Tiamat's Wrath

by James S. A. Corey

  The knock at his cabin door was polite. Even tentative. Caspar stayed in the corridor, braced with a handhold.

  “Hey,” the boy said. “You coming?”

  “Where to?” Alex asked.

  “Bridge. You got to take us in, yeah? Tradition. A pilot retires, he takes himself to the last port.”

  “What kind of tradition is that?” Alex said with a chuckle. “I’ve never heard of it before.”

  “Made it up,” Caspar said. “Just now. Can’t turn that down, start your own tradition.”

  “You can take us in,” Alex said. “You need the practice anyway.”

  “No,” Caspar said. “It’s you or we just plow the fucking thing into the moon and call it done.”

  “You’re a shit liar,” Alex said, but unbuckled himself from his crash couch all the same. “You should work on that.”

  “Just like everything else,” Caspar said. And then, “You’re really going.”

  “Yeah,” Alex said. “I really am.”

  “You were good.”

  “You will be. You don’t need me here.”

  He drifted out of his cabin, the light g of the braking burn making “down” a strong suggestion more than a real weight. He headed for the central lift and up to the bridge. As he floated into it for the last time, the rest of the crew braced their feet to stand at attention. Caspar, behind him, began to clap, and the others joined in. By the time Alex reached the pilot’s station, his eyes were damp enough to obscure his display.

  “On your order, Captain,” he said.

  “Bring us in, Mr. Kamal,” Jillian said.

  The actual landing was easy, from a technical perspective. Even as injured as it was, the Storm knew where the walls around it were, and where the encrustation of human structures would be. Alex felt a great weight falling away from his heart. The custom docking clamps they’d made back when the Storm was a recently captured prize of the war slid home with something between a sound too low to hear and a shudder.

  “Welcome back, reisijad,” the Belter-inflected voice said over the comms. “Looks like you fucked your ship pretty good?”

  “It’ll give you lazy fuckers something to do,” Jillian said, the way Bobbie would have. Same inflection and all. It seemed right in a way Alex couldn’t quite describe that the girl had paid so much attention to how Bobbie ran things. Even when they were gone, the next generation up would keep echoes of them.

  The shuttle to Freehold was a single-hulled transport called the Drybeck. It had begun its life as an ore hauler and been retrofitted sometime in the last twenty years. The company that had owned it had a color scheme of green and yellow, and the ghost of its logo still haunted the bulkheads on the bridge. Its drive was small and touchy, prone to stutter when the burn changed, and limited by a tiny reaction mass tank. The hold was lined with crash couches, and the half dozen of the crew most compromised by the death of the Tempest were coming home more as cargo than companions.

  The long fall down from the gas giants passed through the area that would have been the most trafficked space in Sol system. Hundreds of ships would have moved between Saturn and Jupiter and the inner planets. Maybe half a dozen did the same in Freehold. Alex plotted the course with a growing sense of the emptiness of the system that mere decades couldn’t fill. It was too big. All of it was too big. He’d been there from the beginning, been part of blazing humanity’s trail to the stars, and he still couldn’t quite get his mind around how vast the spaces were.

  He was surprised when, a few minutes before departure, Jillian came to the little bridge and sat in the couch beside his without buckling in.

  “You coming down with us?” Alex asked.

  Jillian looked at him for a long moment without speaking. She looked older than he thought of her as being, as if taking command, even for so short a time as this, had aged her.

  “No,” she said. “The family wants to see me, and I’d like to see them too. But there’ll be time for that when the war’s over.”

  I admire your optimism, Alex almost said, but the darkness was too much. He didn’t want to bring her down with his own skepticism. Instead, he nodded and made a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat.

  “There’s a fast crawler waiting for you in port,” she said. “It’s got enough water, fuel, and starter yeast to get you going.”

  “That’s good of you. I appreciate it.”

  “It’s not altruism. Your ship,” she said. “It’s old, but it’s a gunship. Still better than most of what the underground has burning out there.”

  “Maybe,” Alex said. “It could also be a nest for whatever birds live in the desert down there. That’s part of what I’m going to find out.”

  “When you do, you reach out. The only people who fly solo are slingshotters and assholes. You got to have someone with your back.”

  The comms clicked up. The shuttle was clear to leave. All Alex had to do was respond. He put the message on hold.

  “What are you saying?” he asked.

  “We’re not done,” Jillian said. “Not just that, we’re winning. Underground is going to need every ship it can get, and yours would be a good one to have on the team. If you need a crew for her, you tell me. I’ll get you one.”

  Alex didn’t know what to say. The truth was, he didn’t have a plan except to get back to the Rocinante. But she was right. There was going to be an after. An after Bobbie. An after Amos. An after Holden. Whatever he was doing, he wasn’t going out there to die. Just to recover.

  “I’ll let you know what it looks like,” he said. “We’ll make a plan.”

  Jillian stood and held out her hand. He shook it without unstrapping.

  “It’s been good,” Jillian said. “We’ve done good work.”

  “We have, haven’t we?” Alex said.

  After she left, he went through one last systems check. Flying single-hulled ships was a kind of gambling he usually avoided, but even if he hit a micrometeorite, they’d probably survive it. Anyway. Life was risk.

  He flipped the comms back on.

  “This is Drybeck,” he said. “I am confirming clearance to launch.”

  “You’re still clear, Drybeck,” the voice on the other end of the connection said. “Not blowing nothing up, and no one floating out there to run into. Ge con Gott, yeah? Draper Station out.”

  Draper Station, Alex thought as he eased the ship through the lava tube on its maneuvering thrusters. It was the first time he’d heard it called that. He didn’t hate the sound.

  Freehold, like most goldilocks-zone planets, had a wide variety of environments. Freehold’s salt deserts were on the same continent as the lush mountains he’d hidden in when they first came and the township that had grown to be a modest city. White dunes and mesas of red stone stretched from horizon to horizon. Tent rocks rose in some places, and knife-thick ridges that could have been artifacts of alien civilizations or just beautiful geology. The dawns were warm pink, and the sunsets were green and gold. Alex didn’t know why. At night, the desert sang. High fluting tones as the temperature shift made the sand itself ring like a wineglass.

  The fast crawler was mostly autonomous, and it took its navigation from the time and the position of the sun like an ancient sea captain on Earth. There was no signal coming in or going out that would give Alex’s position away. The transport’s wide titanium-and-rubber treads made the trackless badlands easier to cover than the simplest flight in a ship. The solitude was vast and consoling. He’d expected to feel lonely on the trip, but he wasn’t. The effort of being okay around the crew of the Storm had, it turned out, been exhausting. He hadn’t even known he was making the effort until he didn’t have to anymore. He slept in the little bunk in the crawler’s belly and spent his days sitting on top of the machine watching the sun and sky and stars and didn’t even listen to the music he’d brought with him.

  Twice, huge shambling animals with legs like slender trees and coats like yellow moss had walked with him for
a while. The second had been with him almost half a day before it cooed three times and turned away. As far as he knew, he was the only human being who’d ever seen them.

  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.

  As they worked, she saw so
me 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.