James Corey - Nemesis Games

And still on the horizon, the glow of something huge – a city or a fire – lit the clouds from below, gold on gray. So maybe even the end of the world had its moments of beauty.

Peaches took a bite of her ration bar and sipped the water from her self-purifying canteen. “Is it bothering you?”

“What?”

“What we did.”

“Not sure what that was, Peaches.”

She looked at him, her eyes narrowed like she was trying to decide if he was joking. “We invaded a man’s home, killed him, and took his stuff. If we hadn’t come through, he might have made it. Lived until the sun came back. Survived.”

“He was gonna shoot me for no reason except that I had something he wanted.”

“He wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t gone there. And we lied to him about wanting to trade.”

“Seems like you have a point to make, Peaches.”

“If he hadn’t been ready to pull the trigger, would you have let it go? Or would we still be here, with these guns and this food?”

“Oh, we were taking his shit. I’m just pointing out both sides of the argument had the same plan.”

“Then we’re not exactly the good guys, are we?”

Amos scowled. It wasn’t a question that had even crossed his mind until she said it. It bothered him that it didn’t bother him more. He scratched his chest and tried to imagine Holden doing what they’d done. Or Naomi. Or Lydia.

“Yeah,” he said. “I should really get back to the ship soon.”

Chapter Thirty-one: Alex

“You’re in a good mood,” Bobbie said as Alex sat down across from her. Her breakfast was oatmeal with an egg-like protein crumble, sausages, and hot sauce. Her hair, pulled back in a tight ponytail, was wet with sweat, and her cheeks were flushed from recent exertion. Just looking at her made him feel out of shape. But she was right. He was in a good mood.

“Captain’s bringing my girl to Luna.”

Bobbie frowned. “Your… girl?”

“The Roci .”

“Oh. Right,” she said. “For a second, I just thought… Yeah. It’ll be good to see Holden too. And Avasarala.”

“Be good to be on my own damn ship,” Alex said, tapping pepper onto his plate of reconstituted eggs. “Now if we can just get Amos and Naomi back. Whoa. Did I say something?”

The shadow that had come over Bobbie’s expression vanished again and she shook her head. “Nothing. Just… I don’t know. Envy, I guess. It’s been a while since I had people.”

She stabbed one of the sausages with a fork and glanced around the mess hall as she ate it. Alex’s eggs were chalky and tasted more of yeast than something that came from a chicken, and it brought decades of memory with it. “Being back around active-duty folks making it hard to look forward to civilian life?”

“Sort of.”

“Things change,” Alex said.

“And they don’t change back,” she said, quoting him back to himself.

Alex broke off a piece of toast, popped it in his mouth, and talked around the crust. “We still talking about the service?”

Bobbie smiled. “No, I guess we’re not. I still can’t really get my head around it. Earth’s never going to be Earth again. Not like it was.”

“No, it won’t.”

“Mars either,” Bobbie said. “I think about my nephew. Smart kid. Book smart, I mean. He hasn’t really been in the world except for going through university and then the terraforming project. That’s his whole life. He was one of the first people I knew to really get what off-world colonies meant for everything back here.”

“Yeah. It makes everything different,” Alex said.

“Except how we deal with it,” she said, then racked an imaginary shotgun and fired it off with a popping sound.

“Amazing how much we’ve managed to do, considering how we’re doing it all with jumped-up social primates and evolutionary behaviors from the Pleistocene.”

Bobbie chuckled, and he was glad to hear the sound. There was something about making the people around him feel better that left him feeling lighter himself. Like if the others on his crew could be upbeat, whatever it was couldn’t be that bad. He understood the flaw in that logic: if comforting them comforted him, maybe comforting him comforted them, and they could all drive the ship into a rock while they smiled at each other.

“I heard the relief ships are here,” Alex said.

“Yeah, that may not be as good as we’d hoped,” Bobbie said around a mouthful of sausage. “They were talking about it at training this morning. The relief ships should be getting in operational range right around now, but the scuttlebutt is the crews are all green as hell. Like first-mission green.”

“ All of them?” Alex said.

“The good crews are all back at Hungaria covering our six.”

“Well. Better a bunch of teenagers flying with us than just the two frigates,” Alex said. “But you’ll excuse me if I’d hoped the cavalry coming over the hill was a little more experienced.”

“They probably said the same thing about us when we started up.”

“You know they did. First mission I flew solo, I almost dumped core by mistake.”

“Seriously?”

“Got flustered.”

“That’s military-grade flustered, all right,” Bobbie said. “Well, hopefully, this’ll be a milk run to Luna.”

Alex nodded and took a sip of coffee from his bulb. “You think that’ll happen? You really think it’s over?”

Bobbie’s silence was an answer.

They spent the rest of the meal on less fraught subjects: how training for marines and Navy were different and which one was better; Alex’s stories from Ilus and the slow zone; speculation about what exactly Avasarala was going to do once they got the prime minister to Luna. It was all shop talk, and Alex found it easy and pleasant. He hadn’t crewed with her in years, but she was good to talk to, good to be around. In another life, he could imagine shipping with her. Well, in the military anyway. He couldn’t quite place her on a water hauler like the Canterbury , and he wondered what it would have done to have her on the Roci . Part of what made the Rocinante home was that the crew was so small, and had so much shared context. There was an intimacy that living in quarters with the same handful of people for so long gave. Anyone coming in – even someone as competent and smart and easygoing as Bobbie – would have had to contend with that, and there was nothing that screwed up a crew like having one person who felt excluded.

He was still thinking about that, chewing the next-to-last mouthful of so-called eggs and listening to Bobbie tell a story about free-climbing on the Martian surface, when the Klaxons went off.

“All hands to battle stations,” the calm, crisp voice said between whoops of the alarm. “This is not a drill.”

Alex was up and heading toward his crash couch before he fully registered what was going on. Bobbie was beside him. They both threw their breakfast trays and drink bulbs into the recycler on the way out, long training identifying anything that wasn’t bolted down as a potential projectile if the ship’s vector changed too suddenly. The staccato vibration of the PDCs was already ringing in the decks, but Alex couldn’t imagine what could have gotten near enough for that kind of close combat without being noticed. The alarms were still going off when they reached the corridor and one of the marines – Sergeant Park, his name was – gathered them up.

“No time to get you to your quarters. There are some spare couches we can put you up in over here.”

“What’s going on?” Alex said, trotting to keep up.

“The relief ships are firing on us,” Park said.

“What?” Bobbie snapped.