Fifty-three systems. Four hundred and eighteen ships with five Transport Union supply ships and three Donnager-class battleships among them, and the Storm—still compromised, but able to fly, still on her way. The best hammer that the underground could put together.
And it still wasn’t half the size of the force the Tempest had killed in Sol. Hopefully, if she’d done this right, it would be enough. If she’d been fooling herself, they’d all pay the price. But she was pretty sure she was right.
Once she had all the specs, she started sorting through by drive model, ship mass, and total energetic profile. Alex showed up with a tube of spiced lentils and a bulb of cold tea. She didn’t know she was hungry until she started eating it, and then she was ravenous. She put the monitor aside, rolling the tube and pressing to get out every bit of the spicy, rich mush. When it was gone apart from a burning aftertaste and a pleasant pressure in her gut, she sighed.
“Just like old times,” Alex said. “You never could remember to eat when you had a good problem to solve.”
“My old problems were never like this. It was more how to make sure we get to the next port safely.”
“That’s not what we’re doin’?” Alex asked with a grin.
“Nothing about this has any relationship to safety. This is exactly what I never wanted to be doing. Fighting? Getting people killed? I never even carried a gun.”
“I knew that,” Alex said, and the grin had turned into something softer. “There’s still time. Call this off, head back to port. Go back to getting our people elected into the Association of Worlds.”
Naomi was silent, her mind and her heart at odds the way they so often were. Alex misunderstood.
“I’m only half joking,” he said. “There is time to pull back. We haven’t committed these folks to anything. Not yet.”
“No, we have to do this. If there was time… I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I’d have kept looking until I found a better way. One that wasn’t this.”
The comm controls alerted, a little orange strobe blinking with the incoming message. But it was only the Storm, updating her ETA. Naomi tucked the empty food tube into her pocket. She’d throw it in the recycler when she was done here. The bulb of tea cooled her fingers and pulled a tiny sheen of condensation out of the air.
“You feel like you owe it to them?” Alex asked, gently. “To Bobbie. And Saba. Amos.”
“No,” Naomi said. “And not to Jim either. This isn’t guilt. It’s… possibility? I don’t want to fight. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. Or die. Not our side, and not them either. I want to reconcile. That’s why Bobbie always got so frustrated with me. She wanted to win.”
“Looks like you do too, now.”
“The problem is it’s hard to reconcile when you’ve lost,” Naomi said. “Someone takes all the power, and you try to bring them into the fold again? That’s capitulation. I don’t think violence solves anything, not even this. Not even now. But maybe winning puts us in a place that we can be gracious.”
“Meet Duarte halfway?” Alex said. She could hear in his voice that he wasn’t convinced. If she couldn’t sway him, maybe there wasn’t hope. But she tried.
“Make space for him. Maybe he’ll take it, maybe he won’t. Maybe his admirals will see something in it he doesn’t. The point of this fight isn’t to kill Laconia. It’s to get enough power that we can close the distance they opened between them and everyone else. That may mean punishing some people. It may mean answering for old crimes. But it has to mean finding some way forward.”
“You sure that’s not owing something to Holden?” Alex said. “Because that sounds an awful lot like something he’d say. And then everyone else would roll their eyes at.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. There needs to be a Saba now, so I’ll be that if I have to. But there’s going to need to be a James Holden later. And if he’s not there to do it, we’ll have to pick that up too.”
“What about a Naomi Nagata?”
“She should probably finish solving her traffic control problems. I don’t want anyone going dutchman. Or setting off another lost-time incident. Not if we can avoid it,” Naomi said. The comm alerted again, and this time she answered it. “Rocinante here.”
“This is the destroyer Gathering Storm,” a woman said. Her voice almost hummed with pride and the prospect of violence. “Requesting permission to dock and transfer crew.”
Alex raised a hand. “I’ll take care of this one, Admiral.”
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 Kindermann. 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 dutchman, 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.
“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 m
inds 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.
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