Back in her cabin on the Storm, she put herself through the routine of cleaning and straightening her things. The cabin didn’t need it, but she did. The ritual calmed her. She found herself humming. She didn’t know how long it had been since she’d done that. She needed to go back to her little campsite and clear out all signs of her occupation, but she waited anyway. She’d almost decided that Alex wasn’t going to come talk with her when he knocked at her cabin door.
“Hey,” she said.
“Naomi said it was a good idea?”
“She didn’t go that far. She might have just thought it was the right bad idea for the moment.”
Alex managed a little smile. His melancholy made her feel almost ashamed of her lightness and anticipation. “If you need to step back, no one’s going to think less of you. Kit’s your son. Being part of his life and this too … If you’ve got to pick one, I’d understand.”
“You left out a part of the plan. What happens after the payload hits?”
“We’ve never done it before. So apart from an explosion that makes a nuke look like a firecracker, I’m not sure what I’d say. The Storm’s a tough ship, though. Even if there’s some debris hits, she can take it. Probably.”
“You’re going to want to get that shuttle behind something, though,” Alex said. “Put me on it. I’ll get it to shelter.”
“I need you on the Storm. Keeping the Tempest where I need it, when I need it? It’s going to take a great pilot. That’s you. Rini and I will be in power armor. The shuttle might get shredded, but we’ll be better protected than it will. And you’ll be there to come pick us up.”
Alex shifted his weight. She could see him looking for objections the way old married couples could see when one wanted the other to pass the salt.
“I don’t like putting us on different ships either,” Bobbie said. “But this is the right way to do it.”
“Yes, Captain. All right.” He sighed, and then, to her surprise, grinned. “This is going to be one hell of a rodeo.”
“They aren’t going to know what hit them,” Bobbie said. “My only regret is that Trejo won’t be on the ship when we blow it into hot, fast dust.”
“We can find him later,” Alex said. “I’m going to go obsessively run diagnostics on systems I know are solid so I can feel like I have control of something.”
“Sounds good,” Bobbie said. “I’m going to stay here and see how many of my crew quit rather than go through with this.”
“There won’t be any. These people will still follow when you lay siege to hell. We trust you.” Then, a moment later, “I trust you.”
The door closed behind him, and Bobbie sat in her crash couch like she was easing down into a warm bath. When she closed her eyes, she slept.
Chapter Thirty-One: Teresa
Was Timothy ever really my friend?”
Holden sat on the cot, his back against the wall. The paper gown he wore was crumpled and streaked with old blood. The sclera of his right eye was blood red and the flesh around it swollen. The cheek below puffy and dark. More than that, there was a carefulness to his movements that meant everything ached. The cell was tiny. The smallest closet in her bedroom suite was nearly twice as large. The only light came from a pencil-thin strip at the top of the wall that was too bright to look at directly but left most of the room too dark to read in.
“If he said he was your friend, then he was,” Holden said. “Amos wasn’t a man who felt the need to lie very often.”
“Why was he here?” she heard herself ask, just the way she’d been told.
Holden swallowed like it was a difficult thing to do. He seemed sad. No, not sad. Pitying. It was worse.
“They asked me all this before. I’m sorry that they’re making you do it too.”
Trejo had told her to stay on script, to only say what she’d rehearsed, but she took the chance now. “Maybe they thought it would be harder to lie to someone you’d hurt.”
“Maybe. I’ll tell you the same thing I told them. I didn’t know he was here. I hadn’t been contacted by him. I don’t know what his mission was or who put him onto it or how long he’s been here. If he had a way to get in touch with the underground, I don’t know what it was. And I don’t know why he had a backpack nuke, except that I’m guessing he at least wanted to have the option of blowing something up. If I’d known he was here, I’d have told him not to.”
Teresa looked up at the camera. Holden had answered her next four questions without her asking them. She didn’t know if that meant she should skip that part or make him say it all again.
“How’s your father?” Holden asked into her hesitation. “No one told me, but I put it together that something went wrong. Plus which, he hasn’t come to question me. I feel like he and I have enough of a relationship, he would have.”
My father’s fine, she thought. She couldn’t bring herself to say it. “Don’t worry about him. Worry about yourself.”
“Oh, I’m on that. Plenty worried for both of us. All of us.”
“What happened to his body?” she asked, trying to get back onto the script.
“Your dad’s?”
“Timothy’s.”
“I don’t know.”
She paused. Her gut was tight, and she felt a knot at the back of her throat. She felt it often these days. “He’s dead. I saw it.”
“So they’ve told me. He was a good … Well, he wasn’t really exactly a good person. He cared enough to try, anyway. But he was loyal as hell.” Holden paused. “He was my brother. I loved him.”
“What is the underground doing?”
Holden shrugged. “Trying to make enough room under your father’s boot that anyone else’s opinion matters, I assume. That’s what I’d be doing. Hold on. Just …” Holden levered himself up and spoke directly to the camera. “Could we cut this part short? It seems kind of shitty for her, and it’s not going to change anything.”
At first, there was no reply, then the hard clack of the magnetic door bolts opening. Holden sat down. Teresa felt the thrill of relief that told her how frightened she’d been, alone with this man. How glad she was that this part of the ordeal was over.
“They wouldn’t have let me hurt you,” Holden said. “Even if I’d wanted to. I mean, I don’t, but even if.”
Rage shot through her, unpredictable and vicious. “You’re not much of a dancing bear anymore,” she said.
Holden leaned against the wall, let it hold him up. When he smiled, she saw that one of his eyeteeth was missing. “Nice to be taken seriously, though.”
The door opened, and two guards came in with Colonel Ilich. Their boots squeaked on the tile floor. The guards had their hands on their batons, but they didn’t draw them. Not yet. Ilich put his hand on her shoulder, and she turned to go out. If he said he was your friend, then he was. She wanted to believe that, but she didn’t.
“It’s okay,” Ilich said as the cell door closed behind them. “You did well.”
The magnetic bolts shot closed again. Holden was contained. She felt a little calmer. They walked down the hallway past half a dozen more doors like it. If there were people behind them, Teresa didn’t know who they were or why they were there. It seemed like every day revealed some other vast area of things she didn’t know.
Ever since the bad night, she’d felt more than a little like a prisoner herself. Trejo had made her go over everything she knew about Timothy—how they’d met, what he’d said, what she’d told him, how he got along with the repair drones, why she’d never told anyone about him. After hours of it, Ilich tried to call a halt, but the interrogation had gone on until she was weeping and then well past that too.