Part 2 (1/2)
Not that there weren't stresses and worries that he carried with him. Ever since the death of the Canterbury, Alex had carried a certain amount of baseline anxiety. With just the four of them, the Rocinante was structurally undercrewed. Amos and Holden were two strong masculine personalities that, if they ever locked horns, could blow the crew dynamic apart. The captain and the XO were lovers, and if they ever broke up, it would mean the end of more than just the job. It was the same sort of thing he'd always worried about, whatever crew he was with. With the Roci, it had been the same worries for years now without any of them ever being how it went off the rails, and that in itself was a kind of stability. As it was, Alex always felt relieved to get to the end of a run and he always felt relieved to start the next one. Or if not always, at least usually.
The arrival at Tycho Station should have been a relief. The Roci was as compromised as Alex had ever seen her, and the s.h.i.+pyards at Tycho were some of the best in the system, not to mention the friendliest. The final disposition of their prisoner from New Terra was now soundly someone else's problem, and he was off the s.h.i.+p. The Edward Israel, the other half of the New Terran convoy, was burning its way safely sunward. The next six months were nothing but repair work and relaxation. By any rational standard, there should have been less to worry about.
”So what's bugging you?” Amos asked.
Alex shrugged, opened the little food refrigeration unit that the suite provided, closed it, shrugged again.
”Something's sure as s.h.i.+t bugging you.”
”I know.”
The lights had the yellow-blue clearness that mimicked early morning, but Alex hadn't slept. Or not much. Amos sat at the counter and poured himself a cup of coffee. ”We're not doing one of those things where you need me to ask you a bunch of questions so you can get comfortable talking about your feelings, are we?”
Alex laughed. ”That never works.”
”So let's not do it.”
On the burn, Holden and Naomi tended to fold in on each other, not that either of them noticed doing it. It was a natural pattern for lovers to take more comfort in one another than in the rest of the crew. If it had been different, Alex would have been worried about it. But it left him and Amos with mostly one another as company. Alex prided himself on being able to get along with almost anyone on a crew, and Amos was no exception. Amos was a man without subtext. When he said he needed some time alone, it was because he needed some time alone. When Alex asked if he wanted to come watch the newly downloaded neo-noir films out of Earth that he subscribed to, the answer was always and only a response to the question. There was no sense of backbiting, no social punishment or isolation games. It just was what it was, and that was it. Alex wondered sometimes what would have happened if Amos had been the one to die on the Donnager, and he'd spent the last few years with their old medic, Shed Garvey.
It probably wouldn't have gone as well. Or maybe Alex would have adjusted. Hard to know.
”I've been having dreams that... bother me,” Alex said.
”Nightmares, like?”
”No. Good dreams. Dreams that are better than the real world. Where I feel bad waking up from them.”
”Huh,” Amos said thoughtfully and drank his coffee.
”Have you ever had dreams like that?”
”Nope.”
”The thing is, Tali's in all of them.”
”Tali?”
”Talissa.”
”Your ex-wife.”
”Yeah,” Alex said. ”She's always there and things are always... good. I mean, not like we're together. Sometimes I'm back on Mars. Sometimes she's on the s.h.i.+p. She's just present, and we're good, and then I wake up and she's not here and we aren't. And...”
Amos' brow lowered and his mouth rose, squeezing his face into something smaller and thoughtful.
”You want to hook back up with your ex?”
”No, I really don't.”
”You h.o.r.n.y?”
”No, they're not s.e.x dreams.”
”You're on your own, then. That's all I got.”
”It started back there,” Alex said, meaning on the other side of the rings, orbiting above New Terra. ”She came up in conversation, and ever since then... I failed her.”
”Yup.”
”She spent years waiting on me, and I just wasn't the man I wanted to be.”
”Nope. You want some coffee?”
”I really do,” Alex said.
Amos poured a cup for him. The mechanic didn't add sugar, but knew to leave a third of the cup for cream. One of the little intimacies of crew life.
”I don't like how I left things with her,” Alex said. It was a simple statement, and not revelation, but it had the weight of a confession.
”Nope,” Amos agreed.
”There's a part of me that thinks this is a chance.”
”This?”
”The Roci being in dry dock for so long. I could go to Mars, see her. Apologize.”
”And then ditch her again in order to get back before the s.h.i.+p drive goes back online?”
Alex looked down into his coffee. ”Leave things in a better place.”
Amos' shrug was ma.s.sive. ”So go.”
A flood of objections crowded his mind. The four of them hadn't been apart since they'd become a crew, and splitting the group now felt like bad luck. The repair crew on Tycho might need him or want him or make some change to the s.h.i.+p that he wouldn't know about until it became a critical point somewhere down the line. Or worse, leaving might mean never coming back. If the universe had proved anything in these last few years, it was that nothing was certain.
The chime of a hand terminal saved him. Amos fished the device out of his pocket, looked at it, tapped the screen, and scowled. ”I'm going to need a little privacy now.”
”Sure,” Alex said. ”Not a problem.”
Outside their suite, Tycho Station stretched in long gentle curves. It was one of the crown jewels of the Outer Planets Alliance. Ceres was larger, and Medina Station held the weird null-zone between rings, but Tycho Station was what the OPA had taken pride in from the start. The wide sweeping lines, more like a sailing s.h.i.+p than any actual craft that she served, weren't functional. The station's beauty was a boast. Here are the minds that spun up Eros and Ceres; here is the s.h.i.+pyard that built the largest vessel in the history of humanity. The men and women who, not so many generations ago, had braved the abyss beyond Mars for the first time were smart and powerful enough to make this.
Alex made his way down a long promenade. The people who pa.s.sed him were Belters, their bodies longer than Earth standard, their heads wider. Alex himself had grown up in the relatively low Martian gravity, but even he didn't quite match the physiology that a childhood rich in null g gave.
Plants grew in the empty s.p.a.ces of the wide corridors, vines crawling up against the spin gravity as they would have against the normal pull on Earth. Children scampered through the halls, ditching school the way he had back in Londres Nova. He drank his coffee and tried to cultivate the peace of being on the burn. Tycho Station was just as artificial as the Roci. The vacuum outside its hull was no more forgiving. But the calm wouldn't come. Tycho Station wasn't his s.h.i.+p, wasn't his home. These people walking past him as he went to the common area and looked up through the ma.s.sive and multilayered clear ceramic at the glittering spectacle of the s.h.i.+pyards weren't his family. And he kept wondering what Tali would have thought of all this. If she could have come to a place that saw the beauty in it the way he hadn't been able to with the life she'd wanted on Mars.
When he hit the bottom of his cup, he turned back. He ambled along with the flow of foot traffic, making way for the electric carts and exchanging the small, civilized courtesies in the polyglot linguistic catastrophe that was the Belter argot. He didn't think too much about where he was going until he got there.
The Roci lay half-dressed in the vacuum. With the outer skin cut away and her inner hull s.h.i.+ning fresh in the work lights, she looked small. The scars of their adventures had, for the most part, been borne by the outer hull. Those scars were gone now, and only the deeper injuries remained. He couldn't see them from here, but he knew what they were. He'd been on the Rocinante as long as he'd been on any s.h.i.+p in his career, and he loved her better than any of them. Even than his first.
”I'll be back,” he said to the s.h.i.+p, and as if in answer, a welding rig lit up at the curve of her drive cone, brighter for a moment than the uns.h.i.+elded sun in a Martian sky.