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“The Roci being in dry dock for so long I could go to Mars, see her Apologize”
“And then ditch her again in order to get back before the ship drive goes back online?”
Alex looked down into his coffee “Leave things in a better place”
Ao”
A flood of objections crowded his mind The four of the the group now felt like bad luck The repair crew on Tycho e to the ship that he wouldn’t know about until it becaback If the universe had proved anything in these last few years, it was that nothing was certain
The chime of a hand terminal saved him Amos fished the device out of his pocket, looked at it, tapped the screen, and scowled “I’ to need a little privacy now”
“Sure,” Alex said “Not a problem”
Outside their suite, Tycho Station stretched in long gentle curves It was one of the croels of the Outer Planets Alliance Ceres was larger, and Medina Station held the weird null-zone between rings, but Tycho Station hat the OPA had taken pride in fro ship than any actual craft that she served, weren’t functional The station’s beauty was a boast Here are the minds that spun up Eros and Ceres; here is the shipyard that built the largest vessel in the history of huo, had braved the abyss beyond Mars for the first tih to make this
Alexpromenade The people who passed hier than Earth standard, their heads wider Alex hiravity, but even he didn’t quite ave
Plants grew in the eainst the spin gravity as they would have against the norh the halls, ditching school the way he had back in Londres Nova He drank his coffee and tried to cultivate the peace of being on the burn Tycho Station was just as artificial as the Roci The vacuu But the calm wouldn’t come Tycho Station wasn’t his ship, wasn’t his ho past hih thespectacle of the shipyards weren’t his faht of all this If she could have come to a place that saw the beauty in it the way he hadn’t been able to with the life she’d wanted on Mars
When he hit the botto with the flow of foot traffic,the suistic catastrophe that was the Belter argot He didn’t think too ot there
The Roci lay half-dressed in the vacuu fresh in the work lights, she looked small The scars of their adventures had, for the one now, and only the deeper injuries remained He couldn’t see them from here, but he knehat they were He’d been on the Rocinante as long as he’d been on any ship in his career, and he loved her better than any of them Even than his first
“I’ll be back,” he said to the ship, and as if in answer, a welding rig lit up at the curve of her drive cone, brighter for a moment than the unshielded sun in a Martian sky
The suite Naomi and Holden shared was just down the corridor from the one where he and A and the nuht Alex let hi on
“— if you think it’s called for,” Nao from the suite’sthat you cleaned the last of that out I mean, Miller hasn’t been back, has he?”