He’d wondered more than once why Naomi had chosen to live in a hidden shipping container, but now, here, he thought he understood. The pleasure of being utterly alone made his mourning into something different and strange and humane.
The cave where they’d put the Roci was in the western quarter of the desert. He’d picked it because it was near a patchwork of radioactive ore that added a little camouflage if the enemy was looking for it and acted as a landmark for him.
The fears that haunted him now were that the Roci wouldn’t be waiting for him. That the shelf he’d parked her under had collapsed in his absence. Or that the sealants they’d put on to protect the hull plating had broken down or been compromised by desert animals, exposing a ship built for vacuum to the erosion of wind and sand and salt. As the hours fell away, his anxiety started to grow. The peace of the desert rolled past until the crawler reached the edge of its automatic course and came to a shuddering halt beside a vast outcropping of stone.
Alex took a flask of water and a cloth to tie across his mouth and dropped to the salt-rich sand. The shade under the stone was cool. He followed the tracks of glass where the Roci’s thrusters had melted the sand, it felt like lifetimes before.
And there, dark and quiet and perfectly intact at the back of the cavern, was the old Martian corvette. Something had scratched at the sealant—maybe animals, maybe the sandblasting desert wind—but nothing had broken through. It was just his imagination that made him feel like the ship was welcoming him. He knew that. It didn’t matter.
It took the better part of a day to cut through the sealing coat and get the airlock answering him, but after that, things moved faster. They’d drained the water out of the tanks before they left, but the crawler’s supplies were enough to get the ship almost halfway to capacity. Getting the recycling system back online was harder. He spent half a day checking feed lines before he found the one that had split. And it took another half a day to replace it. It would have taken Naomi or Amos or Clarissa half an hour.
He didn’t sleep in the crawler anymore, especially once the Roci’s galley was able to turn out a little food. With his limited supplies, the food was spartan and the drinks were water and green tea. The ship was lying belly-down on the ground, everything was at ninety degrees from where his mind wanted it to be, and he had to climb to get to his cabin and his crash couch.
Lost as he was in the work of hauling his old ship back to herself, he could almost pretend he was waiting for his old crew. That they’d be there in the machine shop and the flight deck, laughing and arguing and rolling their eyes like they had before. A week into the effort, he’d exhausted himself and fallen onto his couch without eating dinner. He found himself slipping between dreams and wakefulness, hearing their voices in the hallway. Clarissa’s dry whisper and Holden’s earnest concern like they were really there, and if he just concentrated, he’d be able to make out the words. The alert tone as the airlock opened and familiar footsteps in the halls.
When the silhouette bent into his doorway, he still thought he was dreaming. It was the sound of a living voice, the first since he’d left Freehold, that brought him back to himself.
“Hey,” Naomi said.
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Naomi
Hey,” Naomi said.
Alex shifted in his crash couch, and the hiss of the gimbals was like something made from memory. He blinked at her, confused and sleep drunk.
“No shit?” he said.
“No shit,” Naomi said.
“No, no, no. I just … I didn’t know you were coming.” They were simple words. Commonplace. They carried a heavy weight.
Time and tragedy had thinned Alex’s face and darkened the skin under his eyes. His smile was joyful, but it was a bruised kind of joy. The pleasure and delight that could only come to someone who understood how precious they were, and how fragile. She figured that she looked the same.
“I got your message about heading back here, and … well, I had some other plans, but the more I thought about it, the more sense coming back to the Roci made.”
“Thought about it a lot, eh?”
“Ten, maybe fifteen whole seconds,” she said.
Alex barked out a laugh and hauled himself up. She stepped into the cabin, and they embraced. The last time they’d touched had been on the deep transfer station back in Sol. There had been three of them.
After a moment, they stepped back. She was surprised by how good it felt to see Alex in the familiar environment of the Rocinante, even if the ship was ninety degrees from her usual orientation.
“How’d you get here?” he asked, still grinning.
“I have a crackerbox with an Epstein,” Naomi said. “From Auberon to here. It’s not rated for atmosphere, though, so I parked it at the transfer station and hitched a lift down on a shuttle.”
“Planetside again.”
“And my knees already hate it. But I’m in a ship, so it’s not too strange,” she said. “You’re never going to convince me that this whole ‘sky’ thing isn’t fucking creepy. I like my air held in by something I can see, thank you very much.”
“You want a drink? The old girl’s not all the way up to snuff, but she can make you some tea. Maybe even some maté by now, depending on how the recyclers are doing.”
“I wouldn’t say no,” Naomi said, and then, because it felt stranger to leave it unsaid than to say it, “I am so sorry about Bobbie. I cried for a whole day.”
Alex looked down and away. His smile shifted invisibly into a mask of itself. “I still do sometimes. It’ll take me by surprise and it’s like it’s happening again, for the first time,” he said.
“Thinking about Jim does that to me.”
“You should have seen her, XO,” Alex said, and he did something between a laugh and a sob. “Like a fuckin’ Valkyrie, you know? Flying at that big-ass ship like she could take it down by herself.”
“She did. Take it down by herself, I mean.”
Alex nodded. “So did you have a plan now that you’re here?”
He couldn’t talk about it anymore. She understood that. She let the subject drop.
“I was following you,” she said, turning to climb up the deck to the main lift—a corridor for the moment. “Now that Medina and the Typhoon are gone, we could actually move between gates again.”
“That does open up some possibilities,” Alex said. “My to-do list has two things on it. First one’s put the old girl shipshape again, and the second’s figure out what to do next.”
“That sounds perfect,” Naomi said. They reached the galley. The tables projected from one wall, but there were built-in jump seats for times like this. She pulled two of them out. “Let’s do that.”
It turned out that Alex’s first entry gave her days of work to do. He’d gotten a decent start on the re-up process, but the Rocinante had been dry for a long time. Probably the longest since she’d been made by a Martian Navy that didn’t exist anymore. A lot of the systems were old, and the newer ones were replacements that didn’t ever fit together quite the way the originals had. There had been a little corrosion in the reactor shielding. Nothing that time and use didn’t justify, but something to keep an eye on. She felt herself falling into a rhythm she hadn’t known existed, and recognized perfectly. Normalcy. This was how life just was, and everything else she’d done, however comfortable she’d been with it, had been the aberration.
Day after day, she and Alex went through the ship, troubleshooting each system as it came back up. A full crew could have done the whole thing in ten hours, and there were only two of them. But they got it done—the reactor up, the comms, the power grid, the thrusters, the weapons. Some maintenance routines assumed there would be teams of four, but they found workarounds. One piece at a time, the Rocinante came back to life.