Naomi transferred control to Alex. “Hey there, Jillian. This is Alex. You are good for docking, but make sure Caspar knows to slide in from the side. It may not look like we’ve got the drive on, but we do. I don’t want to prove it by cooking you.”
“Like your little drive could burn us,” the woman said.
“I’d feel bad about it, is all. I’ll send the codes.”
“It’ll be good to see you, old man,” the Storm said, and dropped the connection.
“Jillian Houston,” Alex said. “She’s a good kid. She’ll make a fine captain.”
“I remember her father being an asshole.”
“She’s also kind of an asshole.”
It was three hours before the Storm sidled up beside the Rocinante and extended its docking tube. It was strange seeing the Laconian ship with its alien technology, but also with the same design history as the Rocinante itself. Naomi sometimes forgot that Laconia was in so many ways the heir to Mars until something like this reminded her.
She was still putting the final touches on her transit orders when the new crew came over, and Alex had to prod her more than once to get her down to the airlock. He was right, of course, but the project was complicated and so close to finished, it was hard to step away from it.
The Rocinante had run for years on a skeleton crew of four, and then expanded up to six. It was designed for twenty-two. The people who came in, drifting in the microgravity, were a mixed bunch. Belters and Freeholders and a gunner from Brazil Nova who’d joined up on Ganymede. She greeted each of them as they came aboard, hoping that she could commit each name to memory and put it to the correct face later. Belinda Ross. Acacia Kin-dermann. Ian Kefilwe. Jona Lee.
She felt a little odd about the deference and formality in how they saw her. She was Naomi Nagata to them, and that meant not only their captain, but also the admiral of the fleet and the leader of the underground. They also knew her as Captain Draper’s old shipmate, and there was a respect there she couldn’t quite convince herself she’d earned.
The odder thing was seeing Alex with them. One boy—Caspar, his name was—hadn’t even come over to join the Roci. Just to see Alex. The admiration in the boy’s face was impossible to miss. Watching them all together was like seeing an extended family that had come together for a wedding. Or a funeral. Alex hauled them all on a tour, showing them the Roci. He called it an orientation, but it was more like showing off a prized possession. Or no. Not that. A part of his life he’d only ever been able to tell stories about, and now could point to in the flesh.
She made her exit as he was leading them down toward the machine shop, pulling herself up to the flight deck and her nearly complete work. The distraction of the new crew left her unmoored for a few minutes, finding her place and her train of thought. There was less to do than she’d thought.
She put the final orders in. There is time to pull back, Alex said in the back of her mind as the real one, decks below, showed his friends and compatriots something about how the Rocinante’s PDCs reloaded or the way the power grid had been rerouted to support the keel-mounted rail gun or something.
Somewhere far below, an unfamiliar voice laughed.
This was what he’d done. Where Naomi had locked herself away, Alex had gone with Bobbie and made himself a new crew, a new family. It amazed her that he’d done it so naturally that he didn’t even notice. The only reason he didn’t have a place with them was that he chose not to. Even this brief contact told her that they would have welcomed him. He’d built another place for himself in the universe.
She hoped she wasn’t about to take it away from him. She encrypted the orders, opened the broadcast, and sent them out.
Chapter Forty-Two: Alex
Staging was important, but Alex hated it all the same. They didn’t know what was waiting for them on the other side of Laconia gate. For all they knew, the Whirlwind could be squatting just on the other side, ready to blast them all one by one as they came through. Sure, the intelligence they had showed it keeping close to the main planet, but that wasn’t a promise. The faster they got through Laconia gate, the better off they’d be.
That sounded great until it meant trickling the assembled forces from fifty-three systems into the slow zone, bunching them together before the first one went through to Laconia, and then diving through the enemy gate one after another as quickly as they could without vanishing. Then it got a little nervous-making.
“Was it always like this?” Ian, the new comm tech, asked. He was a Freeholder born and bred. Draper Station was as close as he’d ever been to another system. “Caspar said it used to be different.”
“That’s true,” Alex said. “It used to be different.”
The station at the center of the slow zone was growing darker as the days and weeks passed. It had cooled from a point of sun-bright whiteness to a threatening shade of orange. The surface of the slow zone that had been black and featureless still had the strange aurora look. If anything, that seemed to be getting brighter.
“This is the Deliverance,” a voice said from the open comm channel. “We have completed our transit from Hamshalim.”
“Copy that, Deliverance,” Ian said. “Benedict, you’re clear for transfer.”
A few seconds. “This is the Benedict. Copy that. We are starting our burn.”
Two hundred of the ships had already come through. Like the Roci, they were making their way to the Laconia gate. The others were still stacked outside their gates with Naomi’s transition order. Without Medina control to keep anyone from going dutch-man, they had to rely on her for their script. Which would work as long as not too many other ships came through in the same time frame. And as long as the behavior of the gates hadn’t changed.
That wasn’t the slow zone’s only new risk, though. Alex could still remember coming through the Sol gate the first time. Back then, the slow zone had been a place of mystery and terror, alien artifacts and death. Before Medina, he’d have said that the decades had tamed it. Made the place into something known and understood. That it was capable of changes they didn’t understand tore the scab off that wound every time he thought about it. He kept reaching for the drive control, wanting to edge the ship out through the gate just a little faster, a little earlier. He was heading to a battle with a vastly more powerful enemy, but at least that was known. Being reminded that they’d been building roads through a dragon’s mouth left him jumpy.
That was the thing about hubris. It only became clear in retrospect.
“This is the Benedict. We have completed our transit from Hamshalim.”
“Copy that, Benedict,” Ian said. “Chet Lam, you are cleared for transit.”
Alex reached for the drive controls, pulled back.
“You okay?” Ian asked as Alex unstrapped from his couch.
“I’m going to go get some tea. You want some tea?”
“I’m good,” Ian said, and Alex pushed off for the lift. He wished they were under burn, not only because he wanted to get out of there, but because being on the float made moving through the ship too easy. If he could feel the effort of motion, maybe it would do something for his anxiety. As it was, it was just having an itch he couldn’t scratch.
In the galley, he pulled out his hand terminal. There was one message in his outgoing queue, flagged to hold. He braced with his right hand and foot and spun his terminal slowly in the air like a pinwheel while he thought about it. The display, reading his orientation, flickered to keep up with its own rotation. After a few seconds, it started to annoy him. He grabbed it again and opened the message. His own face appeared on the screen. His voice came from the speaker.