Persepolis Rising

Chapter Nine: Bobbie

They sat in the galley, the same way they always did. Amos and Clarissa beside each other, Alex at the end of a table across from her. Holden a little apart, and Naomi closer to him than to the others. Bobbie felt the anxiety humming in her throat and legs like she was about to get in a fight. Worse, because there was a moment of calm that came with violence, and there wasn’t going to be one of those here.

The dinner was—had been—mushroom noodles in black sauce. But everyone had stopped eating when Holden cleared his throat and said he had an announcement. When he’d broken the news, he’d seemed rueful more than anything else, and he covered it up by talking about numbers and business. Going over their last few years, and the projections for the next few. His decision to step down, and Naomi’s too. His nomination of Bobbie to take his place and all his arguments for it. The others listened in silence while he turned to the details of the sale. The noodles had all gone cold and sticky in their bowls.

“Naomi and I are cashing out a quarter of our shares in the ship,” he said, “with a payment plan that pays out the remainder over the next ten years. That still leaves a pretty fair balance in the operating account. The payment plan has a sliding structure, so if things get a little tight at some point, we’re not going to sink you, and if things go really well, you can also pay us out early. So there’s flexibility built in.”

He thought he was being kind. That by making things formal, it would hurt the others less. Maybe he was right. Bobbie kept glancing around the room, trying to get a sense of how they were taking it. Was Alex leaning forward on his elbows because he was feeling aggressive, or did his back just ache a little? Did Amos’ affable smile mean anything? Did it ever? Would they agree to the idea? If they didn’t, what happened then? The anxiety in her gut stung like a scrape.

“So,” Holden said. “That’s the proposal at least. I know we’ve always voted on these kinds of decisions, and if there’s anything in this that anyone wants to look at or a counterproposal that anyone wants to make …”

The silence rang out louder than a bell. Bobbie clenched her fists and released them. Clenched and released. Maybe this whole thing had been a really bad idea from the start. Maybe she should have—

Alex sighed. “Well. Can’t say I didn’t see it coming, but I’m still a little sad now it’s here.”

Naomi’s smile was a ghost, barely there and unmistakable. Bobbie felt something like the beginning of relief loosening the knot in her stomach.

“As far as putting Bobbie in the captain’s chair,” Alex went on, “that’s barely going to be a change. She already bosses me around plenty. So sure. I’m good with that.”

Holden tilted his head the way he did when he was surprised and a little embarrassed, and Naomi put her hand on his shoulder. The unconscious physical grammar of long, intimate years together.

“You saw it coming?” Holden said.

Alex shrugged. “It’s not like you’re all that subtle. You’ve been getting more and more stressed for a while now.”

“Have I been an asshole and just didn’t know?” Holden asked, making it about half a joke.

“We’d have told you,” Amos said. “But there’s this thing for the last couple years, I guess, where you kept looking like you had an itch you didn’t want anybody seeing you scratch.”

“This has been a long damned tour,” Alex said. “If I’d re-upped for another twenty back in the day, I’d be out again by now.”

“Except your navy didn’t last that long,” Amos said.

“I’m just saying a good run’s a good run. I love you two, and I’m going to miss the hell out of you, but if it’s time for something new, then it is.”

Naomi’s smile grew less ambiguous. Holden rocked back a few centimeters on the bench. In her imagination, Bobbie’s best scenarios had involved weeping and hugs. The worst, anger and recriminations. This felt like relief only slightly colored by sorrow. It felt … right.

She cleared her throat. “When we get back to Medina, I’m looking to put out a call for some new hands. So, no rush, but I’m going to need to know if I’m filling more than two couches.”

Alex chuckled. “Not mine. The one thing I think my life experience has been unambiguous about is whether I’m good outside a pilot’s station. I’m here as long as you’ll have me.”

Bobbie relaxed another notch. “Good.” She shifted toward Amos.

He shrugged. “All my stuff’s here.”

“All right. Clarissa?” Claire was looking down. Her face empty and paler than usual. She put her hands on the table, palms down like she was pressing it back into place. Like there was something that could be put back. Her smile was forced, but she nodded. She would stay.

“Well,” Holden said. “Um. All right, then. That’s … I mean, I guess that’s it. Unless someone else has something they wanted to bring up?”

“Kind of a hard act to follow,” Naomi said.

“Well, yes,” Holden said, “but I mean—”

“How about this,” Alex said, standing up. “I’m going back to my cabin and getting the Scotch I’ve been saving for a special occasion. Let’s all have a toast to Holden and Nagata. Best damn command staff a ship could hope for.”

Holden’s expression shifted and his eyes took on a shine of tears, but he was grinning. “I won’t say no,” he said, then stood.

Alex went in for the hug, and then Naomi put her long arms around them both. Bobbie looked over at Amos and pointed a thumb at the knot of three. Is this a thing we should do? Amos rose and trundled over to them, and Bobbie followed. For a long time, the crew of the Rocinante stood locked together in a long, last embrace. After a few seconds, Bobbie even felt Clarissa against her side, pressing in as soft and fleeting as a moth.

Officially, nothing changed after that. The long float before the deceleration burn toward the gate and Medina Station beyond it went the way they’d planned it. Houston, in his cell, was sullen and uncomfortable but secured. Their duties and schedules, habits and customs, all had the same shape. The only thing that had altered at all was what they meant. This had become their last run together. Bobbie felt like something in her body had shifted.

James Holden had been a strange person from the start. Before she’d ever known him, he’d been the man who’d slandered Mars. Then the one who saved it. To judge from what the greater chunk of humanity thought of him, he was an opportunistic narcissist or a hero of free speech, a tool of the OPA or the UN or a loose cannon answerable to no one. She’d seen him that way too, more than she’d known, when she took her place on the Rocinante. Since then, day by day, sometimes even hour by hour, the man and his reputation had peeled away from each other. Captain James Holden of the Rocinante was a name to conjure with. The Holden she knew was a guy who drank too much coffee, got enthusiastic about weird things, and always seemed quietly worried that he would compromise his own idiosyncratic and unpredictable morality. The two versions of him were related the way a body and its shadow were. Connected, yes. Each inextricably related to the other, yes. But not the same thing.

And now he was moving on. And Naomi with him. Losing her was a strange thought too, but different. Naomi had fought against being a persona in the greater world, always letting her lover take the stage so that she wouldn’t have to. When she stepped away, it wouldn’t change the story that other people told about the Rocinante the same way, but Bobbie was going to feel her loss more. As much as Holden was the public face of the ship, Naomi was the person Bobbie had come to trust in their practical, day-to-day lives. Whatever Naomi said was true. And if that wasn’t strictly accurate, it was close enough that Bobbie and the others relied on it with confidence.

When they were gone, nothing would be the same. Bobbie felt the sorrow in that. But, to her surprise, the joy too. She found herself going through her rounds, moving through the ship to check everything that had already been checked, marking anything that looked off—a gas pressure level that was dropping a fraction too quickly, a doorway that showed wear, a power link that was past its replacement date—and the ship itself had changed too. It was hers now. When she put her palm on the bulkhead and felt the thrum of the recyclers, it was her ship. When she woke strapped into her crash couch, even the darkness felt different.

She’d been a Marine—she would always be a Marine, even after that role didn’t fit her anymore. Becoming the captain of the Rocinante felt right for her in a way she hadn’t expected. The prospect of taking the captain’s chair had the same sense of threat and anticipation that pulling on her power armor had back in the day. It was as if her old suit had changed with time—changed as much as she had—and become a ship. A worn one, yes. Out of date, but dangerous. Scarred, but solid. Not just a metaphor of who Bobbie was but also who she wanted to become.

She believed the others—Alex, Amos, Clarissa—were as comfortable with the shift as they claimed. And before, she’d have left it at that. Before it was her ship.

Now that she was going to be captain, it was her job to check.

Amos was in the machine shop, as he usually was, paging through feeds on the strategies for keeping an old gunship like theirs flying and safe. A stubble of white along the back of his skull caught the light where he hadn’t shaved it in a couple of days. They were on the float, conserving reaction mass, but he was braced against the deck like he was anticipating a sudden change. Maybe he was, even if only out of habit. His thick, scarred hands tapped at the monitor, moving from subject to subject in the feed’s tree—lace-plating structural repair, overgrowth in microflora-based air recyclers, auto-adapting power grids. All the thousand improvements that study of the alien technologies had spun off. He understood them all. It was easy to forget sometimes the depth of focus and intelligence behind Amos’ cheerful violence.

“Hey, big man,” Bobbie said, pulling herself to a stop with one of the handholds.

“Hey, Cap’n Babs,” he said.

“How’s it going?”

He looked over at her. “Well, I’m a little nervous about the plating we put down by the drive at that depot back on Stoddard. Lot of folks are seeing flaking with that batch under radiation bombardment. Figure when we hit Medina, I should hop outside and take a peek. Hate to have that turn into baklava on us when we were counting on it.”

“That would suck,” Bobbie agreed.

“Lace plating’s great when it’s great,” Amos said, turning back to his screen.

“How’s the rest of it?” Bobbie asked.

Amos shrugged, flicked through the feed. “Is what it is, I figure.”

The silence settled between them. Bobbie scratched her neck, the soft sound of nails against skin louder than anything else in the room. She didn’t know how to ask if he was going to be okay with Holden and Naomi leaving him behind.

“Are you going to be okay with Holden and Naomi leaving?”

“Yup,” Amos said. “Why? You worried about it?”

“A little,” Bobbie said, surprised to discover that it was true. “I mean, I know you saw it coming before Holden did. I think all of us did. But you’ve shipped with them for a lot of years.”

“Yeah, but my favorite thing about Holden was knowing he’d take a bullet for any one of the crew. Pretty sure you actually have taken a few for us, so that ain’t changing,” Amos said, then paused for a moment. “You might should check in with Peaches, though.”

“You think?”

“Yup,” Amos said. And that was that. Bobbie pulled herself back out.

Clarissa was in the medical bay, strapped into one of the autodocs. Tubes ran from the gently purring machinery into the port on the woman’s side, blood flowing out of the thin body and then being pumped back in. Her skin was the color of a wax candle and stretched tight against her cheekbones. She still smiled and raised a hand in greeting when Bobbie floated in. As a technician, Clarissa Mao had always been one of the best Bobbie had worked with. She had the sense that the thin woman’s drive came out of a kind of anger and desperation. Working to keep some greater darkness at bay. It was an impulse Bobbie understood.

“Rough patch?” Bobbie asked, nodding toward the blood-filled tubes.

“Not a great one,” Clarissa said. “I’ll be back on my feet tomorrow, though. Promise.”

“No rush,” Bobbie said. “We’re doing fine.”

“I know. It’s just …”

Bobbie cracked her knuckles. The autodoc chimed to itself and took another long draw of Clarissa’s blood.

“You wanted something?” she said, looking into Bobbie’s eyes. “It’s okay. You can say it.”

“I’m not your captain yet,” Bobbie said. “But I’m going to be.” It was the first time she’d said the words out loud. They felt good enough that she said them again. “I’m going to be. And that’s going to put me in a position where I’m responsible for you. For your well-being.”

She hadn’t thought about her team in years. Her old team. Hillman. Gourab. Travis. Sa’id. Her last command before this. For a moment, they were in the room, invisible and voiceless, but as present as Clarissa. Bobbie swallowed and bit back a smile. This was it. This was what she’d been trying to find her way back to all these years. This was why it mattered that she do it right this time.

“And if I’m responsible for your well-being,” she said, “we need to talk.”

“All right.”

“This thing with your old implants. That’s going to get worse instead of better,” Bobbie said.

“I know,” Clarissa said. “I’d take the implants out if it wouldn’t kill me faster.” She smiled, inviting Bobbie to smile with her. Making the truth into something like a joke.

“When we get to Medina, I’m going to hire on fresh crew,” Bobbie said. “Not co-owners in the ship the way we are. Just paid hands. Part of that is Holden and Naomi leaving.”

“But you can also hire someone for my place,” Clarissa said. Tears welled up, sheeting across her eyes as she nodded. The autodoc chimed again, pushing her purified blood back down into her.

“If you want to stay on Medina, you can,” Bobbie said. “If you want to stay with the ship, you’re welcome here.”

On the float, Clarissa’s tears didn’t fall. Surface tension held them to her until she shook her head, and then they’d form a dozen scattered balls of saline that in time would get sucked into the recycler and leave the air smelling a little more of sorrow and the sea.

“I …” Clarissa began, then shook her head and shrugged helplessly. “I thought I’d be the first one to leave.”

She sobbed once, and Bobbie pushed over to her. Took her hand. Clarissa’s fingers were thin, but her grip was stronger than Bobbie expected. They stayed there together until Clarissa’s breath grew less ragged. Clarissa brought her other hand over and rested it on Bobbie’s arm. There was some color in her cheeks again, but Bobbie didn’t know if it was the flush of emotion or the medical systems doing their job. Maybe both.

“I understand,” Bobbie said. “It’s hard losing someone.”

“Yeah,” Clarissa said. “And … I don’t know. Something about it seems less dignified when it’s Holden. You know what I mean? Of all the people to get choked up over.”

“No,” Bobbie said. “You don’t need to make light of it.”

Clarissa opened her mouth, closed it again. Nodded. “I’ll miss him, is all.”

“I know. I will too. And … look, if you don’t want to talk about it now, I can just check your file for your medical plan and end-of-life choices. Whatever you and Holden worked out, I’m going to honor it.”

Clarissa’s pale, thin brows knotted. “Holden? I didn’t work out anything with Holden.”

Bobbie felt a little tug of surprise. “No?”

“We don’t talk about things like that,” Clarissa said. “I talked to Amos. He knows I want to stay here. With him. If things ever get too bad, he promised he’d … make it easier for me. When the time comes.”

“Okay,” Bobbie said. “That’s good to know.” And important, she thought to herself, to fully document so that if it happens in someone else’s jurisdiction no one gets arrested for murder. How the hell could Holden not have done that? “You’re sure Holden never talked about this with you?”

Clarissa shook her head. The autodoc finished its run. The tubes detached from the port in Clarissa’s skin and slid back into the body of the ship like overly polite snakes.

“Okay, then,” Bobbie said. “I know now. I’ll make sure you’re taken care of. And Amos too.”

“Thank you. And I’m sorry.”

“About what?”

“I’ve been a little self-pitying about Naomi and Holden,” Clarissa said. “I didn’t mean to make it anyone else’s problem. I’ll get back to duty.”

“Everyone gets to mourn how they need to,” Bobbie said. “And then everyone needs to get their asses back to work.”

“Yes, sir,” Clarissa said with a sharp if ironic salute. “I’m glad we had this talk.”

“I am too,” Bobbie said as she pulled herself to the door. And I’m amazed that Holden never did. For the first time, Bobbie had the sense that there were some ways—not all, but some—in which she was going to be a much better captain than he’d been.