“Kit. I’m about to do something, and it seems like I might not come back. It’s risky anyway. And the last time I did something like this, I thought about you a lot afterward. I know me and your mom didn’t get along there towards the end, and maybe I haven’t been as good a dad to you as I could have been—”
He stopped the playback, looked at it for a long moment, and deleted it without sending. There was this idea that one message could change a lifetime of decisions you’d already made. The truth was, he hadn’t said anything in there that Kit didn’t already know. If Naomi’s plan worked, Alex could go back and say anything that still needed saying in person. If it didn’t, it was probably better for Kit not to have had communications from his rebel pilot father.
Belinda and Jona came in together with the subdued glow of two people who’ve been enjoying each other’s private company. Well, they were in the hours before action. Alex could still remember a time when he’d taken some comfort that way himself. They nodded to him, and he nodded back like he didn’t suspect anything. Truth was, as long as it didn’t affect the ship’s function, a little affection in the crew was probably a good thing. Holden and Naomi’s relationship had been the unstated center of the Roci crew for a long, long time. That was part of why losing Holden had broken everything apart.
Now, here he was, and here was Naomi, back in the ship, doing something dangerous. It almost felt like old times.
His hand terminal chimed. It was Naomi.
“Admiral?” he said.
“Captain is fine.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “Felt weird saying that anyway.”
“So. I’m about to do a thing.”
“A thing?”
“Speechy, rousing-the-troops thing, admiral-of-the-fleet kind of thing.”
“Ironically,” Alex said with a laugh.
“This is serious,” Naomi replied, but there was no scold in her tone. “We’re three transfers away from having the whole fleet in here. I’ve sent my group assignments to the other ships. I thought I should make a statement. Something to the crew. Did Bobbie do that?”
Alex had to think. “Sort of, yeah?”
“I was really hoping you were going to say no.”
“Nervous?”
“I think I prefer being shot at.”
“Well, if this goes well, you’ll get to confirm that. So that’s a plus?”
“Might be.”
“Okay, I’m on my way up.”
Alex took a last long pull from the bulb of tea and tossed the rest into the recycler, then pulled himself back to the central shaft and up toward the flight deck. He felt his anxiety starting to shift, but he wasn’t sure yet what it was becoming. Maybe excitement. Maybe fear.
By the time he got to his couch, Ian wasn’t on the open comms anymore. The kid looked grim, lips pressed thin and fingertips dancing at the edge of the control monitor like they were looking for something to do there. Alex gave a thumbs-up as he strapped in. He didn’t know what he meant by it apart from general emotional support.
Naomi sailed onto the deck. She was in formal blacks that looked like a uniform without quite being one. Against it, her gray-white hair didn’t look old. It looked striking. Her face was serious and hard, her movements fluid and strong. She pulled herself into her crash couch, pulled the tactical readout to her station, and looked over the data there. Her ships. Her fleet. Every eye on the flight deck was pointed toward her. She glanced at Ian.
“Open ship-wide,” she said.
“Yes, Captain,” Ian said.
Naomi cleared her throat. It echoed through the ship.
“This is Naomi Nagata,” she said. “We are about to make our transit into Laconia. We will be going into the heart of enemy territory. We all saw what the Tempest did to the inner planets’ combined fleet. I know that’s in your minds now. It’s in mine too.
“But what we’re doing here is different. We were not able to stop the Tempest when it invaded Sol—”
Stopped the shit out of it later, someone shouted a deck or two below. Cheers and hoots followed, but Naomi ignored them.
“We aren’t trying to stop the Whirlwind. We’re trying to move it. How exactly this will play out is going to depend on what we find when get through that gate. The exact tactics, we will be figuring out on the fly. The grand strategy, on the other hand, is set. We’re going to destroy Laconia’s construction platforms. The tool Duarte has used to make the Magnetar ships. To make Storm-class destroyers. To generate antimatter. All of that ends now. And with that, Laconia’s attempt at empire. We are going to do that.
“Every ship in this fleet has a part to play. The most dangerous role is the actual attack on the platforms. With luck, that will be us. Our battle group will be the Storm out of Freehold, the Cassius out of Sigurtá system, and Quinn and Prince of the Face out of Haza. Five ships, but we won’t be alone. Every ship, every battle group, every member of every crew will be at our backs.
“This will be a long fight. It will be hard. But it will be won. So if you need food, eat now. If you need to visit the head, you have five minutes. After that, we’re going through.”
She killed the connection to the sound of cheers. On the float, there was no way to sink back into her couch, but if she could have, Alex was pretty sure she would. He pulled up his controls, selected the course profile he’d already laid in, and typed in a message to her.
THAT WAS GOOD. DID EVERYTHING IT HAD TO.
It popped up on her monitor. She smiled thinly. A few moments later, he got her reply.
I HATE PUBLIC SPEAKING. HATE IT. NEXT TIME, YOU DO THIS PART.
GET ME A NEXT TIME, he typed, AND I WILL.
Her laugh was barely a chuckle. It was a victory, getting her to relax even that much. It was strange seeing her in Bobbie’s role. It was stranger to realize that in his mind, it was Bobbie’s role. Not Holden’s anymore. He wondered what else had changed while he wasn’t watching.
“All right,” Naomi said loud enough for the flight-deck crew to hear. “It’s time. Alex?”
“Aye, aye, Cap,” Alex said. He triggered the acceleration alarm through the whole ship, waited twenty seconds for any stragglers to get into a couch, and the Roci jumped up, eager as he was. The gel of the crash couch pressed back, cool against him, and he felt himself grinning. His HUD marked the pathway to the gate, and he started wondering how bad it might be on the other side. As the fear of staying in the slow zone faded, the fear of leaving it for Laconia ramped up.
Behind him, another ship’s drive bloomed. The Storm. And then the Quinn. The Cassius. They’d timed it all out to the second. He felt the needle and then the surge of the juice. It was a hard burn for him, it was going to be hellish for the Belters. For Naomi.
He kept his eyes on the drive status, on the maneuvering thrusters. They were making the transit much faster than usual, and a misfiring maneuvering thruster at the wrong moment could throw them off course and into the swirling nothingness at the edge of the slow zone. He didn’t know whether that would be a good death or not, and he wasn’t interested in finding out.