He hesitated, then pulled up Amos’ record. There was no data. He thought about it for a moment. He didn’t want to have the talk, but he was going to have to. If he was going to be the captain again, he was going to have to be the captain again.
He stopped by the galley first for a bulb of coffee and a printed length of something that the system called mushroom bacon. Three of the new crew were floating near a table, and he felt them watching him in the same way people sometimes did in bars or the corridors of stations. Is that James Holden? He’d been able to be oblivious to it before. Now he felt their attention like they were pointing a heat gun at him. He pretended not to notice their interest and headed for the machine shop.
Muskrat floated in the middle of the room, a complex diaper on her haunches with a hole for her tail. She started wagging as soon as Holden came in. It made her gyrate around a center of mass defined by her larger and mostly still body and her lighter and fast-moving tail. Holden tossed a thumb-sized bit of the bacon at her mouth, and she caught it.
“You’re getting better at that,” he said to the dog as it chewed noisily.
The machine shop was perfectly familiar. The smell of high-grade lubricants and the residual heat of the machine printers, the old sign still in place where it had been. SHE TAKES CARE OF YOU. YOU TAKE CARE OF HER.
A clanging came from inside the deck, two sharp, percussive strikes, and then a grunt. The slide of a body moving through a crawl space.
“Hey, Cap’n,” the thing that had been Amos said, pulling himself out from under the decking. He had a wrench in one hand and an air filter in the other. His skin was still a sickly gray, and it left him looking cold. Like someone who had just drowned.
“Everything going all right?” Holden said, gesturing at the dog with a forced cheerfulness.
“So far. Turns out there’s a lot of people been thinking about how to have dogs on a ship. I’m just looking at what kinds of solves they’ve come up with.” He let the tools float and scratched the dog’s ears, stabilizing her jaw with his other hand so she didn’t drift.
“Seems difficult,” Holden said.
“It ain’t all dignified. I’m putting together a traveling kit for Tiny. Figure anyplace she heads for, she’s taking this one. Hard part’s the filters. Turns out these dogs throw off a lot of fur. Gums the standard recyclers up pretty quick if you don’t catch it first.”
Holden braced himself with a handhold. Muskrat tried to turn toward him, but didn’t have anything to push against.
“Have you heard about Teresa having any plans?” Holden asked, avoiding the conversation he’d come here to have.
The mechanic took the filter and started running his thumb along the edge, inspecting it by touch. The blackness of his eyes made it hard to know what exactly he was looking at.
“Nope. Last I saw, she and Alex and one of the new kids were all talking about Martian entertainment feeds. Apparently one of the ones she was into, Kit watched when he was her age. I think Tiny likes having something in common with people, even if it’s just the films they’ve watched.”
“So I was at the med bay just now,” Holden said. “I noticed you hadn’t been by.”
“Yeah, well. Autodoc isn’t so clear on what to make of me these days.”
“Yeah,” Holden said. “About that.” He hesitated. He didn’t know how to ask if the thing in front of him was really Amos anymore.
“What’s on your mind?”
“Are you really Amos anymore?”
“Yup.”
“No, I mean. Amos … died. He got killed. And then the repair drones took the body, and … I need to know, are you really Amos Burton? The Amos I knew.”
“Sure am. Anything else?”
Holden nodded more to himself than to anyone else. Muskrat whined and tried to swim over toward him, paws flailing in the air. He reached out and pulled the dog over, bracing her against his knee and patting her back. “I just think it’s important.”
“Seems like you’re having a hard time taking yes for an answer, Cap. Here’s how I look at it. Yeah, I went through some weird shit. It changed me. I know some things I didn’t know before.”
“Things like what?” Holden asked, but Amos waved the question away.
“Thing is, you went through some weird shit too. You got changed. Know some things you didn’t know going in. Naomi and Alex? Same. Hell, Tiny’s barely related to who she was the first time I saw her. That’s just life.” Amos shrugged. “I guess the dog didn’t change much, except she got a little gray around the muzzle.”
Muskrat wagged.
“You want this to be a philosophy question, that’s fine,” Amos said. “But if you’re asking am I still me? I am.”
Holden nodded. “All right. I had to ask.”
“No problem,” Amos said.
Holden scratched Muskrat one last time. A little cloud of hair floated free, the strands clinging together in complex webs and drifting toward the air recycler. “I see what you mean. Alex is starting our braking burn in twenty-five, thirty minutes.”
“I’ll make this all safe by then,” Amos said.
Holden pulled himself to the door. As he was about to leave, Amos’ voice pulled him back.
“One thing, though?”
He braced in the doorway. Amos’ eerie black eyes were on him. “Sure.”
“Those things that Duarte pissed off? The ones that ate Medina?”
“I know the ones you mean,” Holden said.
“One of the things I know now is that they’re going to kill everybody.”
They were silent for a moment.
“Yeah,” Holden said. “I know that too.”
Acknowledgments
While the creation of any book is less a solitary act than it seems, the past few years have seen a huge increase in the people involved with The Expanse in all its incarnations, including this one. This book would not exist without the hard work and dedication of Danny and Heather Baror, Bradley Englert, Tim Holman, Anne Clarke, Ellen Wright, Alex Lencicki, and the whole brilliant crew at Orbit. Special thanks are also due Carrie Vaughn for her services as a beta reader, the gang from Sakeriver: Tom, Sake Mike, Non-Sake Mike, Jim-me, Porter, Scott, Raja, Jeff, Mark, Dan, Joe, and Erik Slaine, who got the ball rolling.
The support team for The Expanse has also grown to include the staff at Alcon Entertainment and the cast and crew of The Expanse. Our thanks and gratitude go especially to Alex Cabrera-Aragon, Glenton Richards, and Julianna Damewood.
A particular debt of gratitude is also owed to Jeff Bezos and his team at Amazon for their support of the project in all its forms.
And, as always, none of this would have happened without the support and company of Jayné, Kat, and Scarlet.
James S. A. Corey is the pen name of fantasy author Daniel Abraham, author of the critically acclaimed Long Price Quartet, and writer Ty Franck. They both live in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Also by James S. A. Corey
THE EXPANSE
Leviathan Wakes
Caliban’s War
Abaddon’s Gate
Cibola Burn
Nemesis Games
Babylon’s Ashes
Persepolis Rising
Tiamat’s Wrath
THE EXPANSE SHORT FICTION
The Butcher of Anderson Station
Gods of Risk
The Churn
Drive
The Vital Abyss
Strange Dogs