James Corey - Nemesis Games

When her glass was empty, she put her hand on his, and they pressed out to the public corridor outside the club. Men and women waiting to get in – Belters, almost to a person – watched them leave. It was night on Tycho Station, which didn’t mean much. The station was built on three rotating eight-hour shifts: leisure, work, sleep. Who you knew depended on what shift you worked, like three different cities that all occupied the same space. A world that would always be two-thirds strangers. She put her arm around Jim’s waist and pulled him in against her until she could feel his thigh moving against hers.

“We need to talk,” she said.

He tensed a little, but kept his voice light and airy. “Like man-and-woman talk?”

“Worse,” she said. “XO and captain.”

“What’s up?”

They stepped into a lift, and she pushed the button for their deck. The lift chimed, the doors moving gently closed, as she gathered her thoughts. It wasn’t really that she didn’t know what needed to be said. He wasn’t going to like this any more than she did.

“We need to look at hiring on more crew.”

She knew enough about Jim’s silences to recognize this one. She looked up into his blank expression, his eyes blinking a fraction more quickly than usual.

“Really?” he said. “Seems to me that we’re doing just fine.”

“We are. We have been. The Roci ’s a military design. Smart. A lot of automation, a lot of redundancy. That’s why we’ve been able to run her at a third of her standard crew for this long.”

“That and we’re the best damned crew in the sky.”

“That doesn’t hurt. Looking at skills and service, we’ve got a strong group. But we’re brittle.”

The lift shifted, the complex forces of station spin and car acceleration making the space feel unsteady. She was sure it was just the movement.

“I’m not sure what you mean by brittle,” Jim said.

“We’ve been on the Rocinante since we salvaged her off the Donnager . We’ve had no change in staff. No turnover. Name me one other ship you can think of where that’s true. There were runs where the Canterbury had a quarter of the staff on their first mission together. And…”

The doors slid open. They stepped out, moving aside to let another couple go in. Naomi heard the others murmuring to each other as the lift doors closed. Jim was quiet as they walked back toward their suite. When he finally spoke, his voice was low and thoughtful.

“You’re thinking one of them may not come back? Amos? Alex?”

“I’m thinking that a lot of things happen. Take a high burn, and sometimes people stroke out. The juice helps, but it’s not a guarantee. People have been known to shoot at us. Or we’ve been disabled in a decaying orbit. You remember all that happening, right?”

“Sure, but —”

“If we lose someone, we go from running at a third of a standard crew to a quarter. Add to that the loss of nonredundant skills.”

Holden stopped, his hand on the door to their rooms.

“Wait, wait, wait. If we lose someone?”

“Yes.”

His eyes were wide and shocked. Little wrinkles of distress gathered at the corners. She reached up to smooth them away, but they didn’t go.

“So you’re trying to get me prepared for one of my crew dying?”

“Historically speaking, humans are pretty much at a hundred percent on that.”

Jim started to say something, faltered, opened the suite door, and walked in. She followed, closing the door behind them. She wanted to let it drop, but if she did, she didn’t know when they’d pick it back up.

“If we were running a traditional crew, we’d have two people in every position. If anyone got killed or disabled, someone else would be right there to step in.”

“I’m not adding four more people to our ship, much less eight,” Jim said, walking into the bedroom. Running from the conversation. He wouldn’t actually leave. She waited for the silence and the distress and the worry that he’d made her angry to pull him back. It took about fifteen seconds. “We don’t run this like a regular crew because we’re not a regular crew. We got the Roci when everyone in the system was shooting at us. We had stealth ships blowing a battleship out from under us. We lost the Cant and then we lost Shed . You can’t go through that and just be normal.”

“Meaning what exactly?”

“This ship isn’t a crew. We don’t run it like a crew. We run it like a family.”

“Right,” she said. “And that’s a problem.”

They looked at each other across the room. Jim’s jaw worked, objections and arguments getting stalled at his tongue. He knew she was right, and he wanted her to be wrong. She saw him realize there was no way out.

“Fine,” he said. “When the others get back, let’s talk about doing some interviews. Taking a couple people on for a mission or two. If they shake down right, we can look at keeping them on permanently.”

“That sounds good,” Naomi said.

“It’s going to change the balance on the ship,” Holden said.

“Everything changes,” she said, putting her arms around him.

They ordered food from a fusion Indian restaurant, curry and genetically modified rice and textured fungal protein mostly indistinguishable from beef. For the rest of the evening, Holden tried to be cheerful, tried to hide his unease from her. It didn’t even start to work, but she appreciated the effort.

After dinner, they watched the entertainment feeds until the time came in the comfortable rhythm of their day that she turned off the screen and drew him back to the bed. Sex with Holden had started off as a thrilling thing, years ago when they were first seeing exactly how stupid a captain and an XO sleeping together would be. Now, it was richer and calmer and more playful. And more comforting.

After, lying on the big gel-form mattress with the sheets in ropes at the foot, Naomi’s mind wandered. She thought of the Roci and of Sam, of a book of poetry she’d read when she was a girl and a musical group one of the senior engineers had roped her into on the Canterbury . Her recollections had started taking on the surreal confusion of dreams when Jim’s voice brought her back almost to wakefulness.

“I don’t like having them gone.”

“Hmm?”

“Alex and Amos. I don’t like having them gone. If they get in trouble, we’ll be here. I can’t even just fire up the Roci and go get them.”

“They’ll be fine,” she said.

“I know. I sort of know.” He propped himself up on one elbow. “Are you really not worried?”

“A little maybe.”

“I mean, I know they’re grown-ups, but if something happened. If they didn’t come back…”

“It would be hard,” Naomi said. “We four have been what we rely on for a lot of years now.”

“Yeah,” Jim said. And then a moment later, “Do you know who this lady was Amos went back to check on?”

“No. I don’t.”

“You think she was his lover?”

“I don’t know,” Naomi said. “I got the feeling it was more of a surrogate mom thing.”

“Hmm. Maybe. I don’t know why I was thinking lover.” His voice had started taking on the fuzzy edges of sleep. “Hey, can I ask an inappropriate question?”

“If memory serves.”

“Why didn’t you and Amos ever get together? I mean back on the Cant .”

Naomi laughed, rolled over, put her arm across his chest. Even after shipping with him all this time, she liked the way his skin smelled. “Are you serious? Have you paid any attention at all to his sexuality?”

“I don’t think Amos and I are supposed to do that.”