“Does it matter?”
“Well, if you don’t think it does, then maybe not.”
She sighed. There were tears in her eyes and a smile on her face. “We did it. We made it safely to Luna. Just like we hoped.”
“Yeah.”
“You know what I really missed when I was in the Pit? Anything that actually meant anything. They fed me, and they kept me alive, and we had this kind of support group thing where we could talk about our childhood traumas and shit. But I couldn’t do anything that mattered. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t talk to people outside the prison. I was just being and being and being until sooner or later, I’d die and they’d put someone else in my cell.”
She leaned forward, her elbows on the workbench. She’d burned the side of her thumb on something—a soldering iron, the barrel of a gun, something—and the skin was smooth and pink and painful-looking. “I won’t go back there.”
“Peaches, there’s no there to go back to. And anyway, I’m pretty sure Chrissie knows you’re on board here. She’s not pushing the issue, so as long as we stay cool and act casual—”
Her laugh was short and bitter. “Then what? You can’t take me with you anymore, Amos. I can’t go on the Rocinante. I tried to kill Holden. I tried to kill all of you. And I did kill people. Innocent people. That’s never going away.”
“In my shop, that’s just fitting in,” Amos said. “I appreciate that seeing the crew again could leave you feeling a little antsy, but we all know what you are. What you did. Including all the shit you did to us. This isn’t new territory. We’ll talk it through. Work something out.”
“I’m just afraid that if he doesn’t back your play, they’ll send me back, and—”
Amos lifted a hand. “You’re missing some shit here, Peaches. Lot of folks seem to be. Let me lay this out again. There’s no back, and it ain’t just the real estate. The government that put you in prison only sort of exists anymore. The planet that put you in prison is going to be having billions of people die in the next little bit. Making sure you serve your whole term doesn’t mean shit to them. There’s a new Navy between us and the Ring, and there’s still a thousand solar systems out there to fuck up the way we fucked up this one. Because what you’re doing right now? Yeah, you’re worrying about how it would go for you if none of that happened. And I’m thinking that you’re doing it because you’re not looking at the facts.”
“What facts?”
“It ain’t like that anymore.”
“What isn’t?”
“Any of it,” Amos said. “With Earth puking itself to death and Mars a ghost town, everything’s up for grabs. Who owns what. Who decides who owns what. How money works. Who gets to send people to prison. Erich just called it the queen of all churns, and he ain’t wrong about that. It’s a new game, and—”
His hand terminal chimed. Amos looked at it. The design was nicer than his old one, but the interface was a little different. It took him a few seconds to figure out what the alert meant. He whistled between his teeth.
“What is it?” Peaches asked.
He turned the screen toward her. “Seventy messages and twenty-three connection requests. Going back to before the rock dropped.”
“Who from?”
Amos looked at the list. “Alex, mostly. A few from the captain. Fuck. I got six hours of stored video with just Alex trying to talk to me.”
Peaches’ smile was thin, but it was a smile. “At least you have people.”
Chapter Fifty: Alex
“A bicycle?”
Amos leaned on the breakfast bar. “Sure. They don’t need fuel, they don’t get sick. Most of the repairs, you can handle on your own. You’re looking for post-apocalyptic transportation, bikes are the way to go.”
Alex sipped his beer. It was a local brew from a pub just down the corridor with a rich hoppy flavor and a reddish color. “I guess I never thought about it that way.”
The suite on Luna was bigger than their rooms on Tycho Station had been, but of the same species. Four bedrooms opened onto a wide, recessed common area. A wall screen bent around the curve of the room, set to an idealized lunar landscape that was more photogenic than the real one. Every now and then, an animated “alien” girl would pop out from behind a rock, look surprised, and dart away again. It was cute, he supposed, but he would have preferred the real moonscape.
“So anyway, I didn’t want to go through Washington. Too many people there, and if the pumps stopped working, I didn’t want to be pedaling through knee-high sludge, right?”
“Right,” Alex said.
Holden was on the Rocinante. Naomi was asleep in her room. She’d been sleeping a lot since the Rocinante had plucked them all out of the vacuum. The medical system said she was getting better and that the rest was good. It worried Alex, though. Not because she needed the sleep, but because maybe she didn’t actually need it and was pretending to. Being here with Holden and Amos and Naomi was a bone-deep relief. He wanted it to be the end of their separation, everything come back into its right place like nothing had ever happened.
But it wasn’t. Even talking to Amos, Alex thought he could feel little differences in the man. A kind of abstraction, like he was thinking of something else all the time and only pretending to give Alex his undivided attention. Naomi had been in medical debriefing since they’d arrived, and the physicians hadn’t allowed anyone in to see her except Holden. If Naomi was finding excuses to stay isolated from them, that could be a very bad sign. They still didn’t know all of what she’d been through that she’d wound up with the Free Navy and then escaped from it, but that it had been a trauma seemed obvious. And so he tried to enjoy the peace and pleasure of having his crew again and ignore the anxiety growing in the back of his mind, the sense that—just like with the governments and planets and system of the solar system—things here had changed.
Amos’ hand terminal chirped. He sucked down half a glass of beer then bared his teeth. “I gotta go do a thing.”
“All right,” Alex said, pouring the rest of his beer into the sink. “Where are we going?”
Amos hesitated, but only for a fraction of a second. “Dock. Got something I need to move into my shop.”
“Great,” Alex said. “Let’s go.”
The stations on Luna were the oldest non-terrestrial habitation humanity had. They sprawled across the face of the moon and sank below its surface. The lights set into the walls glowed with a warm yellow and splashed across vaulted ceilings. The gravity—even lighter here than on Mars or Ceres or Tycho—felt strange and pleasant, like a ship ambling on without being in a rush to get anywhere. It was almost possible to forget the tragedy still playing out a little under four hundred thousand klicks over their heads. Almost, but not quite.
Amos went on about everything that had happened while he was down the well, and Alex listened with half his attention. The details of the story would be grist for a hundred conversations once they were back in the ship and going somewhere. It didn’t matter that he get all of it now, and the familiar cadences of Amos’ voice were like hearing a song he liked and hadn’t listened to in a long time.
At the dock, Amos looked up and down the halls until he saw someone he knew sitting on a plastic storage crate. The crate was blue with white curls of scrapes along the side like a painting of waves. The woman was thickly built with black cornrows, dark brown skin, and an arm in a cast.
“Hey, Butch,” Amos said.
“Big man,” the woman said. She didn’t acknowledge Alex at all. “This is this.”
“Thanks, then.”
The woman nodded and walked off, her low-g shuffle a little stiffer than the people around her. Amos rented a loading mech, grabbed the crate, and started for the Roci, Alex trotting along beside him.