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.