“Do you know who I am, Admiral?”
“I don’t … The high consul—”
“Yes, I am the high consul’s daughter and heir,” the girl said. “You understand now. Good. I am on the Rocinante at my father’s request. Your threat is ridiculous and your orders are to return immediately to your assigned mission protecting the homeworld.”
The girl couldn’t be sixteen yet, but her voice had an easy arrogance. Naomi turned to Jim and mouthed, Is that true? He lifted his hands in a Belter shrug.
“Miss,” the admiral said, unconsciously bowing as she did, “you are … I was unaware … This is very irregular, miss. I’m afraid I can’t allow this ship to go anywhere.”
The girl rolled her eyes dramatically. “Is there a protocol? A security protocol?”
“I’m sorry?”
“If I am in distress, being held against my will. Threatened. Whatever. Is there a phrase I use to indicate that? Something innocuous I can slip into any conversation without my captors knowing it?”
“I … That is—”
“It’s a yes-or-no question, Admiral. This isn’t hard.” At this rate, the Whirlwind was going to nuke them to be rid of the girl.
“There is, miss,” Admiral Gujarat said.
“And have I said it?”
“You haven’t.”
“Then we can take it as given that I am not here under duress. That something is going on between the high consul and the leadership of the underground—something with which I have been entrusted and you haven’t. With that in mind? Go. Back. To. Your. Post.”
The woman on the screen squared her shoulders. “I have orders from Admiral Trejo that—”
“Stop,” the girl said. “What’s his name?”
“Whose?”
“Admiral Anton Trejo. What is his last name?”
“Trejo?”
“Yes,” the girl said, and leaned close to the camera so that her whole face filled the screen. She spoke softly and with an incandescent rage. “Mine is Duarte.”
“I’m sorry, miss,” the admiral said. “I can’t let your ship leave.”
“No?” the girl said. “Then shoot me the fuck down.” She dropped the connection and turned to Alex, staring down at her slack jawed. “We can go. That woman is scared to death right now.”
“Prepare for high burn?” Alex announced over the ship-wide channel, and the girl nodded curtly and settled back in her couch.
“Jim?” Naomi said.
“I know,” he said. “It’s been a really weird day.”
“We thought you were dead,” Naomi said as she stepped into the lift.
Amos blinked his unnerving black eyes, then shrugged. “Yeah, I can see that, Boss. What can I tell you? Sorry.”
Eight hours of high burn had taken them out of the Whirlwind’s effective range. Fifteen had increased the distance to the point that she almost felt safe. Not safe safe, but close enough that she could imagine stepping away from the ops deck and starting to make sense of everything that had happened, hearing everything that had brought Jim and Amos back. And how Teresa Duarte fit into it.
And also to tell them what had happened during their long and separate pilgrimages. What they had lost. With the four of them together, Alex had asked for the ceremony. As if the universe had given them a chance, and he was worried that if he didn’t take it now, it would somehow slip away. And she and Amos were heading to the airlock together again, as if the past had returned. But as if it had returned changed.
The changes to Amos were odd. His skin was somehow pale and dark at the same time, like a thin coat of white paint over black. His eyes were darkness, and there was something strange about the way he moved. But after so long, being able to think of him without grief and worry made the alterations only interesting. It was so much better than what she’d already carried with him. With losing him.
“I’d have called earlier, but … Well, I wasn’t ready to go. I was being patient.”
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “One thing and another. Good to be back, though.”
The lift stopped, and she stepped off. Amos followed just a step behind. “You’re different.”
“Yup,” he said, smiling amiably. It was such an unmistakably Amos-like thing to say. Such a familiar way to say it.
“Did the bomb fail?” she asked.
“Nope, it was fine.”
“So why didn’t you follow through on the mission? No blame, but … What was your thinking there?”
Amos went still for a moment, like he was listening to something she couldn’t hear.
“I met the kid,” Amos said. “Seemed kind of shitty killing her. I thought maybe it was the wrong call.” He shrugged.
Naomi stepped over and put her arms around him. It was like hugging a metal strut. “Good to have you back.”
Alex and Holden were at the interior door to the airlock. Alex had changed into an MCRN uniform. An artifact from another age. Jim was in a white formal shirt. He’d washed his hair and combed it back. He looked distinguished and somber.
The coffin in the airlock was just a shell, hardly more than a body bag with slightly hardened sides. And it was empty.
“This is way we always did it,” Alex said now that they were together. “When we’d lost someone and couldn’t recover the body. We’d still take the moment.”
He cast his eyes to the deck. Jim did the same. Amos put on the same somber face he always did at moments like this. A flood of complex feelings washed through her. Sorrow and joy, relief and the emptiness of a loss that would never be made whole.
Alex cleared his throat and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Bobbie Draper was one of my best friends. She was a Marine right down to her bones. Anything else she did was built on that. She was brave and honorable, and she was strong. She made a hell of a captain. I remember when Fred Johnson tried to make her into an ambassador back in the day, and she kept calling it the way she saw it instead of playing politician. She was always like that. She took on the impossible, and she made it work.”
He took a deep breath, opened his mouth like he was going to go on, then closed it again and shook his head. Jim was weeping now too. And so was she. Amos’ newly black eyes shifted like he was reading something in the air, and he lifted his chin.
“She was a badass,” he said, then paused and nodded, satisfied.
“She will be missed,” Naomi said. “From now on. And forever.”
They stood in silence for a moment, and then Jim stepped forward and cycled the exterior door. When it was open, the little chemical boosters on the coffin slid it to the edge of the lock. And then it was gone. Jim cycled the lock closed again, turned, and stepped in, putting his arms around her and Alex. A moment later, the solid mass of Amos’ arms looped around her too. The four of them held each other there with the hum and rumble of the Rocinante around them. They stayed there for a long time.
The elements of her little ragtag fleet that had been closest to the ring gate were through long before the Roci was even halfway through the system. Alex kept them at a punishing burn, balancing the reaction mass they still had and the distance to a friendly resupply depot in Gossner system. If they took breaks a little more often than during the dive into the system and burned a little less heavily, it was to conserve mass and because the Whirlwind and her cohort of destroyers were parked close in to Laconia, still knocking down the torpedoes and long-arc rocks that Naomi’s people had flung at the planet. Three days into their burn toward the gate, someone somewhere had grown the balls to issue an order, and the Whirlwind flung half a dozen torpedoes at the retreating Roci. The PDCs took them all down, and no more followed.