Alex looked over at Clarissa and grinned.
“The captain doesn’t like the fake coffee the Roci makes,” he said. “Gives him gas.”
Clarissa didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure she was supposed to.
“It does not,” Holden said. “That was one time.”
“More than once, Cap’n,” Amos said. “And no offense, but it does smell like a squirrel crawled up your ass and died there.”
“Okay,” Holden said, “you’ve got no room to complain. As I recall, I was the one who cleaned your bunk after that experiment with vodka goulash.”
“He’s got a point,” Alex said. “That was damn nasty.”
“I just about shat out my intestinal lining, that’s true,” Amos said, his expression philosophical, “but I’d still put that against the captain’s coffee farts.”
Alex made a fake gagging noise, and Amos buzzed his lips against his palm, making a rude sound. Naomi looked from one to the other like she didn’t know whether to laugh or smack them.
“I don’t get gas,” Holden said. “I just like the taste of real coffee better.”
Naomi put her hand on Clarissa’s forearm and leaned close. Her smile was gentle and unexpected.
“Have I mentioned how nice it is to have another woman on the ship?” she asked.
It was a joke. Clarissa understood that. But it was a joke that included her, and her tears surprised her.
“I appreciate your saying all that about Bull,” a man’s voice said. Clarissa, moving through the ship, didn’t recognize it. An unfamiliar voice in a spaceship caught the attention like a strange sound in her bedroom. She paused. “He was a friend for a lot of years, and… and I’ll miss him.”
She shifted, angled back toward the other crew cabins. Holden’s door was open, and he sat in his crash couch, looking up at his monitor. Instead of the tactical display of the ships, the stations, the Rings, a man’s face dominated the screen. She recognized Fred Johnson, traitor to Earth and head of the Outer Planets Alliance. The Butcher of Anderson Station. He looked old, his hair almost all gone to white, and his eyes the yellow color of old ivory.
“I asked a lot from him,” the recording went on. “He gave a lot back to me. It… it got me thinking. I have a bad habit, Captain, of asking more than people can give sometimes. Of demanding more than I can fairly expect. I’m wondering if I might have done something like that with you.”
“Gee, you think?” Holden said to the screen, though as far as she could see he wasn’t recording.
“If I did, I apologize. Just between us. One commander to another. I regret some of the decisions I’ve made. I figure you can relate to that in your own way.
“I’ve decided to keep the Behemoth in place. We’re sending out soil and supplies to start farming on the drum. It does mean the OPA’s military fleet just lost its big kahuna. But it looks like we’ve got a thousand planets opening up for exploration, and having the only gas station on the turnpike is too sweet a position to walk away from. If you and your crew want to help out with the effort, escort some ships from Ganymede out to the Ring, there might be a few contracts in it for you. So that’s the official part. Talk about it with the others, and let me know what decisions you come to.”
Fred Johnson nodded once to the camera, and the screen fell to the blue emptiness and split circle of the OPA’s default. Holden looked over his shoulder. She saw him see her.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
They were silent for a moment. She didn’t know what to say. She wanted to apologize too, to walk down the path Fred Johnson had just showed her, but she couldn’t quite.
She waited to see whether Holden would reach out to her. When he didn’t she pulled herself back down toward the crew quarters. Her stomach felt tight and uncomfortable.
They weren’t friends. They wouldn’t be, because some things couldn’t be made right.
She’d have to be okay with that.
Amos smelled of solvent and sweat. Of all the crew, he was the one most like the people she knew. Soladad and Stanni. And Ren. He came into the galley with a welding rig on, the mask pushed up over his forehead. He smiled when he saw her.
“You did a number on the place,” Amos said. She knew that if the occasion arose, he would be perfectly willing to kill her. But until that moment, he’d be jovial and casual. That counted for more than she’d expected. “I mean, you had a salvage mech. Those are pretty much built for peeling steel.”
“I didn’t at the end,” she said. “It ran out of power. The locker in the airlock was all me.”
“Really?” he said
“Yeah.”
“Well,” he said, pulling a bulb of the fake coffee from the machine and drifting over to the table. “That was pretty impressive, then.”
She imagined him working, the mask down to hide his face, the sparks, the flickering of his great hunched shadow. Hephaestus, the smith of the Gods, laboring in his underworld. It was the kind of association Clarissa Mao would make. Melba Koh would only have thought about the temperature of the arc, the composition of the plates he was fusing together. She could have both of those thoughts, but neither were really hers.
She was on the float now. Later, when the ship was under way and thrust gravity pinned her to the deck, she’d still be on the float. Her world had been constructed around stories about who she was. Jules-Pierre’s daughter, Julie Mao’s sister, the crew lead on the Cerisier, instrument of her father’s vengeance. Now she was no one. She was a piece of baggage on her old enemy’s ship going from one prison to another, and she didn’t even resent it. The last time she’d felt this nameless, she’d probably been in an amniotic sac.
“What was the problem?”
“Hmm?”
“You said I really did a number on something. What’s the problem?”
“Deck hatch between the machine shop and here gets stuck. Ever since you crumpled it up. Binds about half open.”
“Did you check the retracting arm?”
Amos turned to her, frowning. She shrugged.
“Sometimes these door actuators put on an uneven load when they start to burn out. We probably swapped out four or five of them on the trip out here.”
“Yeah?”
“Just a thought,” she said. And then a moment later, “When we get back to Luna, they’re going to kill me, aren’t they?”