Teresa started to say yes, and then no, and then she understood what he was asking.
“No,” she said. “He’s not on my side.”
“All right,” Amos said, and fired the pistol twice. The muzzle flash was the brightest thing in the world.
“How did you find us?” Holden asked, swaying on his feet.
“This asshole,” Amos said. “I been tracking him every time he came out from the compound over there. Figured sooner or later, I’d get a shot at him. You made a good distraction.”
“Did you have to kill him?” Holden asked.
“Just evening up the score, is all. Are you sure you’re okay, Cap? You seem kind of fucked.”
A dozen questions pressed at Teresa’s mind—where have you been living, how did you survive without any of your things, how badly are you hurt, why aren’t you dead—but what came out of her mouth was, “Aren’t you cold?”
Amos looked at her, thought about the question. Snowflakes were landing on his bare chest and melting there. The hole in his ribs where he’d been shot wasn’t bleeding. After a moment, he shrugged. “I’ll live.”
Before Teresa could say anything more, a powerful, deep roar came from somewhere high above them. Her first thought was that they’d started an avalanche. She imagined herself and all the others wiped away by tons of snow rushing down the mountain. But then she saw the lights in the sky.
Amos took her elbow, leaned close, and shouted in her ear, “We should get back to the tree line.”
She let herself be led, Holden and Muskrat following close behind, as a huge ship fell from the sky. The plumes of its maneuvering thrusters melted the snow in the clearing away in an instant and set the security cart rolling. Teresa huddled back among the dormant trees, her hands over her ears, until the roaring stopped and Amos tapped her shoulder.
The ship was a fast-attack frigate. A very old Martian design. Its sides were a patchwork of different plating materials. Steam rose all around it, and the cooling metal and carbon-silicate lace ticked and popped. Teresa walked out toward it with a sense of awe and joy and profound accomplishment. She’d done it.
The airlock opened, and a man in no kind of uniform looked down into the darkness and the mist and the snowfall.
“Who’s there?” the man’s voice called.
“Alex?” Holden shouted.
Almost conversationally, the voice said, “Well, holy shit.”
A rickety metal stair ladder descended. Holden went up first, his steps unsteady at first, but more sure the higher he went. Muskrat paced at the bottom of the stair anxiously.
“I don’t know,” Teresa said to her. “This is why I told you to stay in my rooms.”
“Go on up,” Amos said. “I got this.”
Teresa put her hands on the bright metal and climbed up toward the hands of strangers reaching out to help her aboard. And behind her Amos, balancing without his hands because his arms were filled with dog. The black wound on his side didn’t appear to bother him. The man waiting for them laughed when he saw Muskrat, and the dog wagged uncertainly at first.
The locker room seemed to be on its side, Holden and a bald, dark-skinned man embracing and grinning at each other. Timothy—no, Amos hauled up the ladder, and the airlock door closed behind her.
She’d practiced for this moment. I’m Teresa Duarte, and I’m giving you back this prisoner in exchange for passage out of Laconia. Now that it had arrived, it seemed like that was all just given.
“You got to come up to the flight deck,” the dark-skinned man said. Alex, Holden had called him. “We gotta get out of here, but I’m not letting either of you two sons of bitches out of my sight.”
Teresa followed them, unsure what else to do. Amos walked with her through the sideways lift and flight deck. A beautiful older woman with curly white hair pulled down almost over her eyes was waiting there. When she saw Holden, she took a long, shuddering breath. The prisoner took her hand.
“All right,” Alex said. “Everybody strap in. We’re off this mudball.”
A rough cheer rose all around her, and Teresa surprised herself by joining in. Amos took her by the shoulder and led her to an ancient-looking, thoroughly disreputable crash couch.
“You’re gonna need to strap in, Tiny. I got an idea what to do with this one,” he said, pointing a thick thumb at Muskrat. “So you just stay here with Naomi and the captain.”
“Naomi,” Teresa said. “That’s Naomi Nagata?”
“And this is the Rocinante,” Amos said. “And I don’t know who most of the rest of these people are, but one way or another, we’re home.”
And then he was gone, leading Muskrat into the belly of the ship and leaving her to stare up into the monitor. It felt strange, like she was in a dream, but also mundane as walking down a slightly unfamiliar hallway. She was here. She was leaving.
The ship shuddered, hissed, started to rise up.
“You want me to kick on the main drive?” Alex asked over the sound of the thrusters burning. “I could slag that whole palace if you want.”
“No,” Holden said, “leave it be. We still have friends there. Elvi, for one.”
“Oh,” Alex said. “Should we go get her?”
“No,” Holden said. “She’s where she needs to be.”
The Rocinante rose, pushing Teresa back into the cool, blue gel of the couch. The ship shuddered and hummed as it rose, and then when they were high enough from the ground, a new, deeper thrum began, and they leaped upward. Into the darkness of space. Leaving everything behind. She closed her eyes, trying to decide what she felt. If she felt anything, or maybe everything all at once.
Her home, everything she’d ever known, was falling away behind her, and all she was certain of was that she never wanted to go back. The princess was getting hell and gone from fairyland.
A sharp alert caught her attention at the same moment the pilot—Alex—said something obscene. She looked over at him, and his face was ashen.
“Alex?” the woman said.
“We been target locked,” Alex said. “We took too long. It’s the Whirlwind.”
Chapter Forty-Nine: Naomi
Because the Rocinante was built to land on its belly, Holden stepped onto the flight-deck wall. He looked thin. More than thin, he looked like he’d been ill for months. The lines around his mouth were deeper than they’d been, and his grin looked less like his usual easy joy and more like surprise that anything good had actually happened. He looked bruised at heart, but only that. Not broken. He didn’t look broken.
He met her eyes, and something in her chest that she didn’t know could relax relaxed. She took a long, shuddering breath. Jim took her hand. She’d thought that would never happen again, and here he was, touching her again.
“Hey,” he said, too softly for anyone to hear but her.
“Hey,” she said back.
Amos, behind him, looked wrong. His skin was gray and his eyes were a uniform black. She’d seen kids on Pallas affect the same look with dyes and scleral tattooing, but on Amos it didn’t look like an edgy fashion choice.
Also, he was carrying a big black dog with a gray muzzle and a perplexed expression. The girl beside him seemed familiar, but not so much that Naomi could place her. There would be time for stories later.
Alex climbed up to his crash couch, grinning. “All right. Everybody strap in. We’re off this mudball.”
The crew cheered, not quite drunk with success, but maybe a little tipsy. Or maybe that was just her. Holden slipped into one of the other couches, staying close to the girl. Protective of her.
Slowly the ship tilted back to its normal, upright position.
“You want me to kick on the main drive?” Alex asked. “I could slag that whole palace if you want.”
Before Naomi could answer, Holden did. “No, leave it be. We still have friends there. Elvi, for one.”
“Oh. Should we go get her?”
Holden shook his head, even though Alex wasn’t loo
king at him. “No. She’s where she needs to be.”
He’d been on the ship for less than fifteen minutes, and he was answering like he was the captain. If she’d pointed it out, he would have been horrified. And apologetic, and maybe in some other context she would have expected the apology. She was, after all, the head of the underground, the engineer behind the campaign and a hundred other operations besides. The pleasure of having him back, of feeling herself and Alex and the ship falling into ancient patterns, was more than she could express. It was like waking up after a long and terrible dream to find that whatever it was hadn’t actually happened.
In all her long life, it was maybe the most beautiful moment she’d ever had.
It couldn’t last.
She felt Alex flying the ship inside Laconia’s atmosphere, sliding them above the landscape and rising up above it until the drive plume wouldn’t be a danger to anyone below. When the main drive kicked on, they shot up, rising through the last of the atmosphere and into the light of the Laconian sun. As Alex laid in their course for the ring gate, Naomi checked the tactical map for her fleet. The burns they were all under were punishing. By keeping on the edge of what human endurance would allow, they made it less likely that the Laconian ships would reach them. And the enemy ships themselves…
She pulled up an overlay that showed the destroyers and the Magnetar-class battleship. It was like looking over and finding a centipede on her arm. The target-lock alert came on, cutting through the merriment and joy like a scalpel.
“Alex?”
“We been target locked. We took too long. It’s the Whirlwind.”
Naomi laid down a sensor feed over her tactical display. The Magnetar was still almost nothing without magnification. Hardly more than a pale spot of darkness in the middle of the steady star that was its drive plume. With only a little magnification, though, it was the same eerie almost-organic shape as the Tempest. The bone-pale vertebra of an unimaginably huge animal. A ship like that had brought two navies to their knees. A single frigate with its supplies nearly drained already didn’t stand a chance. All her joy collapsed to ashes. She wondered whether Duarte would let her see Jim when they were both in prison. Whether they’d even be allowed the option of surrender. Fighting down through the planetary defenses had taken four ships and cost one of them. Or, depending on the next few minutes, maybe two.
At least the Whirlwind was the last Magnetar that would ever be built. She’d broken the construction platforms, so at least that. If she died in the effort—if they all did—Bobbie would still have approved. Some sacrifices were worth it.
“We have a tightbeam request incoming from the Whirlwind,” Ian said. His voice only shook a little.
“Let’s have it,” Naomi said, and Ian looked at her. The uncertainty in his eyes was clear. He didn’t know if she was going to surrender or lead them all into death. She wasn’t perfectly certain herself. “Now, Kefilwe. This won’t get better by waiting.”
He put the incoming message on every display, though only Naomi’s was live. She didn’t know if he meant to pressure her by letting the whole crew see the exchange or if he was nervous and screwed up. It didn’t make a difference.
The woman on her screen was young, with dark skin and straight, close-cropped hair. She wore Laconian blue and the rank insignia of an admiral, the same style that Mars used to use. The rage in her eyes gave Naomi very little hope.
“I am Admiral Sandrine Gujarat, commander of the Laconian battleship Voice of the Whirlwind. You have thirty seconds to drop core, deactivate your weapons systems, and open your airlock for boarding. Failure to do exactly as you are told will result in the destruction of your ship.”
Thirty seconds. Naomi raised her chin in defiance. If she was taken, they would get everything she knew eventually. The networks and contacts in dozens of systems. The long-term plans and strategies. Everything she’d built in all the time she’d spent working for Saba and then taking his place. It had made her into a perfect asset for the enemy. A ship full of her people stood breathless, waiting for her to decide whether to give them all over or let them all die. It was like being crushed under a hundred gs and weightless at the same time.
The voice that answered wasn’t hers. It wasn’t even one she knew.
“No, Admiral Gujarat. It will not end in anybody’s destruction. You will stand down at once.”
On her screen, the admiral’s eyes widened in anger, but also in confusion. Naomi craned her neck to see the girl who had spoken. She was in a crash couch, gesturing that the comms control should be transferred to her. Naomi hesitated for a moment, then went with it. When the Roci’s feed showed the girl’s face, the Laconian admiral paled.
“Do you know who I am, Admiral?”
“I don’t… The high consul—”
“Yes, I am the high consul’s daughter and heir,” the girl said. “You understand now. Good. I am on the Rocinante at my father’s request. Your threat is ridiculous and your orders are to return immediately to your assigned mission protecting the homeworld.”
The girl couldn’t be sixteen yet, but her voice had an easy arrogance. Naomi turned to Jim and mouthed, Is that true? He lifted his hands in a Belter shrug.
“Miss,” the admiral said, unconsciously bowing as she did, “you are… I was unaware… This is very irregular, miss. I’m afraid I can’t allow this ship to go anywhere.”
The girl rolled her eyes dramatically. “Is there a protocol? A security protocol?”
“I’m sorry?”
“If I am in distress, being held against my will. Threatened. Whatever. Is there a phrase I use to indicate that? Something innocuous I can slip into any conversation without my captors knowing it?”
“I… That is—”
“It’s a yes-or-no question, Admiral. This isn’t hard.” At this rate, the Whirlwind was going to nuke them to be rid of the girl.
“There is, miss,” Admiral Gujarat said.
“And have I said it?”
“You haven’t.”
“Then we can take it as given that I am not here under duress. That something is going on between the high consul and the leadership of the underground—something with which I have been entrusted and you haven’t. With that in mind? Go. Back. To. Your. Post.”
The woman on the screen squared her shoulders. “I have orders from Admiral Trejo that—”
“Stop,” the girl said. “What’s his name?”
“Whose?”
“Admiral Anton Trejo. What is his last name?”
“Trejo?”
“Yes,” the girl said, and leaned close to the camera so that her whole face filled the screen. She spoke softly and with an incandescent rage. “Mine is Duarte.”
“I’m sorry, miss,” the admiral said. “I can’t let your ship leave.”
“No?” the girl said. “Then shoot me the fuck down.” She dropped the connection and turned to Alex, staring down at her slack jawed. “We can go. That woman is scared to death right now.”
“Prepare for high burn?” Alex announced over the ship-wide channel, and the girl nodded curtly and settled back in her couch.
“Jim?” Naomi said.
“I know,” he said. “It’s been a really weird day.”
“We thought you were dead,” Naomi said as she stepped into the lift.
Amos blinked his unnerving black eyes, then shrugged. “Yeah, I can see that, Boss. What can I tell you? Sorry.”
Eight hours of high burn had taken them out of the Whirlwind’s effective range. Fifteen had increased the distance to the point that she almost felt safe. Not safe safe, but close enough that she could imagine stepping away from the ops deck and starting to make sense of everything that had happened, hearing everything that had brought Jim and Amos back. And how Teresa Duarte fit into it.
And also to tell them what had happened during their long and separate pilgrimages. What they had lost. With the four of them together, Alex had asked for the ceremony. As if the unive
rse had given them a chance, and he was worried that if he didn’t take it now, it would somehow slip away. And she and Amos were heading to the airlock together again, as if the past had returned. But as if it had returned changed.
The changes to Amos were odd. His skin was somehow pale and dark at the same time, like a thin coat of white paint over black. His eyes were darkness, and there was something strange about the way he moved. But after so long, being able to think of him without grief and worry made the alterations only interesting. It was so much better than what she’d already carried with him. With losing him.
“I’d have called earlier, but… Well, I wasn’t ready to go. I was being patient.”
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “One thing and another. Good to be back, though.”
The lift stopped, and she stepped off. Amos followed just a step behind. “You’re different.”
“Yup,” he said, smiling amiably. It was such an unmistakably Amos-like thing to say. Such a familiar way to say it.
“Did the bomb fail?” she asked.
“Nope, it was fine.”
“So why didn’t you follow through on the mission? No blame, but… What was your thinking there?”
Amos went still for a moment, like he was listening to something she couldn’t hear.
“I met the kid,” Amos said. “Seemed kind of shitty killing her. I thought maybe it was the wrong call.” He shrugged.
Naomi stepped over and put her arms around him. It was like hugging a metal strut. “Good to have you back.”
Alex and Holden were at the interior door to the airlock. Alex had changed into an MCRN uniform. An artifact from another age. Jim was in a white formal shirt. He’d washed his hair and combed it back. He looked distinguished and somber.
The coffin in the airlock was just a shell, hardly more than a body bag with slightly hardened sides. And it was empty.
“This is way we always did it,” Alex said now that they were together. “When we’d lost someone and couldn’t recover the body. We’d still take the moment.”
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