“Your son, him,” Karal said, and the accusation in his voice was calming because she knew how to answer it.
“You know those stories about a trapped wolf chewing itself free?” she said. “That boy’s my paw. I’ll never be whole without him, but I’m fucked if I’ll give up getting free.”
Cyn smiled, and she saw the sorrow in his eyes. Something released in her. It was done. She was done. All she wanted now was to go listen to every message Jim had left her and find the fastest transport back to Tycho that there was. She was ready to go home.
Cyn spread his arms, and she walked into them one last time. The big man folded around her, and she rested her head on his shoulder. She said something obscene and Cyn chuckled. He smelled of sweat and incense.
“Ah, Knuckles,” Cyn rumbled. “Didn’t have to fall this way. Suis désolé, yeah?”
His arms tightened around her, pinning her arms to her sides. He reared back, lifting her feet off the deck. Something bit at the flesh of her thigh and Karal limped back, needle still in his hand. Naomi thrashed, slamming her knee into Cyn’s body. The vicious embrace pressed the air out of her. She bit Cyn’s shoulder where she could reach it and tasted blood. The big man’s voice was soft and lulling in her ears, but she couldn’t tell what the words were anymore. A numbness spread along her leg and up into her belly. Cyn seemed to fall with her locked in his arms, but he never landed. Only spun backward into space without his legs ever leaving the deck.
“Don’t do this,” she gasped, but her voice seemed to come from far away. “Please don’t do this.”
“Had to, Knuckles,” Cyn said. “Was the plan immer and always, sa sa? What it’s all about.”
A thought came to her and then slid away. She tried to land her knee in his crotch, but she wasn’t sure where her legs were anymore. Her breath was loud and close. Over Cyn’s shoulder, she saw the others standing beside the gantry to the ship. Her ship. Filip’s ship. They were all turned to watch her. Filip was among them, his face empty, his eyes on her. She thought she might have cried out, but it could only have been something she imagined. And then, like a light going out, her mind stopped.
Chapter Twenty: Alex
When piloting a ship—any ship—there was a point where Alex’s sense of his body reached out to subtly include the whole vessel. Coming to know how that individual ship felt as she maneuvered—how the thrust gravity cut out as that particular drive shut down, how long the flip took at the midpoint of a run—all of it made a deep kind of intimacy. It wasn’t rational, but it changed how Alex felt about himself. His sense of who he was. When he’d gone from the massive, stately heft of the colony-ship-turned-ice-hauler Canterbury to the fast-attack frigate that had become the Rocinante, it had been like turning twenty years younger.
But even the Roci had tons of metal and ceramic. She could spin fast and hard, but there was an authority behind the movement. Muscle. Piloting the racing pinnace Razorback was like strapping onto a feather in a thunderstorm. There was nothing to the ship but a blister the size of the Roci’s ops deck strapped to a fusion drive. Even the engineering deck was a sealed compartment, accessible to technicians at the dock. It wasn’t the sort of ship the crew was going to maintain; they had hired help for that. The two crash couches huddled close together, and the compartments behind them were just a head, a food dispenser, and a bunk too small for Bobbie to fit in. There wasn’t even a system to recycle food, only water and air. A maneuvering thruster could spin the ship around twice in ten seconds with power output that would have shifted the Roci five degrees in twice the time.
If piloting the Rocinante required Alex to think of the ship like a knight’s horse, the Razorback begged for attention like a puppy. The screens wrapped around the couches and covered the walls, filling his whole visual field with the stars, the distant sun, the vector and relative speed of every ship within a quarter AU. It threw the ship’s performance data at him like it was boasting. Even with interior anti-spalling fabric a decade out of fashion and the grime and signs of wear on the edge of the couches, the ship felt young. Idealistic, feckless, and a little bit out of control. He knew if he spent enough time to get used to her, the Roci would feel sluggish and dull when he got back. But, he told himself, only for a little while. Until he got used to it again. The thought kept him from feeling disloyal. For sheer power and exuberance, the Razorback would have been an easy ship to fall in love with.
But she wasn’t built for privacy.
“… as a community, Mars has got its collective asshole puckered up so tight it’s bending light,” Chrisjen Avasarala continued behind him. “But the prime minister’s convoy has finally launched. When he gets to Luna, I’m hoping we can get him to say something that hasn’t already been chewed by half a dozen diplomats playing cover-your-ass. At least he knows there’s a problem. Realizing you’ve got shit on your fingers is the first step toward washing your hands.”
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.”