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“Do you know what Tay-Sachs disease is, or sickle cell anemia?” asked Dr. Acharya.   “Nope,” said Amos. “Am I supposed to?”   James knew where this was going, but let the doctor speak for Amos’s sake.   “They are both genetic disorders, which, when the individual presents with both copies of the gene, homozygous, the mortality rate is high. Very high. But when the person carries only one copy, each condition brings an unusual benefit. In Tay-Sachs, it’s a heightened ability to survive famine; in sickle cell, protection from malaria. The unfortunate effects of the ailment in full presentation, which would normally cause the gene to be selected against within the population, is balanced by the heterozygous advantage and remains in circulation. It’s only a rough analogy, but something similar is in play with you and your kind. Your physical size, your strength, your greatly increased ability to fend off illness and infection, your partner also benefits, save for the increased strength. But there’s a cost. In times past, alphas fought to the death over omega partners, and the omega, if pregnant, deprived of his partner’s protection and the physical sustenance provided through coitus, dies along with the child. There is no surviving that separation. And that was the balance nature struck for your kind, the negative with the positive. That was why you were never many, but you held on. What they did to your kind was an atrocity, which they waved off with false accusations and indictments.” The doctored sighed heavily, his eyes introspective. “You have no choice but to stay. In the past, you would have grown up knowing these things.”   “What else do I need to know, doc? All that medical mumbo jumbo ain’t exactly page-turning,” replied Amos.   “Assuming all goes well with the birth, James’s heat will be suppressed until the child is old enough to fend for him or herself, at five or six.”   “Doc, a six-year-old is barely more than a toddler,” Amos countered.   “Your child will develop faster than you think. Six or seven will be the equivalent of a young teen. That’s when he or she will express the first change into physical adulthood. If the child is to be another alpha or omega, the second change will happen when the next heat commences, and since there are no other omegas in evidence, that would be your heat, James.”   “Wait… what?” said Amos.   “That’s for the future, Mr. Burton. One step at a time. Your little family has a habit of biting off more than it can chew,” replied the doctor.   “One of my fathers is a latent. He told me about some of this. One of the many reasons my family are separatists.” He took Amos’s hand. “Thank you for explaining all this, Ted, but can you and Amos give Naomi and me some space?”   He squeezed Amos’s hand by way of asking forgiveness. Amos squeezed back because none was needed and he gently collected the doctor ahead of him.   Jim was terrified.   More than anything the doctor had to say, more than what was happening within himself, more than even the protomolecule in all its unnatural, unholy power, more than any of that, this moment left him a frightened child in the woods, in the rain, in the dark of night.   He still loved her as fiercely as he ever did. That had never faded. He’d simply put it away when it seemed she was never going to be there to receive it. The dead are loved, as are the lost, and our grief is love deprived of a direct object.   And still, life had altered too radically to just pick up where they left off. Clearly the same was true for her. Her eyes were guarded. She looked older than she should, which made the fact that she was still as beautiful as he remembered all the more poignant. It meant he’d known her real beauty. Not prettiness - the unearned gift of youth - but real beauty, which is a different thing entirely. It’s what stays until the end once the prettiness of flesh has faded and sagged. His mother had told him about that when he was young and hadn’t really understood because he’d been blessed with uncommonly good looks. She’d told him to enjoy it while it lasted because it never did, and if he failed to find his own genuine source of beauty in someone else’s eyes, then his final years would be bleak.   What his mother had said crystallized and he could imagine her maternal love, her soft words saying, “Told you, sweetie.”   “I’m not angry,” she said. “But this is painful.”   “I don’t know what to say you, but this is your home, this is your family. We’ll find a way through this.” His throat closed up. “I love you. I never stopped loving you.” He did not want to ugly-cry, but the options were growing limited.   “And Amos?” she asked.   “Naomi…”   “The funny thing, I always wanted things to be better between you two. When I left, I prayed Amos wouldn’t float away, that he would stay here, with you. I guess I prayed a little too hard.” Where she found the strength to smile at her own joke, he would never know.   “We’ll find a way through this,” he repeated. “And we’re getting Filip.”   The small light that had lifted her eyes faded instantly. “He’s not a prisoner, James. He’s where he wants to be.”   “Only because that lunatic has him brainwashed.”   “One insane crisis at a time, yeah?” she said. She floated towards him. “May I?” she pointed at his stomach.   “Yeah, of course.”   Her delicate hand was a memory on his skin. The nights they’d spent in each others' arms were forever etched in his mind. Her smell, her warmth, the springy pillow of her hair and the depths of her eyes. None of that was gone. When he’d imagined this scenario with her, their roles were reversed, of course, and she was the source of all creation.   “I see it, I feel it, I still can’t believe it,” she whispered.   He let out a dramatic, lip-flapping breath. “I say the same thing every ten minutes.” He placed his hand on top of hers. “Can you help me be a good mom?”   She pulled her hand away. “I’m the last person who should give that kind of advice.”   “You’re the best person to give that advice. That’s why you can’t quit yet, Naomi. You can’t. You’re not alone now. You have us. We have to save him.” He tried to take her hand back, and did, and held it to the point where she forcibly pulled away.   “I tried to kill him.”   “Amos told me. Were you trying to kill him or stop Marco?”   “How does that matter?”   “It’s the only thing that matters. You were willing to sacrifice everything, yourself, your son, to stop that fucker. There’s an entire system back home that doesn’t know what you tried to do to save them all. They have to know. And so does Filip. That’s how we get him back. We show him the big picture, the things that really matter. Marco is a joker and a criminal and the day we catch him, I’m giving him to Bobbie and I’m gonna’ let her do what she does because it won’t cost her what it cost you. And she’ll do it. She’ll do it for you, and with the biggest fucking smile you ever saw because he’s worthless and you are priceless.”   His breath came heavy and fast.   “Wow,” said Naomi. “All that, huh?”   He never loved her more than at that moment.   “You’re beautiful,” he said. "And that was the short version. Just imagine everything I held back."   “I missed you so much,” she replied. “Am I forgiven for leaving?”   “Stop that,” he said, wiping his eyes. “No fair making the hormonal pregnant guy cry.” He pulled her into a hug before she could fend him off. “There’s nothing to forgive, but if you need to hear me say it, then yes, you’re forgiven.”   She was stiff in his arms, yielding only enough to make it clear she would rather he let go. He did.   “I missed us,” he said, giving voice to the elephant in the room, the loss.   “So do I, but neither of us is who we were. Whatever happens, we have to accept that. You’re not the only one who’s changed, Jim.”   And just like that, she retreated again behind impenetrable walls. Whatever was pulling her back was not something to which she was going to give access until she was ready. Was it as simple as the obvious, or was it more? The doctor was right, this family was always biting off more than it could chew.   “What’s Martha hiding, Naomi?”   The lights went off in her eyes.   “We need to save Clarissa. Whatever you know, whatever you got, Naomi, tell me.”   “I think she communicates with the satellite,” she said.   “How?”   “I don’t know exactly, but when we left the planet, it all just fell in place a little too conveniently. How to control doors and other things. Too easy.”   “But you don’t know for sure.”   “I don’t. But I’m pretty sure.”   “I’ll take your pretty sure as good enough. Is that it?”   “That’s it. She keeps her cards close to her chest, but there’s nothing much happening there. I’ve been the one to go exploring the most and the farthest. No one’s tried to stop me or divert me away from anything. If there’s anything else she’s hiding, she’s got it up here.” Naomi tapped her temple.   “Why doesn’t she like Dr. Acharya?”   “Because he’s got no filter, and he doesn’t want one. That’s not convenient for her. He’s never called her out, but everyone knows he disapproves of the way she handled it.”   “Handled what?”   She reached for her hair. He had to keep her present or she would bail inwards.   “Handle what, Naomi?”   “About Filip, about the trade.”   “She made that happen?”   “She pointed out that it was the fastest, easiest way for the most people to get out and away from Marco and his people. It made sense, Jim.” She shrugged in the way of inners, with her shoulders.   “Mother fuck. I knew it wasn’t you. I knew you would never do that.”   “But I did.”   “She gave you no choice. That’s not your fault. I would never have done that to you.” That last came out nearly as a growl.   “And that’s why you start wars,” she whispered. “You won’t compromise, even when it’s the only choice that makes sense.”   “No. Fuck that. We have to bring him back to you. Physically, and emotionally.”   “You’ll never get him away from Marco. He worships him.”   “He should be worshiping you. But we have to deal with Clarissa first. Bring the ship within communications distance with the docking port on the moon.”   “That’s dangerous. If Marco knows you’re here, the Pella will be able to target us.”   “Just for a fly-by, Naomi. Swing us around in a close orbit. You think if the hatch is open we can pick up on Bobbie’s suit comms?”   “I don’t know. Maybe.”   “We need to warn her.”   “Bobbie’s no dummy. I think she’s got Martha pegged.”   “Still, we can’t take that for granted. All your logins are still active.”   “Jim…”   “I know. One thing at a time. This is the first thing - Clarissa. Now that includes getting Bobbie in the loop, so that’s still part of the first thing too.” He gave a tight-lipped smile. “I can remember a time when I didn’t have to try so hard to give you the pilot’s chair of the Roci.”   “Fine,” she acquiesced.   James hit the internal comms. “Amos, you and the doctor are gonna’ wanna’ strap in. Naomi’s taking us for a ride.”   “Copy that, Jim,” replied Amos. “Where we going?”   “Gotta’ call a Marine about a horse,” said James.   “Pretty sure that’s not what that means, but I copy. Strapping in now.”   “After you,” he gestured for Naomi to lead to the bridge of the ship.   It was corny and silly and perhaps pointless, but he wanted to watch her settle into the pilot’s chair. He wanted to watch her sign in and bring up the Roci’s navigation displays. He wanted to see her check all her systems, at a glance, knowing them as well as she knew her own body. He wanted to see that because that was where Naomi belonged, piloting their ship, the sharp human mind behind the deadly armament and blistering propulsion. Those things at least - their ship, their home - hadn’t changed. Those things were solid and reliable and precise. She wasn’t top of the line at this point, but she was hardly redundant, and Naomi knew her and flew her as though they were twins or lovers.   Watching her settle in made his memories real, made it all more than a dream.   “What?” she asked, flicking a glance at him from the corner of her eye.   There was no way to explain his thoughts that didn’t come out as creepy, so he just winked at her and took his own seat.   “You ready, Amos?” she asked into the comm’s speaker.   “Wait’n on you,” came the response.   “Okay, folks, the satellite is in tidal lock, which means one rotation per orbit. I’m taking the Roci in a retrograde orbit around the satellite in order to acquire our target position as quickly as possible while keeping the moon between us and the planet as long as possible. The downside is that the communication window will be short. Our initial burn will be hidden by the satellite, but that’s the only boon we get. After that, we have to run her quiet.”   “This is how we skirted the inside of the hub,” James commented. “It was Clarissa’s plan.”   “Sometimes the simplest plan is the best,” she remarked, eyeing his chair and satisfying herself that he was strapped in as she set the Roci’s navigation program to calculate the burn. She had the course laid in and a set of teakettle adjustments on quick access command. “Burn in five, four, three, two, one.”   The Rocinante punched into gear, pushing him back into his chair. Several adjustments finessed their trajectory and the motor cut off, relieving the torture to his spine and bladder.   “That’s it. It’ll be a couple of hours before we’re in range. You all right?” she asked.   “I’m good. Gotta’ pee, though. That was like the kid just became a grown adult and stepped on my bladder.” He grimaced as he unclipped the safety harness.   “I know that feeling,” she said. “It gets you right here.” She ran the tip of her finger along the gums of her lower teeth. It was a strange demonstration, but she was right. It did get you right there.   He unstrapped and headed for the ship’s toilette.     All four of them, Amos, Dr. Acharya, Naomi and himself, were on the bridge when they approached what Naomi figured would be a reasonable distance to expect reception. She tapped the Roci’s call sign in Morse code. It was the simplest method, and the least likely to garble if there was signal loss or degradation.   On the third try, Bobbie tapped back a quick, efficient response.   On mission. All fine.   Naomi tapped back - Watch Martha. She lies.   Duh, was Bobbie's terse response. I know. Under watch.   “We’re passing over the docking bay now. The door is sealed,” Naomi reported. “This is the best chance we have for voice comms if you want to risk it.”   James flicked the comms to a private channel that would sound only Bobbie’s helmet.   “Bobbie, do you copy?”   Through a heavy hiss of static, Bobbie replied. “I copy. I’ve got Martha with me. Took her as collateral.”   “Copy that,” said James. “She may be able to communicate with the satellite.”   “You don’t say,” came the reply. “Understood. Now get that ship back to a safe location. I’ve got it under control here.”   “Understood,” said James.   “This is going to go badly,” said Dr. Acharya. “Martha Swinton is a prideful person.”   “Aren’t we all, doc?” said Amos.   “Perhaps so, Amos, but most of us are able to check our pride in the face of the greater good and the greater need. I’ve learned that even when it looks like Martha is acting in the best interest of everyone, it’s often just a matter of coincidence. And she conflates the lack of conscience with the courage to make sacrifices, but rarely are they her sacrifices. Make of that what you will,” the doctor said.   “You just described pretty much everyone we ever run into, doc, so you’ll forgive us if we don’t seem too shocked,” replied James.   “Then include yourselves in that description,” said the doctor, sourly.   That was probably fair, thought James, but it was a thought experiment for another time.   A red glow pulsed from the panels.   “The Roci’s being targeted,” Naomi said. “Target lock still soft.” She continued to watch the screen, the pulse decreasing with each beat. “Out of range, no lock, but there can be no doubt - the Pella knows we’re here.”   “Nothing incoming?” James asked.   “No, looks clear,” Naomi replied. She flipped the comms once again. "Bobbie, did you catch that? The jig is up."   "Copy that," said Bobbie. "Less talking, more flying."   “We know something too," said James when Bobbie's signal went dead. "We know she’s damaged enough not to waste torpedos on wild shots, but she wouldn’t have bothered trying to acquire a lock if she were incapable of launching, so we assume she is capable,” said James.   “Makes sense,” said Amos.   “And there was no targeting attempt on the Pashang Fong, so the Pella’s sensors are likely compromised, not able to pick up something as small and primitive as the Fong,” added Naomi.   “Do not let Clarissa hear you say anything like that about her ship,” said James. “And while I think you’re right, let’s stick to the idea that they probably can ping something as small as the Fong if they’re looking for it.”   Naomi squinted at her screen and her fingers flew over the control surface.   “We have a new situation,” she said.   “Oh, of course, it’s only been five minutes since our last one. We’re overdue,” snarked Amos.   “There’s another ship out there,” said Naomi. “It’s small, but not as small as the Belter ships.” She flipped on the active sensor array, now that they were out of range of anything from the Pella and that particular cat was out of the bag, no need to run silently. It was nothing but a bright white dot on the very edge of visual acquisition. The other sensors gave more information.   “That ship is from the Nauvoo,” said Naomi. “That’s one of her custom shuttles.”   “Is she in range?” asked Amos.   “For tight-beam, yes,” said Naomi. “Is that a good idea, though?”   “I have a hunch I know who that is,” said James. “And while I may not be happy to see her, she doesn’t deserve to get vaporized out here. Put me through.”   She glanced at Amos who only nodded her back to James, then she opened the channel.   “Drummer, if that’s you, this is not a safe place and we’re not the baddies. Please copy,” Jim warned.   It was several seconds before the reply came through.   “Kowltim, im 'go milowda' wit to," came the reply in a tightly controlled female voice. "Never a dull moment, huh?”   Yeah, that was definitely Camina Drummer.   Jim gave detail to the warning. “Drummer, there’s a ship on the planet with an itchy trigger finger and I don’t think she’s picky about targets. I'm sending you her rough coordinates. That’s all we have. We had to get out of range without taking one up the ass.”   “Funny choice of words,” came the reply a few seconds later. “Changing course now. We’ll swing around the planet and rendezvous with you at your current location?”   She’d said we’ll, not I’ll.   James muted the comms. “Naomi, is that thing armed?”   “Not with anything that would worry us, no,” she responded.   He flicked the comms back on. “Copy that, Drummer. I’m guessing a couple of days from your current position. We’ll be here.”   He closed the channel.   “So much for a quiet escape,” he said.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“You know perfectly well who that was,” Bobbie replied.   Martha was as livid as a wet hen, and Alex was problematically uncomfortable with the situation. Who trained you, man? she thought. But that was the eternal difference between the Navy and Marines - resolve.   She’d locked the position of her suit’s right arm an hour ago, in order to keep the gun on Martha without having to expend the energy to do so.   “You think that pop gun is going to leave a scratch on anything in here?” she’d scoffed at Bobbie.   “No, not anything from here. Just you, you meaty little Earther,” she’d passed back with bitterly saccharine snideness. Martha had actually swallowed hard at that comment, to Bobbie’s satisfaction. They always thought they could out-think you, out-maneuver you, because to them you were an idiot jarhead. They never understood how easy that shit was to deflect when you simplified it down to one on one. No, not all of them, just you. Just you.   “How do you communicate with the satellite?” she asked her.   “How... what?” She was a crap liar, Bobbie noted. Her tells spilled out like candy from a ripped bag.   “I know you talk to this thing,” Bobbie laid flatly, the first layer of a manipulation sandwich. “It’s obvious. You don’t just walk onto a thing like this and start pressing buttons.” That was the lettuce and tomato. “Also, Naomi mentioned early on that you found evidence of what the original inhabitants were like, so that means you have access to some kind of information, some terminal or something somewhere.” That was the meat. She paused for dramatic effect. “That leaves the question of how many body parts you’re willing to give up before you show me how to talk to this thing.”   “You’re a psychopath,” Martha spat at her.   “Oh, you’d better hope not,” she responded with faux humor. “See, a psycho would just start with your toes and work her way to the top, regardless of how much information you gave. A sane person would stop once the needed information was surrendered. It’s not in your best interest if I’m a psycho, now is it?”   “I’ve dealt with better than you,” Martha said through gritted teeth.   “Is that a challenge? I love a good challenge! Who are you comparing me to? Marco? Please let it be Marco! Fun!” Bobbie let her voice go just a shade unhinged.   Martha’s granite affect started to chip as Bobbie brought her crazy voice to bare. She was no one’s psychopath, but she could play one with uncanny, natural ease. And it was working. Martha was one of those who needed to feel that she was taken seriously by those around her. She was the kind of person who would eventually monopolize any conversation and make use of self-descriptors that enhanced what a serious, strong, sober person she was. That kind of external locus of validation was an exposed nerve that Bobbie had been trained to step on with vigor. She could torture this woman without ever laying a finger on her. She was practically handing her the tools with which to do it.   Alex looked nonplussed and mildly disgusted. She ignored it. Marines had no need for such high horses. The real work was always on the ground, in the mud, and Bobbie felt like a pig in muck just now.    “Martha, I don’t want your little collection of camp followers and whatever else these people may be to you. I have my own family, and you’re just going to have to take my word for it that dealing with them is more than enough for any one person. But you know this already, don’t you? You knew exactly who we were when we arrived, to include Clarissa Mao. Bravo to you for knowing your current celebs and all, but right now all I care about, the only thing in the world giving me purpose, is getting my friend back from wherever she was taken. I mean, you would be amazed at how single-minded I can be, Martha. Just look at my pal Alex here. Doesn’t look too happy, does he? That scowl he’s wearing is for me, not for you. He knows perfectly well what I’m capable of. He’s seen it, first hand, glossy red and splattered on the wall.   “Your bullshit…”   “Doesn’t scare you? Is that what you were going to say?” Bobbie unlocked her gun arm and pushed Martha up against the hallway wall, holding her immobile while she dug in under the edge of her ribcage with her free hand, bending the bone in the wrong direction just enough to invoke a gasping, fish-like expression from Martha. Her “O-face”, but not the good one. The woman trembled under Bobbie’s attention, then gave a shuddered nod of defeat.   Bobbie released her and she drew in great lungfuls of air, trying to keep down the nausea Bobbie was sure she felt from the pain. Bobbie knew exactly how much that rib pinch hurt when performed by the fingers of a power suit. It blinded and made sweat pour, but there was little long-term damage.   “Tell me how you communicate with the satellite,” Bobbie repeated.   Martha gestured back in the opposite direction from where Bobbie had marched her, back toward the docking bay.   “Right then, lead the way,” Bobbie said with an incongruous chipper tone.   When they passed the common room again, Bobbie placed a warning hand on Martha’s shoulder. This time she was smart enough to heed the warning and passed without a glance inside at the others who watched them go by.   In the docking bay, Bobbie gave her a little more rope and let her walk ahead. Maybe she would be stupid enough to run for one of the ships, or a tool belt, something that would give Bobbie a good excuse to knock her off her feet, but she gave her no such segue. Instead, she made a quick line for the wall opposite the one that led to the common room. Between and behind where two small Belter ships were parked, she placed her hand on the wall and made a twisting motion with her palm. Another door irised open.   The room on the other side was much smaller than what they had seen so far of the spaces in play here in the satellite. This was more to a human scale, if not exactly so. Assuming the thing against the far wall was a terminal, there was only the one in the room.  No, that was wrong. There were two. The other was longer, higher, and of a much larger scale.   “All right,” said Bobbie. “Make it work.”   “Make it work,” Martha repeated with disdain under her breath. She approached the terminal and placed her hand in a circle very similar to the ones on the wall near the food slots. A blank area proved to be a screen, though the entire terminal looked to be made of the same material as the floors and walls. The screen glowed with indecipherable information. Martha touched areas of the screen and the information stopped, zoomed in on whatever she’d touched and new information populated the screen, equally indecipherable.   “That’s it?” Bobbie asked.   “That’s it,” said Martha. “Sorry to disappoint whatever’s rattling around in that tiny skull of yours, but if you can read alien gibberish, then you’re a step ahead of me.”   “How’d you figure out the doors and lights?” Bobbie asked.   “I already told you. I didn’t. It was the kids who discovered that. Amazing what young minds can figure out when you stop saying no to them.”   “Naomi said you found images of the original inhabitants,” she continued, moving Martha out of the way and tapping areas of the screen at random.   “Keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll eventually come across them too. There’s no secret, no magic. I was bored and just kept tapping the screen.”   “You’re lying,” said Bobbie, though she wasn’t sure of it now. Perhaps this was all there was to it. Perhaps not. She flipped through screen after screen. Most of them were dead ends, waiting for some kind of input. Backing out was easy enough. Each screen left a dot that linked back to the prior screen in the upper right-hand area.   “Bobbie, you can’t read that. What good does this do us?” Alex asked.   “I’m recording all of this on the suit’s camera, Alex,” she replied absently. “I may not be able to make heads or tails of whatever this is, but maybe the Roci’s computer can make some sense of it. Right now, I’m going through as many screens as I can to get a good sample of images.”   “And we had to take her hostage for this?”   “Apparently, yes,” said Bobbie. “You weren’t going to give this up just for the asking, now were you, Martha?”   “I may have, but you decided to be being a cunt about it, so you can certainly count on my lack of cooperation herein out.”   “Oh, sweetheart, are you breaking up with me? I was going to invite you to prom and everything. Never mind. I like it better this way, or haven’t you guessed already?” But Bobbie was no longer concerned with Martha’s presence. She only wanted to record this data and get it back to her ship where they could go over it with the help of the Roci’s computer core.   The current screen cleared out the back-up dots at the top. She tried to move past it, but it returned again and again. A circle shrinking down in size, almost like a target. The celadon on black tone gave way to blue on black and then white on black and then just black on black.   Words in English populated the screen.

WHO IS THIS?

There was no keyboard or other methods she could make out for typing out a reply. She turned her exterior suit speakers up to high and responded out loud, “This is Gunnery Sergeant Roberta fucking Draper. Who the hell are you?”

ROBERTA FUCKING DRAPER, NICE TO HEAR YOU AGAIN. CLARISSA FUCKING MAO AT YOUR SERVICE.

Bobbie could not restrain the barked laugh that escaped her.   “Clarissa fucking Mao! Hot damn! Where are you?” Bobbie looked around but saw nothing that resembled a camera

YOU CANNOT COME FOR ME RIGHT NOW. I HAVE NOT BEEN HARMED. THE HOSPITAL’S DIAGNOSTICIAN SAW THAT MY IMPLANTS ARE KILLING ME. A REMEDY IS IN THE WORKS. THREE MORE DAYS BEFORE I AM RELEASED.

“Pretending that all of that doesn’t sound crazy as fuck, Clarissa, why doesn’t it release you now?” she asked.

IT CANNOT. TRUST ME BOBBIE, I’LL BE OKAY. YOU HAVE TO PROMISE NOT TO ATTACK ME WHEN YOU SEE ME.

“Why would I attack you?”

I WILL NOT LOOK THE SAME. I’M GETTING A MUCH BETTER UPGRADE THIS TIME.

Bobbie glanced at Alex who had come up alongside her to read the screen. Bobbie mouthed the question, “An upgrade?”

YES, AN UPGRADE. THREE DAYS FROM NOW I'LL BE READY FOR MY DEBUT.

“Okay, we’re not going anywhere. We’ll be right here. I don’t want Martha shutting the docking bay hatch on us.”

NOT A PROBLEM. WE HAVE ACCESS TO THOSE SYSTEMS NOW. IN FACT…

The unchanging light of the room dimmed for a moment, as did the light from the docking bay that could be seen through the doorway. When it came back up the screen on the larger terminal activated and read “WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THE EMERGENCY?”

I HAD THE DIAGNOSTICIAN FLIP EVERYTHING TO ENGLISH AND TUNE THE LIGHTING AND DISPLAYS TO A HUMAN LIGHT SPECTRUM. I ALSO OPENED A CORRIDOR OF PRIVATE ROOMS WITH REAL BEDS. YOU DON’T HAVE TO SLEEP IN THE CAFETERIA ANY MORE. THERE WILL BE A RED STRIPE LEADING TO THAT CORRIDOR. THE ROOMS ARE NOT LOCKABLE. IT IS A HOSPITAL AFTER ALL.

“Does this place have a better comms array then what we’ve been using?” Alex asked.

YES. MUCH BETTER.

“Okay, good. Don’t use it now. The Pella knows we’re here. Can you tie in my suit comms and make something like a tight-beam happen between here and the Roci?”

YES.

“You fuck’n beauty!” Bobbie was elated at the turn in their luck.

NOT SO BAD YOURSELF.

Bobbie wanted to kiss the screen. If Clarissa were there now, she’d have kissed her too.   Martha Swinton looked like she was sucking on a pill, but she had the presence of mind to ask, “How about towels, sheets, toilette paper? Can you pull those out of your magic ass too?”

YOU’D BE SURPRISED WHAT I CAN PULL OUT OF THIS ASS OF MINE. YOU’LL FIND TOWELS IN A WALL ALCOVE AT EVERY POOL AND ALSO IN THE BATHROOMS. THERE’S ANOTHER ALCOVE WITH A HOLE TO DISPOSE OF WHATEVER YOU USE. NO TOILETTE PAPER, THOUGH. THEY USED TOWELS FOR EVERYTHING.

“How repulsively frugal,” Martha sighed.

I OPENED TWO ADDITIONAL ROOMS FOR YOU AND FOR ALEX. FOLLOW THE BLUE STRIPE. LET MARTHA GO. YOU DON’T NEED HER ANYMORE. ALL THE DOORS WILL OPEN TO YOU AND ALEX EXCEPT WHERE ENTRY IS TOO DANGEROUS.

“Read that, Martha? You’re dismissed,” Bobbie tossed over her shoulder. “Run along now. I’ve got the keys.”   “This was a mistake,” she hissed at Bobbie.   “Maybe, but I don’t think it was my mistake. You could have helped if you had wanted to. You could have volunteered and been the hero in all of this, but your compulsion to remain in control of the others by keeping your little secrets is the only mistake I see here. I found my missing crew member - who got the rest of this place up and running, by the way - and who is now in control of the entire show. Have mistakes been made? Yeah, but not by me.”   Bobbie marched out into the docking bay. “Holy fuck, will you look at that!”   The once-featureless walls now had signage in English. There were words at regular intervals over what Bobbie assumed to be more closed doors. Above those were larger signs above groups of doors that read HYDRO and OXY-NITRO on one side and CHLORINE and AMMONIA on the other. Those must be atmospheres for the sets of doors below them. The largest group of doors was under the oxy-nitro sign, one of which was the only other door that had been open up to now.   “Bobbie?” Clarissa’s voice sounded tinny in Bobbie’s helmet speaker. “Can you hear me?”   “I hear you, Claire,” Bobbie responded without making it obvious to her observers.   “Just let her go, Bobbie. Don’t play with her. She’s not worth your time,” Clarissa said.   “She can’t hurt me,” Bobbie whispered, even though she knew she couldn’t be heard outside her helmet.   “Exactly. She can’t hurt you, so there’s no reason to hurt her. We may need her later.”   “Copy that,” said Bobbie.   “Alex is upset, and I know you don’t care right now, but fix that if you can. He’s not the bad guy here either,” Clarissa remonstrated.   Suddenly everyone was a therapist? But she was right. He wasn’t the bad guy. Maybe the ineffectual guy, but not the bad guy.   “Your rooms are in the opposite direction from the ones I opened for the others. Theirs are patient rooms. Yours were originally apartments for the staff. Trust me, you’ll like them. Take advantage of the wait and relax a little bit. Let me know when you want to communicate with the Rocinante and I’ll make that happen. In your room, you won’t need to use the helmet comms. You can use the original system. It’s powerful enough to reach back to the hub and the rest of the gates.   “You’re kidding,” Bobbie said.   “Nope. They’ve got even better stuff than that, but we’re stuck with our own level of technology on the other side as the upper ceiling,” Clarissa replied.   “Okay,” Bobbie said as Martha was striding away from them.   Bobbie held Alex back.   “Hey,” she said. “I know I go a little overboard. None of that is about you.”   He sighed. “Yeah, I know, Bobbie. Doesn’t really make it any better, though, when you go all gung-ho on me. A guy’s got his pride, you know, and I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever behaved in a way where that was in order. If I’m wrong, please correct me.”   He wasn’t wrong. The situation simply called for it sometimes, and another Marine would know that and take it as a given, but Alex wasn’t a Marine. It wasn’t fair to expect the same commitment to hostility when hostility was called for.   “You’re right. I’ve been a dick to you, and not just today. Sorry about that. It’s not personal, which I know doesn’t make it any better, but it’s not.” She shifted the hand she’d used to hold him back and gave his arm as gentle a squeeze as the armor could execute.   He held on to his anger for just a moment longer before his face broke into a crooked smile. “Jeez, Bobbie. All right. Just dial it back a little, yeah? It’s hard enough holding on to my manly pride with you there in that power armor, the deadliest sumbitch I ever met.”   “It’s too bad there’s not another suit. I’d show you how to put her through her paces.” It was only as the words slipped out that Bobbie heard the double entendre.   Alex hadn’t missed it. “You don’t say?” he quipped.   She pretended she was going to strike him and pulled the punch with a wink.   Martha was long gone down the hallway. Bobbie was sure she was inventing some ludicrous story that painted her as the victim (which she kinda’ was) and Bobbie as the devil herself.   Well, Marines are called devil-dogs, so…     The blue stripe they found in the hallway (unsettlingly identical to the one that had preceded the giant squid that had taken Clarissa) led them through three large doorways that had been closed up to now and down one level. It ended in an abrupt Y where the stripe ran left and right into the hallway walls. Bobby placed her hand to the wall and twisted her palm. Inside, the room was expansive, but not so huge as to seem sterile and out of proportion. There was a dip in the center of the room that contained a recessed sitting area. She saw no way in other than to just step down onto the cushions. There was another room that was a bathroom with the same arrangement she has seen in the larger, communal lavatory, but this one had only a single toilette, sink, and a large tub of water set into the floor. What she thought was a bedroom was the most literal interpretation of the term she had ever seen. There was nothing in it, but the floor proved to be as soft as a mattress. The entire room was a single bed.   She poked her head out of the doorway and could see into Alex’s identical room. He was in the main room taking stock of his surroundings.   “Alex, I’m closing this door and taking a bath,” she called across the hall.   From in his room, he waved her off, “Sounds like a plan, Bobbie.”   She ducked back into her room and palmed the door closed.   “Clarissa, are you there?”   The voice that responded sounded vaguely similar to Clarissa’s voice, but it wasn’t her.   “She is not available at the moment, Bobbie. Can I help you with something?”   “Who am I talking to now? Are you who’s helping Clarissa?” she asked.   “Yes. I am the diagnostician. Clarissa has named me after her sister and given me her voice.” It was a young person’s voice, high and sweet.   “Clarissa said I would be able to communicate with my ship. Are you willing to do that for me?”   “Yes, of course. The danger on the planet’s surface is known to me. They will not detect the communication. Putting you through now.”   There was static for a minute as Bobbie began to disassemble her power suit, removing it piece by piece. She laid the parts on the cushions in the recessed sitting area.   “Who is this?” It was Amos’s voice.   “Amos, it’s Bobbie. Everything okay over there?” she asked.   “Yeah, we’re good. How is this communication happening?”   “Long story short, we’ve got at least part of the satellite up and running. It’s hard to explain, but Clarissa has made contact with the entity that runs this place. I don’t have all the details yet, but she’s acting as a liaison right now. Also, the satellite is fixing what’s broken with her. She’s asked me to stay a few days - three days to be exact - while she gets her ‘upgrade’, her word, not mine.”   “You and Alex all right?” he asked.   “Peachy. We’ve just been given very generous accommodations, which is a good thing because I’m pretty sure I’ve completely fucked whatever chances we had of good relations with these people,” she admitted.   “If they’re still walking and talking then I’m guessing you never even got to the foreplay, let alone the fucking.”   Bobbie snickered at that. “Yeah, that’s true, but I doubt they’re gonna’ see it the same way. Just tell the captain we’re okay, Clarissa seems like she’s going to be okay, and you should be able to reach us on this channel. It’s secure.”   “Copy that, Bobbie. Be safe. We’ll be talking.”   The hiss of the open channel closed out.   “Hey, you, diagnos… whatever your name is, you there?” she spoke at the ceilings and walls.   “I’m here. You can call me Julie. That’s what Clarissa picked for me.”   “Okay, Julie, I realize you aren’t a maid or anything like that, but you’re my only contact here, so what are the chances of getting the water in that tub to about ten degrees warmer than my body temperature?”   “The chances are excellent. Give it a couple of minutes while I cycle the water through.”   “Did Clarissa explain soap and shampoo and pretty smells to you?”   “Not deliberately, but I’ve learned what those things are. There are two bowl-shaped depressions next to the tub. You can use either as both soap and shampoo. There are towels in the alcove already.”   She was out of her underwear and heading for the bathroom. The water in the tub was not bubbling like in a hot tub, but the water was flowing so briskly from one end to the other that the current was noticeable and soothing against her skin. The two depressions by the tub were each filled with a creamy, slippery confection. They both smelled sweet but different from one another. She pulled a towel from the alcove (which proved to be round rather than rectangular) and laid it close to where she entered the tub.   "One last thing," she said to the ceiling. "Clarissa said that the doors on the rooms she opened for everyone can't lock. Is the same true for these she opened for me and Alex?"    "These two doors will lock. When you close the door, repeat the turning motion of your hand, twice in quick succession. Only you or I will be able to unlock the door. Shall I tell Alex as well?"   "Yes, please. Tell him I said he should keep it locked whenever he's alone, and please lock mine now."   "Done," said the voice of Jullie Mao.   Bobbie tipped her head back under the surface and allowed the quiet whoosh of the water to be the only sound in her world for a few minutes.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Amos was lost in thought, somewhere between the knowledge that Peaches would be coming home and the gently professional fondling of Dr. Acharya as he examined Amos’s meat and two veg, as the doctor had put it.   “Let me know if there’s any discomfort,” the doctor said.   “I’m all right, doc,” Amos answered absently.   The doctor rolled the sonogram wand up under his scrotum, to the area between his balls and butthole. He shifted forward in the chair a bit to give the doctor better access. At least it was just the wand and not a finger up the wazoo.   “Do you have any soreness here, in this area?” the doctor asked.   “Sometimes, yeah. After sex,” he replied. It was a soreness similar to blue-balls, but deeper within the pelvis.   “The Cowper’s gland.” The doctor froze the screen and pointed it out. “In a run-of-the-mill male like me, they’re only the size of a chickpea, but in your body, they are each the size of a small plumb. And this here-” He pointed to a larger dark area. “-is the bladder they both share. This is where the sire’s milk is held. The soreness is from the involuntary muscles that move the sire’s milk through the urethra and to your partner’s womb. When the sex act is protracted, it’s only natural that these muscles become sore and sensitive. Has there been any other discomfort?”   “Nothing to complain about, doc,” Amos replied. “Other than the fact that I still feel like I’m smuggling contraband in the front of my pants.”   “I think it’s safe to say that you are the current record-holder, Amos. Nearly twenty-two centimeters when completely flaccid. I can only imagine the proportions when erect.”   “About thirty-five, last time I measured.”   “Yes, well, as unsettling and emasculating as that may be, it sounds perfectly normal from what the literature has to say concerning the general prodigiousness of the typical male alpha.”   Dr. Acharya took Amos’s penis in both hands and used the tips of his thumbs to roll back the foreskin.   “Again, apart from the remarkable size, everything looks healthy. The glans are glossy and well lubricated. The foreskin is plentiful and covers the glans completely when flaccid.” He released Amos’s cock and snapped off his gloves. He gestured with his chin and eyebrows for Amos to put himself away.   “Thank you for humoring my curiosity, Amos.” He dropped the gloves in a waste receptacle. “I haven’t really had the chance to ask James about how he handles that,” the doctor gestured vaguely at Amos’s cock again.   “I don’t want to speak for him, doc, but I think he’s all right with it.” Amos knew that Jim was more than all right with it. There was little in the way of foreplay these past weeks. Jim sought him out and the look in his eyes left no doubt as to his need and desire. When they stripped down, Jim was shameless, guiding Amos home, taking him completely in a single, slow impalement. His eyes would roll back, his breath fluttered. If they faced one another, Jim wrapped himself around Amos. If they were back to front, Amos curled around him. Either way, they rode the tide of pleasure and connection well into sleep, waking still connected to one another, drowsy and lost to the glow that bridged between them.   “If that ever changes, it’s something to bring up, all right?” The doctor gave Amos his I’m serious face.   “Got it.” Amos got dressed, zipping up his coverall. “What do you think Bobbie meant about Clarissa getting a new upgrade?”   “I’m sure I don’t know, Amos.” The doctor finished putting away the sonogram equipment. “However, it is gratifying to know that I was right about the satellite being a hospital. Everyone just assumed that’s what I wanted it to be, so that’s what I said. It could have just as easily been a prison. In human terms, there’s very little architectural or structural difference between the two.”   He closed the closet (a very fastidious man) and turned back to Amos.   “How are you doing, Amos?” he asked with a tone of voice that said he wanted the deeper answer, not the passing in the corridor answer. “James seems to be the one getting all the attention, and I get the feeling that’s fine with you, but you’re as much a part of this equation as he is, so… how are you? You can answer me as a doctor, as a nosey old man, whatever makes you comfortable.”   Amos paused, unsure what to say.   “His time is very soon, Amos. Very soon. You’ve got to be feeling something. Any expectant father would.”    “I’m fine, doc. I ain’t as complicated as you all seem to enjoy being. I say what needs saying; I do what needs doing. The rest of you are always…” He pantomimed overly chatty mouths with his hands. “Maybe if you all shut up for a while you’d hear your own thoughts and have a better idea what to do with yourselves.”   “Eloquently put, Mr. Burton, if a bit cynical.”   “Whatever, doc. Stop trying to take me apart. What you see is what you get. You want to play shrink, trust me, Jim and Naomi will give you all the neuroses a person could ever ask for.”   “And their neuroses, these don’t concern you?” the doctor continued.   “That’s for them to figure out,” Amos replied.   “Perhaps before, yes, but you’re in the picture now, Amos. When the door closes at night, it’s you and Jim, not Jim and Naomi. And that’s permanent, so whatever they deal with, you deal with. Have you thought about that?” The doctor gave him a pointed stare.   Amos released an exasperated breath. “I make ships go, doc.”   “And I’m told you’re quite good at that. Hopefully, you can bring the same skills to bear on your relationships, and make them go too.” There was a finality to the statement, like that was the end of the conversation, but then, “What about Jim and Naomi? How do you think they will manage together with all these neuroses you suggest they have?”   “I think…” He paused. “I think it doesn’t matter what I think. They’ll deal with it like anyone else, in the way that works best for them.”   “Is that how you think the rest of us deal with our neuroses, in the way that works best for us? Perhaps you should pay closer attention to how people handle their troubles.” He passed a hand over his face, pulling down toward his chin. “And you don’t get a say in how that turns out?”   “It’s not about having a say, doc. Everybody wants their say. You’re all obsessed with having your say. Talk, talk, talk and nobody listening.”   “I’m listening, believe it or not. I want to hear what you have to say.”   What did he have to say? Why did this old man care about him? Was he afraid of Amos, afraid of his physical size? Was he afraid he would hurt James or Naomi?   “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” he said.   “I don’t think you do, Amos, but you’re right about people being complicated. And poor listeners. That much is certainly true, and that’s how we hurt one another, and ourselves more often than not.” He took Amos’s hand in a way that was ironically more intimate than when he’d held and examined his cock. “Failure to tell them how you feel is just as bad as them not listening. The end result is the same.”   He had a point.   “Let me ask you something, doc,” Amos countered. “You know that Jim’s got his teeth sunk into the idea of getting Filip off that planet? You know that once he bites down, he don’t let go. You know that, right?”   “That seems as good a description of the man as any, and you know him better than most, so I take your word as truth,” the doctor replied.   Amos continued. “See, that’s the part that I can’t get out of my head, how that’s going to go down. Filip don’t want to be rescued, according to Naomi."   “Yes, that’s the truth.” The doctor sighed.   “And Marco ain’t gonna’ let him go without a fight,” Amos added.   “Again, true.” His face pulled into a grimace.   “Then I can promise you that whatever concern you have about Jim and Naomi and me is taking a back seat to the one that concerns Filip. Once our people are back on board this ship and Jim knows his family is safe, that’s when the shit’s gonna’ hit the fan. I know you’re looking at me and I’m the one who looks like the big baddie, the one who’s in control, but I’m not the one who stole this ship or put this family together and made it work. That was Jim. To be honest, I couldn’t stand him at the beginning, when we were still on the Canterbury. He was the ship’s Don Juan, had his pick of whoever he wanted, and he didn’t give a shit what kinda’ mess he left behind when he was done with them. You know the kind of guy I’m talking about, the one people all flock to even when they know it’s a mistake, his bed’s never empty or cold. He’s got that pretty face and that pretty smile and that’s all it really takes with most people when you strip back all the bullshit. When he and Naomi got together, that was her business, and I ain’t one to tell anyone who they can or can’t take to bed, and I damned sure ain’t listening to anyone try to tell me either. But it wasn’t easy at first. I wasn’t going to let him hurt Naomi. But despite him being pretty enough to punch, Naomi ain’t a complete idiot either. She’s been burned. She knows the game. And cocky as Jim is, he wasn’t anything like her past mistakes. He was a different kind of mistake. And now he’s my mistake. And that’s okay, doc. We’re all mistakes in one way or another. So we pick our mistakes and make the best of them.”   Dr. Acharya held his eye for a moment. “What you see is what you get, huh? Add that to your list of mistakes, Amos. But thank you for your honesty.”   “I’m gonna’ get that kid, doc. I’m gonna’ get that kid because he belongs to Naomi. He deserves to know the person I know, not the lies his dad told him about her. And I’m gonna’ get him for Jim because that’s what he needs right now and there’s not much use getting in his way. It’s better to just make peace with it and try to keep your hand on the wheel if you can, so that’s what I’m going to do.”   By Amos’s standards, that was more talking than he normally did in an average month. The doctor’s roll in getting him to vocalize that much thought was obvious.   Fine, doc. So maybe I do have my own shit to deal with. Smart-ass.    “What’s it like down there planetside?” Amos asked, suddenly curious to fill in the setting.   “It’s purple and it smells,” replied the doctor.   “Smells? Like what? Bad smell? Good smell? Chicken soup smell?”   “Certainly not chicken soup. It’s not a bad smell, but what passes for plant life has some unique components that make for a sweet smell when it decomposes, like caramel on the point of burning. Any baker would recognize it instantly.” He thought for a moment. “But it’s not the smell that disturbs. You tune that out soon enough. There are trees shaped like femurs with photosynthetic filaments. Hairy bones are what they look like. And they can move. Only very slowly, but a whole stand of trees can pick up and change location in just a few days. Most of the plants are motile. I say plants, but the line between plant and animal is a distinction from Earth. It doesn’t hold much value down there on the planet. Our own plants do surprisingly well as long as the local stuff is kept back. It’ll trample seedlings, and even larger green plants will eventually succumb to the local variety if it’s allowed to encroach too much.”   “Have you tried eating the local plants?”   “After much testing, yes. It won’t kill you, but it won’t feed you either. It’s not nutritive to us, which isn’t surprising, really. We’re specialized eaters. You can’t just graze on grass or most trees on Earth and expect that to sustain you either. It won’t, and we evolved right alongside it. Some of the animals are edible, but not many. Though some of the settlers have developed a taste for little creatures that live in the tree roots.  I’m not a farmer, but more than a few came with us and they stayed to tend the crops. They said it wouldn’t matter who was in charge if the crops failed.”   “Sounds like a fair point,” Amos replied.   “As I said in a prior conversation, many things were at stake and pyrrhic victories are well outside of anyone’s price plan.” He strapped himself into a chair and crossed his arms in front of his chest and belly. “If you carry through with this foolishness, what will you do with the boy once you have him? Bring him here? Do you think he will thank you for that?”   “That’s for Jim and Naomi to figure out. If they want my help, they can have it, but we all got our strengths and our opportunities.” Something the doctor just said suddenly struck Amos. “You said pyrrhic victories were outside of anyone’s price plan, doc. Wouldn’t you call getting ships but no food and no land a pyrrhic victory? You guys came out here to settle.”   “We came out here for lots of reasons. Some were looking for something, others looking to get away from something.”   “Which one were you, doc?” Amos asked.   “Just looking for somewhere quiet. Somewhere where if I just walked off one day, no one would have to deal with the body.”   And that struck Amos as the kind of admission intended to invite further questions, ones he wasn’t interested in asking. This old man might be looking for how best to play his last cards, but Amos was far from folding. He didn’t have the finesse that was probably needed to get Filip to have a change of heart about Naomi, but he certainly had the muscle to hold the kid down while those with more dexterity did what needed doing. In truth, he was itching to get to the surface. He imagined himself armed to the teeth, Bobbie at his side in her power suit ready to fuck some shit up. Yeah, that would be fun. Maybe the doctor would find renewed interest in life if Amos sent a few patients his way. Maybe not. Regardless, he certainly hoped more than a few would volunteer themselves for the doc’s services.   “Don’t go checking out too soon, doc. I’m sure there’s a paper in here somewhere for you to write.” There was that too, the professional curiosity.   “More than one, to be sure. I’m not suicidal, Amos. I just had an image in my mind of how and where I want to die, and it’s not inside a metal can floating in the vacuum, or inside a Martian dome. It doesn’t have to be Earth’s sky, but it needs to be a real sky. Nature can take over after that.”   And that also sounded like a fair point.   “I realize you’re trying to be useful, doc, but I think Jim and me will be fine. We understand each other at this point and there’s the connection in our heads, the voices you mentioned. It’s more than just voices. It’s a way of communicating. We don’t talk too much, Jim and I, because we don’t have to. Not really. We just know.”   “I understand that, but Naomi isn’t part of that connection. She doesn’t know,” he said.   “We’ll figure it out,” Amos replied, his patience growing thin. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned it’s that no one else is going to think about our family the way we do; no one is going to come to the same answers we do. I don’t think you’re a bad guy, doc. I think you’ve got everyone’s best interests in mind, that don’t mean you’re right about those interests.”   “And when the boy wants to stay on the planet?”   “We all do things we don’t want to do, doc, and we don’t do things we want to. He’ll adjust.”   “And how will that make you different from Marco when you disrupt his wants and wishes.”   “Oh, see, doc, that’s where you and I walk different paths. I don’t pretend to be different from Marco. I don’t pretend to have an immortal soul that needs to be kept clean. I know I’m dirty. I know I’ve done some seriously fucked up shit. I ain’t a good guy, doc. I’m just a guy trying to protect what’s his. Being a good guy is pointless because good is all about your point of view. It moves with you.”   Amos had to admit that the doctor was a better shrink than probably even he himself thought. It was funny how just giving words to thoughts gave them shape and form, made them solid things you could turn around in your hands and inspect from different angles.   He loved Naomi. He loved Jim. He loved them equally but in different ways. Naomi was sister; Jim was husband and lover. It was the leg of their relationship that connected Jim to Naomi that was a messy tangled knot. But he knew Naomi would find a way to untangle it. That was her nature. It was how she navigated ships and diagnosed faulty systems. She could look at the knot from the inside, from its tightest loop, and trace the lines back out again, figure out which cables needed pulling, which ones needed rerouting, and which ones needed replacement.   “Yeah, doc, don’t worry about us. We’ve been punched around, but we know how to punch back.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The wamakuting’s tail was just visible between two tree-toes. Wamakuting preferred the toes and roots of older bone-trees as hiding places because they didn’t move away so quickly. These trees were very old and hardly moved. Filip pinched the tip of its tail and it let out its namesake squeal.   It was a fat one, worth caching to show the others. Wamakuting were inoffensive until you tried to pull one out from its hiding place. Once the fat end was free from the roots, you had to be careful. They delivered a nasty bite and their three-sided jaws made messy, shredded wounds that were a nightmare to stitch, so he held down the business end of the burgundy creature with a bone-stick.   He’d just managed to get it out from between the roots when the tree took notice. Filaments wafted more closely than the breeze could explain. They weren’t dangerous, but they exuded a sticky film that was hard to wash off and impossible to get out of hair. He moved out of their reach, holding the animal down with the stick. It squealed again. It was too close to metamorphosis to eat. The changes in its body would already be underway, rendering it unpalatable. Not that much of anything on this planet was genuinely palatable, and none of it looked remotely appealing, but there was a certain symbolic cachet to be had from the attempt.   His father would disagree that there was any bravado in caching a large wamakuting, but cachet with those closer to his own age had its own value. His father wouldn’t be around forever and it was time that he started his own myth-making. Simply being present for his father’s didn’t count and the strike on the Callisto shipyards and the attack on Earth was forever tainted by the presence, redirection, and misdirection of his mother Naomi. And as much as those events had forever altered human history, only a few had been present for Callisto, and the attack on Earth was hard to keep in perspective. It happened somewhere else, to people whose existence was only an academic concept - faceless, nameless Inners somewhere that way toward the sun. Hard as it was to believe, the memory of that attack was already fading in the minds of the Pella’s crew. It was yesterday’s news, and the less said about it among their new friends here on the planet, the better for all. Even his father, who would have milked that accomplishment until the end of time, knew to leave it alone for now. No one on the Pella was a farmer; no one had a clue what to do with a seed in the soil, and it was only now that most of them even understood just how delicate and fragile a seedling could be, how precarious those first days and weeks were, that a single misstep would destroy tiny green leaves poking up from the ground, leaves that would become plants that would become food, the only food that a human could eat here in the ass-end of the galaxy.   You could kill the entire colony by just running through the fields without concern for where you stepped. So Marco created a new myth, one about shepherds of the land, of Belters who were bending a hostile alien planet to their will.   Perhaps it wasn’t the kind of thing his father would approve of, or give any credence, but catching the fat wamakuting and getting it to wriggle into the cage he’d made out of more dried bone-sticks lashed together with the ubiquitous sticky filaments from the bone-trees (his hands would be stained for weeks) was his small addition to that same myth, the story of bending this place to their will.   The thing snapped and contracted and tried to flip around to sink its triple jaw into his hand, but it calmed down as soon as he had it in the cage. They were docile if you put them in the kind of cage Filip had constructed. Anything else, anything not from this place, and they would struggle and contort until they died.   The filaments of the tree were wafting his way again, so he took his prize away from their reach and headed back to what passed for a town. Its construction still unnerved Filip to no end. It was bad enough to live under the open sky, but the dwellings the colonists had built were primitive things made of dried mud blocks they called adobe, whatever that meant. All it meant to Filip was that when it rained (rained!) the blocks didn’t stay dry for long. And they smelled. Everything smelled like burned sugar. Trees looked like haphazardly arranged piles of bones. Fat wamakuting crawled in their roots. Bigger things chased and ate the wamakuting, and even bigger things chased the wamakuting-eaters. His father hadn’t forbidden him from exploring as far he wanted to, but there wasn’t much drive to go too deep into the forests. The animals there ignored you mostly, but they were ugly, lumbering things. They all had some version of a pair of thin retractable arms they used to inspect their surroundings. They would fixate on human footsteps or places where you touched the trees and smaller plants but apparently humans and their artifacts were as disturbing to the creatures as the creatures were to the people. After a thorough inspection, they would wander off and avoid the areas where people had been. So far, only the wamakuting lacked the arms or antennae or whatever they were. When they metamorphosed into climbers, they had them.   A pair of vedimang guarded a dead bone-tree. There would be a slimy mass of eggs within the hollow bole. They preened their sensor arms until he approached close enough to make them rear up, backs to the dead tree, pale undersides exposed, first three pairs of sharply pointed legs drawn back ready to snap forward with blinding speed at any perceived threat. He gave them a respectfully wide berth. They would not pursue, but neither would they suffer his proximity. Their tubular bodies could stretch much further than first glance would lead one to believe.  The hollow he’d climbed down was relatively free of undergrowth but the sticky mud sucked at his boots. He’d fastened them very tightly. His toes had gone from uncomfortable to painful to numb. Hunting creatures that bit could be sold as brave to his friends, but breaking a foot, or worse, for no better reason than stupidity just made him a nakangepensa.  And likely dead.  Trekking up diagonally out from the hollow, Filip was slow and methodical in his steps. The ground grew marginally less muddy and firmer. It stopped sucking at his boots, instead tending to slough off under his feet. A moment of pure panic grabbed him by the ballsack and rectum when a large section gave way beneath his right foot. He was saved by the fact that he was climbing up the right-hand slope, so rather than tipping, he leaned into the slope, sliding a short distance.  Sabaka! Keting pashang to ando du, Filip?  The ground stopped shifting and he caught his breath, a bracing flush of adrenaline prickling the skin of his upper back.  That part would have to be edited out or rewritten when he told the story later.   The wamakuting was rolled up into a ball within the cage but looked unharmed by the fall. A bruised ego, jarred elbow, and a layer of mud on his right side were the only price exacted by the fall. Small price, all things considered.   Brushing off the worst of the mud (what a stink!) he continued up the slope. Cresting it, the mud-brick village crouched ugly and brown as a mouthful of rotting teeth in the distance. He hated it. It was unclean and the smell never disappeared. It infiltrated his dreams, creating images of a waste reclamation system that had broken down, poisoning the ship his dream-self inhabited.   His father forbade them to stay in the Pella. Its broken hulk leaned into another hill on the south side of the town, the drive cone pointing in a direction decidedly no longer opposite the nose of the ship.  Crippled, but not dead. Her rail gun was useless, but she could still fire torpedoes and three of her four gun turrets were functional. He longed for her clean surfaces, her scrubbable hull, her enclosed spaces of safety and security, and as much as he hated to admit it, her crisply militant Martian lines, her dedication to efficiency. A newer ship than the Rocinante, better, faster, deadlier. And she would never fly again. Ever.   Here under the lavender sky, it took only a tiny change of perception to shift the void overhead, to feel that it was underneath you and that he would fall headlong into the darkness, or worse, the great stain of color that rose into the sky earlier and earlier as the endless days marched by. It was just rising now in the east, blending with the clouds and riot of colors of the late afternoon sunset.   It was - all of it - indecent, and most offensive of all was the way his body had responded after they had crashed. The gravity should have been cruel, should have crippled him, just a sad pile of snapped bones in a scrawny skin bag. And it had been that way at first, as was natural, but it had taken just weeks before he could walk with little discomfort. The ówala settlers who had built that repulsive excuse of a “village” had said it would be so, but who could believe such a thing? They had no explanation, and the Pella’s crew had written them off as liars, holding back information. His father had killed seven of them trying to pry loose information they did not have.   But all of that was an indulgence that led back to his mother, the worm. His father would say it was self-pity, weakness, to feel anything for these people. He would say that the final moment when Naomi had traded him for strangers, for ships, was the proof, the undeniable proof of how defective she was, what a sad waste it was for a Belter of Naomi’s stature to fall so far down the gravity well of Jim Holden’s pitiful Inner cock. After all, what could a sad, stumpy, misshapen, paxoníseki possibly have in his pants? She’d traded him, and with a quickness, once Martha had spoken a few words of poison into her ear. She’d let him go after Marco had handed over the Belter ships and let the women and the children leave. She’d made her choice, again, and sided with Inners. Well, mostly Inners. But the Belters among them were hardly Belters. Traitorous bootlickers, the lot of them. Good riddance.   On the outskirts of the settlement, he wove his way through the ring of wickedly thorned plants the settlers had cultivated in a circular run around the entire village. There were three places where a winding path gave access; everywhere else the thorns measuring five to six centimeters created an impenetrable barrier. He nodded a greeting at the two guards on the inner side of the path. They only glanced at him, and then at one another. He knew what they were thinking.   Marco’s puppy, let Marco deal with him.   It was the smart thing to think, and it infuriated Filip. He wanted a confrontation, questions, anything that meant they took him seriously. What are you doing out there? No one is allowed. What do you have there in the cage? But none of that came, or would ever come. They just ignored him. He wasn’t intimidating to them, but his father was, and so they treated him like a child that could not be touched. He could slap one of them and they would just gently push him back. The knowledge didn’t make him feel powerful; it made him feel impotent.   Shoulders hunched and head down, he made for the structure that Marco had commandeered shortly after arriving. It was in the middle of the settlement and was the largest of the buildings. It had been Martha’s. She’d had used it for meetings with the settlers, but it had also been her home. That hadn’t been lost on Marco, the way she’d flexed an apparent group need to her personal benefit. He’d taken it without a word to or from any of the remaining settlers and certainly not from the Pella’s crew.   His father was nowhere to be seen inside, though every dark corner of the empty room was heavy with his presence. Every shadow was his watchful eye, his quick temper, and even quicker dismissal.   The wamakuting was placed on a small table next to his bed. The table was rickety, as was the bed, but his father had let him construct a folding blind that gave the space some privacy. In a basket weaved from a kind of local reed was his only change of clothing. Filip took the opportunity to change so that his father wouldn’t see the evidence of his fall, the mud caked to his pants. The wamakuting trembled and warbled inside the cage.   The clothing in the basket was hardly fresh, but it was better than what he was stripping off.   His legs had thickened. They would never be Earther legs or even Martian legs, but they were no longer the proper legs of a Belter. The changes in his arms and chest were less noticeable, but the legs… They would never be the same again. He slicked the pants on quickly and yanked his other shirt over his head. Jamming his feet back into the only boots he owned, he grabbed the cage with the wamakuting and headed back out.   “Kepelésh Marco?” he asked one of the few women settlers when she passed him.   She remained silent and only pointed in the direction of the Pella on the far side of the village.   Of course; his obsession.   Filip cut through the spaces between buildings, ignoring whatever social norms were expected of him, to recognize private spaces or places. If they were going to treat him like a child, then perhaps that’s what he would give them. Out the other side of the village enclosure, Cyn caught his eye. It was impossible to miss the breadth of the old Belter and the man had eagle eyes. He was chatting with Karal, pretended not to pay Filip any mind, but he felt the man’s eyes on his back as he made his way out the far exit and toward the Pella.   Filip counted to ten and before he’d made it to seven, Cyn was at his side.   “Oye, kepelésh to ando go?” he asked.   “Da Pella,” he answered curtly.   “You gonna’ give Marco that wamakuting?” he asked. “Marco na lik wamakuting. Im na bekedabúsh.”   “To wanya ke?” Filip untied the cage from his belt and held it up for Cyn’s inspection.   Cyn waved him off. “No. I don’t eat these maggots. You out catching these?”   Filip nodded a silent reply.   “Marco went to the Pella about an hour ago. I go with you, Filipito.”   At least he hadn’t called him bosslet. He hated the diminutive used in reference to himself, but worst of all when it was sourced from his father. Why couldn’t they see him for himself? Why couldn’t they acknowledge that he was next in line?   Cyn kept quiet the rest of the way to the ship. Maybe he’d read Filip’s souring mood. Maybe he just didn’t have anything else to say. Maybe he was just babysitting Filip. The last was the most probable and most infuriating.   The Pella’s hulk came into view after they cleared a large hill. Her nose was pointed up the hill, her back was even with the ground. They’d dug one of the gun turrets out, the one that was pressed against the soft earth of the hill and removed it. Cyn and Aaman were still trying to create a platform for it that would allow it to fire away from the ship. It wasn’t going very well. The turrets were designed to take their ammunition feed from within the ship. Taking the turret away from the ship was like taking a hand away from an arm without any nerves or muscles to keep it connected. It was still a hand, but in name only. The three other turrets were free and still functional as was her torpedo bay, helped by the skyward tip of the nose.   But she was made to land on her tail, her interior arranged like a building with floors, top to bottom. On her side, and broken, she was cockeyed inside and dangerous to get around. Floors were walls and walls were floors. Her personnel hatch was open. Cyn banged on her hull and Marco’s head popped out from the open bay door.   “Bosmang,” said Cyn. “Me got Filipito to see you.”   Marco’s head popped out from the bay door. “Filip, come here. Something you need to see.”   Filip handed Cyn the cage with the wamakuting and climbed the makeshift ladder that had been constructed against the ship’s hull. He paid close attention to his footing. The last thing he needed was to have his father and the remaining crew see him fall like a dope. He put on his determined face - the one he hoped looked more committed than scared - and made it up to the hatch where his father gripped the interior handholds. There was another, smaller ladder inside the bay door that was attached to the ladder that would have led to the bridge if the ship were upright.   “Come on,” his father said grimly.   They made their way through the interior of the ship. When they reached the bridge, Marco passed him a rope that he used to swing into one of the seats that would have been to the left of the bridge but were now in a direction that was more up than left. He strapped in and relaxed into the seat.   He passed the rope to his father who used it to take the seat next to him. Marco tapped the screen on and brought up the ship’s sensor and targeting logs. There was a record of an attempted lock on what appeared to be another Martian ship.   He squinted and then his head drew back when he realized the IFF code on the screen.   “Da Rocinante,” Filip whispered in disbelief.   “Ya,” his father said. “The enemy is here.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Cold is not a thing unto itself. It’s the absence of a thing - heat. You don’t make cold; you move heat away.   Death is a lot like that. You don’t make death; you take life away.   The puncture to the hull wasn’t an explosion or a violent ripping. It was a sudden hitch of the shuttle’s body and an instant popping of the ears. Mika was sure they would explode and the roar in his ears was first all-consuming, and then started to fade.   Sound doesn’t carry in a vacuum and Mika imagined his life rushing out the two whistling holes the bulkheads had suddenly acquired.   Drummer hit the control screen and it went red. Mika didn’t know what that meant. All he knew was that it felt like his brains were trying to squeeze out from his ears. Drummer’s face was purple with panic. She pushed off of the bulkhead at her feet and slammed into the opposite side of the shuttle at a diagonal. She punched open a drop-down box and pulled out two grey disks. They each had a film on one side that she peeled away to reveal a thin layer of gel. She smacked one down on the hole that had appeared in the shuttle’s floor and the other where the shot had exited the wall.   Motors whined as the shuttle re-pressurized.   “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Drummer spat once there was enough air to spit.   “Na gut, ya?” Mika huffed. He wanted her to reassure him, but he knew the situation was bad. They had no idea what kind of damage the punctures represented to the exterior and they had lost a good deal of atmosphere in a ship that didn’t hold much to begin with.   “Na gut,” she replied. “We have to land. On the satellite or on the planet. We have to get down.”   On the planet? On the surface with nothing but pitiless gravity underneath and horrifying open sky overhead?   His terror must have been written on his face. Drummer pulled her face close to his and said, “I know, I know. No choice, Mika. No one is dying today, but we have to land.”   She pulled herself back into her seat and fingers flew over the control panel.   “Keredzhang da Rocinante…”   “Not the Rocinante. No line of sight. That was from the surface.” She palmed the comms button. “Rocinante, mayday, mayday.”   Amos’s voice answered over the comms. “Drummer, you there?”   “Yeah, Amos. We’re here. Took a shot through two bulkheads. The atmosphere is critical.”   “Are you still compromised?”   “Temporary repairs are in place.”   “You got eyes on your exterior?”   “Not where I need them, no.”   “Then you can’t take that thing down to the planet. You have no idea what kind of exterior damage you have and you may burn up on entry. You need to make it to us. What’s your current P.S.I?”   “Less than seven,” she gasped.   “Not good,” Amos said through the speaker, repeating what Drummer had said earlier. “You’re gonna’ have to burn’er hard to make it. Real hard. You got juice on that thing?”   “Yeah.”   “Okay, I’m sending you a Naomi Nagata special.”   “Naomi?”   “Drinks are on me once you’re here, Drummer. I’ll explain everything. For now, strap in and get ready for a rough ride. Naomi will get you here but she’s not in charge of the laws of physics. It ain’t gonna' be fun.”   “Copy that,” said Drummer. She tapped more screens open on the display and the information the Rocinante was sending populated into the shuttle’s navigation.   “You heard him. Strap into that chair tight,” she said to him. Mika strapped in and freed the gimbals so the chair would rotate into the direction of thrust. Something happened that left Mika bewildered and brought the scene into focus. She took his hand and held it fast. She glanced at him from the corner of her eye and in that brief moment, he saw the young girl she had once been. She would be pretty if only she would let go of the severe composure. And she was scared.   “We in it together, Drummer. You and me,” he said to reassure himself.   The hint of a smile softened her eyes and she said into the speaker, “She’s yours, Amos.”   It was a woman’s voice who answered back. “Brace for burn in five, four, three, two…”   Maybe it was God, maybe just the Epstein drive, but something stepped on his chest with the weight of an entire space station. The juice kicked in with sickening sharpness, lighting him up from the inside with cold fire. The strain on his chest and the fire in his veins made him want to scream into the void. Maybe he did or maybe it was Drummer. It wasn’t possible to differentiate the roar of the motor from his own voice. His bones vibrated with the ship until he felt the marrow inside.   Drummer never let go of his hand.   The ship pitched through maneuvers that were a hate crime.   Mika lolled into and out of consciousness. Drummer’s hand was still in his, but limp. She must have passed out as well. Just when he thought it was over, the ship flipped a full one hundred eighty degrees and burned hard again to cancel their thrust. Acid and bile filled the back of his throat but he managed not to vomit.   They were on the float again.   “Drummer, kowlting gut, ke?” the woman’s voice in the speaker asked.   “No more Nagata specials, okay?” was Drummer’s weak answer.   The woman in the speaker said, “That shuttle can’t dock with the Rocinante. Too big and her hatches are wrong. But you can bring her into the satellite. Our people are running the show there.”   “You been here ten minutes and already staged a coup?” Drummer wiped the sweat from her face.   There was silence for a moment before the woman spoke again. “Actually, yes, we did. For right now it’s to your benefit, so take advantage. I’ve sent the coordinates for the docking bay on the satellite.”   At least it wasn’t the planet. The satellite promised a solid enclosure, walls all around, a seal against the vacuum and Mika was thankful.   “Stay in the chair,” Drummer warned.   For reasons that do not answer to logic, he started to unbuckle his safety harness.   “No!” Drummer yelled. “Stay where you are. I have to light the motor again. We are still in danger.”   She stared him in the eye until he acknowledged, then she returned to the control panel. “Tell your friends we’re coming, Naomi.”   She flipped the comms off.   “Im Naomi Nagata ke?” Mika asked.   “Mm-hm,” she answered, bringing up the new flight plan.   “You roll with big people, Drummer.”   She glanced over at him before tapping the screen. “So do you.”     “Mika,” Bobbie Draper greeted him in full power armor regalia and a huge grin. She was magnificent, beautiful, a goddess of war. Next to her was Alex, looking diminutive and perplexed.   “Bobbie, Alex,” he greeted them. He gave Alex a clumsy hug, which the older man returned with patient reluctance. Bobbie’s bright enthusiasm with him was the hallmark of a woman who was at ease because she wasn’t remotely the object of your desire.   “So, what?” Drummer said enigmatically to the two of them. “You come to my house and can’t say hello?”   “We had a situation that was going to require too much explanation,” said Alex.   “Yes, I know about your situation,” Drummer replied sparing a glance in Mika’s direction, which Alex noticed. It took him all of three seconds to connect the dots.   Alex opened his mouth to speak and found Drummer’s index finger pinning him into silence. “Don’t blame him because you’re a sloppy drunk. How was he to believe what you said anyway?”   Alex sighed and asked, “Does anyone else know?”   “All of Medina Station. But no one believes it,” she waved off. “Just a tall tale from one of the young sex workers who fell in lust with a pomang koyo. Nothing more.”   The temperature setting on Mika’s cheeks turned to maximum. Even through his swarthy complexion, it was clear that Alex was in a similar state of embarrassment.   “Why is he here, Drummer?” asked Bobbie.   She shrugged. She’d never given him a solid answer. Maybe she just didn’t want to be alone?   “A friendly face,” she said cryptically.   “You okay, kid?” Alex asked. He tipped his chin in Drummer’s direction and said, “She put a gun to your head?”   He glanced at Drummer and she made a permissive gesture. He was free to say what he wanted.   “No, Alex. No gun.” He spoke slowly so that he could get his words in order and not stumble. He wanted to impress Alex. “Things are bad on Medina. No work, no money, no food. So hungry.” He nodded at Drummer. “I ask for help. Drummer say she gonya go vedi… going to find the Rocinante and she say I can come, get off Medina together.” Mika shrugged. “Not happy to see me?”   Alex crossed over to him, taking him by the arm.   “Come on,” Alex said.   “Where are you taking him?” Bobbie asked.   “To talk to him without her in the room.” Alex nodded his head at Drummer.   Mika was propelled by Alex through the docking bay. It was only as he passed the shuttle’s flank that the peril they’d been in was revealed. There was a huge, rough wing of exterior hull metal protruding from the side of the shuttle, peeled back from where the shot had exited. Had they tried to enter the atmosphere of the planet, that sheet of metal would have caught the air and they would have been ripped to shreds.   “Don’t look at it,” Alex said when Mika gasped. “Just walk.”   The gravity on the satellite was nearly identical to the spin-gravity of Medina Station’s rotating drum, minus the Coriolis effect.   “Alex, the gravity…”   “Yeah, kid, gravity is weird here. We all noticed. Just keep walking.”   “Are you angry?”   They walked down several hallways where the walls, ceiling, and floors all curved into one another. There were no straight lines to be seen, but there were signs over some places and they were in letters he could read. How could that be?   Alex palmed open a door in the hallway and they entered a bizarre space. It was too large to be a personal space and too small to be a public space.   “Where is this?” Mika asked.   “These are my digs, kid. Make yourself comfortable.”   “All this? Yours?”   “For now, yeah.” His attention went vague and he spoke to another person in the room, though there was no one else. “Julie, just a wild request, but what are the chances of some clean clothes for someone of this fellah’s proportions?”   “Stand with your legs at shoulder width and lift your arms parallel to the floor,” said a woman’s voice. It was a pretty voice, a young voice, and Mika blushed but did as he was bid. A pencil-thin beam of white light appeared on his body, apparently from the crown of his head to the floor. It did a full circle around his torso.   “In the same alcove as the towels,” came the pretty voice again.   “Why don’t you take a bath,” Alex offered. “You kinda’ smell.”   Everyone smelled on a space station, so in truth no one smelled, all things being relative. It was strange for anyone to point out such a thing. A knot of embarrassment grabbed him by the diaphragm.   Alex picked up on the embarrassment. “Come on, in here,” he said. “It’s real nice. More hot water than you’ve probably ever seen in your life. You can use as much as you like.”   Mika placed his hand in the water. He’d never seen a tub like this before. It was perversely lavish and decadent. He eyed Alex with sudden suspicion. No, Alex had been clear before and there had been every opportunity, so this wasn’t that. He pulled his shirt over his head in a single pull. Pants hit the floor and Mika slipped into the water.   It was the most visceral, delicious pleasure he’d ever experienced. The water effervesced and tingled. It was like taking drugs, but his head was clear. Alex sat against the far wall, folding his legs, scrubbing his scalp to dig out the tension.   “Who is Julie?” Mika asked, standing in the water to soap places that hadn’t been soaped for longer than he cared to admit.   “Julie is…” Alex started then paused. “Your English is a lot better than the last time we met,” he observed.   “Drummer teach me… is teaching me. Dumb way to talk. Nothing means what it sounds like it means,” he responded before ducking under the flow of the water to rinse away the soap. It was like flying. The tub was big enough to let him push off with his toes before the water brought him back to the far end. Breaking the surface he sluiced water from his face and hair.   “Who is Julie?” he asked again, water sputtering from his lips.   “Julie is the name of the being that runs this place,” Alex answered.   “Being?”   “Clarissa Mao gave me that name when we met,” said the woman’s voice. “It was her sister’s name. Your name is Mika?”   He glanced up at the ceiling. “Ya,” he replied. Clarissa Mao? Could she mean that Clarissa Mao?   “Mika, I am the last doctor here in this hospital.”   “I’m not sick,” he said.   “No, you are not. Though you have not eaten well for most of your life. I can help with some of that.”   “I don’t have money,” Mika said.   “The infrastructures that would have cared about money no longer exist.”   Mika wasn’t sure what to make of that, but it sounded like money wasn’t a concern. But something was. Alex was wound too tightly, much more so than when they’d met on the station. His swagger was gone. He looked smaller.   “Why you sad?” Mika asked.   “I’m not sad,” Alex responded.   “Something wrong with you. You mad at me?”   “How could I be mad at you? You just hopped out of a shuttle, and while I certainly expected to see Camina’s face come out of there, I did not expect to see yours. I just want to know what your deal is, why you’re here?”   “Me not stalking you, Alex. Needed somewhere to go. Here is somewhere. Drummer chasing you, not me.” Most of that was a lie, but he didn’t know how to tell it truthfully because a lot of it wasn’t a lie, but the true part didn’t matter and it seemed maybe the lie did. “But you broke my heart little bit.”   Alex sighed. “You broke your own heart, kid. I told you that you and me ain’t never gonna’ happen. I just ain’t wired that way.”   “You could have take me from Medina. No have to fuck, but… but save me from that place.”   “You would have just ended up here.”   “Me here anyway! But if you took me, I have friends and a crew and a ship. Now I have Drummer and to vedi ere mi lik dzheman.”   “Not a dzhemang.” Alex scrubbed his face. “Mika, I keep getting farther and farther away from home. Not just Mars, but my life, my wife and kid. Every time we get past some obstacle, some crazy thing happening to us, I think maybe, just maybe, this is the point where I get to turn around and head back in, head back home. But there’s no home for me back there, and the universe is taking great pains to remind me. It just keeps pushing me farther and farther out into the night, into the void. I’m not mad at you, Mika. I’m just mad because what I want is small and simple and the answer is still no. And I see you…” His eyes were bright with tears that would not fall. “And I think, am I like Holden? Do I just have to pass by something or someone to drag it along with me, pulling it out into the nothing? Is that what I am now? Are you here because you chased me, or because I pulled you?”   Mika slipped slowly down into the water until just his eyes were above the surface. He wanted to hug Alex. He wanted to be taken by him here in this insane washroom. And he knew that if somehow that came true, if it actually happened, it would destroy Alex.   He cleared his face from the water and said, “Apogee.”   “What?” Alex asked in exasperation.   “Maybe you are in orbit and just waiting for apogee,” he said.   Alex’s face screwed up into the expression people make just before they tell you to shut the fuck up or get the fuck out.   “You know orbits, ya?” Mika asked tentatively.   “Of course I know orbits. I’m a fucking pilot.”   “Every orbit elliptical. Not such thing as true circle. You know this. Apogee is farthest point. Maybe you are at farthest point and now you start to come back around. Maybe you no drag me and I not chase you wherever you go. Maybe I come to help you home.”   “Why would you want to help me?” Alex sighed, his head leaning back against the wall.   “Why not? Rocinante most famous kapawu ever.” He ticked off on his fingers, “Jim Holden, Alex Kamal, Bobbie Draper, Amos Burton. You are legends.” He felt suddenly ridiculous, naked in the tub of water. “What you think, Julie?” he asked of the bodiless voice in the ceiling in a moment of randomness.   “I am still learning about your species,” came the voice. “Your biology is straight forward and simple, though there are some physiological differences between individuals that lead me to believe that you have not solved many of the issues inherent in micro-gravity. Your psychology is another matter.”   “Use smaller words,” he tossed at the ceiling. He leveraged himself out of the tub, water sheeting everywhere, then back into the tub via grooves in the floor that he’d only now noticed. “Where you put clothes?”   A light came on in a depression in the wall though there was no light source he could make out. There were several folded sheets that felt like towels, but on top of these, there was a shirt and pants. They were simple, very simple. They did not appear to have been sewn because there were no seams or joins. Each piece appeared to have been tightly woven into the end shape as a single piece of cloth. They were silky smooth and cool and had a certain elasticity to them.   The voice continued, “You are unpredictable and you don’t work well together. And you are messy. A hospital is a clean, orderly place. You are not clean or orderly, but you are life and life must be protected.”   Well, that sounded reassuringly crass and cynical, if a bit imposing and presumptuous. He took one of the towels and dried himself. The pants and shirt slipped on fluidly and the elasticity of the pants kept them in place without a tie or belt of any kind.   “Is that the answer you were expecting,” Alex asked.   “Don’t matter. It’s true. Work bad together, messy, never know what people ando fo du. Milowda ando vedi fo kopeng. Kopeng hard to find. Ówala, sabakawala, easy to find.”   “That’s the damned truth, kid,” Alex said in resignation.   “Me help you on Medina. Me come with Drummer to find you now, to help now. You got so many kopeng, you can tell me to fuck off? Drummer don’t know why she here. She chasing Holden because she say omega people her people, but Belters her people too and she here, not there." He shrugged because it still didn't make sense to him. "I know why me here, to help my kopeng, my friend, but you only got ówala questions for Mika.”   They were silent for a while. Alex said, “Two peas in a pod, you and me, huh?”   “Keting peas?” he asked.   “Just means we got more in common than either of us wants to admit.” He pushed himself up the wall to a standing position.   Mika ran his hands down the silky fabric of his new clothing. “You try these?” he asked Alex.   “Nope. I think you are the very first human being to wear clothing made by an alien space station hospital…thing.”   “They feel good,” Mika replied.   “They look good,” Alex said with a sad smile. “I don’t have any idea how long we’re gonna’ be here after Clarissa makes her appearance, but I’m gonna’ trust you to be honorable. You can stay here with me if you want.”   Julie replied, “I can open quarters for him, Alex.”   “You hear that? You can have your own room or you can bunk with me. Choice is yours, kid. For my part, I could use the company.”   “Okay, me stay with you, but now we go find Drummer. We just leave her on the dock with Bobbie. Na gut.”

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Clarissa Mao
     A hand is a way to know the world. So is an eye and a tongue, an ear and a nose. And like any being born to these gifts, how they function, how they communicate with the mind, had never been a thing Clarissa Mao had had to handle or guide or control.   If you touch, you feel.   If you look, you see.   If you lick, you taste.   If you listen, you hear.   But Clarissa Mao had not been born to the gifts currently at her disposal.   These eyes were not her eyes and they had a three hundred and forty-degree field of view, with just a small blind spot behind her. Despite the assurances of Diagnostician Julie that the wrap-around field of vision was a boon, her mind just would not make sense of the image. Left and right were compressed into left-of-forward and right-of-forward, and that which was behind her was at the extreme edges of her vision. It was adjusted and tuned to something closer to what she remembered, but the edges were rounded and faded to white.   “Is there something in between?” she’d asked.   “You can adjust it yourself. Just imagine widening or squinting your eyes,” Julie had answered.   Nothing happened.   “Don’t think about it, just do it,” Julie urged.   “It’s blurry.”   “Increase your point of focus.”   “What?”   “Your original eyes have a six-degree point of focus. Everything else is degrees of peripheral vision that are out of focus. You don’t see this because your original eyes automatically move to whatever captures your attention, bringing it into focus. Your new eyes do not move but have an even focus across their entire field. Imagine shifting the focus of your eyes. Let them go blurry and then back again.”   For some reason, this took much longer than learning to widen or shrink her field of view.   These eyes could see well above and below the normal range of human color vision. Some of it was interesting, but most of it was just confusing, her mind interpreting the light as the pulsing, shimmering chevrons and waves of an ocular migraine, with the same irreconcilable ability to both see through the distortion and also be blinded by it. More adjustments were made to color and contrast.   During this time she mostly floated, finding a floor solidly under her feet only when Julie tasked her to compare what her vision reported and what her body did, bringing them closer and closer into sync.   Hearing was simpler, though, like her new vision, the range was much wider. But at least it answered directionally to the same dynamic she had always known.   Her arms, hands, and fingers lacked anything as formal as a point of articulation, a joint in the sense of bone meeting bone. They were more like the tentacles of the hospital gurney squid that had initially come to collect her.   Touch was an amplified sensation. The smoothest of surfaces felt granular in a strangely orderly manner.   “You are feeling the molecular grain of the material,” Julie had said.   “Why would I need that?” she’d replied.   “It’s simple enough, so why not?” she’d answered.   Her legs were magnificent. They weren’t pretty or sexy or shapely, but they were powerful. She continually had to resist the urge to hop like a kangaroo. She had no tail, with only her toes and balls of her feet to the floor. Her metatarsals were long - so long - her heels up and canted backward. They had an amazing spring to them.   “They consume a great deal of energy,” Julie advised. “Normal activity, walking, won’t deplete energy to a degree you will notice. But running for extended periods, or lifting heavy loads will drain power.”   “Will I feel it?” she asked.   “You will feel slow, then you must rest and allow the material of your new body to re-energize.”   “The material of my body? Are there no motors?”   “Of course there are, in the sense that muscles are motors and nerve cells are motors. Nothing so primitive as gears and pulleys.”   “What does it run on? It has no mouth. Do I eat?” She passed a hand over her mouthless, noseless face.   “You call it Planck energy. You do not eat.”   “Planck energy doesn’t sound very appetizing.”   “A replacement body that eats is a body that consumes other life. When at rest, the new body will pull Planck energy from the surrounding location. If you exhaust the body, reenergizing will take some time.”   “It breathes,” Clarrisa observed when she realized she felt her chest expand and contract.   “It imitates the sensation. You would go mad without it. Notice that you also have a heartbeat.”   She did. Steady, metronomic, perfect.   “Do I sleep?”   “Yes. You’ve been sleeping occasionally here.”   “I didn’t realize.” It all felt like one continuous span of time. She was, in fact, unsure how much time had elapsed.   “You’re not currently saving the memory of sleep. You’re also not dreaming. That will have to be changed before you return. You need both. For now, the functions are off because I fear you will have nightmares concerning your new body.”   “Are you kidding? I love this thing.”   “It’s not a thing. It’s you and you are it. You still feel it as though it were something you are wearing. It’s not. It’s something you are being, and which you will be forever.”   “I know,” she lied.   “No, you don’t know. You think, but you don’t know. When you stop wearing it and start being it, then you’ll know.”   “You were never this much of a bummer before. Crazy, occasionally a bitch, but never a bummer.” No, that was one thing of which she could never accuse Julie. Julie was the one with a plan forever in the back of her mind to escape into the void. She was the one who needed to hurtle through the ether at electron-ripping speeds. She was the one who mixed with OPA, who reveled in their disreputableness. In a different life, she would have been a pirate or a mercenary, or her own version of Robin Hood.   There was a pause, and then, in the original voice of the Diagnostician, “I am not your sister. We both know I am using her voice because it makes you more comfortable.”   “You’re still a bummer.”   In Julie’s voice again, “It reminds me of the Razorback.”   “I thought you weren’t really my sister,” she snarked.   The diagnostician ignored the goad. “The memories are yours, of course, but I see it, I remember it through your memories. The two are much alike. Stronger, faster, simpler in most ways, more advanced in others.”   “Does this thing have any weapons?”   “This is a hospital, not a military installation. I am a diagnostician, not a weapons manufacturer.” Her voice did a perfect imitation of a reproving tone. “But if you were threatened or attacked, this body is proof against anything your original body could have possibly withstood.”   “Unbreakable. Excellent.”   “No, not unbreakable. Your original body was remarkably unprotected and vulnerable. Life is always tender and soft, but there are degrees to that and your species falls to the softer side. No carapace. Your extremities end in blunt digits with nails that are more a liability than a tool. Small teeth. Nothing in the way of offensive armament and no capacity to regenerate lost tissue. Your new hands can crush things your old hands would not have been able to lift, and if you think those legs were designed for running, imagine what a well-placed kick could do. Are those weapons enough for your needs? Do you foresee battle conditions in your future?”   “You know my every experience so you know the last couple of years have been pretty interesting.”   “Yes. Contact is always an interesting time.”   Clarrisa laughed at that, though she did not imagine the humor had been intentional.   After the diagnostician was satisfied that Clarissa had integrated with the new body to a degree where she could put it through its paces, the black void around her faded to a pearlescent cloud, as devoid of scale or depth as the darkness had been. It congealed and solidified around her, transforming into various landscapes. Her only task was to traverse their ever-changing topographies.   When there was an open savannah, she ran as fast and hard as she could go. Her legs pistoned through great expanses of grass at blistering speed. A surprising distance was covered before her legs went sluggish, as though the joints were becoming more solid, less flexible, and with that, she learned how this body experienced fatigue and exhaustion.   She relearned to swim in a lake as clear as glass between two towering mountains, where large round boulders pebbled the bottom like habitation domes. She learned that her human legs only moved up and down. These legs swam by kicking.   She climbed trees and things that looked like great coral growths, but on land, not in the water. She learned what falling was like. Still, as terrifying as any fall, the heavy hit was felt, but without pain. Though she was assured the fall was nothing compared to what the body could withstand, this was when she learned to run a diagnostic check.   “How long will I live?” she asked when the check was completed and everything was in the green.   “You just said I, not it,” the diagnostician observed.   She flexed her fingers and they were her fingers. She squinted then widened her eyes and they were her eyes. She wasn’t thinking about making it happen anymore. It just happened.   “You will live ten times your natural lifespan,” her sister's voice continued.   “A thousand years?”   “Your natural lifespan is not one hundred years. Your species is designed to last between fifty and fifty-five years. It’s only culture that allows you to live as long as you currently do.”   “Five hundred years is still nothing to sneeze at.” That was longer than mankind had been in space   “You may not want that much time.”   “Hey, I thought your job was to protect life. What’s with the one-eighty?”   “Your new body is already ancient. It was made when this place was still active and vital. It will last much longer than that, but a mind is not a body. A body is physical matter, all of which has been here since the beginning of the universe. A mind is a delicate construct, a synergy of events and dynamics that give rise to self-awareness. It cannot remain integral and whole forever.”   “You seem like you’re in one piece.”   There was silence. From the spot where she’d fallen from the coral, in the distance she could see a great herd of animals slowly grazing the prairie. They grunted and groaned, but she could see nothing like a face or a head. They were physiological palindromes, the same front to back as back to front. Mountains in the distance purpled vaguely into a lavender sky.   “I have not always been,” her sister’s voice said, enigmatically.   “No, you haven’t,” Clarissa replied, unable to resist.   “You are as ready as you’re going to be.”   “You think?”   The coral, the prairie, the herd of palindromes faded into black. She floated in what her body now reported to her was purest water, so pure that her body only just registered how it flowed past her.   She was in a long tunnel. Somewhere ahead there was light. On and on she glided through the water, through the tunnel, until she came out into a great pool.   
James Holden
   It woke him hard and abruptly, a gut-punch like a nightmare, the line between reality and dream was wide, fuzzy, and fading.   He would have sworn it was a heart attack, but it was in the wrong place.   “Hey,” whispered Amos, his tongue thick with sleep, gripping James' arm gently.   “I don’t feel good, babe. Lemme’ go.”   Jim gently wrested his arm from Amos’s grip, the latter mumbling something unintelligible as he retreated back into sleep. Jim pulled himself hand over hand out of the bunk, into the center-well and up toward the head.   Halfway up the stairs, the pain tightened down into a wicked little knot. He gasped then left his epiglottis open, neither inhaling nor exhaling, only letting his body’s movement equalize the air in his lungs, trying to let the pain subside and have an exit point.   — You need water, said the voice from his dreams, the great female voice from the cave.   Fine, water, whatever, he thought.   In the head, he strapped himself to one of the toilettes and gave himself over to the disgracefully inevitable. At first, nothing came, then the pain ramped up and made him bear down, sweat breaking out across his back and shoulders in a fiery prickle. The evacuation of material was startling, but the pain subsided again with breathtaking relief. He reached back past the disgust of what he was about to do and passed fingertips over his rectum. It was slippery and wet and when he pulled his fingers back to inspect them, they were merely slick with what looked like spittle. There wasn’t even any smell.   Fuck, he thought. It’s one thing to call on the devil; it’s a decidedly different thing to have him show up, and Jim wasn’t remotely ready for a visit. The spike of pain returned with another rush of fluid. Jim looked between his legs and while the suction of the toilet would not typically leave anything to see, what little was visible was just water. He ran his fingers along the inside of the toilet, well beyond being grossed out.   Water. Nothing more.   He wiped and slipped his pants back up. The soreness deep in his stomach was still there accompanied by a burning that informed him of his digestive tract in greater detail than he could ever previously remember.   He was still groggy and the discomfort and pain had made him break out in a greasy, unpleasant sweat. Further sleep seemed unlikely and Dr. Acharya had been clear about informing him when the flushing began.   Silence on the Rocinante was not in short supply. She’d been running on a crew much smaller than was considered minimum ever since they’d taken control of the Tachi and renamed her. She was made for many more people than inhabited her halls and decks, which made for a kind of luxury not typically associated with Martian gunships. There was space for privacy, which was next to unheard of anywhere in the system, inner and outer populations alike.   He swam through her dimly lit interior, making his way back to the bunks and Dr. Acharya.   The grunt that escaped him came with bile. The pain was stunning and different than it had been before. Something inside of him flipped, turned. Bellies gurgle and groan and make all sorts of gassy sounds, but flipping? The baby had been moving for some weeks now, but this was unprecedented, like it was doing gymnastics.   He came to the doctor’s bunk door and hit the call button. No answer. He hit it again and knocked on the door physically. Dr. Acharya finally answered, his face telling a succinct story about where it had lain against a pillow, hair smashed flat on one side. As disheveled as he was, he took in Jim’s appearance quickly and came to the obvious conclusion without Jim saying a word.   “Has it started?” the doctor asked.   “Yeah, a little while ago. It woke me up.” He placed his hand under the curve of his belly, though this offered no relief in microgravity.   “The baby will turn soon,” the doctor said.   Jim breathed heavily through another bout of pain. “I think it already happened. Little sucker did a backflip on my kidneys a few minutes ago.”   The doctor processed that bit of information with a look of suspicious doubt but said nothing else on the matter.   “Come on then. It would seem your child is as impatient as you are, Mr. Holden.”  
Naomi Nagata
    Just enough thrust to hold things down, the doctor had said. When she’d asked for something more specific, he’d said, “A quarter gee should be enough.”   That at least gave her something to work with. Too often, people like the doctor assumed her skills were something quasi-magical, which was an easy way to dismiss how much study and practice it had taken, how much work.   Math, people. All math, no magic.   The Epstein drive lit and she imagined the whomp of its plume pushing the Rocinante and giving her at least a temporary sense of up and down within her hull. It was only a quarter of a gee. The location of the Pella was now well out of range. A course orbiting the satellite would be safe for a while.   She found that she could not leave the bridge.   She was terrified.   She had been scared during her own delivery, but fear had been only an undercurrent. Joy had been the primary tide then. Joy followed by the ghost of concern about what the future would bring. Marco had been besotted. It had been there in his eyes from the first moment. Filip would be his, not theirs.   Nothing waiting for her in the med bay was hers, and that was the core of it, the slap that came out of nowhere, the reasonless punch, the kick…   Her breath came fast and shallow. She willed herself to slow and take deeper breaths, and the tears came as if on cue with the thrust of the Epstein drive.   She had only just come to grips with seeing Amos place his hand on Jim’s face, as chaste and innocent as one could ask, and just as intimate. They did not look at one another, but into one another. That had been her and Jim, that look, that investigation into another human paradigm. And now it was for someone else. Jesus, why Amos? If it had been a stranger, some random person, man or woman, she could have bitten down on that easily. Caustic disdain for the stranger, corrosive jealousy for Jim. But she was denied the easy way out, the petty way out. There was too much love here, of more than one sort, and now tangled into a knot that included her, binding more tightly with every attempt to pull free.   And she could not leave the bridge.   Right on cue, the ship’s comm sounded, “Naomi, that’s good. Please join us when you’re done.” Dr. Acharya was clearly not well-versed in the piloting of a ship. He made it sound like she was putting away laundry.   One deep breath and then out. “On my way,” she thumbed back through the speaker.  
Amos Burton
   This was not a place where he could fix anything. There was nothing here to weld, to seal, to re-route. There was only Jim, in the med-bay chair, now flattened and transformed into a surgical table, his legs in stirrups, his hand squeezing Amos’s with stunning strength.   “Doc, he don’t look so good,” Amos reported, panicked at Jim’s appearance, the sweat streaming from him, his hair plastered along the edges of his face and down his neck.   “It’s happening too fast,” said the doctor with tightly restrained concern.   Naomi was in the doorway, frozen, eyes wide.   “Amos,” said the doctor from far away. “Mr. Burton!” he yelled. “Bring me that box there.”   He brought and opened it. Inside was a soft, clear plastic mask, tubbing, other devices, and containers.   “Naomi, plug this end in that receptacle,” the doctor ordered.   Naomi moved like a zombie but did as the doctor asked.   “Amos, get two clean suits from the closet there. One for you, one for me. Get in the suit, but don’t touch the gloves. Pass your arms beneath the sterilizer up to the elbows, then put on the gloves. We have to do a cesarean.” The doctor’s swarthy skin was a sickly shade of green.   “A what?” gasped Jim.  
Marco Inaros
   There were no words to describe it. Just a feeling, a sense that something was coming. It pulled his eyes toward the heavens, but it did so via his heart. He’d let Filip fire test rounds at what they had figured was one of the settlers’ ships injudiciously leaving the satellite.   It wasn’t that, though.   No. What he felt was both disdainfully familiar and repulsively alien at the same time.   James Holden.   Yes, he was sure the universe had one last quadrille in store for the both of them.

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Power suit envy wasn’t the half of it.   They had gathered at the large pool - Naomi’s pool - when the voice of Julie Mao informed Bobbie and Alex that Clarissa’s “second debut” was imminent. Conspicuously absent were Martha and Petra, though they only represented the core of a number of other colonists who had declined to come as well. Petra refused to watch her fears come to life with the emergence of Clarissa in her new form from the bowels of the satellite and the end of that dark tunnel that terrified her, and Martha had taken advantage of Petra’s fear, stoking it, spreading it to others. She’d layered it on top of the lie she’d told about Bobby trying to kill her.   “No one tried to kill you. You just needed some motivation,” Bobbie had corrected offhandedly when Martha’s story found its groove and she began to tell it with the confidence of artificial truth. “I haven’t tried to kill anyone since basic training. If I’d needed you dead, you would be.”   It hadn’t exactly been a friend-winning moment, and Bobbie realized she’d given Martha a decent card to play against her, and she’d let her have it because there was nothing she could really do with it. Bobbie didn’t plan on remaining here one second longer than she had to, and if it came to it, the Mao sisters in their newly elevated and upgraded forms could open exclusive territory within the satellite where no sentient being had stepped foot in hundreds of thousands of years.   Still, it wasn’t exactly the most meritorious service and something Mika had said in passing hung with her, sticking to her like glue.   “Nating fo du. Na bingi,” she’d heard him say to Alex, and from his point of view, he was right. There really was nothing for these people to do other than sit and reminisce, and in the case of Martha, seethe. Idle hands really are the devil’s workshop, and there were kids here. The boredom must be doubly bad for them.   She owed these people nothing, but in the same vein, they had done nothing to deserve being left worse off than when the Rocinante had arrived, even if all that had been degraded was their peace of mind.   Bobbie, Alex, Camina, and Mika stood apart from the rest, and Bobbie realized that a bad guy who leaves you alone is still a bad guy, the choice is his, not yours. She needed to fix this and an idea started to form.   The swell of water at the far end of the pool marked Clarissa's emergence. The tunnel had given birth. An indistinct shape drifted closer, settled to the bottom of the pool and walked its way to the edge where they waited to see what would rise from the water.   Despite the description Julie had given her (she’d stopped trying to find different names for the satellite’s A.I.), Bobbie had imagined and expected something akin to her own power armor. Something with hard edges and aggressive planes. Something that looked mean and deadly and human. What emerged from the water was the antithesis. It was rounded and seamless. Not a drop of water stuck to its surface as it emerged. In fact, where the two met, Bobbie could see that the water’s meniscus curved sharply away, denoting that the surface of the body was strongly hydrophobic. The head was an upside-down comma, the tail curling up and forward from the back. The eyes were dragonfly eyes. It appeared to be a similar technology to the squid that had taken Clarissa. Smooth and vaguely, pearlescent silver-white. Its overall layout was humanoid, but everything about it said that no homo sapiens had been present on the design team. It was like watching a film made on Earth. Everything was both recognizable and utterly alien at the same time.   “Fuuuck me,” whispered Alex from Bobbie’s side.   “Sorry, Alex. Missed your chance,” replied the silver being with Clarissa’s voice. “You’ll notice this body is rather lacking in external accouterment.”   “How are you talking? There’s no mouth,” Bobbie asked.   It shrugged in the Belter fashion and turned toward Camina. “Camina Drummer. Surprise, surprise. Who’s the kid?”   “Mika,” he answered weakly from behind her.   “Don’t let the haircut fool you, Mika. I’m as human as you.” Mumbles and whispers passed between the group of colonists who hadn’t completely succumbed to Martha’s propaganda. Clarissa the silver dragonfly robot turned her shimmering rainbow eyes on them. “Whatever you think is happening, no one is going to hurt you, least of all me.”   “Martha’s been spinning a very different story,” interjected Alex.   “Has she? Is there any reason to turn her lie into the truth?”   “Despite the fact that I would enjoy ten minutes alone with Martha, no. These people have less than nothing and certainly don’t pose a threat.” And they didn’t deserve to suffer any ill will from her on Martha’s account. “Listen, you still in the good graces of this place?”   “Yes,” she replied hesitantly and then swept alien hands down her alien torso. “What, are you not entertained?”   “I have a whole lifetime to freak out over this, and frankly, I’ve actually met freakier and it was trying to kill me. Look, speaking of entertainment, there’s nothing for them here. Nothing to do. They’re safe, but this is no better than a very clean prison for them. I know it’s a hospital, but they had to pass the time somehow, right? There must be something.”   “Environmental enrichment is very important,” came Julie’s voice from nowhere. “My libraries are vast, but they come from other species and cultures. What entertains one being may well horrify another.”   “There’s a small library on the shuttle,” said Camina. “It’s mostly religious stories, though, and educational programs for children.”   An older woman approached them from the group of colonists. She was terrified and doing a commendable job of not letting it show. “That would be very welcome to some of us, if perhaps not to you,” she said, never once taking her cloudy eyes from Clarissa’s new form.   “The Rocinante has the complete MCRN R&R database. It’s only about a year out of date. Books, films, serialized programs, music, games,” added Bobbie. “We could route it through the shuttle. Would that work?” Bobbie said to the room as a whole.   “Yes,” replied Julie before anyone else could speak. “Just open the channel. I’ll do the rest. Given some time to review your libraries, I should be able to modify my current holdings so that they can be more fully engaged and enjoyed.”   “You would be giving these people access to the cultural knowledge of the people who lived and worked here?” asked Camina.   “Yes, though there are forms of entertainment that will not cross species or cultural lines, most of it should be engageable in one way or another,” replied Julie.   “They would be the first people to ever learn from an alien species. Imagine what they will know,” said Bobbie, speaking less about the older people and more about the children. Just imagine what their minds and grasp of the universe will be like, she thought.   And for a split second, the idea filtered itself in Clarissa’s direction. What was she now? What would her grasp of the world around her be like? This creature wasn’t remotely like the being that had tried to kill her on Ganymede. That thing had been a paltry human creation, playing with alien fire. It had been crude and artless, but this creature before her was beautiful in a way she understood. Its beauty was in its precision, in its lack of anything excess. Martian structural engineers and designers would appreciate its qualities, and that gave her pause.     The small library onboard Clarissa’s shuttle transferred to the satellite almost instantly, though Martha had committed to a sour expression and she wasn’t giving in. None of the colonists would approach Clarissa, save for the smallest children who were pulled back and restrained by parental hands. Petra would not be in the same room as Clarissa. Martha pretended to console her, all the while adding kindling to the fires of fear.   Bobbie hailed the Rocinante from the shuttle’s comms. Naomi answered, her voice deeply distracted.   “Can you route it through the shuttle?” Bobbie asked.   “Yes, just… just leave the channel open. I’ll let the shuttle gauge how quickly the satellite can take the data without frying the merely human go-between,” she answered.   “Everything okay over there? You sound out of sorts,” Bobbie inquired, the distraction in Naomi’s voice out of keeping with her personality. There was a pause that stretched into a failure to answer. “Naomi, what’s up?” she asked.   “It’s a little girl,” Naomi said softly over the comms.   Bobbie took a moment to process that. That was the last line in a much longer story that hadn’t been delivered, but Naomi’s other-whereness made this the wrong time to dig for details.   “Is Jim okay?” she asked.   “He’s fine. Dr. Acharya had to do a c-section. Can you imagine that? A c-section.” Naomi slid from distracted to detached.   “And Amos?” Bobbie inquired further.   “He’s like a big dog that just had puppies. He keeps laughing and crying at the same time.”   “And the baby, she okay?”   “Yeah. She’s tiny, but she’s perfect.”   “Then why do you sound like you’re about to tell me someone ran over my cat?”   Another pause, and then, “Someone took my cat a long time ago, Bobbie. And now there’s this new cat, and… and…”   “We’re getting Filip. You know that, right? We’re getting him.”   There was a misty, fuzzy sound in Naomi’s voice. She hadn’t cracked yet, but she was made of eggshell. She was slipping.   “Jim swore to you we would get him.”   “You didn’t see him with Amos - and the baby.”   “And now Jim knows what his promise actually means. Now he knows the way you know. Because you lived it.”   “You think?” Naomi asked weakly.   “I doubt very much that it will be necessary, but if it is, Naomi, you have to know that I will make it happen. You have my word, if no one else’s, okay? Just hold it together, Naomi. We’re coming.”   “Soon?” she asked.   “Yes, very soon. We’ve worn out our welcome here in typical fashion.” Bobby sighed in resignation.   “Some things never change, huh?”   “That’s right. We’re family, and that hasn’t changed.”   But it was always changing, wasn’t it? A family isn’t a static thing. It’s alive and growing and aging all the time. Or at least that’s what she thought. She thought of her family as being made of positions and ranks, squads and missions. It was easy to regard and accept that as a family because it quite literally meant matters of life or death. To enter, engage, and survive battle, men and women could be nothing less than brothers and sisters. No lesser mode of thought or level of commitment could or would be tolerated.   Failure to acknowledge this simple dynamic is what gave rise to fragging.   And it occurred to her that perhaps from the other side of the room, from where the colonists huddled in a mass away from the newly emerged Clarissa, that perhaps in their eyes, she, GySgt Roberta Draper, was worthy of a fragging if only they had the means.   “Just keep it together, Naomi. We’re leaving as soon as we know that the people here are in good hands. I’ve got some repair work to do.”   “Data transfer is live,” Naomi said hollowly and the comms went silent and closed.   Bobbie turned to Camina. “Anything you need to get off your shuttle, get it now. She’s not airworthy and she can’t dock with the Roci. We need to take Clarissa’s ship.   “Feel free to take one of the others as well,” Martha said, snideness dripping from her tongue like syrup. “If it gets you the fuck out of here sooner, it’s a bargain.”   “Thanks,” said Bobbie with plastic joviality. “You know, Martha, this could have all gone very differently. I wanted to like you. I appreciate balls, but I’ve never been too fond of dick.”   She left it at that, sure Martha could do the math.   “Whatever. You think some movies and books make up for your intrusion?” She was doubling down, her anger winding up like a spring.   “For them, yes.” Bobbie gestured to the others. “For you, I don’t really care. I didn’t come here to hurt you or anyone. Believe it or not, I actually think you want to help these people. I just don’t think you’re very good at it.”   “Just fucking go,” she responded, equal parts resignation and malevolence.     The Pashang Fong was joined by what was ostensibly her new, uglier sister. Clarissa had given the ship a once-over and assured them all that she was perfectly capable of riding on the exterior of the Fong since she did not actually breathe and the sad little Belter ship could be left behind. Bobbie was ready to go with that idea, but even then they would not all fit in a single trip and she was determined to make it a one-way.   The ship remained unnamed.   “And Dr. Acharya?” asked Alex as they prepared to leave.   “Sounds like a problem for you,” she said. “Or maybe Naomi can program that thing so he can come back alone. None of that changes what we do now, and what we do know is leave.”   In the end, Clarissa still rode the exterior of the Pashang Fong. Bobbie was determined to find a way to pack them all in, but Clarissa insisted that she would suffer no ill effects and, more importantly, she was not about to be robbed of the chance to quite literally ride a rocket ship. Alex and Mika took the unnamed ship and Bobbie and Camina climbed into the Fong with Clarissa riding outboard.   The Belter ship left its human cargo with the Rocinante and then released, detaching and maintaining a position close enough to the Roci to be retrieved. The Pashang Fong docked, Bobbie and Camina boarded the Rocinante and Clarissa made her way along the outside of the ship toward the personnel hatch. She would remain there, outside, until Bobbie had a chance to debrief and fill James in on her changes.   It was quiet and dark and the space inside the Roci was compact compared to the satellite. Bobbie was deeply thankful and relieved to be back in her natural environment. No giant rooms and inexplicable gravity. No million-year history or creepy A.I.s. Just clean, honest Martian lines.   They found the med-bay was closed to access. Behind its uncompromising door were Amos, Jim, and their new baby. On this side was Dr. Acharya and Naomi.   “Where is she?” asked Naomi, referring to Clarissa.   “She’s still outside,” Bobbie replied, which invoked an alarmed expression from Dr. Acharya. “Trust me, she’s fine, but it’s gonna’ take some explanation.” Bobbie’s eyes shifted back to the med-bay door. “Can I see them? I need to debrief with the captain.”   Something shifted in Naomi, a nearly imperceptible shiver.   “Soon,” said the doctor with unexpected authority. He was speaking in his professional capacity. “It’s better if we go to the galley and I’ll bring Mr. Burton to you. There are many of you and right now there are natural drives in play that also require some explanation.”   On their way to the galley, Alex said, “We need to talk about getting you back to your people, doc.”   “I would have preferred for James to say it, but I have been asked to stay indefinitely. With the hospital up and running - I always knew it was a hospital - they have no need of me.”   Alex glanced back at Bobbie. Bobbie gave him her don’t look at me face. Until recently, she had been the newest addition to the crew. It was her first time on the other side of the equation, and adding someone to a crew was no small affair, let alone doubling its size in one fell swoop.   They waited in the galley. Mika had positioned himself between and behind Bobbie and Camina. He hadn’t spoken a single word to this point. It wasn’t lost on her, how much this was like when they had waited for Clarissa to arrive the first time, the fact that she was outside the ship only added to the déjà vu.   Dr. Acharya floated into the galley, Amos behind him, glassy-eyed and strange.   She tried to make eye contact with the doctor; it wasn’t clear if he just never connected or was trying to avoid it.   “Why is he doped up?”   “Just a little bit,” said Amos. He hadn’t slurred, but it was close.   “Oxo, so bik,” Mika whispered from behind her. Yes, it was easy to forget how much Amos had changed physically. He’d always been a bear of a man, but now he was simply massive. The short time away from the Rocinante had refreshed Bobbie’s take on the matter, like a scent you’d learned to tune out but was overwhelming upon return.   Amos’s glassy eyes slipped over the party present in the galley. “Where’s Peaches?”   “Outside,” Bobbie replied. A tap of her foot against the bulkhead moved her towards Amos. Dr. Acharya looked dismayed, but Bobbie pinned him with a glare. Amos eyed her with growing awareness. Something rippled across his face, traveled down his neck and into his shoulders. A tensing. A preparation. That was enough for Bobbie. This was not unlike when Amos and Jim started sharing the sheets. They’d avoided Bobbie and Alex and been left alone in turn because Alex was oblivious and Bobbie, perfectly aware of what was going on, hadn’t the slightest clue how to engage them on the topic. Perhaps, unbeknownst to any of them, natural inclination had spared lives. Whatever had a hold of Amos was primal, animal; it smelled of wet fur and dark caves. She shook her head. The smell was real, even if her interpretation seemed fanciful. Even drugged enough to show, he was letting off a cloud of warning that creatures furrier than humans, but smarter, would have understood perfectly.   She held her spot. Amos’s eyes flicked across her, thought processes clouded by whatever the doctor had given him only half-forming. They finally settled and looked her square in the eye, though they were fidgety and wiggly. What had the doctor given him?  “Hey, Babs,” he said, the ghost of a grin pulling one side of his face.   Thank God, she thought. She hated that nickname, but she knew Amos knew that and this was just subverted ribbing. “I hear you’re a daddy, Amos.”   “Papa,” he replied. “I’m papa; Jim is daddy.”   “Alright, Papa.” She waited until his attention floated back in her direction. “Things are real different with Peaches, sweetie, but it’s gonna’ be okay, I promise.”   “You promise?” he asked, and it was as if thirty years dropped from him in just seconds. It was his little-boy voice, which Bobbie had never heard before. Something caught in her throat at that unexpected vulnerability.   “I promise,” she said. “And when we get squared away, we’ve got another mission.”   Amos’s head lolled in Naomi’s direction. “I know. Naomi needs her boy.”   “Yes, and he needs her, and I’m gonna’ need you to help me get him.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Jim’s attention flicked from the image on the hand-screen to Amos, to the doctor, and back to the screen. A slippery-smooth silver impossibility waving hello into the camera at the forward starboard gun turret was more than he was ready to deal with at the moment.   “Of course,” he snorted. “Of course she’s a robot. I mean, why was I expecting something remotely not crazy? Stupid me.” He flicked the screen in a random direction and Amos snapped it out of the air before it managed to fly more than a foot.   “She’s still outside, Jim,” said Amos. “Told Bobbie she’ll stay there ‘till you give the word.”   “Good, I hope she enjoys the view.” There were too many people in the room. It was the same as always, but right now, just too many.   “Daddy, this ain’t her fault,” said Amos, his voice gentled.   “Yeah? Are you sure? Would that thing have taken her if she hadn’t had those damned implants? Whose fault were those?”   Somewhere beneath layers of painkiller, a deep soreness stuck up its hand to remind him of its presence. He’d only glanced once since he’d come to. The incision was lower than he’d expected, and smaller, a little grin made of stitches dead center between his belly button and his dick. Dr. Acharya was gifted when it came to stitch-work and assured him the horizontal scar would be minimal. But the internal stitches also had a voice and they went deep. He'd smiled later - when he was awake enough - and Amos had joked that at least the doctor hadn't had to stitch other places that were less convenient, but it hadn't struck him as funny.   Elsewhere within him roiled a beast that was all the more dangerous because she’d been drugged into silence. She was resentful and angry and defensive, ready to take the head off of anything that stuck a nose into her valley. One swipe is all it would take.   Amos sighed his defeat. “Look, James-” Not Jim, not daddy, but James. “-there’s still a mission to be completed and she’s out there in the vacuum, without a suit, without a damned thing, like it was a fuck’n day-spa. Sounds to me like that’s something we could use on this mission. There’s a wounded Martian corvette down there with a madman at the helm.”   “Then go kill him!” Jim spat.
   — Yes! Swipe his jaw away and let him bleed out.
   Shut the fuck up already, Jim said to the voice in his head. Let me think. You're driving me crazy.   His internal remonstration eventually registered on Amos’s face. Jim hated how drugged he felt, how disconnected. The soft connection between them was its own bizarre hurdle to get over. When it reacted with a delay, it was untenable.   But mostly he hated that all of this was distracting him from Kavish. Destruction and devastation ran through him like black smoke filling every corner. He wanted nothing more than to wipe the world clean of anything standing between himself and her beautiful face and perfect, tiny fingers.   Kavish Naomi Holden-Burton lay in her medical bassinet, swaddled expertly into a little papoose. Her eyes, so full of disapproval over the lights and sounds around her, were amorphously blue. His own eyes were mahogany, Amos’s were grey. Hers wouldn’t show their true color for some months, and Dr. Acharya had only shrugged when Jim had put the question to him.   “She is healthy and her physiology is perfect. I doubt her eye color will be of any impact,” he’d answered dryly.   “Her physiology…?” Amos had asked.   “She carries both your genes,” Dr. Acharya had replied. “Whether she expresses as an alpha or omega cannot be determined now. That will be for her body to decide during its first change. There may be a second change, or there may not be. But that is far in the future. Right now she is a baby just like any other, and I think she’s hungry.”   Just thinking about it awoke the pins and needles behind his nipples and the surrounding tissue.   “Give her to me, papa,” he said to Amos. Though the microgravity made it a non-issue, Amos still cradled her head as he’d been shown. Her tiny form seemed to disappear into his hands.   Academically, he’d known she would have teeth. Dr. Acharya had warned him, but just as believing is not the same as knowing, knowing is not the same as experiencing. And it wasn’t like she had a full set of choppers. They had only just come through, her incisors and premolars just breaking the surface, but that was enough. He put her to his chest and her little mouth started working, latching on. She snuffled softly and fed, and he knew exactly how many teeth there were without having to look. Her little hand curled into a fist she used to steady herself, her head as bald and whispy as an old man.   A wiggling sheen of tears covered Amos’s eyes at the sight, and he dabbed them dry with his sleeve.    “Am I still not allowed to leave, doc?” Amos asked.   The doctor shook his head slowly in disbelief. “Why are all of you so ready to die? You seek it. There’s a pathology there that is disturbing.” He scowled at Amos. "If you must, yes. They are no longer physically dependant on you."   “I ain’t look’n to die, doc. But Kavish is here and she’s healthy and it seems to me like you’re taking good care of Jim.” Amos floated over to Jim, placing the most tender of kisses on his forehead. “You said most of how I feel is from the scent Jim and Kavish are giving off, right?”   “It is,” said the doctor, and then huffed out the remainder of his breath. It was pretty clear where Amos was going with this. “Even if I knew what to give him, and I don’t, and even if we had it, and I cannot imagine we do, drugging Jim like that without knowing the outcome while the baby is feeding is not something I would recommend to any parent who has just given birth, regardless of the circumstances. Just the pain meds he’s taking are enough to concern me. They easily pass through the colostrum and can cause suppressed breathing in the baby. No, it’s out of the question. Unconscionable.”   “Then keeping me aboard means you either gotta’ keep me zipped tight with drugs, or else I’m a danger to everyone outside this room,” he stated.   Again the sigh. “That’s true, Amos.”  With the tip of a thick finger, Amos traced the delicate rim of Kavish’s ear. “It’s your choice, cap’n.” He hadn’t called him captain in many weeks. “We got ours, daddy, and I am the happiest, proudest papa that ever lived, but Naomi…” Amos’s lower lip pulled in to stop it from quivering. On a man is big as Amos, as strong as Amos, as typically dispassionate as Amos, that tiny revelation spoke volumes.   “Let Bobbie go,” said the doctor.   Amos turned his head slowly toward the man. “She is going to go, doc. But she ain’t just picking up some marooned kid. She’s gonna need help, the kind that don’t flinch.”   Jim thought for a minute. The inner voice was dissenting in the extreme. It flooded his head with a resounding no.   “You let Bobbie take point. Not because I don’t trust you, but…” He wanted to lay his hand on Amos’s cheek, but just now both hands were busy with the baby.   “It would’a been that way regardless, daddy. You know it.” And the thought having silently passed between them, Amos caressed his face, moving his crazy hair out of the way.   “Yeah, but I had to say it.” Jim grimaced when Kavish latched down especially hard, not realizing he’d let her float away just a hair. He pulled air through his teeth. “Yeah, she’s hungry.”   “Amos,” the doctor said with a softness that spoke of fear. “Either I should leave now or you should go and make your preparations. The pheromones in here are enough that even I feel them. This is isn’t safe and I don’t want to give you any more drugs.”   “You stay, doc. I’m gonna’ go seal myself in a suit with clean air and visit Peaches outside. You alright with that?”   “That… sounds like a good idea, Amos,” the doctor relented.   “Be careful,” said Jim. The image in the hand terminal of Clarissa’s new robot body wasn’t actually frightening. It looked like a child’s idea of a robot, all rounded corners and oddly jointless. There were no teeth to frighten him, no claws, nothing but those giant rainbow eyes and funny rounded hands waving hello. But somewhere in there was Clarissa Mao, or at least some version of her, and no version of her had ever been on his list of favorites.   “Just be careful,” he repeated. “And come back to me in one piece.”   Amos kissed him and saluted a farewell to the doctor. Dr. Acharya opened the door to the med bay. Watching Amos exit that door left Jim cold and hollow.   When it was closed, he said to the doctor, “Get Bobbie on the comms before Amos finds her.”   The doctor did as he was asked.   “Thank God,” said Bobbie over the comms. “Look, Jim…”   “Bobbie, just shut up for a minute and listen to me. Is Amos there? Can he hear you?”   There was a pause. “No. I’m alone.”   “Bobbie, the mission is yours. I know you know what you’re doing and I trust you with my life. I’m trusting you with Amos’s. If it comes down to it, if there’s a pinch and you have to choose…”   “You listen to me, James Holden. You may be the captain, but you’re no Marine. Everyone who belongs on this ship is coming back to this ship, if I have to kick God in the dick to do it, you hear me?”   That brought a sad smile to Jim’s face. “Don’t go pissing God off, Bobbie.”   “Oh, I’ve got a few questions I’d like answers to, and you’ll forgive me for saying, but that’s between God and me; no captains in between.”   Yeah, he understood that feeling all too well. “Take whatever you need, Bobbie. I’m giving you unrestrained authority. You do whatever needs doing. Just bring my family back, and that includes you.”   “Hard copy on that, Jim. They’re my family too.”   She closed out the comms before he could say anything else, but there was nothing else to say and they both knew it. It would be in her hands now, the mission, Filip, Amos. Either he believed in her or he didn’t.   He did.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“…if I have to kick God in the dick to do it, you hear me?”   Amos held his breath, not daring to flip the suit comms off, lest he make it known that he’d heard the conversation.   It’s one thing to assume that those kinds of things got said when you weren’t around; it’s another thing to hear it.   He certainly didn’t resent it, but sometimes things that aren’t meant for your ears aren’t meant for your ears. He didn’t want to think that if push came to shove, Bobbie was being ordered to prioritize him over the mission. At least it sounded like Bobbie was on the same page he was.   All or nothing.   The comms clicked dead and he quickly took the opportunity to change his broadcast channel.   Sweet Jesus, he prayed Naomi hadn’t heard.   He exhaled to calm himself. “Opening exterior airlock,” he said over the new frequency.   “Copy that,” replied Naomi, no sign in her voice that she’d caught Jim’s orders, though it was hard to tell these days. Frail was her new normal.   The airlock cycled the atmosphere down to near-vacuum before the outer hatch opened. He tethered himself and rolled out the exterior. The majesty and immense reach of the nebula struck him again, undiminished.   — What sky is this?   “Buddy, now ain’t the time,” he thought to himself.   — You are away from the child and your man.   Magnetic boots gripped down and he turned toward the forward turrets. She sat with her legs oddly folder underneath her, long arms gripping adjacent tether points, gleaming under the light of uncountable stars.   She turned that crazy head and looked his way, rainbow eyes against a rainbow sky.   He didn’t balk, but neither did he hurry. The last tether point was the one she was holding onto. She gave it a friendly pat, entreating him to join her. Sitting in a bulky spacesuit that barely fits isn’t as easy as it sounds, but he managed, legs spread out ahead of him.   Her head slowly tipped in his direction and he instinctively leaned away. She motioned with her hand that she wanted to touch his helmet with her head. He braced and allowed it to happen.   “Hear me now?” Clarissa’s voice came tinny and high through the material of his helmet, transmitting via direct contact. “It’s my ear and my mouth at the same time, but it’s analog only if you can believe that.”   “Clarissa Mao picks an entry-level model. Whodathunkit?” He goofed. Then, more seriously, “You alright in there?”   “Yeah, I’m okay, Amos. I thought it would be a lot harder too. Maybe it will be, one day, when I’ve had a chance to actually think about it. But right now I’m sitting on the hull of the Rocinante, and Amos, I swear it feels exactly like I’m sitting here naked, without a stitch of clothing on. I know I’m not breathing, but that truth feels more like a lie than anything. I can see all the way around my head! And it’s just you and me sitting out here, and… it’s amazing. So yeah, I’m okay.” She paused a moment. “Amos?”   “Yeah, Peaches.”   “You’re a father, Amos. Congratulations. How does it feel?”   “Like my heart wants to explode out of my chest. I’m crying. I’m laughing. Yeah, I’m basically fucked.”   “What’s she gonna’ be?”   “The doc says he don’t know yet.”   “No, I mean, is she an Inner, a Belter? You and Jim are Inners, but look where she was born, here on the float, in a different part of the galaxy, with the very gods looking down upon her.”   “Listen to you, all fancy-schmancy.”   “I have a masters in literature from Columbia, you know. Not just a pretty face.” She tapped his helmet lightly with her head for emphasis. “You want some advice? I’ve got the womanly angle.”   “Yeah, please, shoot.”   “Let her decide what she wants to be. All this crazy we’re in, this is all because other people feel compelled to decide what others should or shouldn’t be. The protomolecule, the war, you and Jim. Think about it. It all comes back to the same thing.”   “Yeah, I guess it does.” And she was perfectly correct. “On that note, we’ve got one more thing that kinda’ answers to the same sentiment. Jim wants us to get Filip, and it don’t sound like that’s the choice he’d rather make.”   “Maybe you should leave him,” she said.   “I don’t think that’s an option,” he replied. “I actually came out here to see if you’ll join me and Bobbie on this op. The new hardware looks pretty tight. Could use you.”   “Yeah, I’m in. But I want you to think about what I said. He might be right where he should be, for everyone’s sake. Bobbie said she’s very worried about Naomi. Said she sounded thin and stretched.”   “She is. That’s why we gotta’ get him. For her.”   “And when we do, what if it doesn’t work out? Has anyone thought about what happens to Naomi then?”   “A wise person once told me that you should always let a lady decide for herself.”   “Touché. So how’s this going to go down?”   “Bobbie’s got the command on this op. But we know where the settlement is, so, we’re in, we’re out. With you and Bobbie dressed for war, seems like a simple thing to me.”   “Did you sign a pact with the Fates or Old Scratch that I don’t know about? Simple is never in this little family’s repertoire.”   On that account, she was certainly correct. But it didn’t do to overcomplicate the matter. It was Bobbie’s mission. He was just out here recruiting.   “So what does the little grub look like?” she asked.   “Cranky little face with an attitude.” Her little eyes could already stare daggers when something woke her. He and Jim were having to learn the hard way about the importance of silence when raising a baby.   “Ah, that’s the Jim Holden in her, ready to scrutinize everything and anything within an inch of its life. What does she have from you?” she asked.   “She’s mostly quiet and just looks. I think she has my eyes.” The shape, if not the color. He’d hoped that she would be more like Jim. His looks were better suited to creating a pretty girl. Amos felt like any kid of his would as easily look like a rottweiler as anything else.   “Then she’s lucky. Your eyes are your best feature,” she complimented.   That was kind of her. “Didn’t think I had any good features.”   “Oh, Amos. Too late now, but there was a time…”   “Yeah, Peaches. I know.”   “So, I know Bobbie’s calling the shots, but I’m guessing you have at least something in mind already?”   “As soon as our orbit brings us clear of the settlement, I’m thinking we take the Fong down a few hundred clicks out of range and burn low over the terrain, find a nice landing spot, get the kid, and if we can score a little revenge for Earth and Mars, I’m good with that.”   “I think we should take both ships.” She pointed out to a bright spot that looked like a twinkly star, but there was no atmosphere to account for its twinkle. It was the little Belter ship slowly tumbling a few dozen kilometers away. “Riding outboard in a vacuum is one thing. I don’t think attempting the same arrangement during atmospheric maneuvers would be smart. I’ll take the little P-O-S and follow. Anyway, we need the extra room for Filip, regardless.”   “Sounds good,” said Amos. “She should have a name. Let her know we trust her.”   “Hm. I’ll think of something.” Then, “Sancho Panza.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Two stars traced their descent from the heavens, streaks of white fire in a firmament of lavender, orange, peach, and red. Too slow to be shooting stars and too small not to have burned up.   “It’s time,” he said to Cyn. “We ready?”   “Ya, bosmang. We ready.”   Cyn passed back the small joint he’d saved for a special occasion. Its potency had all but evaporated, but the symbolism was what mattered to Marco. Marco drew the last draw, the paper flaring hot in his fingertips. Clouds in the late-morning sky played confusingly with the light show overhead. He imagined that at some point someone would find it beautiful, but it only made his head spin to look up. Too much was in the sky that wasn’t under his control, too many people who were lost, who had no purpose or cause. Marco suffered their lack as his overburden, his additional weight to carry because the rest were too weak, too undeserving.   They refused the fires of change and remained impure.   It would be different here. Here, the people would face the fire, face the change, face the ugly things, the needful things, the things others had no belly for.   Marco had belly enough for an entire race of man.   But not all men made the cut.   No, not all.   He stubbed the remainder of the joint out into the soil, jabbing it deep, suddenly repenting having indulged, even though the joint was so old the effect was barely noticeable. He headed down the hill, Cyn in tow.   “Where you think they land, bosmang?” Cyn asked.   “Doesn’t matter. Da sabaka da pomang gonya be in charge. Look.” He pointed to where the twin points of light just now dipped into the haze along the horizon. “Too far to walk, even in power armor. They’ll come back in low. Typical Inners. Two-dimensional thinking.”   The walk back to the village was long and hot. The stink in the air was particularly high today. Cyn wheezed behind him, the larger man winded by the pace Marco set. The settlers would have to be separated and kept under guard. They wouldn’t believe him that their people weren’t involved. Maybe they were. But those two rockhoppers would only hold a few people, so that seemed unlikely. Naomi would remain aboard the Rocinante. Holden wasn’t stupid enough to bring her or risk her presence being used against him. The duster bitch would certainly be on point as well as Naomi’s muscle, Amos.   He prayed that one of the remaining seats had been reserved for Holden. The rest would be collateral damage. Holden was the prize, and whether he was taken whole or was reduced to jelly made little difference to Marco. He’d keep what was left of him in a jar on a shelf.   And he would have that jar now. No more waiting.   The Pella came into view when they broke the tree line.   “Take the guards back to the village with as much weaponry as you can carry. Tell them we saw four ships. Four. Tell them we will spare the colonists we find among them, but only if they cooperate.” Marco thought for a moment. “If they don’t cooperate, kill the weakest and the youngest.”   “Ya, bosmang,” Cyn replied gravely.   “And tell Filip to come to me here.”   Cyn nodded and went to instruct the guards. Marco clambered up the side of the ship via the makeshift ladder. Inside, the humidity was adding a hint of musk to the usual antiseptic smell. She was never intended to be exposed like this, to the elements, to rainfall. She was becoming one with the mud. But she had at least one more mission left in her.   She would bring the enemy to his knees and the Rocinante to heel.   On the bridge, strapped into the nav seat, he released the gimbals and let the chair float free. The remaining functional systems powered up and the bridge was cast in the cold blue light Martians loved so well. He wondered if it was because the dusty planet outside their domes was so iconically red, dry, and sterile. Perhaps the blue was to help mask the failure of their grand project.   Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.   The screen softly chimed its readiness.   “Go milowda vedi keting milowda mebi gonya vedi,” he whispered to himself.   The ships had landed much farther away than he had expected. Unusual. Moving away from the ships, there were three heat signatures, one of which was larger than a human should read, another clearly read as the duster’s power armor, but the third was a mystery. Its heat signature was much lower than even the duster’s power armor.   It would be some time before the sensors could get more than that. He leaned in the chair letting his eyes go unfocused.   Come to me, Holden. Come. We are olympian, you and I. I recognize it. I acknowledge your place in this. I do! I salute you. There is no God without Lucifer, no Zeus without Hades, no Jupiter without Pluto. Come to me with your cohorts, your lesser angels.    Here we are where the old gods left their toys in disarray, abandoned.
   What events have unfolded under these skies? What heroes rose and fell?
   Come to me, Holden. Don’t insult me; bring a good fight. Bring your pomang bitch, bring Naomi’s flunky, bring whatever you have.    Filip clambered up onto the bridge.   “Mi ta vedi da kapawu. Where you want me?”   Filip eyed the stations, keen to waken weapons of destruction and obliteration, to pockmark the firmament with eternal scars. So eager. But Marco had a different job for him.   Marco showed him the readout from the ship. “A few days yet. You have the most important job of all, Filip. More important than mine.”   The boy’s eyes went wide.   “You will go to them, to Holden and his sad little crew. Go to them and pour sweet poison into their ears.” The excitement drained from Filip like water down a tube.   “I want to fight,” he retorted.   “And you will. You will, Filip," he said. "Your mother is with them. I feel it. She is their weakest point because of you, so you must be the bait, the lure. You will make them think I have abused you, that I have gone mad. I’m sure he thinks it already, but you, you will make them believe it. And that will make him come out of hiding.”   Filip’s eyes squinted, thinking, finding a way to accept this task.   “We get one chance, my son.”   “How do you know they want me?”   “Don’t be stupid, Filip. They could have torpedoed the Pella whenever they wanted. They could have wiped this place from existence, but Holden has no nerve. If the Rocinante were yours, Filip, if you were on the other side of this, would you not have reduced this place to molten slag? Think, Filip. Think.”   “They want me,” Filip said softly.   “They want you, yes, Filip. Now you see.”   “I will never go with them. I’ll kill them all.”   “No. Holden’s people don’t matter. They are no one, nothing. They are extras in the grand play, in the background, nameless. There is only one person who matters here. Only one. Holden. You will strike at him, Filip. You will rip from him the thing he loves. What Naomi tried to do to you, to me, you will do to her. But you will be successful because you are my son, you have my blood, and this will be where the tale ends. You will have your revenge, and so will I. Then you will take your place, Filip. Then they will know who you are.”   Filip was about to speak, but Marco cut him off with a finger. “I know you hate the cold of my shadow. I know it. You would not be my son if you sought to hide there. Shine, my boy. Shine and take your place beside me. That is what you want, no?”   Of course it was, and had always been, but the time had not been ripe.   “I will kill him.” Filip’s face held a determination his voice did not support.   “Not him. Her. And then he will come to me.”   The boy flinched, physically. Now was the crisis moment. Marco had repeated his name over and over as he spoke to him. A trick to slip the message deep into the boy's head. He had to hear every part of it attached to his name. He had to ingest the action as inseparable from the actor. Filip would come out of the furnace gleaming, or he would burn away as ash.   “Do not pity her, Filip. She was never a mother to you, only a womb. Remember why we are here, in this place. She tried to kill you, Filip. But you lived. She traded you and went with strangers. She is nothing. Less than nothing.”   Filip trembled. One corner of his mouth pulled in strangely. He was biting his lip, hard. Marco was sure there would be blood.   Good, my son. Blood is the warrior's paint.   The boy took a deep breath and the tremble receded. “How?” he asked.   Beautiful, thought Marco.   “It will take more resolve that just pressing buttons,” he gestured vaguely at the control panel in front of him. “It will cost.”   “I can pay!” Filip’s chin jutted out in a show of youthful bravado.   “I know.”     “Bosmang,” Cyn said, incredulous. “Mi na kang. Na du pegunta fo mi fo du da ting xiya. Please, no.”   “Do it!” growled Filip.   He’d found his courage between the ship and the settlement. Marco had eased off the details and leaned into what would happen after. His injuries would be bound and made to appear tended, but only to a slovenly, careless degree. Painkillers had been scavenged from the ship and Marco held them where Filip could see them, assuring him that the agony would not be for long.   “Bosslet, no.” The big man slipped his hands behind his back in refusal.   “You only make it worse, Cyn. The boy is ready. He knows what to do.” He got in Cyn’s face, could smell his breath. “Big koyo like you do it easy, on the first try. Someone else will fuck it up and Filip will suffer needlessly. Is that what you want? Is that how you show respect? Make my boy suffer?”   Cyn, the biggest man on the crew, failed to sniff back the tears that spilled. “You give him the junk fast, ya?”   “It’s right here,” Marco held up the injector. “Filip gonya du salta!” Marco pantomimed Filip flying high on the Martian drugs. He would be out for a while and then groggy for a while longer. All of that was in their favor. Drugged to keep him docile after having been broken. The best lies were made of mostly truth.   Cyn broke his eye contact with Marco. He turned to Filip. “Mi xalte to ere kori, Filipito.”   Filip was suddenly on the ground with a heavy thud. He almost laughed until Cyn jammed a knee deep into Filip's armpit, grabbed his arm and pulled it into his crotch, bending it quickly across his hip joint. The snap was unexpectedly wooden and crisp. Cyn flinched and sobbed at the sound of the break. Filip's face dissolved into horror at the pain.   Cyn punched him twice in the face with all the force he could muster, tears streaming down his cheeks in rivers.   “Enough,” said Marco, barely audible over Filip’s screams.   Cyn moved back, his expression did not bode well.   Transformation always exacts a price, thought Marco.   Filip writhed on the ground, his right arm now possessing two joints, the original and the one Cyn had just made. Marco stuck the injector through the fabric of Filip’s pants, at the thick part of the leg (too thick, damned planet) and gave him the full dose of the painkiller. Filip’s cries died suddenly as the pain was washed away in chemical bliss. Cyn checked Filip’s pulse at his neck, lifted his small limp frame in his large arms and carried him to Marco’s mud-brick home.   Cyn would be a handful after this. He was overly attached to Filip, coddling him. It would be up to Filip to mend the path once he was awake. Marco had no power to offer forgiveness in this. Only Filip could give it.   In the dark of the room, they tended his arm.   “You had the drugs. Why not give it to him first? Why make him feel it?” Cyn asked.   “He wanted it. He didn’t want to hide from the pain. You should respect him for that,” Marco answered.   It wasn’t the answer Cyn wanted to hear.   They set Filip’s arm without him ever waking and then splinted it. The break was a simple fracture, no broken skin, but he gave Filip an injection of antibiotics just in case. Cyn had done a number on his face, and those wounds were open.   When it was done, Cyn left silently. He hadn’t spoken a word since asking about the drugs.   The transparent hand terminal he’d brought from the Pella lay next to Filip’s bed on the little basket where he kept his clothing. It was set to a dim setting, but he could still see the three dots that represented his fate coming to call. Fillip’s face was only now starting to bruise and the swelling had yet to really set in. It would be much more dramatic come tomorrow.   At their current rate, Holden’s people would be here in five days. They had to be packing serious ammunition, given how far away they had landed. That was a lot of ground to cover and the duster would surely understand that meant added risk, added opportunity to be ambushed.   Perhaps that was the reason for the inordinate size of one of the signals.   It didn’t matter.   Brute force had been the opening overture on Earth and Mars. This would be about finesse. Not the strike of a battle-ax or sword, but the sting of a scorpion hidden in the sheets.   That is you, my little Filip, my little scorpion. Today you rest, tomorrow too. The next day you leave to intercept the enemy. Sing well, my boy. Make them believe. Keep your stinger curled away until the target is in view, then strike!
   Naomi, sweet girl, sweet wife. How you could have given me such a gift and then walked away, I will never know, and I no longer care. The story comes full circle and the mistake you made will be your undoing.
   Marco walked outside to find Cyn sitting on a large stone, one of several arranged in a circle around a fire pit. It had been Martha’s “meeting place” when she had still had the fortitude to direct these people. That had come to a quick end, of course.   Marco approached Cyn slowly, letting the man react however he would. He stayed put. Marco placed a hand on his shoulder.   “Thank you, my friend. You are the only one I could trust to do it.”   “I know why. I know Filipito say to do it, but Marco… never again. Never.” His voice was raw, his jaw trembled. He wasn’t just hurt, he was blind with rage, a rage fathered by guilt. He would never have spoken to Marco like that otherwise. When he walked away, Marco let him go. The big koyo might be dangerous just now. No matter. His anger and emotional injury would be put to good use with a little redirection.   The nebula was just now reaching its zenith, high in the sky. Somewhere over there, in that direction, where those mountains faded into clouds, the two ships had landed, disgorging their occupants onto this strange purple globe.   The scale of things was fitting.   Marco walked back into the mud-brick building to clean Filip’s face.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Clarissa slipped out of her makeshift backpack. All three had one and all three helped carry the load, but Clarissa was coming to learn that having an outer surface as smooth as hers wasn’t always a plus. The backpack refused to stay in one place and had it been actual skin underneath, she’d be an abraded mess right now.   Luckily her new skin was much tougher than that.   But not Bobbie’s or Amos’, and coupled with the dogged personality they both shared, Clarissa found that she was the one calling for breaks and when to stop for the night otherwise the two of them would go until they dropped.   “Fuck me, this place stinks,” said Amos for the millionth time, laying his pack down. It was Bobbie who pointed out that perhaps Amos did, in fact, notice it more than she did because his olfactory senses had been heightened and retuned. They sat and Bobbie and Amos each worked through a nutrient bar, the last of the supplies Clarissa had brought as her share of the trip and as a kind of olive branch to Holden. Up above them somewhere, Holden, Drummer, Dr. Acharya, Mika, and Naomi tended to little baby Kavish on the Rocinante.   They’d brought the two Belter ships in low over the terrain as close as they dared before landing them in amongst some unusually dense stands of bone trees. The local wildlife had moaned and mooed its disapproval when they exited the ships, but they kept their distance. Clarissa had disturbed them the most. They only had to sense her presence and they would slump, ripple, and scoot away like nightmare sea lions on a beach.   The topography was starting to level off from gently undulating hills to a flat plain. Dense copses of the bone trees Dr. Acharya had mentioned stood in haphazard lavender piles, their tendrils drifting in the breeze, and occasionally against it. This planet was a quiet place once the creatures near the ships had moved away. Bobbie had been first to take notice that there was very little sound of wildlife in the sparsely populated landscape. The creatures here all resembled different versions of a caterpillar. Some small and delicate, others large and lumbering, but despite their superficial differences, they were all of a similar basic body plan. It made sense, but she kept looking for other biodiversity, for creatures that had gone a different route and didn’t find them. It was as if this place had suffered a calamity that was recent on the evolutionary scale and diversity was still very low. The diagnostician had shown her the planet as it had appeared many millennia ago, but only from afar. Still, this place was clearly vastly different from what she had seen in the images. Something had laid waste to this system, and the creatures down here had not been spared.   But that was old news. Holden had been shown the past when he was in the hub of the slow zone. When Earth was still a slowly forming ball of slag and lava, forces had clashed here that made every war and every weapon mankind had ever made look like pebbles thrown by petulant children.   Bobbie and Amos shared a kind of telepathic silence as they assembled their little camp. They didn’t need to speak. There was nothing supernatural going on, just that their core nature and time together had made it so. Clarissa was less comfortable with it, not because she didn’t enjoy the quiet, but because she felt excluded and there wasn’t a thing she could say to either of them. The feeling of exclusion was hers alone. They were doing nothing to cause it.   There were times when it was clear to her how easily she could unravel. How she could let the fear and strangeness unknit what had been mended and she would evaporate, leaving this alien shell behind. She envied Bobbie her beauty, made all the worse by the fact that Bobbie was utterly unaware of the power of her smile and the hold those feline eyes could have over a man. Or a woman. And Amos was blind to it, or rather, Bobbie had come in through a side door, the one marked for family, and Amos had taken her as a sister instead.   Clarissa wondered how she would fit into the world in her new form. Would anyone ever accept her that way, as family? Lovers were clearly out of the question, and while there was a kind of relief in that, that she would never again be regarded as just a pair of boobs with a life support system, a tiny, scandalous part of her mind was saddened at the fact. Not at being objectified, but at the loss of that tool, which she had learned to turn to her advantage.   “You all right over there,” Bobbie asked.   “I’m fine,” she lied. “Just thinking about what happened here. Notice how similar all the animals are?”   “Ya’ think?” asked Amos, suspiciously.   “I do, actually,” she replied. “I mean, the same is true on Earth, with vertebrates, like us. We all have a similar body plan, but there are others too. Insects, mollusks, they have bodies that are very different to ours. Nothing like that here. Just caterpillars. Big ones, small ones, fat ones, long ones, bit still - caterpillars. And the trees are all oddly similar too.”   Bobbie shrugged. A Martian like her was likely not to notice. Under the domes on the red planet, life was mostly homo sapiens and their carefully tended plants and fungi. A lack of variation probably looked perfectly normal to her.   “You sure it ain’t the whole Clarissa Mao, Alien Robot Extraordinaire thing?” Amos asked through a mouthful of nutrient bar, far more on point than Clarissa was ready to hear.   “Said the only alpha in living memory to graduate to an adult alpha/omega pair-bond,” she quipped back. He laughed softly through his nose as he ate.   They certainly made for an odd little squad, to be sure. Clarissa the robot, Amos the alpha, and Bobbie the armored Marine. Maybe she wasn’t as alone and isolated as she felt. Maybe she was right where she needed to be, with the other oddballs and misfits. Clarissa imagined that Julie would have been right at home here. She would have loved it, reveling in their joint failure to conform. Her smile would have been huge, her eyes as bright as the stars overhead. She would have known what to say, how to spin the story so that it was romantic, these heroes at the ass-end of the galaxy on a ride-or-die mission. In the past, Clarissa would have been snide and dismissed Julie’s antics. Today, she felt like she understood the appeal. She missed Julie terribly. The way the diagnostician had plucked her memories and clothed itself in her voice, her tone, and manner, it had had been comforting at first, but later it only drove home the fact that Julie was gone, uploaded into the ring at the edge of the solar system. Her sister had become a subroutine.   “Can we talk about the op for a minute,” she asked, desperate to get out of her own silver head.   Bobbie’s face dropped for a split second because they’d gone over it a dozen times, but she recovered quickly and gave the broad strokes.   “We assume they saw us come down. We assume they know we’re coming and how many we are. We assume they expect us to bring the worst. We assume they will make every attempt at subterfuge. They’ll send some kind of decoy to distract and misguide us,” she repeated for the umpteenth time.   Clarissa started at the end and picked each piece apart.   “What do we do with the decoy?” she asked.   “We don’t kill him or her. We pretend that we’re fooled. We gently milk the decoy for information,” said Bobbie. “Your high-end diplomatic skills will come in handy.”   “And if they attack us?” she asked.   “We know where the Pella is now. We know her position, aim, and reach. Torpedoes are useless here on the ground - they’re made to follow the heat signature of a ship or another missile - so it will be the PDC’s, which is why we’re coming in through this pain-in-the-ass long route. She’s canted slightly uphill, nose-first, and this route keeps that hill between the ship and us.” Bobbie had programmed a near-suicidal decent for the two ships, knowing that she herself was the physical weak link and if she could handle it, then so could they. Screaming past the Pella faster than she could ever get a target-lock from the ground where overrides would have to be implemented to even get her to fire. She’d had Clarissa SLAR the Pella as they went by, the radar emitting a beam that would have fried flesh and boiled blood aboard the small Belter ship. Good thing Clarissa was neither flesh nor blood these days. The image had been clear enough to see the ship, like a great whale beached against a hill, her nose pointed slightly up, the rest of her hull flat to the ground.   Now came the part that Clarissa hated.   “There’s a stretch as we approach the settlement where the hill no longer gives us cover from the ship. The settlement is sufficiently out of the line of fire that if they want to hit us with the PDC’s, that’ll be the time. When we make it past there…” Each time Bobbie reviewed the plan she said when not if. “… Then it’s small arms fire we have to watch out for.”   “And when we’re in the settlement?” Clarissa prompted.   “Answer’s still the same, Claire,” Bobbie replied. “That part depends on what we find. I’m more than happy to ventilate Marco and his crew with as much lead as you like, but the other settlers are off-limits. I don’t care what’s going on now. I don’t care if they’re helping Marco. They’re doing it so that he doesn’t kill them. They have to be spared at all costs.”   “Where was this charity on the satellite with Martha?” Clarissa asked.   “It was there, but you were off getting your upgrade,” she replied. “The only person who I laid a hand on was Martha. She was actively in the way. Everyone else got a bed and some entertainment for their troubles. Are you having doubts, Claire?”   Was she? Yes, of course she was, but not the ones Bobbie implied. Clarissa was sure that once the threat of the Pella was circumvented, she could walk straight into the settlement and grab the kid, shoving aside anyone who got in her way. It sounded easy enough, but she also knew that her appearance would set off a panic that would likely complicate matters. If they all scattered rather than coalescing to face the threat, they would never find Filip out in the purple and brown landscape. It will have all been for nothing.   “That’s them,” said Amos. “What about us?”   “You’re the most vulnerable, Amos. But you’re also the most likely to slip into the settlement and find Filip without calling attention to yourself. Clarissa and I will draw the main fire and give you time to get in and out. If the kid fights, knock him out. A skinny belter should be nothing to carry for you.”   “What about the Pella?” Amos asked.   Bobby pointed to the backpacks they’d shrugged off. “We have seven heavy concussion grenades designed for vacuum detonation. In the atmosphere, their blast will be almost half again as powerful since the air will propagate the shock wave.”   Bobby looked at Clarissa without saying anything.   “And those are mine,” Clarissa acknowledged.   Once the boy was secure, she would take the grenades to the Pella as fast as her new legs could plow across the earth. She would drop them into the body of the ship, like some insane tarantula wasp laying deadly eggs, and then get the fuck out of there as fast as her body would allow. Bobbie would detonate them once she reported delivery of the ordinance.   If Clarissa could smile, she would have at the way Bobbie’s Marine lingo had rubbed off on her. There was something wickedly attractive in its precision and pragmatic lack of sentimentality. Delivery of ordinance and remote detonation were endearingly detached ways to say fuck some shit up beyond all mother-fucking recognition.   “Yep, those are yours,” Bobbie confirmed. “With the Pella out of the way, it’s just a bunch of farmers and maybe a few remaining members of Marco’s crew. I’ll take care of the latter. You haul ass back to the ships, pick up Amos and Filip, and I’ll make it back to the other ship.”   “All three of us in that little ship, huh?” Amos dropped into their conversation.   “How big can he be?” Bobbie asked. “He’s a Belter. Just fold him up and tuck him in. It’s just to pick you up and bring you back to the other ship. A few minutes at most.”   “I mean, we're not entering or leaving orbit, so if you don’t break the sound barrier, I should be able to ride outboard again for the duration,” Clarissa added. Bobby gave a see, there you go expression.   That was the plan. It sounded solid enough for a half-assed plan, and it left Clarissa nervous. Her mind was trained to look for every misstep, every poorly delivered compliment, every amateur insult, every bruised delicate ego, which men took such pains to curate. That had been her life in her father’s shadow. In stark contrast, Bobbie inhabited a world where reactions were to be disdained. The reaction was a step too late, it was for the enemy to enact. That’s what Bobbie had said to her in an earlier break. For Bobbie, only action existed. She initiated, she began, she made others react. She would not take the role of reaction if she could help it.   Clarissa’s father would have likely assassinated someone like Bobbie. Julie would have built a church to worship her.   Clarissa hoped that Bobbie’s assurance was well-founded. It was a one chance deal.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Mika was as starstruck as a Belter could be.

There were many pirate ships in space, many ships with storied pasts and famous folk at the helm, but none like the Rocinante. She was a temple, a shrine to a rebel family that counted every kind of person, Earther, Martian, and Belter, in her crew. Only these were no statues, no cold representations. Here lived the souls that had given rise to the legends.

And he was among them, a skinny Belter kid who had never been more than no one.

It was quiet on the ship since the rescue party had gone to the surface. Drummer had asked him to stay out of the way and it had been Dr. Acharya who had saved the moment when Drummer had chosen her bunk and Mika had assumed that he would share the space with her, taking the upper bunk in the tiny room. A pinched expression had passed over her face and the doctor asked Mika to share his space. The thrill of joining the crew softened the sting of being separated from the person who had been his savior until now. Drummer was tight and severe, but she was also direct and she said what she meant and meant what she said. There was security to be drawn from that and Mika was not ready to let that go completely.

And despite the churn of emotions, still, the ship fascinated him.

Anyone born to a life on the float acquired a natural aesthetic sense of ships. Sometimes it was in the cleverness of Belter repurposing and the frugality of making everything serve more than one purpose. Sometimes it was in the sheer novelty of how three-dimensional spaces were arranged in a ship that spoke of the owner’s mind. And sometimes, as in the case of the Rocinante, it was made of intimidating precision and single-mindedness. The Rocinante wasn’t a display of Belter ingenuity; she was a monument to Martian determination and discipline. He’d already explored the ship’s interior from one end to the other. She was little, square, stout, and beautiful. And she was amazingly clean. Not just clean of grime and dirt and the inevitable signs of human habitation, but also in her layout. Everything was hidden behind smooth panels with micron-fine joins. It had all come from one source, one design aesthetic, none of the eclectic hodgepodge of Belter ships. She looked as if she’d been milled from a single solid blank of titanium.

And Mika was torn.

How could he not be starstruck? How could he sit in the same galley as Naomi Nagata and James Holden and not feel the massive weight of their presence, their respective stories? How could he ever make peace with the part of his mind that was so scandalized that he worshiped these people who had been no friends of the OPA, who brazenly flew their stolen Martian corvette through the vacuum, who were suspect to both Inners and Belters alike. Even to a pirate, they were pirates. As a Belter, their company, and worse, the desire for that company, was problematic.

But those were the legends, the myths that had sprung up and evolved around these people and this ship with startling speed. The reality was something altogether different and intimidating in its own unexpected way. They say that you should never meet your heroes and Mika now understood why. A hero is not a person. A hero is the halo of stories that orbit around that person, much bigger than they could ever be.

He had pictured Naomi Nagata as a wild pirate queen in his mind. She had ridden with crews of the worst ilk, stealing, pillaging, her crystalline laughter filling the ether like solar wind, her famous beauty eclipsing the stars. In truth, she was small and quiet and fiercely intense, her eyes seeing everything. She had as much gravity as a small planet, and though she looked like a broken toy, the beauty he had imagined was very much there.

Amos Burton, about whom Mika had known the least, was nonetheless utterly unlike the vague image Mika had held. When he had heard people speak of him, it had been in disparaging tones of the brutish mechanic who was Naomi’s brainless bodyguard. The man Mika had seen making a meticulous inventory of weapons and supplies had been anything but brainless. Much like Naomi, he was a zone of silence, and he was bigger than any man Mika had ever encountered, a wall of shoulders, back, and arms that looked like they could bend steel. He’d spoken rarely, but when he did, everyone had listened.

Dr. Acharya was unknown to him, not part of the legends, but he seemed a kindly man, aged permanently into the role of pampa, no longer koyo. After giving Mika a quick once-over, Mika told him the alien hospital had already done as much. Dr. Acharya had not replied to that.

Drummer was Drummer, and always would be. She was a known quantity.

And then there was James Holden. Captains who crewed ships filled with hooligans and cutthroats were dangerous people carefully curating their cults of personality. They did not just find themselves in questionable company; they collected and fertilized it with care. They romanticized themselves into gods of their own making. James Holden did none of that. Mika rarely saw him, given that he remained with Kavish in the medical bay, which Dr. Acharya had maintained off limits, the heavy bulkhead door closed. When Mika did see him, he wasn’t the handsome young man he had seen on the vids and screens. He wasn’t the monster the OPA had conjured or the maniac the Inners had sold. He was disheveled and puffy and in dire need of a shave. He would smile at Mika, the kind of smile that says I see you and I’ll talk to you when I’m ready, but not now.

Amos Burton may have been the biggest man Mika ever met, but James Holden was the most burdened. You could practically see a cloud of ghosts hovering around him, passing through him.

Assuming all went to plan, it would be at least a couple of days before they heard anything from the rescue party and Mika was a young man with nothing to do but observe. His life had never been one made out of the expectations of others, save for those brief, sweaty transactions where men lied to themselves, reaffirming their fictional prowess by means of his slight body.

Mike floated silently through the ship while the rest busied themselves.

Naomi was strapped into a chair on the bridge when he popped his head through the opening. Her eyes were unfocused, turned inward, her hands danced over the control panels under their own power and volition. Mika sniffed in a breath loudly enough for her to hear and turn her head.

“You don’t have to hide,” she said.

“Don’t want to bother you,” he replied sheepishly.

She looked down at him from her chair. The soft halo of hair backlit around her head darkened her features, made her eyes into shadows.

“You need something to do?” she asked.

He did. He very much wanted something to do, something that felt important. A passenger is not part of the crew and right now he still felt like a passenger.

“Ya,” he said.

She waved him up to where she sat. A jolt of excitement raced through him, from his stomach to his chest and out into his skin as goosebumps. Gently propelling himself up through the opening, he took the chair to which she had pointed with her chin and lips. It was an unusual gesture and he had to consciously check himself from repeating it to see how it would feel to imitate someone so famous.

“Strap in,” she said. “Always strap in.”

He knew, but he was too in awe to take offense. I worked with Naomi Nagata was already being carefully tucked away for future deployment. He imagined how devastating such a statement would be to throw down on the table. What could anyone possibly say to top that?

She worked her arcane magic on the control panels and with a swipe of the finger passed something to the panel in front of him. It lit up and displayed information. Here was his job. Sweat broke out across his back with a sharp prickle.

“See the blue light?” she asked. “Oxygen level in the medical bay. See something wrong?”

He looked and was bewildered by the information. He could read most of it, but that didn’t mean it made sense to him.

“Compare the blue light up top to the smaller one at the bottom, on the left. What do you see?” she asked.

“Big one less than small one,” he said without an ounce of confidence.

“Yes, by three percent. It should be the same as the small light. See the bar under the bigger light? Push it up three marks,” she said.

She pretended not to watch, but he felt the attention from the corner of her eye. He touched the smooth surface of the panel and the bar under his finger glowed green. Up three marks until it was the same as the smaller light. He looked to her for assurance.

“Good. James and the baby use more oxygen than the system will currently calculate. It’s even worse when Amos is in there with them. Until Dr. Acharya lifts the quarantine on the medical bay, we have to check it regularly.”

“Not alone, by…by…?” He didn’t have the words.

“No. Not by itself. It fluctuates too much and excess oxygen is a different kind of dangerous. It has to be done manually for now. It can be reprogrammed, but it would mean taking the core offline. That’s not something we can afford to do until there’s less on our plate,” she explained.

Naomi eyed him as though she were taking a laser scan. Something happened and her eyes unfocused again, the way she’d been when he entered the bridge.

“How old are you, Mika,” she asked.

He shrugged. He wasn’t exactly sure. “Fifteen, sixteen,” he said.

“Same as my son,” she whispered.

Her son, Filip, on the planet, the goal of the rescue mission. Mika was suddenly apprehensive. He’d seen how fragile Naomi became when Filip was mentioned, how she thinned out into transparency. He knew better than to mention Filip, but it had been her, and he was at a loss and there was nowhere else to take the conversation.

“Maybe we will be friends,” he said, unsure why that had occurred to him.

“Maybe not,” she said. “He’s very angry, Mika. If you meet him… When you meet him, his anger isn’t about you. It’s about me.”

That admission demanded something in return, something that would ease her mind.

“When I meet Alex, he very sad. He drink roum and say about his wife and boy. Alex very, very sad, you know? I stay with him and listen.” Mika paused, unsure where to go with his train of thought. Then it occurred to him. “You know my job on Medina is pashang… sex… no?”

She nodded and her eyes became guarded.

“Sometimes people no want pashang. Pay only to listen, to hear.” So many had been like that. The saddest part of being a sex-worker was coming to know how empty and hollow people often were.

She nodded again in acknowledgment.

“Maybe Filip just need listen. I good at listening.”

“Yes, you are, aren’t you,” she said. Her face changed. “Your English gets better every time I hear you. I think maybe you are very good at listening.”

“Have to be,” Mika replied. “People say many lies. Have to listen under the lies.”

Her head pulled back minutely. “Under the lies. That’s a good way to describe it, Mika.”

He could hear his heartbeat in his ears at being complimented. Drummer had been right. If he could communicate better, he had more to offer, and more to offer meant security and safety. At least for now.

Maybe Filip just needed a friend, someone to show him that what he had discarded was someone else’s dream come true.

But Filip Inaros was part of a very different story than the one taking place inside the Rocinante. Filip was part of the hard-line, the extremists. He’d known many others like him, striking the toughest poses, picking fights just to float around with a black eye, a scar, maybe even a cast. Showing that you could take a beating well was almost as important to them as showing that you could serve the beating. Their lives were lived right up against the outer hull, seeking the blistering cold of the vacuum as their badge of honor. The cold made them cold. The rock and ice and steel of ship and station made them hard as frozen carbon dioxide. They spat in the faces of people like Mika who sought a different kind of safety in sex work. Ironic, given that many of them had started out just like Mika, with their asses in the air, their legs spread wide.

“Why you think Filip not be my friend?” he asked.

“Well, you’re as Belter as they come, Mika. He’ll like that.” She turned back to her panels. “I can’t really tell you much. I don’t know him very well. He’s been with his father for most of his life.”

“Marco,” Mika said.

Her brows lifted in silent acknowledgment.

“Is there more jobs?” Mika asked when he felt her slipping back into herself.

“There’s no end of jobs, Mika. This ship was meant for close to thirty people on her crew. We’re not doing stem to stern checks like we should and I can’t remember the last time she got a deep clean.”

She scanned his face and saw the change at the mention of cleaning.

“Checks then, yes?”

The pressure dropped in his face and she must have seen because she smirked at him. She thumbed a button on the main panel.

“Alex, I know its early, but any chance you can come and relieve me now? I want to work Mika into the maintenance routine and it’s going to take a bit to show him everything.”

It was Drummer’s voice that came back through the speaker. “Belay that, Alex. I got it.”

“On the Rocinante, checks always start at the stern,” Naomi said. “There's no duty officer aft because we don't have enough people for that, so, from the stern to the bridge and then report to whoever has the command. Bobbie and Alex were trained under MCRN standards and those are the standards we try our best to keep.”

“Yes, the Rocinante, the benchmark of Martian ideals,” came Drummer’s voice with scathing dryness as she slipped through into the bridge. “To gonya work?” She asked Mika directly.

“Soyá,” he replied with a smirk.

Naomi thanked Drummer who took the vacant seat and nodded for him to follow Naomi as she disappeared through the entry. They corkscrewed down from level to level until arriving at engineering. She pulled a thick rectangle of white plastic out from a slot.

“Always starting at the slot for the clipboard, to your right. See?” She showed him how the diagram matched the wall. Everywhere shaded in red meant there was something to count, everywhere there was green there was a light or gauge to be checked

Mika flushed with relief that the diagram was simple and obvious.

“Wipe the whole board clean to start. Never do it one by one. If you do it that way and you get distracted, then you won’t know where you stopped and you’ll have to start over, understand?” She pulled a small cloth from the same slot that had produced the board and wiped it clean. A pen attached to the top of the board with a strong magnet. She popped it off and handed both to him.

He froze. The pen frightened him because his letters were still broken, crooked things so unlike the crisp, square lines of Drummer’s hand.

Her eyes softened and she placed a hand on his arm. “It’s just numbers, sweetie, and the other boards for the other decks are just like this one. She’s a warship and they designed these checks to be made during combat, so they’re simple.”

This deck held mostly filters to count. Mika recognized the ones he’d helped Alex acquire. There were many lights and gauges to check.

“You’ll do it every two hours, so it’s easy to get lazy. Don’t be lazy, Mika. Lives depend on it, okay?” she punctuated.

He acknowledged the instructions with as much seriousness as he could muster. Completing the circle around the deck, he returned the board to Naomi. She nodded her approval and told him to sign it. Mika scrawled his name in halting letters.

The Rocinante’s cargo hold led directly off of engineering. Less a deck and more of a sidelong room. Each container had its own white area on the outside to mark off its contents. Food, other consumables (so much coffee!), and munitions were the primary contents. She showed him how to slide each tray out or up as the case may be. She impressed upon him the need to count everything, no matter that the container had yet to ever be used.

From engineering, they rose up one deck to the machine shop. Amos called it the repair bay. Naomi explained that this was Amos’ realm and that he could tick off exactly how many nuts, bolts, and washers were in each and every drawer. This was the most time-consuming deck for checks.

“If Amos is here, he’ll give you the check. He’d rather do it himself if possible," she said. It took well over an hour to check everything.

“Now you know why we’re happy to have someone new to take up a little of the slack in routine maintenance. It has to be done, Mika. Always."

The crew deck did not require any counting, but like the other decks, there were panels in each area indicating oxygen, carbon dioxide, air pressure, and airflow. Since this is where the crew slept, every single filter in current use was to be checked for integrity and blockage. They all looked clean and in good order. Alex lay in his bunk and quietly made space for them to check his area. When they were done, a two-fingered salute bid them goodbye.

In the canteen (they called it a galley), he learned to check the water lines and mist the plants in their circular growth pods. She made him a bulb of tea for which he was grateful.

The medical bay was next. The head and washroom were on this deck as well. They started there, which felt exactly like they were avoiding the medical area proper. Finished with that, Naomi reluctantly tapped a knuckle to the hatch. It unlocked and Dr. Acharya’s head popped through.

“Ah, checks. Mika?” He looked Mika over once. “I have it here.” Dr. Acharya disappeared then returned with the board marked in fastidiously neat, small writing.

“Make sure the time the doctor did the last check is within the last hour. He’s very careful with the medical bay, so you can trust his count, but sign next to his name so that the next person knows you didn’t just skip this level,” Naomi softly instructed.

As Mika was writing, Holden spoke from inside.

“Naomi?” he asked.

Her eyes closed for a moment, she breathed in deep and said, “Yes.”

“Let her in, Ted,” James said.

“The boy is with her,” Dr. Acharya replied over his shoulder.

There was silence for a few seconds, then, “He can come in too. If Naomi is showing him how to do checks, then he needs to know all of it.”

Naomi looked down and minutely nodded for him to go in first. Dr. Acharya gave him a gentle smile that spoke of understanding and Mika was thankful to know he wasn’t the only one who felt the discomfort.

Holden reclined in the medical chair, a tiny bundle held to his chest.