“Is our prisoner on board?”
“Amos locked him in medical a couple hours ago,” Naomi said, then let her entire skeleton relax with a long groan.
“Can you walk back to the ship?” Holden asked her.
“Yep. Say your goodbyes.”
Holden let her go, watching her stagger off on unsteady legs for a few moments before he turned back to shake hands with Carol Chiwewe. She and the RCE man had moved their argument to sewage systems and water treatment. After a brief goodbye and good luck to them both, he walked over to Basia and his family.
“Doctor,” he said to Lucia, shaking her hand. “Could not have survived this without you. None of us could.” Next he shook Jacek’s hand. Finally, he shook Basia’s. “Basia. Thanks for your help with the ship. And thank you for trying to help Naomi. You’re a brave man. Farewell and fair weather.” The roiling storm clouds and gentle drizzle of rain made a joke of it, and he grinned at them.
“What?” Basia said. “But I thought you had to take me to—”
Holden was already walking away, but he stopped and said, “Work hard. Next time I come to this planet, I want to be able to get a decent cup of coffee.”
“We will,” Lucia replied. Holden could hear her tears in her voice, but the rain hid them on her face.
He wouldn’t miss the planet, but he would miss the people. Just like always.
On the Rocinante, liftoff pressed Holden into his crash couch like the ship was welcoming him back with a hug. As soon as they hit low orbit, he floated out of his chair and down the crew ladder to the galley. Thirty-five seconds later, the coffee pot was gurgling to itself and the rich aroma of brewing filled the air. It made him feel giddy.
Naomi floated in. “The first step is admitting that you have a problem.”
“I do,” he replied. “But I’ve just spent a couple months down on a planet that spent the entire time trying to kill me. And I have a shitty job I have to go do, so I’m going to take a moment and make a cup of coffee first.”
“Make me one too,” she said, then pulled herself over to the wall panel and started paging through status reports.
“Make it three,” Amos said, dragging himself into the room. “I got a ton of shit to fix because you guys let someone use my girl for target practice.”
“Hey, we did our best—” Naomi started, but was cut off by the comm panel squawking.
“You guys makin’ coffee down there?” Alex said from the cockpit. “Have someone bring me up a bulb.”
While Amos and Naomi began putting together a list of the repair work they could do during the long transit back to Medina Station, Holden prepared four large bulbs of coffee. He didn’t mind. It was very comforting doing something simple and domestic to make other people happy. Black for himself. Two whiteners, two sweeteners for Amos. One whitener for Alex. One sweetener for Naomi. He handed the finished bulbs out.
“Can you take this up to Alex?” he asked, handing a second bulb to Naomi. Something in his voice or his face made her frown with worry.
“Are you okay?” she said, taking the bulb but not leaving. Behind her, Amos took his coffee awkwardly in his mangled hand and headed aft with it toward his machine shop, looking at the task list on his terminal and muttering about how much work he had to do.
“Like I said, shitty job needs doing.”
“Can I help?”
“I’d like to do this one alone, if that’s okay.”
“Of course it is,” she said, then kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I’ll look you up later.”
Holden went up to the airlock and storage deck and found a self-sealing vacuum package, a trowel, and an EVA suit for doing external repairs with a portable blowtorch. He climbed into the suit, then clumped through the ship to the cargo bay.
To what he was pretty sure was Miller’s final resting place.
He waited in the cargo bay airlock while the outer doors cycled open, putting the compartment into total vacuum, then went in. If something went wrong, if what was left of the protomolecule on his ship decided to defend itself, he’d be in vacuum with an airlock blocking entry into his ship. He sealed the airlock behind him, and told Alex to lock out local control on the door until he called and asked him to open it. Alex agreed without asking why.
And then Holden began methodically tearing the cargo bay apart.
Five hours later, and one air recharge for the suit, he found it. A small blob of flesh no larger than the tip of Holden’s finger, attached to the underside of a power conduit behind a detachable panel in the cargo bay’s bulkhead. When they’d first spotted the protomolecule monster that had hitchhiked onto the Roci from Ganymede, it had been less than half a meter from where he found the polyp. It made his skin crawl to realize how long they’d been lugging this last remnant of that monster around on his ship.
Using the trowel, he scraped the polyp off the conduit, then put both it and the tool into the vacuum bag and activated the charge to seal it. He blowtorched the conduit for several minutes, heating the metal red to kill any residue left by the scraping. Then he dug through the supplies in the cargo area until he found a reload for the ship’s probe launcher, opened the probe up, and stuffed the bag inside the casing.
He linked his suit radio to the Roci’s general shipwide channel. “Naomi, you around?”
“Here,” she said after a moment. “In ops. What do you need?”
“Can you grab manual control on probe, uh, 117A43?”
“Sure, what do you want me to do with it?”
“I’m going to chuck it out the cargo bay door. Can you give it about five minutes, then send it into Ilus’ sun?”
“Okay,” she replied, not asking the question he could hear in her voice she wanted to. He killed the radio.
The probe was a small electromagnetic and infrared sensor with a rudimentary drive system. The kind naval vessels used to see what might be hiding on the other side of a planet. It wasn’t much bigger than an old Earth fire hydrant. It had heft, though. When Holden pushed it over to the cargo bay door, it was difficult to stop it again.
Outside, Ilus spun by, the angry brown of her cloud layer starting to show some spots of white, and even the occasional flash of blue from the ocean underneath. It’d be a while, but the planet would bounce back. Mimic lizards would return and start competing for space with human children and those annoying little bugs that bit and then fell over dead. Two alien biologies fighting for space. Or three. Or four. Nothing that Ilus hadn’t already experienced a few billion years before. New fight, same as the old fight.
Holden put a gloved hand on the probe floating next to him, and pointed the other at the planet.
“That’s you, man. That’s the second world you’ve saved. And once again, we have nothing to offer you in return. I kind of wish I’d been nicer to you.”
He laughed at himself, because he could almost hear the old detective in his head saying, You could also have my Viking funeral not be all about how you feel.
“Right. See you on the other side,” Holden didn’t really believe in another side. Nothing after death but infinite black. Or, he hadn’t, anyway. Sure, out-of-control alien technology might be involved, but maybe, just maybe, sometimes there was something else. “Goodbye, my friend.”
He gave the probe a hard push, and it drifted slowly away from the ship. Holden watched it dwindle until it was just a tiny point of light reflected from Ilus’ star. Then it lit up for a few seconds with a short drive flare and streaked away from the planet. Holden waited until he couldn’t see it anymore, then shut the cargo bay doors.