“Thank you,” Prax said. He pulled up the document, signed off, and returned it. It would be twenty minutes at the speed of light before it reached Luna. Twenty minutes back. Who knew how long in between?
It was a start. He could feel good about that, at least.
The ship was quiet in a way that felt like anticipation, but Prax didn’t know exactly what of. The arrival at Tycho Station, but beyond that, he wasn’t sure. Leaving his bunk behind, he went through the empty galley and up the ladder toward the ops center and then the pilot’s station. The small room was dim, most of the light coming from the control panels and the sweep of high-definition screens that filled 270 degrees of vision with starlight, the distant sun, and the approaching mass of Tycho Station, the oasis in the vast emptiness.
“Hey there, Doc,” Alex said from the pilot’s couch. “Come up to see the view?”
“If… I mean, if that’s all right.”
“Not a problem. I haven’t been running with a copilot since we got the Roci. Strap in right there. Just if somethin’ happens, don’t touch anything.”
“I won’t,” Prax promised as he scrambled into the acceleration couch. At first, the station seemed to grow slowly. The two counter-rotating rings were hardly larger than Prax’s thumb, the sphere they surrounded little more than a gum ball. Then, as they drew nearer, the fuzzy texture at the edge of the construction sphere began to resolve into massive waldoes and gantries reaching toward a strangely aerodynamic form. The ship under construction was still half undressed, ceramic and steel support beams open to the vacuum like bones. Tiny fireflies flickered inside and out: welders and sealant packs firing off too far away to see apart from the light.
“Is that built for atmosphere?”
“Nope. Kinda looks that way, though. That’s the Chesapeake. Or it will be, anyway. She’s designed for sustained high g. I think they’re talkin’ about running the poor bastard at something like eight g for a couple of months.”
“All the way where?” Prax asked, doing a little napkin-back math in his head. “It would have to be outside the orbit of… anything.”
“Yep, she’ll be going deep. They’re going after that Nauvoo.”
“The generation ship that was supposed to knock Eros into the sun?”
“That’s the one. They cut her engines when the plan went south, but she’s been cruisin’ on ever since. Wasn’t finished, so they can’t bring her around on remote. Instead, they’re buildin’ a retriever. Hope they manage too. The Nauvoo was an amazin’ piece of work. Of course, even if they get her back, it won’t keep the Mormons from suing Tycho into nonexistence if they can figure out how.”
“Why would that be hard?”
“OPA doesn’t recognize the courts on Earth and Mars, and they run the ones in the Belt. So it’s pretty much win in a court that doesn’t matter or lose in one that does.”
“Oh,” Prax said.
On the screens, Tycho Station grew larger and more detailed. Prax couldn’t tell what detail of it brought it into perspective, but between one heartbeat and the next, he understood the scope and size of the station before him and let out a little gasp. The construction sphere had to be half a kilometer across, like two complete farm domes stuck bottom to bottom. Slowly, the great industrial sphere grew until it filled the screens, starlight replaced by the glow from equipment guides and a glass-domed observation bubble. Steel-and-ceramic plates and scaffolds took the place of the blackness. There were the massive drives that could push the entire station, like a city in the sky, anywhere in the solar system. There were the complex swivel points, like the gimbals of a crash couch made by giants, that would reconfigure the station as a whole when thrust gravity took rotation’s place.
It took his breath away. The elegance and functionality of the structure lay out before him, as beautiful and simple and effective as a leaf or a root cluster. To have something so much like the fruits of evolution, but designed by human minds, was awe-inspiring. It was the pinnacle of what creativity meant, the impossible made real.
“That’s good work,” Prax said.
“Yup,” Alex said. And then on the shipwide channel: “We’ve arrived. Everyone strap in for docking. I’m going to manual.”
Prax half rose in his couch.
“Should I go to my quarters?”
“Where you are’s as good as anyplace. Just put the web on in case we bump against somethin’,” Alex said. And then, his voice changing to a stronger, more clipped cadence: “Tycho control, this is the Rocinante. Are we cleared for docking?”
Prax heard a distant voice speaking to Alex alone.
“Roger that,” Alex said. “We’re comin’ in.”
In the dramas and action films that Prax had watched back on Ganymede, piloting a ship had always looked like a fairly athletic thing. Sweating men dragging hard against the control bars. Watching Alex was nothing like it. He still had the two joysticks, but his motions were small, calm. A tap, and the gravity under Prax changed, his couch shifting under him by a few centimeters. Then another tap and another shift. The heads-up display showed a tunnel through the vacuum outlined in a blue and gold that swept up and to the right, ending against the side of the turning ring.
Prax looked at the mass of data being sent to Alex and said, “Why fly at all? Couldn’t the ship just use this data to do the docking itself?”
“Why fly?” Alex repeated with a laugh. “’Cuz it’s fun, Doc. Because it’s fun.”
The long bluish lights of the windows in Tycho’s observation dome were so clear Prax could see the people looking out at him. He could almost forget that the screens in the cockpit weren’t windows: The urge to look out and wave, to watch someone wave back, was profound.
Holden’s voice came over Alex’s line, the words unidentifiable and the tone perfectly clear.
“We’re looking fine, Cap,” Alex said. “Ten more minutes.”
The crash couch shifted to the side, the wide plane of the station curving down as Alex matched the rotation. To generate even a third of a g on a ring that wide would demand punishing inertial forces, but under Alex’s hand, ship and station drifted together slowly and gently. Before Prax had gotten married, he’d seen a dance performance based on neo-Taoist traditions. For the first hour, it had been utterly boring, and then after that, the small movements of arms and legs and torso, shifting together, bending, and falling away, had been entrancing. The Rocinante slid into place beside an extending airlock port with the same beauty Prax had seen in that dance, but made more powerful by the knowledge that instead of skin and muscles, this was tons of high-tensile steel and live fusion reactors.
The Rocinante eased into her berth with one last correction, one last shifting of the gimbaled couches. The final matching spin had been no more than any of the small corrections Alex had made on the way in. There was a disconcerting bang as the station’s docking hooks latched on to the ship.
“Tycho control,” Alex said. “This is the Rocinante confirming dock. We have seal on the airlock. We are reading the clamps in place. Can you confirm?”
A moment passed, and a mutter.
“Thank you too, Tycho,” Alex said. “It’s good to be back.”
Gravity in the ship had shifted subtly. Instead of thrust from the drive creating the illusion of weight, it now came from the spin of the ring they were clamped to. Prax felt like he was tilting slightly to the side whenever he stood up straight, and had to fight the urge to overcompensate by leaning the other way.
Holden was in the galley when Prax reached it, the coffee machine pouring black and hot, with just the slightest bend to the stream. Coriolis effect, a dimly remembered high school class reminded Prax. Amos and Naomi came in together. They were all together now, and Prax felt the time was right to thank them all for what they’d done for him. For Mei, who was probably dead. The naked pain on Holden’s face stopped him.
Naomi stood in front of him, a duffel bag over her shoulder.
“You’r
e heading out,” Holden said.
“I am.” Her voice was light, but it had meaning radiating from it like harmonic overtones. Prax blinked.
“All right, then,” Holden said.
For a few seconds, no one moved; then Naomi darted in, kissing Holden lightly on the cheek. The captain’s arms moved out to embrace her, but she’d already stepped away, marching out through the narrow hallway with the air of a woman on her way someplace. Holden took his coffee. Amos and Alex exchanged glances.
“Ah, Cap’n?” Alex asked. Compared to the voice of the man who’d just put a nuclear warship against a spinning metal wheel in the middle of interplanetary space, this voice was hesitant and concerned. “Are we lookin’ for a new XO?”
“We’re not looking for anything until I say so,” Holden said. Then, his voice quieter: “But, God, I hope not.”
“Yessir,” Alex said. “Me too.”
The four men stood for a long, awkward moment. Amos was the first to speak.
“You know, Cap,” he said, “the place I’ve got booked has room for two. If you want the spare bunk, it’s yours.”
“No,” Holden said. He didn’t look at them as he spoke, but reached out his hand and pressed his palm to the wall. “I’m staying on the Roci. I’ll be right here.”
“You sure?” Amos asked, and again it seemed to mean something more than Prax could understand.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Holden said.
“All right, then.”
Prax cleared his throat, and Amos took his elbow.
“What about you?” Amos said. “You got a place to bunk down?”
Prax’s prepared speech- I wanted to tell you all how much I appreciate… — ran into the question, derailing both thoughts.
“I… ah… I don’t, but-”
“Right, then. Get your stuff, and you can come with me.”
“Well, yes. Thank you. But first I wanted to tell you all-”
Amos put a solid hand on his shoulder.
“Maybe later,” the big man said. “Right now, how about you just come with me?”
Holden leaned against the wall now. His jaw was set hard, like that of a man about to scream or vomit or weep. His eyes were looking at the ship but seeing past it. Sorrow welled up in Prax as if he were looking into a mirror.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
Amos’ rooms were, if anything, smaller than the bunks on the Rocinante: two small privacy areas, a common space less than half the size of the galley, and a bathroom with a fold-out sink and toilet in the shower stall. It would have induced claustrophobia if Amos had actually been there.
Instead, he’d seen Prax settled in, taken a quick shower, and headed out into the wide, luxurious passageways of the station. There were plants everywhere, but for the most part they seemed decorative. The curve of the decks was so slight Prax could almost imagine he was back on some unfamiliar part of Ganymede, that his hole was no more than a tube ride away. That Mei would be there, waiting for him. Prax let the outer door close, pulled out his hand terminal, and connected to the local network.
There was still no reply from Persis-Strokes, but it was probably too early to expect one. In the meantime, the problem was money. If he was going to fund this, he couldn’t do it alone.
Which meant Nicola.
Prax set up his terminal, turning the camera on himself. The image on the screen looked thin, wasted. The weeks had dried him out, and his time on the Rocinante hadn’t completely rebuilt him. He might never be rebuilt. The sunken cheeks on the screen might be who he was now. That was fine. He started recording.
“Hi, Nici,” he said. “I wanted you to know I’m safe. I got to Tycho Station, but I still don’t have Mei. I’m hiring a security consultant. I’m giving them everything I know. They seem like they’ll really be able to help. But it’s expensive. It may be very expensive. And she may already be dead.”
Prax took a moment to catch his breath.
“She may already be dead,” he said again. “But I have to try. I know you aren’t in a great financial position right now. I know you’ve got your new husband to think of. But if you have anything you can spare-not for me. I don’t want anything from you. Just Mei. For her. If you can give her anything, this is the last chance.”
He paused again, his mind warring between Thank you and It’s the least you can fucking do. In the end, he just shut off the recording and sent it.
The lag between Ceres and Tycho Station was fifteen minutes, given their relative positions. And even then, he didn’t know what the local schedule there was. He might be sending his message in the middle of the night or during dinnertime. She might not have anything to say to him.
It didn’t matter. He had to try. He could sleep if he knew he’d done everything he could to try.
He recorded and sent messages to his mother, to his old roommate from college who’d taken a position on Neptune Station, to his postdoctorate advisor. Each time, the story got a little easier to tell. The details started coming together, one leading into another. With them, he didn’t talk about the protomolecule. At best, it would have scared them. At worst, they’d have thought the loss had broken his mind.
When the last message was gone, he sat quietly. There was one other thing he thought he had to do now that he had full communication access. It wasn’t what he wanted.
He started the recording.
“Basia,” he said. “This is Praxidike. I wanted you to know that I know Katoa is dead. I saw the body. It didn’t… it didn’t look like he suffered. And I thought, if I was in your place, that wondering… wondering would be worse. I’m sorry. I’m just…”
He turned off the recording, sent it, and crawled onto the small bed. He’d expected it to be hard and uncomfortable, but the mattress was as cradling as crash couch gel, and he fell asleep easily and woke four hours later like someone had flipped a switch on the back of his head. Amos was still gone, even though it was station midnight. There was still no message from Persis-Strokes, so Prax recorded a polite inquiry-just to be sure the information hadn’t gotten lost in transit-then watched it and erased it. He took a long shower, washing his hair twice, shaved, and recorded a new inquiry, looking less like a raving lunatic.
Ten minutes after he sent it, a new-message alert chimed. Intellectually, he knew it couldn’t be a response. With lag, his message wouldn’t even be at Luna yet. When he pulled it up, it was Nicola. The heart-shaped face looked older than he remembered it. There was the first dusting of gray at her temples. But when she made that soft, sad smile, he was twenty again, sitting across from her in the grand park while bhangra throbbed and lasers traced living art on the domed ice above them. He remembered what it had been like to love her.
“I have your message,” she said. “I’m… I’m so sorry, Praxidike. I wish there was more I could do. Things aren’t so good here on Ceres. I will talk with Taban. He makes more than I do, and if he understands what’s happened, he might want to help too. For my sake.
“Take care of yourself, old man. You look tired.”
On the screen, Mei’s mother leaned forward and stopped the recording. An icon showed an authorized transfer code for eighty FusionTek Real. Prax checked the exchange rates, converting the company scrip to UN dollars. It was almost a week’s salary. Not enough. Not near enough. But still, it had been a sacrifice for her.
He pulled the message back up, pausing it in the gap between two words. Nicola looked out at him from the terminal, her lips parted barely enough for him to see her pale teeth. Her eyes were sad and playful. He’d thought for so long that it was her soul and not just an accident of physiology that gave her that look of fettered joy. He’d been wrong.
As he sat, lost in history and imagination, a new message appeared. It was from Luna. Persis-Strokes. With a feeling somewhere between anxiety and hope, he went to the attached spreadsheet. At the first set of numbers, his heart sank.
Mei might be out there. She might be alive. Certainl
y Strickland and his people were there. They could be found. They could be caught. There was justice to be had.
He just couldn’t afford it.
Chapter Thirty-Two: Holden
H olden sat in a pull-down chair in the Rocinante’s engineering bay reviewing the damage and making notes for Tycho’s repair crew. Everyone else was gone. Some more than others, he thought.
REPLACE STARBOARD ENGINEERING BULKHEAD. SIGNIFICANT DAMAGE TO PORT-SIDE POWER CABLE JUNCTION, POSSIBLY REPLACE ENTIRE JUNCTION BOX.
Two lines of text representing hundreds of work hours, hundreds of thousands of dollars in parts. It also represented the aftermath of coming within a hand’s breadth of fiery annihilation for the ship and crew. Describing it in two quick sentences felt almost sacrilegious. He made a footnote of the types of civilian parts that Tycho was likely to have available that would work with his Martian warship.
Behind him, a wall monitor streamed a Ceres-based news show. Holden had turned it on to keep his mind occupied while he tinkered with the ship and made notes.
Which was all bullshit, of course. Sam, the Tycho engineer who usually took the lead on their repair jobs, didn’t need his help. She didn’t need him making lists of parts for her. She was, in every sense, better qualified to be doing what he was doing right now. But as soon as he turned the job over to her, he wouldn’t have any reason to stay on the ship. He would have to confront Fred about the protomolecule on Ganymede.
And maybe lose Naomi in the process.
If his early suspicion was correct and Fred actually had bartered using the protomolecule as currency or, worse, as a weapon, Holden would kill him. He knew that like he knew his own name, and he feared it. That it would be a capital offense and would almost certainly get him burned down on the spot was actually less important than the fact that it would be the final proof that Naomi was right to leave. That he’d turned into the man she feared he was becoming. Just another Detective Miller, dispensing frontier justice from the barrel of his gun. But whenever he pictured the scene, Fred’s admission of guilt and heartfelt appeal for mercy, Holden couldn’t picture not killing him for what he’d done. He remembered being the sort of man who would make a different choice, but he couldn’t actually remember what being that man was like.
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