Alex sighed. “Well. Can’t say I didn’t see it coming, but I’m still a little sad now it’s here.”
Naomi’s smile was a ghost, barely there and unmistakable. Bobbie felt something like the beginning of relief loosening the knot in her stomach.
“As far as putting Bobbie in the captain’s chair,” Alex went on, “that’s barely going to be a change. She already bosses me around plenty. So sure. I’m good with that.”
Holden tilted his head the way he did when he was surprised and a little embarrassed, and Naomi put her hand on his shoulder. The unconscious physical grammar of long, intimate years together.
“You saw it coming?” Holden said.
Alex shrugged. “It’s not like you’re all that subtle. You’ve been getting more and more stressed for a while now.”
“Have I been an asshole and just didn’t know?” Holden asked, making it about half a joke.
“We’d have told you,” Amos said. “But there’s this thing for the last couple years, I guess, where you kept looking like you had an itch you didn’t want anybody seeing you scratch.”
“This has been a long damned tour,” Alex said. “If I’d re-upped for another twenty back in the day, I’d be out again by now.”
“Except your navy didn’t last that long,” Amos said.
“I’m just saying a good run’s a good run. I love you two, and I’m going to miss the hell out of you, but if it’s time for something new, then it is.”
Naomi’s smile grew less ambiguous. Holden rocked back a few centimeters on the bench. In her imagination, Bobbie’s best scenarios had involved weeping and hugs. The worst, anger and recriminations. This felt like relief only slightly colored by sorrow. It felt … right.
She cleared her throat. “When we get back to Medina, I’m looking to put out a call for some new hands. So, no rush, but I’m going to need to know if I’m filling more than two couches.”
Alex chuckled. “Not mine. The one thing I think my life experience has been unambiguous about is whether I’m good outside a pilot’s station. I’m here as long as you’ll have me.”
Bobbie relaxed another notch. “Good.” She shifted toward Amos.
He shrugged. “All my stuff’s here.”
“All right. Clarissa?” Claire was looking down. Her face empty and paler than usual. She put her hands on the table, palms down like she was pressing it back into place. Like there was something that could be put back. Her smile was forced, but she nodded. She would stay.
“Well,” Holden said. “Um. All right, then. That’s … I mean, I guess that’s it. Unless someone else has something they wanted to bring up?”
“Kind of a hard act to follow,” Naomi said.
“Well, yes,” Holden said, “but I mean—”
“How about this,” Alex said, standing up. “I’m going back to my cabin and getting the Scotch I’ve been saving for a special occasion. Let’s all have a toast to Holden and Nagata. Best damn command staff a ship could hope for.”
Holden’s expression shifted and his eyes took on a shine of tears, but he was grinning. “I won’t say no,” he said, then stood.
Alex went in for the hug, and then Naomi put her long arms around them both. Bobbie looked over at Amos and pointed a thumb at the knot of three.
Officially, nothing changed after that. The long float before the deceleration burn toward the gate and Medina Station beyond it went the way they’d planned it. Houston, in his cell, was sullen and uncomfortable but secured. Their duties and schedules, habits and customs, all had the same shape. The only thing that had altered at all was what they meant. This had become their last run together. Bobbie felt like something in her body had shifted.
James Holden had been a strange person from the start. Before she’d ever known him, he’d been the man who’d slandered Mars. Then the one who saved it. To judge from what the greater chunk of humanity thought of him, he was an opportunistic narcissist or a hero of free speech, a tool of the OPA or the UN or a loose cannon answerable to no one. She’d seen him that way too, more than she’d known, when she took her place on the
