“You’re thinking one of them may not come back? Amos? Alex?”
“I’m thinking that a lot of things happen. Take a high burn, and sometimes people stroke out. The juice helps, but it’s not a guarantee. People have been known to shoot at us. Or we’ve been disabled in a decaying orbit. You remember all that happening, right?”
“Sure, but—”
“If we lose someone, we go from running at a third of a standard crew to a quarter. Add to that the loss of nonredundant skills.”
Holden stopped, his hand on the door to their rooms.
“Wait, wait, wait. If we lose someone?”
“Yes.”
His eyes were wide and shocked. Little wrinkles of distress gathered at the corners. She reached up to smooth them away, but they didn’t go.
“So you’re trying to get me prepared for one of my crew dying?”
“Historically speaking, humans are pretty much at a hundred percent on that.”
Jim started to say something, faltered, opened the suite door, and walked in. She followed, closing the door behind them. She wanted to let it drop, but if she did, she didn’t know when they’d pick it back up.
“If we were running a traditional crew, we’d have two people in every position. If anyone got killed or disabled, someone else would be right there to step in.”
“I’m not adding four more people to our ship, much less eight,” Jim said, walking into the bedroom. Running from the conversation. He wouldn’t actually leave. She waited for the silence and the distress and the worry that he’d made her angry to pull him back. It took about fifteen seconds. “We don’t run this like a regular crew because we’re not a regular crew. We got the Roci when everyone in the system was shooting at us. We had stealth ships blowing a battleship out from under us. We lost the Cant and then we lost Shed. You can’t go through that and just be normal.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
“This ship isn’t a crew. We don’t run it like a crew. We run it like a family.”
“Right,” she said. “And that’s a problem.”
They looked at each other across the room. Jim’s jaw worked, objections and arguments getting stalled at his tongue. He knew she was right, and he wanted her to be wrong. She saw him realize there was no way out.
“Fine,” he said. “When the others get back, let’s talk about doing some interviews. Taking a couple people on for a mission or two. If they shake down right, we can look at keeping them on permanently.”
“That sounds good,” Naomi said.
“It’s going to change the balance on the ship,” Holden said.
“Everything changes,” she said, putting her arms around him.
They ordered food from a fusion Indian restaurant, curry and genetically modified rice and textured fungal protein mostly indistinguishable from beef. For the rest of the evening, Holden tried to be cheerful, tried to hide his unease from her. It didn’t even start to work, but she appreciated the effort.
After dinner, they watched the entertainment feeds until the time came in the comfortable rhythm of their day that she turned off the screen and drew him back to the bed. Sex with Holden had started off as a thrilling thing, years ago when they were first seeing exactly how stupid a captain and an XO sleeping together would be. Now, it was richer and calmer and more playful. And more comforting.
After, lying on the big gel-form mattress with the sheets in ropes at the foot, Naomi’s mind wandered. She thought of the Roci and of Sam, of a book of poetry she’d read when she was a girl and a musical group one of the senior engineers had roped her into on the Canterbury. Her recollections had started taking on the surreal confusion of dreams when Jim’s voice brought her back almost to wakefulness.
“I don’t like having them gone.”
“Hmm?”
“Alex and Amos. I don’t like having them gone. If they get in trouble, we’ll be here. I can’t even just fire up the Roci and go get them.”
“They’ll be fine,” she said.
“I know. I sort of know.” He propped himself up on one elbow. “Are you really not worried?”
“A little maybe.”
“I mean, I know they’re grown-ups, but if something happened. If they didn’t come back…”
“It would be hard,” Naomi said. “We four have been what we rely on for a lot of years now.”
“Yeah,” Jim said. And then a moment later, “Do you know who this lady was Amos went back to check on?”
“No. I don’t.”
“You think she was his lover?”
“I don’t know,” Naomi said. “I got the feeling it was more of a surrogate mom thing.”
“Hmm. Maybe. I don’t know why I was thinking lover.” His voice had started taking on the fuzzy edges of sleep. “Hey, can I ask an inappropriate question?”
“If memory serves.”
“Why didn’t you and Amos ever get together? I mean back on the Cant.”
Naomi laughed, rolled over, put her arm across his chest. Even after shipping with him all this time, she liked the way his skin smelled. “Are you serious? Have you paid any attention at all to his sexuality?”
“I don’t think Amos and I are supposed to do that.”
“It’s not a place you want to be,” Naomi said.
“Hmm. Okay. I was just thinking, you know. How much he followed you around back on the Cant. And he’s never talked about leaving the Roci.”
“He’s not staying on the Roci for me,” Naomi said. “He’s staying for you.”
“Me?”
“He’s using you as his external, aftermarket conscience.”
“No, he’s not.”
“It’s what he does. Finds someone who has a sense of ethics and follows their lead,” Naomi said. “It’s how he tries not to be a monster.”
“Why would he try not to be a monster?” The sleep-slurred words were like a blanket.
“Because he is one,” Naomi said, her consciousness flickering across the line. It’s why we get along.
The message came two days later, and without warning. Naomi was in an EVA suit, inspecting the work with Chief Engineer Sakai. He was in the process of explaining why they were looking at a different ceramic alloy for the connections between inner and outer hull when a priority message popped into her HUD. She felt a rush of fear, the aftermath of her talk with Holden. Something had happened to Alex. Or Amos.
“Hold on,” she said, and Sakai answered with a raised fist.
She started the message. A flat transmission screen popped on with the split circle of the OPA, and when it flickered away, Marco was there. The years had thickened his face a degree, softened the curve of his jaw. His skin had the same richness and depth she remembered, and his hands, folded on the table wherever he’d recorded this, were as delicate. He smiled with the mixture of sorrow and amusement that was like falling backward through time.
The message halted, cut off by the suit’s medical systems. Warnings for increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure. She chinned the override, and his voice stuttered softly into her ears, smoothing as the feed cohered.
“I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to hear from me. If it helps, I’d just point out that I haven’t done it before this. And I’m not doing it lightly now.”
Shut it off, she thought. Stop the feed. Erase it. It would all be lies anyway. Lies or only what parts of the truth served him. Forget it ever came. Marco looked away from the camera as if he’d read her mind, or known what she would be thinking.