Tiamat's Wrath

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.

As they worked, she saw some of the ways Alex’s time on the Storm had changed him. Whether he knew it or not, he understood electrical systems better than he had before. And he’d learned some tricks about checking the stability of carbon-silicate lace plating that shaved half a day off her estimates.

At night, they slept in their old cabins. She didn’t know whether Alex went through his cabinets, but she went through hers. She’d never had much that she claimed as her own, but what little there was felt like the artifacts of some other, ancient Naomi. It was like coming across a favorite toy from childhood and being reminded of all the half-forgotten experiences that traveled with it. The shirts she’d worn that Jim had liked. The mag boots with the extra strap at the calf that helped stabilize her knee. A broken hand terminal she’d meant to fix before she went into hiding and hadn’t ever gotten around to.

There were other cabins in the ship, with other personal supplies. Things that had belonged to Amos and Bobbie. Maybe even Clarissa. Maybe Jim. The trivial leftovers of a life. She was tempted to go through those too, but she held back. She wasn’t sure yet that she’d be doing it for the right reasons, and it turned out that mattered to her.

As soon as the comms were up, the Roci started gathering covert communications from the underground. Three bottles had passed though Freehold gate since she’d left her shuttle. One from Sol, one from Asylum, one from Pátria. More would be coming. When she wasn’t working, she paged through the information and listened to the reports of the leaders of the underground. Of her underground.

It was a week and a half after her arrival, and Naomi was out, sitting on the desert sand as the sun set. The truth was that as much as she enjoyed complaining about being planetside, there was a kind of surreal thrill to being under a vast dome of air. After an hour or so, she had to go back inside or she started getting anxious. But for that first thirty minutes, it was beautiful. The sunlight seemed to sink into the sand, lighting it from within. And the star field that bloomed above her head was familiar, even if the high air made the steady stars seem to flicker and shimmer.

It felt very strange to be in such a quiet, peaceful, empty place and also the middle of a war.

She heard his footsteps on the sand, soft and regular as an air intake gently cycling. She sat up and dusted the sand from the backs of her arms. Alex was wearing his flight suit, and it hung a little loose on him. Even with his usual beaming smile, he seemed a little deflated. He grunted as he sat on the dune beside her.

“You holding together okay?” Alex asked.

“I’m all right,” Naomi said.

“Just asking because you’ve been spending a lot of time working the Roci with me, and then going straight to the reports and newsfeeds when you’re done. You haven’t taken much downtime.”

Naomi felt an old, familiar touch of annoyance, and it was strangely delightful. If Alex had started his mother hen habits back up, it had to mean he was feeling better. Not recovered, maybe never that, but improved.

“Doing the briefings is my downtime.”

“Coordinating a massive resistance to an authoritarian and galaxy-spanning empire is your hobby?”

“I didn’t have an option. We don’t have a golgo table, and … No offense? Even if we did, you play like a Martian.”

He chuckled to show he knew it was affection. “Have you got a note back for them? Another bottle to pop out into the systems?”

It was a hard question. Even when she’d had her mind on the panels and wiring of the Rocinante, a part of her had been thinking about the grand strategy of the underground. About limiting Laconian reach and power, about taking advantage of the openings left by the enemy’s mistakes.

And about the goal at the end. That was the trick of grand strategy. Knowing where the journey was ending even when you were making up all the individual steps to get there.

Working on the Roci had given the insight she’d had on the passage out from Auberon time to season. What had been a vision of a possible future had, while she worked with her hands and taken her mind elsewhere, become a bone-deep certainty. As long as Laconia had the capacity to make ships like the Tempest and the Typhoon, it could never grow past being an oppressor. The dream of empire could only die if the ancient Martian dream of independence through better technology was put to rest.

An attack on Laconia posed half a dozen unsolvable problems, and Naomi thought she had solutions to at least four of them …

“I’ve got some things I should send out. I can bounce a broadcast off the repeaters at Freehold and up to the Storm. Even if there aren’t any ships closer to the gate than that, they can get one of their torpedoes going. And if they’ve been doing what they’re supposed to, they’ll have some bottles already on the float near the gates.”

“Lightspeed is way better than the best drive,” Alex said, nodding sagely. “Trying to send a bottle from here would take a pretty long time. You know, though, there is a way to shave a few seconds off the time it takes to get your messages out.”

She shifted to look at him. The sun was gone, and the rose-and-gray twilight made him look younger. She lifted an eyebrow, inviting him to go on. He looked at her with feigned innocence.

“All we’ve got to do is be a few light-seconds closer, right?”

It hit her with a relief she hadn’t expected. She looked up into the Freehold sky, past it to the stars.

“Right,” she said. “Let’s do that. I’m sick of walking on walls.”

An hour later, they were strapped into their couches on the flight deck. Working the Rocinante’s displays was like singing with an old friend as she checked the maneuvering thrusters’ output profiles. The reactor was stable. The thrust was good. Even after its long rest, the Roci’s power grid was solid.

“We’re good,” Naomi said. “Take her out.”

“Oh yeah.”

The ship lurched, and the crash couches shifted. Naomi had the familiar sense of motion as they accelerated and then slid out of the cave on maneuvering thrusters only. The deck swung around and down until it was under her, and she sank into the gel as Alex took them higher from the ground.

When the drive kicked in, the whole ship rocked and shuddered, and Naomi felt the prick of the needle and then the coolness of the juice in her veins, keeping her from suffering the worst of the g forces. Alex was grinning like a kid on his birthday as the old gunship rose again for the great emptiness. Naomi watched the external temperature as they rose, the atmosphere growing colder and colder, but also thinner and thinner until there wasn’t enough there to conduct away heat at all. The shuddering stopped, and the only sounds were the ticking of the air recyclers and the occasional harmonic chiming of the drive passing through a resonance frequency. On her tactical display, the planet fell away behind them and they passed escape velocity. They weren’t even in a long orbit of Freehold now. They were on their own. Free.

Naomi shouted, a wide, celebratory yawp. And Alex answered back. She lay back in the couch and let herself just be home. Just for a moment.

The Roci was an old ship now. She’d never be state of the art again. But like old tools, well used and well cared for, she’d become something more than plating and wires, conduits and storage and sensor arrays. Old Rokku had said that after fifty years flying, a ship had a soul. It had seemed like a cute superstition when she was young. It seemed obvious now.

“God, I missed this,” Alex said.

“I know, right?”

An hour later, Alex put them on the float, and Naomi unstrapped. Freehold system was so empty, there was no traffic control authority. No flight plans or patrols watching for drive plumes without transponders. She started her diagnostics running, but she already knew from the sound of the drive and the taste of the air that they’d come back clean. She moved from station to station, checking the displays and controls as if there were other crew members who might be using them.

She didn’t notice the change in Alex’s mood until he spoke.

“I tried to keep her alive. I really did. Right at the end, she was out there throwing rounds at that great big bastard, and I was going to take us in. Burn the Storm right in there and try to get her back on board. But there wasn’t time.” His sigh had a shudder in it. “And it would just have fucked things up if I’d done it.”

Naomi wrapped her hand around a foothold and braced. She turned to look at him, and this time he met her eyes.

“She was a hell of a woman,” Naomi said. “We were lucky to know her.”

“The thing I kept thinking all the way out was, How am I going to tell Kit his Aunt Bobbie’s gone?”

“How did you?”

“I haven’t yet. I couldn’t stand to when we were in Sol system. And now … I still don’t know if I can. I miss her. I miss all of them, but … but I watched her go, and … Shit.”

“I know,” Naomi said. “I was thinking about her a lot. I sent the okay for the mission.”

“Oh, Naomi. No. This isn’t your fault.”

“I know that. I don’t always feel it, but I know it. And it’s strange, but the way I comfort myself? I think of all the other ways she could have died. Like oncocidal-resistant cancer. A reactor bottle failure. Just getting old and frail until the antiaging drugs weren’t enough anymore.”

“That’s a little macabre,” Alex said. Then, a moment later, “But yeah. I know exactly what you mean.”

“It was Bobbie,” Naomi said. “She knew we don’t live forever. And if she’d gotten to choose a way to go, I bet this would have been in her top five.”

Alex was quiet for a few seconds, then sniffed. “I miss her every minute of every day, but god damn, it was just so fuckin’ right.”

“Going hand to hand with a ship the combined strength of Earth, Mars, and the Transport Union couldn’t beat and winning?”

“Yeah. If we’ve got to die, I guess that’s a pretty good way to go. Still. I’m sorry we’ve got to die.”

“Mortality does suck that way,” Naomi said.

“What would be your way?”

“I don’t know. That’s not what I think about,” she said, surprised that she knew her opinion about what aspect of her own death was important to her. “I don’t care how I go. There are just things I want done first.”

“Like what?”

“I want to see Jim again. And Amos. I want this war over with, and a real peace established. The kind where people can be angry with each other and hate each other and no one has to die over it. That’d be enough.”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “That would. I think about Amos a lot. Do you think—”

There was something like a great, soundless pop—a detonation without quite being a detonation—and Naomi fell. Would have fallen if direction still existed. Everything had gone the electric noncolor of eyes pressed too hard in the darkness. Nothingness buzzed around her like an assault. Somewhere nearby, someone was screaming. It might have been Alex. It might have been her own voice.

The bright void she fell into—falling in all directions at once—had shapes inside the light, jagged and shifting as a migraine halo. She felt something missing in herself, but couldn’t tell what it was. That frightened her worse than the suddenness and strangeness of the transition. The sense of absence without an object, of loss without knowing what had been lost. She tried to close her eyes, but nothing changed. She tried to reach out, but there was nothing to reach for. Or with. She couldn’t tell whether she’d just fallen into the light or if she’d been falling for hours.

She felt herself slipping into something else. Something like sleep but not sleep, and she resisted by instinct. A deep fear wrapped itself around her, and she held on to it as if it could save her.

And then, without any more warning than had come before, it was over. She was on the Rocinante’s flight deck. She’d drifted away from her crash couch. Behind her, Alex gagged. She grabbed a handhold and braced. Her body felt wrung out, exhausted. Like she’d been awake for too many days, and the fatigue had seeped into her muscles.

“Did we,” she said, and her voice sounded weird in her ears. She swallowed and tried again. “Did we lose time?”

The soft tap of Alex’s fingers against a control panel. She closed her eyes, grateful beyond words that the darkness came when her lids fell. A wave of nausea came over her and left again.

“We did,” Alex said. “Lost … almost twenty minutes.”

She pushed off, navigating her way to her couch by long instinct more than thought. She strapped in with a sense of deep gratitude. Alex’s face was grayish, like he’d just seen something horrifying.

“That wasn’t … that wasn’t like the other ones,” he said. “That was different.”

“It was,” Naomi said.

Alex checked over the Rocinante’s status and seemed to take some comfort in it. Naomi was tingling, the pins-and-needles feel of a pinched nerve, but without a physical location on her body. Like her mind was slowly coming back. It was a deeply unsettling feeling.

“Fucking Duarte,” she said. “Fucking Laconia and their fucking tests.”

“What do you think they did this time?”