Leviathan Falls

Chapter Forty-Eight: Alex

“… evacuate immediately. Assume whatever system you are entering is where you will be from now on. Expect and assume no further contact after your transit, and do not reenter the ring space once you’ve left. This is not a joke. This is not a drill. Message repeats.” Naomi ended the recording, sent it out, and then floated back from her control screen and swallowed a couple times. Alex felt the same. The hollowness in his gut.

“Well,” he said. “Holy shit.”

The ops deck around them wasn’t in ruins, quite, but it was hurting. He’d been in the galley when the universe went strange and the black things had come swimming through it like matter was a thin mist and they were the only things that were real. Which was just as well, seeing as half the pilot’s crash couch was missing now. If he’d been in his usual spot, he wouldn’t be worrying about any of this.

Naomi’s right arm was in a sling, but she wasn’t missing anything. The best they could reconstruct, she’d jumped back when one of the things had gone for her and slammed her shoulder against the bulkhead. A long stretch of the decking was gone, and there was a hole in the inner hull that Amos had thrown a quick patch on, the metal bright against the old foam-and-cloth covering.

“What do we need to be ready?” Naomi asked.

Amos went still the way he did ever since he’d gotten killed, then he shrugged. “There’s a few things I should patch up. We lost one of the port PDCs, but as long as we’re not planning to shoot anybody, that can wait. Make sure the water tanks aren’t leaking and triple-check the reactor and the drive.”

“How long?”

The big mechanic smiled. “If we’re good, half an hour. If we’re not, then it depends how bad we are.”

“Get started, and I’ll come assist as soon as I can.”

“Copy that, Boss,” Amos said. “And Tiny, right?”

“Not leaving without her,” Naomi said. “But I may be cutting the Falcon loose.”

“Let me go double-check the bridge then. You can fuck things up pretty good if you try folding those back in when they’re broken.”

“Thank you,” Naomi said, then turned to Alex. “Preflight checks. All of them, top to bottom. And keep running the diagnostics until the second we’re ready to go. If you can get through them five times, do them five times.”

“You got it,” Alex said, and hauled himself into an undamaged crash couch. “Don’t worry. The Roci’s not going to let us down now.”

“That’s because we’re not going to let it down,” Naomi said.

On the tactical display, the ships still remaining in the ring space started ticking from yellow to green as their courses changed and their drives bloomed. On the comms, half a dozen connection requests were already queued—people asking for clarification or for help. He didn’t know what to do for any of them.

Naomi ignored them for the time being and put in her own connection request to Elvi, which was accepted as soon as it was made.

“What’s the Falcon’s status?” Naomi asked.

Alex started the diagnostic run, querying each of the maneuvering thrusters for power, reaction mass feed status, pressure, and control response.

Elvi’s answer was equal parts mania and relief. “Fucked, flustered, and far from home.”

“I’m going to need something a little more technical,” Naomi said, but there was a smile in her voice. One of the port thrusters threw up an alert for low reaction mass. Alex started isolating the line and looking for pressure drops.

“We lost two crew. Harshaan Lee and David Contreras. I don’t think you met David. He was a chemist. He had a wife on Laconia.”

“Oh. Not Harshaan. I’m so sorry.”

“We sustained some damage, but not as much as last time, because I’ve been through that twice now. I never wanted to do that again. I hate it.”

“How long before you’re good to go?”

“It’ll take an hour,” Elvi said. “And then, like a bat from the depths of hell.”

Alex found the problem. A broken feed from the water tanks. In a perfect life, they’d fix it, but the Roci had been built for war. Multiple redundancies were in her nature. Her backups had backups had backups. He started flipping through alternate feeds while the diagnostic run went on ahead of him.

“Where are you going?” Naomi asked.

Alex felt a little twinge of concern at Elvi’s sigh. “Sol,” she said, quietly. “I haven’t said so yet, but Sol.”

“Not Laconia?”

“The Whirlwind’s heading that way. Even if Trejo decides to honor his amnesty, and there are literally no consequences for breaking his word, I’m pretty sure Admiral Gujarat has an enemies list. If I’m on it, and I am very much on it, a lot of my staff is going to be in for a hard run too. I’m breaking up some families, but I’m saving some lives. What about you?”

“Sol,” Naomi said. “But I can’t go until Teresa’s out of the station. I won’t make you wait for me. As soon as we can detach the ships, you get the fuck out of here.”

“Don’t need to say it twice,” Elvi said, and dropped the connection. Alex identified a feed with no pressure drop and switched to it. Naomi pulled up the first message in the queue.

“This is Captain Loftman of the Lagomorpha. We are in need of assistance. Our drive cone has suffered catastrophic damage…”

Naomi fell to, finding rescuers for ships in need of rescue, answering questions for ships whose command staff were in panic, checking in with Amos now and again as he worked his way through the ship. On her screen, a small window was dedicated to the visual telescopy pointed at the station, the entrance.

Alex felt himself trembling before he knew what it was about. When he did know, he pulled his hands back from the controls. The Roci went on, checking the status of the air and water recyclers, the power grid, the Epstein drive.

“Naomi,” he said, and something in his voice must have told her there was a problem, because she abandoned the comms at once and turned to him. For a moment, he remembered her the way she’d been when he first knew her back on the Canterbury, when the biggest problem he’d had was whether they could get from Ceres to Saturn and back fast enough to collect the on-time bonus. She’d been a quiet thing then. Always hiding behind her own hair and avoiding eye contact. The woman she’d become… Well, they were related, but they weren’t the same.

“If this is what’s happening,” he said, thinking his way through each word as he said it. “If this is pick-the-last-place-you’re-going-to-be… I know I’ve been a restless kind of guy, but Kit is in Nieuwestad system with his wife and their little boy. And I’m not young. If there’s no chance of me ever seeing them again on one hand, and there’s I’m-able-to-find-a-job-and-send-messages-and-swing-by-a-couple-times-a-year on the other? I don’t know that I can go back to Sol. My family’s not there.”

There was a way that his last words could have been cruel, but he didn’t know how else to say it. Naomi was family, and Jim was. And Amos. Even Teresa and her old dog, a little bit. He looked away, afraid to see hurt in Naomi’s eyes.

“If it were Filip,” she said, “I’d be going where he was.”

“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.

The alarm sounded when he was still a hundred thousand klicks from the gate. A misfeed in the fuel supply to the reactor. Maybe nothing, maybe the first sign of a real problem. He pulled up the logs, running down them with a fingertip to help his eyes keep focus. This wasn’t the time to miss anything. He was glad now he hadn’t gone for the beer, or the ones after it.

“Come on,” he cooed to the ship. “We can do this. Just a little further down the trail now.”