“I’m sorry.”
“You’re a lovely man.” She turned back to her comms, and a moment later Elvi was there. “Change of plans. I have to send the Roci someplace else. Can Amos and I hitch a ride?”
“Of course.”
“We have a dog.”
“That makes it the least problematic passenger I’ve had in years.”
Naomi dropped the connection and made a different one.
“What’s up, Boss?” Amos asked.
“Don’t pull in the bridge to the Falcon. Get the Roci shipshape, get whatever you want to keep, and grab a berth on the Falcon. Muskrat’s stuff too.”
Alex leaned forward, looking for the right explanation. The right apology.
“Alex going to hang out with his kid?” Amos asked.
“Yup,” Naomi said.
“It’s not that I don’t love you guys,” Alex said.
“Sure, whatever,” Amos agreed cheerfully. “If I’m not going to be on board to patch any leaks, I’ll want to change some repair priorities.”
“Use your best judgment,” Naomi said, and let the connection drop. She stretched over, squeezed Alex’s hand once, and let it go. “Get to work with the preflight. We’re under some time pressure here.”
Thirty minutes later, they were at the airlock. Naomi had a small bag under her arm. Amos had a bottle of liquor and part of Muskrat’s customized crash couch. The rest had already been moved over to the Falcon. The dog, floating between them with her tail windmilling, seemed the most anxious of them, glancing from one to the other with wide, wet, brown eyes. It was hard to believe that after all the years on the Roci, all the lives they’d lived together there, it would be so easy to gather up everything and pack it out. And yet, there they were.
The inner airlock doors were open, and the control pad said that the bridge was pressurized. Alex gripped and released the handhold even though he wasn’t drifting. This is a mistake, he thought. We shouldn’t be doing this. I was wrong.
Then he thought of Kit, and of never seeing him or hearing his voice again, and he kept his mouth shut.
“I left a list in engineering,” Amos said. “It’s all the stuff you really need to get fixed soon. I mean, don’t wait. And then a couple dozen things you ought to look at. But I’m pretty sure you’re good. I don’t know if they have a dry dock on Nieuwestad.”
“They do,” Alex said. “I checked.”
Amos’ black eyes shifted. They suddenly didn’t seem eerie at all. “You probably ought to head there first. And don’t use the rail gun. Cracked capacitor will probably blow if you charge it.”
“Don’t shoot anybody. Got it.”
“Unless you have to,” Amos said, then he tucked the dog under one arm and headed for the airlock door. Naomi, watching, smiled.
“He hasn’t changed,” Alex said. “Not really.”
“He has,” she said. “We all have.”
“Before you go, I wanted to say…” Naomi shook her head gently, and he trailed off.
“It was good,” she said.
“It was.”
She touched a handhold, rotated, and slid through the still air and into the lock. Muskrat barked once, and Alex was going to tell them to say goodbye to Teresa for him, but the inner door slid closed. The outer door opened, and Naomi and Amos and the dog transferred onto the bridge and across it. He saw that they were speaking to each other, but he didn’t know what they said. As the Falcon’s lock opened to accept them, the Roci’s outer door closed, and Alex was alone on the ship. He waited for a moment, telling himself that he was just listening to the hum of the docking bridge retracting. Making sure nothing went wrong. But even after it was folded in place and ready for travel, he floated there for a few more seconds before he headed back up to the controls.
It felt odd, piloting from ops. Not that he hadn’t done it before, but when he had, it had been because there was someone with him there he wanted to talk to without shouting down. Despite all the times he’d run through the diagnostics with the others on board, he ran them again, saw nothing unexpected, and maneuvered away from the Falcon. When he lit the drive, the crash couch rose up under him, and he settled into the gel. The drive looked solid. He hadn’t caught the Falcon in the plume. He shifted up to a third of a g, then a half. Then a full g. Then more. The ship creaked, and he told himself that it was only the normal sounds. They only seemed louder because he was the only one hearing them. Two gs and he injected himself with a half dose of the juice. He stopped there. He also didn’t want to strain the ship before it could get a real once-over. He didn’t want to have a stroke when no one could get him to the autodoc.
“Trade-offs,” he said out loud. “It’s always trade-offs.”
No one answered. He took a moment, feeling the emptiness of the ship. Just him and the Rocinante and the starless void of the ring space. He opened the ship-wide comm.
“If anybody’s in here, this is your last chance. Say it now, or you’re part of the crew from now on.”
It was just a joke, and he was the only one who could appreciate it. He checked the drive. It was running fine. The course was inside tolerance, but there was enough noise that he’d want to adjust a time or two before the transit. The time until he reached the gate… He upped the drive to three gs. His bones could handle it. He wasn’t that old.
For the first half hour, he sat in the crash couch, shifting between diagnostic screens, waiting and watching for a sign of malfunction. Then he cut thrust to a third g for a few minutes, went down to the galley, and got a cup of tea. He wanted a beer, but maybe not until after the transit. But he could put on some music, so he did. Old Martian rai-fusion rang through the corridors and cabins. It was both beautiful and melancholy.
He got back in the chair and put the spurs in again.
It wasn’t long before other ships reached the gates. The list of vessels in the ring space, formatted for reporting just the way Naomi had designed, lost one name. Then another. The rubric showed that it was safe to go, that they were at very low risk of going dutchman, with the profile ticking up almost imperceptibly with every ship that left. The Duffy, heading for Bara Gaon. The Kaivalya for Auberon. Even the poor, busted-up Lagomorpha with its bad drive cone made it through Sol gate. When the Whirlwind passed into Laconia, the model shifted for almost a minute, ready to warn any incoming ships to slow their approach. It would have been a good system.
Slowly, and yet with all due haste, the ring space emptied.
Pressed into his couch, he started thinking about what came next. Here he was, a pilot with an old, broken ship and no crew. He didn’t know much about Nieuwestad, other than it was a corporate holding. That wasn’t going to mean much. But there wasn’t a large military presence. Having a gunship would either ensure his independence or make the local authorities anxious about him. But that was borrowing trouble before it came. The Roci was a good ship, and rated for atmosphere. Once he got it fixed up and found a crew, they could carry scientific survey teams through the system. Maybe do a little prospecting of his own. He imagined Kit and his wife shipping out with him on some microclimate engineering mission. Or something. Or just a little family vacation. He imagined being Grampa Alex, and grinned to himself. Then he imagined being Grampa Alex without Giselle there to make comments about his belly, and let himself smile just a little bit more. There were good lives out there for him. Possibilities.