pressed against her back, the light radiating past her as she cast a shadow on whole stars, galaxies. The sense of whirling faded a little, and she wondered where Alex was, out among all these stars. She remembered to start counting. One thousand and… how long had she already been out? Seven? Eight? Well, she might as well think the worst. One thousand and thirty. Why not? She lifted her hands over her head. Danger. Then Do not approach. Then Explosion hazard. She felt like she was trying to warn the stars. The Milky Way. Don’t come here. Stay away. There are humans here, and you can’t trust them.
She stretched with every motion, letting it all go. She should have been scared, but she wasn’t. She was going to her death, and that sucked. She would have liked to live longer. To see Jim again. And Alex. And Amos. She would have liked to tell Jim all the things she’d been so careful for so long not to say. One thousand and sixty. Time to change her signs. Four minutes left. Four minutes and a lifetime.
Somewhere out there, Filip was with his father, the way he had been for years. Since he was a baby. And Cyn, poor Cyn, already as dead as she was going to be because he’d seen her in the airlock and thought stopping her would have been saving her. Thought the life she had with Marco was worth having. She wondered what would have happened if she’d stayed. If the Chetzemoka had flown without her. Would Jim have set off the bomb? She had to think he would have. He wasn’t a man who reined in his curiosity well. The stars shuddered, blurred. She was weeping. Danger. Do not approach. Explosion hazard.
If the suit had been powered, it would have been screaming alerts at her. She was almost glad now that it wasn’t. She wasn’t even light-headed yet. She’d seen people pass out. As long as her CO2 scrubbers kept working, it would be a peaceful way to go. No choking, no panic. Just a moment’s disorientation and then, softly, out. Here she was, after so many years, throwing herself out another airlock. She could still remember that first one, back on Ceres. It had been set in the floor, of course, but she could still conjure up the feeling of pressure on her fingers when she’d told it to cycle open, still believing that it meant her own death. And even then, she hadn’t wanted to die. She’d just wanted it to be over. To be free of it all. For the pain and guilt to be over. And the feeling of being trapped. She might have been able to stand all the rest of it, but not the sense of being caught.
This death wasn’t at all like that. This was throwing herself in front of a bullet so that it wouldn’t hit her friends. Her family. The family she’d chosen. The one built from people who had risked their lives for her. She wished Cyn could have met Jim. Could have understood how far she’d come from the girl he’d known on Ceres, back in the day. How much she wasn’t just Knuckles anymore.
She wasn’t religious, but she’d known any number of people who were. Explosion hazard. Low air. Three minutes. She wondered whether they would have thought what she was doing now was sinful. Giving herself over to the void in hopes that Alex would see her, would understand, would save himself.
r /> And her. It would be nice if somehow he found a way to save her back. Or if Jim suddenly swept down from the stars to gather her up. She chuckled. God knew he’d try. Always blundering into being the hero, her Jim. Now he’d know what it had felt like for her all those times he’d squared his jaw and run off into near-certain death because it was the right thing. Pity she wouldn’t be there to point it out to him. He might not connect those dots himself. Or he might. He’d changed over the years, and he wouldn’t change back.
Danger. Do not approach. Explosive hazard. She’d lost count again. Two minutes? One? She didn’t know. She found herself humming a melody she’d heard as a child. She didn’t know the words to it. They might not have even been in a language she knew. It didn’t matter. She was glad for the song’s company. Grateful. More than that, she was grateful that she wasn’t going to die nauseated. Okay, fine. If this is what I get, this is what I get. Not a life without regrets, but none I can’t live with. None I can’t die with.
Still, she thought to the universe, if it isn’t a problem, I wouldn’t say no to a little more.
Something moved off to her left, streaking out from behind her. Huge and metal and shining brightly in the sun. It looked like a missile, pointing back toward the sun as it retreated. Its drive wasn’t firing. That seemed weird and kind of random. She wondered if —
The impact came in the center of her back, hard as an assault. An arm wrapped around her shoulder and a leg around her waist locking her immobile. She squirmed by reflex, trying to escape the attack, but whoever it was had her cold. She couldn’t escape. She felt the other person’s free hand fumbling at her suit. Something hard and metal pressed against her thigh where the air bottles would go.
Her ears popped as the pressure in the suit suddenly changed. A clean, vaguely astringent smell filled her nose. A fresh bottle. She almost laughed. She was being held in a rescue hold. The newcomer did something else she couldn’t quite figure, and then locked a tether to her waist and released her. When they rotated together, face-to-face, the newcomer grabbed Naomi’s helmet and pressed her own against it.
“Bobbie?” Naomi said.
“Hey,” the Martian ex-marine shouted, grinning. The sound carried from suit to suit by the conduction, and it made her sound terribly distant for someone who was holding Naomi in her arms. “Imagine meeting you here, right?”
“I’d say it’s really good to see you,” Naomi shouted back, “but that seems weirdly understated. The ship! It’s rigged to lose bottle containment if another ship sets off its proximity alert.”
Bobbie scowled and nodded. Naomi saw the woman’s mouth moving as she relayed the information to someone. To Alex. She watched Bobbie listen to something she couldn’t hear. She looked older than the last time Naomi had seen her. She looked beautiful. Bobbie said something else into her mic, then pressed their faceplates together again.
“I’m going to start moving us around,” Bobbie shouted. “We need to point our feet toward the sun. Low profile. Suck up less heat, okay?”
Naomi buzzed with questions that didn’t need answers. “Okay,” she shouted back.
“Are you in immediate medical distress?”
“Probably. It’s been a really hard day.”
“That’s funny,” Bobbie shouted in a voice that meant it wasn’t funny. “Are you in immediate medical distress?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“All right. Put your arms over my shoulders and lock your forearms.” Bobbie pulled back a few centimeters and demonstrated the forearm lock. Naomi made the Belter sign that meant roughly Acknowledged and understood. A few seconds later, Bobbie’s armor fired thrusters, and Naomi’s weight came back. She was being lifted up, carried into the stars. The sun-bright drive plume of the Chetzemoka passed them, dwarfing the small, dark box of the ship itself. It fell away toward the sun and slowly, over the course of long, eternal minutes, vanished below them.
They didn’t fit in the pinnace. Not really. It was made for one, maybe two, and it had four with one of them in powered armor. The air was hot and thick, and the recyclers were starting to throw alerts and errors. Alex had shut down the reactor and switched to batteries so they wouldn’t be generating as much heat.
“I mean, we could make a burn for it,” Alex said, “but we got people coming from both directions and half as many crash couches as we’ve got folks.”
He was in the one actual couch at the front of the pinnace. Bobbie sat curled near the mutilated deck where another couch had once been. The door to the cabin was open, and the prime minister of Mars floated there in a sweat-stained undershirt. He made the place seem dreamlike. For herself, Naomi floated near the ceiling. Alex had set the wall screens to show the outside, but it was all so much less vivid than the real thing. It didn’t fool her.
The Chetzemoka was below them, a spinning black dot against the overwhelming white sun. She caught glimpses of it at the edges of the floor where the screen stopped. Alex had also had the Razorback’s system highlight the incoming UN escort ships and, in blue, the Rocinante.
“So,” Alex said. “XO. You’re… ah. Out here. That was kind of unexpected.”
“Wasn’t thinking to see you either, Alex,” Naomi said. Her blood felt strange in her veins. Sluggish and bright at the same time. And she was having trouble focusing her eyes. Her hands had lost the worst of the swelling, though. The hours of work between the hulls had probably worked all the extra fluid back in where it belonged. Something like that. Her entire body hurt, and she was still discovering how profound her nausea had been as layers of it she hadn’t recognized resolved. Her twenty-second sunburn from the jump off the Pella was swollen and tender to the touch, but not blistered. It would peel once it had healed enough. When she’d gotten into the Razorback, and the ship had been sealed, she’d drunk a liter of water from a bulb and she hadn’t had to pee yet. The dehydration headache was starting to lose its hold. Bobbie had offered her painkillers, but something in Naomi resisted the idea of doing anything else to her body until she’d seen the inside of a medical bay.
She realized that her consciousness had flickered out when it came back. Bobbie and the prime minister were talking about good noodle restaurants in the major neighborhoods of Londres Nova. The air was thick and close and stank of bodies. She was sweating in her crappy EVA suit. The blue dot that was the Rocinante had grown a halo, the drive pointing toward them as it slowed to match their course.
In the corner of her eye a blackness flickered and was gone.
“Alex,” she said, and then coughed so long and hard Bobbie had to brace her. When her lungs were clearer, she tried again. “Alex. Can you spare a couple of those missiles?”
“Depends, XO,” Alex said. “What did you want me to do with them?”
“Kill that ship,” Naomi said.
“It’s all right,” Alex said. “We warned everyone about how it’s booby-trapped. No one’s going to —”
“Not because of that. Just because it’s time for it to go.”
Because I tried to give it to my son instead of a childhood. Because I spent my own money to get it, and it turned into a trap for me and the people I love. Because everything about that ship was a mistake.
“Ah. Looks like it’s registered to an Edward Slight Risk Abatement Cooperative. They going to be okay with us knocking their bird into the sun?”
“It’ll be fine,” Naomi said.
The prime minister lifted his finger. “It seems to me that —”
“Missiles away,” Alex said, then smiled an apology. “You’re the head of my government, Nate, but she’s my XO.”
“Nate?” Naomi said. “You’re on a first-name basis now?”
“Don’t be jealous,” Alex said and pulled up a panel. Against the sun, the ship was nothing. A tiny darkness spinning below them like a fly. And then it was gone.
I’m sorry, Filip, she thought.
She turned her head toward the approaching Rocinante. It was closer.
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Chapter Forty-eight: Holden
If the medical bay could have raised its eyebrows and made judgmental little tsk-tsk sounds, it would have. Instead, the readout threw a list of amber-colored alerts so long that the first few scrolled off the screen before Holden could read them. Naomi grunted when the needle poked into her vein and the medical expert system’s custom cocktail started flowing into her. Holden sat beside her, holding her other hand.
The transfer from the Razorback had been easy enough. Once they’d matched course, Alex snugged the pinnace up against the airlock, and all four of them had come over together. Holden had been waiting on the other side of the lock, not quite willing to believe that they were really back. Fred Johnson was there too in his greeting-a-political-grandee outfit. It was strange to see Fred visibly change roles, holding his body differently, his expression changing so subtly and profoundly it seemed like the shape of his skull had shifted. It left Holden a little curious about how much the old man presented to him was also tailored to the situation. Chances were, he’d never know.
When the inner door cycled open, he’d forgotten about Fred and the prime minister of Mars and the destruction of Earth and pretty much everything that wasn’t Naomi. Her skin was ashen where it didn’t look slick and swollen from radiation burns. Her eyes were bloodshot and bleary with a profound exhaustion. Moving into the room, she was careful, like any unexpected bump would hurt. She was the most beautiful thing he’d seen in years. He felt like he was the one returning home now that she was here. When she saw him, she smiled, and he grinned back. Somewhere a few feet away or a few miles, Fred Johnson and Nathan Smith were making some kind of formal greeting. It didn’t matter at all.