“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.