Tiamat's Wrath

Epilogue: Holden

Holden lay strapped in the autodoc, his eyes closed. The ship was on the float, conserving the last of their reaction mass. He didn’t mind. Weightlessness was a visceral reminder that he wasn’t on Laconia anymore. He loved it for that.

The machine ticked and hummed in a vaguely disapproving way, like it was trying to tell him to exercise more and cut back on salt. There were voices in the background. There were always voices in the background these days. After so many years with a skeleton crew, having a full complement felt like having a party where too many people had showed up and no one was leaving.

A needle slid into his left arm, and the autodoc chugged to itself, pumping in his own peculiar cocktail of oncocidals and antiagathics and blood pressure stabilizers. And probably something for psychological distress. Lord knew he had that coming. The coolness gave him a pins-and-needles feeling on his lips, and he tasted something that his brain tried to interpret as peanuts. When it was done, the needle withdrew and a thin scanning bar on an armature came out and waved a wand along his face. An image of his skull and lips appeared on the screen, with the new growth in green.

“All the parts in the right place?” Naomi asked from the doorway.

“Most of them,” Holden said, and the scanner beeped at him, chiding. He stayed still while it finished. When the armature retracted, he said, “It does feel pretty fucking undignified to be teething at my age.”

“Well, they knocked your tooth out,” Naomi said. Her tone was mild, but he could hear the murder behind it. He played it all down, but she knew. All the time he’d been under Laconian control, he’d made light of things. He’d made rules for himself so that his powerlessness didn’t turn into despair. He’d plotted and planned and watched for opportunities. Now it was over, and everything he’d been careful not to feel was still waiting for him.

“My dad used to say something when he’d been traveling,” Holden said as the autodoc finished its run.

“Which one?”

“Father Caesar. He used to say that when you went too far too fast, your soul took some time catching up to you.”

Naomi frowned. “I thought that was how religious fanatics argued that Belters didn’t have souls.”

“Might have been that too,” Holden said. “Father Caesar was talking about jet lag. Anyway, I was thinking about it with just … change. You know?”

He didn’t talk about the day he’d been arrested much. Not with anyone besides Naomi. He’d been taken into custody on Medina Station, held for questioning. Not sure if he was going to live the rest of his life in a box or be slaughtered as a warning to others. And Governor Singh had shipped him back to Laconia for questioning about the aliens that had made the rings and the other aliens that had killed them. And through the first part of it, and then again on and off all the time he’d been gone, he’d had the sense that none of it was really happening. Or that it was, but not to him. He’d become someone else. Being a prisoner had driven him a little crazy for a while, and he still wasn’t right. Not really. But every day he woke up on the Roci with Naomi beside him and Alex in the pilot’s chair, he felt a little closer to sane. His soul a little bit nearer, in a wide and metaphorical sense.

Naomi pushed off, floating to him, and catching herself with the unconscious grace of someone born to it. She took his hand. She did that a lot these days. He liked it too. Especially when he woke up in the middle of the night, too groggy from sleep to know where he was, and started to panic that the guards were coming to beat him again. Her voice calmed him down, but her hand in his worked faster.

“We’re going to start the braking burn in about forty minutes,” she said.

“Hard?”

“Alex says about three-quarter g. We’ll be fine. But I thought I’d let you know anyway.”

“We won’t be trapped in the same couch for hours.”

“Well, not by that, anyway,” she said. He didn’t know if the sly sexual banter was sincere or just another way of telling him he was home. It soothed him either way.

“Just between us?” he said. “I’m going to be glad when it’s just us again. These are nice folks, but they’re not family, you know?”

“I do,” she said. “We might … we might need to talk about hiring someone on, though. With Clarissa and Bobbie both gone.”

“Yeah,” he said. “We’ll look at it.” He meant, But not now. Later. When I can. She heard it all.

“I’m going to go check the coolant feed lines,” she said. “These kids all grew up on newer ships. They’re not used to our heat tolerances.”

“All right,” Holden said. “I’m going to finish this and head for the flight deck.”

“Sounds good,” she said, and pushed backward, keeping her eyes on him as she moved away to the door and caught herself without even looking.

After she was gone, the autodoc chimed, giving him permission to unstrap himself. He moved slowly not because he hurt, but because he liked the sensation of freeing himself. The report was on the screen when he got there. All in all, it was pretty solid. He pulled up a record going back to his return to the Roci, and all the trend lines were going the right way. So there it was in clean, glowing lines. His soul on its way back.

It would be good to feel like himself again. Naomi was stuck as the central planner for the underground as it transitioned to whatever came next. But she’d made it very clear that one run as captain of a gunship on campaign was more than a lifetime’s worth for her. The captain’s chair of the Rocinante was his. Though, since she was still nominally the admiral of the resistance fleet, his captaincy felt a bit like an emeritus title. Even so, there were responsibilities that came with it. If not now, then soon.

He hesitated, then pulled up Amos’ record. There was no data. He thought about it for a moment. He didn’t want to have the talk, but he was going to have to. If he was going to be the captain again, he was going to have to be the captain again.

He stopped by the galley first for a bulb of coffee and a printed length of something that the system called mushroom bacon. Three of the new crew were floating near a table, and he felt them watching him in the same way people sometimes did in bars or the corridors of stations. Is that James Holden? He’d been able to be oblivious to it before. Now he felt their attention like they were pointing a heat gun at him. He pretended not to notice their interest and headed for the machine shop.

Muskrat floated in the middle of the room, a complex diaper on her haunches with a hole for her tail. She started wagging as soon as Holden came in. It made her gyrate around a center of mass defined by her larger and mostly still body and her lighter and fast-moving tail. Holden tossed a thumb-sized bit of the bacon at her mouth, and she caught it.

“You’re getting better at that,” he said to the dog as it chewed noisily.

The machine shop was perfectly familiar. The smell of high-grade lubricants and the residual heat of the machine printers, the old sign still in place where it had been.

SHE TAKES CARE OF YOU. YOU TAKE CARE OF HER

A clanging came from inside the deck, two sharp, percussive strikes, and then a grunt. The slide of a body moving through a crawl space.

“Hey, Cap’n,” the thing that had been Amos said, pulling himself out from under the decking. He had a wrench in one hand and an air filter in the other. His skin was still a sickly gray, and it left him looking cold. Like someone who had just drowned.

“Everything going all right?” Holden said, gesturing at the dog with a forced cheerfulness.

“So far. Turns out there’s a lot of people been thinking about how to have dogs on a ship. I’m just looking at what kinds of solves they’ve come up with.” He let the tools float and scratched the dog’s ears, stabilizing her jaw with his other hand so she didn’t drift.

“Seems difficult,” Holden said.

“It ain’t all dignified. I’m putting together a traveling kit for Tiny. Figure anyplace she heads for, she’s taking this one. Hard part’s the filters. Turns out these dogs throw off a lot of fur. Gums the standard recyclers up pretty quick if you don’t catch it first.”

Holden braced himself with a handhold. Muskrat tried to turn toward him, but didn’t have anything to push against.

“Have you heard about Teresa having any plans?” Holden asked, avoiding the conversation he’d come here to have.

The mechanic took the filter and started running his thumb along the edge, inspecting it by touch. The blackness of his eyes made it hard to know what exactly he was looking at.

“Nope. Last I saw, she and Alex and one of the new kids were all talking about Martian entertainment feeds. Apparently one of the ones she was into, Kit watched when he was her age. I think Tiny likes having something in common with people, even if it’s just the films they’ve watched.”

“So I was at the med bay just now,” Holden said. “I noticed you hadn’t been by.”

“Yeah, well. Autodoc isn’t so clear on what to make of me these days.”

“Yeah,” Holden said. “About that.” He hesitated. He didn’t know how to ask if the thing in front of him was really Amos anymore.

“What’s on your mind?”

“Are you really Amos anymore?”

“Yup.”

“No, I mean. Amos … died. He got killed. And then the repair drones took the body, and … I need to know, are you really Amos Burton? The Amos I knew.”

“Sure am. Anything else?”

Holden nodded more to himself than to anyone else. Muskrat whined and tried to swim over toward him, paws flailing in the air. He reached out and pulled the dog over, bracing her against his knee and patting her back. “I just think it’s important.”

“Seems like you’re having a hard time taking yes for an answer, Cap. Here’s how I look at it. Yeah, I went through some weird shit. It changed me. I know some things I didn’t know before.”

“Things like what?” Holden asked, but Amos waved the question away.

“Thing is, you went through some weird shit too. You got changed. Know some things you didn’t know going in. Naomi and Alex? Same. Hell, Tiny’s barely related to who she was the first time I saw her. That’s just life.” Amos shrugged. “I guess the dog didn’t change much, except she got a little gray around the muzzle.”

Muskrat wagged.

“You want this to be a philosophy question, that’s fine,” Amos said. “But if you’re asking am I still me? I am.”

Holden nodded. “All right. I had to ask.”

“No problem,” Amos said.

Holden scratched Muskrat one last time. A little cloud of hair floated free, the strands clinging together in complex webs and drifting toward the air recycler. “I see what you mean. Alex is starting our braking burn in twenty-five, thirty minutes.”

“I’ll make this all safe by then,” Amos said.

Holden pulled himself to the door. As he was about to leave, Amos’ voice pulled him back.

“One thing, though?”

He braced in the doorway. Amos’ eerie black eyes were on him. “Sure.”

“Those things that Duarte pissed off? The ones that ate Medina?”

“I know the ones you mean,” Holden said.

“One of the things I know now is that they’re going to kill everybody.”

They were silent for a moment.

“Yeah,” Holden said. “I know that too.”