“It’s not the odds-on bet. Even when their fleet was new, taking out the rail-gun emplacements would have been a mighty tall order.”
Drummer considered. “We can get a couple ships as backup, just in case. If it turns out Laconia needs its ass kicked, I’m not sending our ships through their gate. But it may make that charter an easier sell. Let Mars smell blood and vengeance and see if the EMC gets more interested in enforcement and policing than it was before?”
“It would be a very different case,” Santos-Baca agreed. It was good that they were on the same page with this. Drummer had half-feared that the board was going to come up with their own strategy. Her job was herding kittens. Only thankfully not this time. She was trying to avoid being a police force. She sure as hell didn’t want to command a full military. If there was going to be a war on the far side of Laconia gate, let Mars fight it.
“All right then,” Drummer said. “Nothing we can’t handle.”
Chapter Eleven: Bobbie
When the Roci pulled into port at Medina, the security detail was there to take Houston into custody. Bobbie watched Holden as the prisoner marched away. She thought there’d been a melancholy look in Holden’s eyes. The last thing he’d done as captain was hand over a man to live in a cell. Or she might have been reading more into the situation than was there. Drummer’s threatened press release didn’t appear.
After that, they’d all gone out to a club. Naomi rented a private room for all of them, and they’d eaten a dinner of vat-grown beef and fresh vegetables seasoned with mineral-rich salt and hot pepper. Bobbie tried not to get drunk or maudlin, but she was the only one. Except Amos. He’d watched all the hugging and weeping and protestations of love like a mom at a five-year-old’s birthday party, indulgent and supportive, but not really engaged with it.
After they’d eaten, they went out to the floor of the club and danced and sang karaoke and drank a little more. And then Holden and Naomi left together, their arms around each other’s hips, strolling out into Medina Station’s corridors as if they were going to come back. Only they weren’t.
The four of them made their way back to the port talking and laughing. Alex was reciting lines and acting out scenes from one of the neo-noir films he collected. She and Clarissa egged him on. Amos grinned and ambled along behind them, but she saw him watching the halls in case four old half-drunk space jockeys attracted any trouble. Not that there was a reason to expect it. It was just something he did. She noticed it in part because she did it too.
Back at the ship, the others scattered, floating to their rooms. Bobbie waited in the galley sipping a bulb of fresh coffee until they were gone. There was still one more thing she wanted to do before she called it a day, and it was something she wanted to do alone.
Around her, the Rocinante ticked as the residual heat of their journey slowly radiated out into the absolute vacuum of the slow zone. The air recyclers hummed. A sense of peace descended over everything like she was a child again and this was the night after Christmas. She let her breath deepen and slow, feeling the ship around her like it was her skin. When she finished the last drop of coffee, she put the empty bulb into the recycler and drew herself down the corridor to Holden’s cabin. The captain’s cabin.
Hers.
Holden and Naomi had taken everything out already. The drawers were unlocked. The captain’s safe was open and scrubbed, waiting for a new access code. The double-sized crash couch—the one Holden and Naomi had shared for so long—gleamed, clean and polished. The slightly acrid smell of fresh gel told her that Naomi had replaced it all before she went. Clean sheets for the new tenant. Bobbie let herself drift into the space, stretching out her arms and legs. Eyes closed, she listened to the peculiar quietness of this cabin, how it was like the one she’d been using these last years. How it was different. When she reached out to take a handhold, the wall was still a half a meter away. A double-sized crew cabin, created so Naomi and Holden could share the space, had become the privilege of being the Rocinante’s captain. She smiled at the thought.
The safe waited for her passcode. She fed it the prints from her thumb and two index fingers, then typed in the password she’d chosen and spoke it out loud for the system to learn. Sixteen digits long, committed to her memory, and not associated with anything outside itself. The safe closed with a solid clack, magnetic locks falling into place where it would take a welding torch and a lot of time to force. She pulled up her partition on the wall screen, checking to see that everything was in place. The drive was quiet, the reactor shut down, the environmental systems well within the green. Everything just the way it should be on her ship. It was going to take a while, she figured, before that thought didn’t seem like she was playacting. Better that she got used to it, though. Her ship.
Four messages waited for her in the queue. The first two were automated messages, one confirming the docking agreement and fee structure for their present stay on Medina, the other showing the withdrawal from the group account of Holden and Naomi’s lump cash-out. The Rocinante already sending her the things it used to route to Holden. The third was from Medina traffic control, but the fourth was from the man himself. James Holden. She opened that one first.
His face appeared on the screen, floating in the same room she was in now, back when it had been his. He was smiling, and she felt herself smiling back.
“Hey, Bobbie,” he said, and his voice seemed loud in the quiet. “I just wanted to leave this here for you as a note. I’ve spent a lot of time on the Roci. My best moments are part of this boat. And a bunch of the worst ones. And most of the people I love. I can’t think of anyone else in thirteen hundred worlds I’d trust with it the way I trust you. Thank you for taking this cup from me. And if there’s ever anything I can do to help out down the line, just say so. I may not be part of the crew anymore, but we’re still family.”
The message ended, and she flagged it to be saved. She opened the one from traffic control. A young man with deeply black skin and close-cropped hair nodded into his camera at her.
“Captain Holden, I am Michael Simeon with Medina Station security. I am sending this to inform you that, in accordance with union policy, the Rocinante is being called to a mandatory security contract. Your presence is required at a briefing on the incoming ambassadorial contact from Laconia at the location and time embedded in this message. Please confirm that you or your representative will be attending.”
Bobbie tapped the reply, considered herself in the screen for a moment before she pulled her hair back into a bun, and scowled her reply.
“This is Captain Draper of the Rocinante,” she said. “I’ll be there.”
Ten minutes into the briefing, Bobbie thought, Oh. This is why he didn’t want the job anymore.
The room was in the drum section of the station, up near the nonrotating command decks. The desks were lined up in rows like the worst kind of classroom, with hard seats and built-in drink holders that didn’t quite fit the cheap ceramic mugs they’d given out. There were around forty people in the uncomfortable seats with her—representatives of all the ships presently in the slow zone—but she and the executive officer of the Tori Byron had places of honor. Front row, center. Where the smart kids sat. The Rocinante and the Tori Byron were, after all, the only gunships around Medina at the moment. All the rest were tugs and cargo haulers.