“No,” Caspar said. “It’s you or we just plow the fucking thing into the moon and call it done.”
“You’re a shit liar,” Alex said, but unbuckled himself from his crash couch all the same. “You should work on that.”
“Just like everything else,” Caspar said. And then, “You’re really going.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “I really am.”
“You were good.”
“You will be. You don’t need me here.”
He drifted out of his cabin, the light g of the braking burn making “down” a strong suggestion more than a real weight. He headed for the central lift and up to the bridge. As he floated into it for the last time, the rest of the crew braced their feet to stand at attention. Caspar, behind him, began to clap, and the others joined in. By the time Alex reached the pilot’s station, his eyes were damp enough to obscure his display.
“On your order, Captain,” he said.
“Bring us in, Mr. Kamal,” Jillian said.
The actual landing was easy, from a technical perspective. Even as injured as it was, the Storm knew where the walls around it were, and where the encrustation of human structures would be. Alex felt a great weight falling away from his heart. The custom docking clamps they’d made back when the Storm was a recently captured prize of the war slid home with something between a sound too low to hear and a shudder.
“Welcome back, reisijad,” the Belter-inflected voice said over the comms. “Looks like you fucked your ship pretty good?”
“It’ll give you lazy fuckers something to do,” Jillian said, the way Bobbie would have. Same inflection and all. It seemed right in a way Alex couldn’t quite describe that the girl had paid so much attention to how Bobbie ran things. Even when they were gone, the next generation up would keep echoes of them.
The shuttle to Freehold was a single-hulled transport called the Drybeck. It had begun its life as an ore hauler and been retrofitted sometime in the last twenty years. The company that had owned it had a color scheme of green and yellow, and the ghost of its logo still haunted the bulkheads on the bridge. Its drive was small and touchy, prone to stutter when the burn changed, and limited by a tiny reaction mass tank. The hold was lined with crash couches, and the half dozen of the crew most compromised by the death of the Tempest were coming home more as cargo than companions.
The long fall down from the gas giants passed through the area that would have been the most trafficked space in Sol system. Hundreds of ships would have moved between Saturn and Jupiter and the inner planets. Maybe half a dozen did the same in Freehold. Alex plotted the course with a growing sense of the emptiness of the system that mere decades couldn’t fill. It was too big. All of it was too big. He’d been there from the beginning, been part of blazing humanity’s trail to the stars, and he still couldn’t quite get his mind around how vast the spaces were.
He was surprised when, a few minutes before departure, Jillian came to the little bridge and sat in the couch beside his without buckling in.
“You coming down with us?” Alex asked.
Jillian looked at him for a long moment without speaking. She looked older than he thought of her as being, as if taking command, even for so short a time as this, had aged her.
“No,” she said. “The family wants to see me, and I’d like to see them too. But there’ll be time for that when the war’s over.”
I admire your optimism, Alex almost said, but the darkness was too much. He didn’t want to bring her down with his own skepticism. Instead, he nodded and made a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat.
“There’s a fast crawler waiting for you in port,” she said. “It’s got enough water, fuel, and starter yeast to get you going.”
“That’s good of you. I appreciate it.”
“It’s not altruism. Your ship,” she said. “It’s old, but it’s a gunship. Still better than most of what the underground has burning out there.”
“Maybe,” Alex said. “It could also be a nest for whatever birds live in the desert down there. That’s part of what I’m going to find out.”
“When you do, you reach out. The only people who fly solo are slingshotters and assholes. You got to have someone with your back.”
The comms clicked up. The shuttle was clear to leave. All Alex had to do was respond. He put the message on hold.
“What are you saying?” he asked.
“We’re not done,” Jillian said. “Not just that, we’re winning. Underground is going to need every ship it can get, and yours would be a good one to have on the team. If you need a crew for her, you tell me. I’ll get you one.”
Alex didn’t know what to say. The truth was, he didn’t have a plan except to get back to the Rocinante. But she was right. There was going to be an after. An after Bobbie. An after Amos. An after Holden. Whatever he was doing, he wasn’t going out there to die. Just to recover.
“I’ll let you know what it looks like,” he said. “We’ll make a plan.”
Jillian stood and held out her hand. He shook it without unstrapping.
“It’s been good,” Jillian said. “We’ve done good work.”
“We have, haven’t we?” Alex said.
After she left, he went through one last systems check. Flying single-hulled ships was a kind of gambling he usually avoided, but even if he hit a micrometeorite, they’d probably survive it. Anyway. Life was risk.
He flipped the comms back on.
“This is Drybeck,” he said. “I am confirming clearance to launch.”
“You’re still clear, Drybeck,” the voice on the other end of the connection said. “Not blowing nothing up, and no one floating out there to run into. Ge con Gott, yeah? Draper Station out.”
Draper Station, Alex thought as he eased the ship through the lava tube on its maneuvering thrusters. It was the first time he’d heard it called that. He didn’t hate the sound.
Freehold, like most goldilocks-zone planets, had a wide variety of environments. Freehold’s salt deserts were on the same continent as the lush mountains he’d hidden in when they first came and the township that had grown to be a modest city. White dunes and mesas of red stone stretched from horizon to horizon. Tent rocks rose in some places, and knife-thick ridges that could have been artifacts of alien civilizations or just beautiful geology. The dawns were warm pink, and the sunsets were green and gold. Alex didn’t know why. At night, the desert sang. High fluting tones as the temperature shift made the sand itself ring like a wineglass.
The fast crawler was mostly autonomous, and it took its navigation from the time and the position of the sun like an ancient sea captain on Earth. There was no signal coming in or going out that would give Alex’s position away. The transport’s wide titanium-and-rubber treads made the trackless badlands easier to cover than the simplest flight in a ship. The solitude was vast and consoling. He’d expected to feel lonely on the trip, but he wasn’t. The effort of being okay around the crew of the Storm had, it turned out, been exhausting. He hadn’t even known he was making the effort until he didn’t have to anymore. He slept in the little bunk in the crawler’s belly and spent his days sitting on top of the machine watching the sun and sky and stars and didn’t even listen to the music he’d brought with him.
Twice, huge shambling animals with legs like slender trees and coats like yellow moss had walked with him for a while. The second had been with him almost half a day before it cooed three times and turned away. As far as he knew, he was the only human being who’d ever seen them.