James Corey - Nemesis Games

“Let’s face it,” Holden said, “if things keep going the way they are, finding work for a private warship may get pretty tough.”

Amos laughed. “Let me get a preemptive I-told-you-so in here. Since when that turns out not to be true, like it always does, I might not be there to say it.”

Chapter Two: Alex

The thing Alex Kamal liked most about the long haul was how it changed the experience of time. The weeks – sometimes months – spent on the burn were like stepping out of history into some small, separate universe. Everything narrowed down to the ship and the people in it. For long stretches, there would be nothing but the basic maintenance work to do, and so life lost all its urgency. Everything was working according to the plan, and the plan was for nothing critical to happen. Traveling through the vacuum of space gave him an irrational sense of peace and well-being. It was why he could do the job.

He’d known other people, usually young men and women, whose experience was different. Back when he’d been in the Navy there had been a pilot who’d done a lot of work in the inner planets, running between Earth, Luna, and Mars. He’d transferred in for a trip out to the Jovian moons under Alex. Just about the time an inner planet run would have ended, the young man started falling apart: getting angry over trivial slights, eating too much or not at all, passing restlessly through the ship from command center to engine room and back again like a tiger pacing its cage. By the time they’d reached Ganymede, the ship’s doctor and Alex agreed to start putting sedatives in the guy’s food just to keep things from getting out of hand. At the end of the mission, Alex had recommended the pilot never be assigned a long run again. Some kinds of pilots couldn’t be trained as much as tested for.

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 shipyards 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 ship. 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 shit 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 ship. 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 horny?”

“No, they’re not sex 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 ship drive goes back online?”

Alex looked down into his coffee. “Leave things in a better place.”

Amos’ shrug was massive. “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 ship 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.”