“Truer words were never spoken, boss,” Amos said.

They finished eating and sat in companionable silence for several minutes. Amos pulled beers out of the small refrigerator and handed them around. Alex picked his teeth with his pinky fingernail. Naomi went back to her repair projections.

“So,” she said after a few minutes poring over the numbers, “the good news is that even if the UN and the OPA decide that we’re responsible for our own repair bills, we’ll be able to cover them with just what we have in the ship’s emergency fund.”

“Lots of work flyin’ colonists out through the rings,” Alex said. “When we’re flyin’ again.”

“Yeah, because we can stuff so much compost in our tiny cargo hold,” Amos said with a snort. “Plus, broke-as-hell-and-desperate is maybe not the customer base we should be chasing.”

“Let’s face it,” Holden said, “if things keep going the way they are, finding work for a private warship may get pretty tough.”

Amos laughed. “Let me get a preemptive I-told-you-so in here. Since when that turns out not to be true, like it always does, I might not be there to say it.”

Chapter Two: Alex

The thing Alex Kamal liked most about the long haul was how it changed the experience of time. The weeks – sometimes months – spent on the burn were like stepping out of history into some small, separate universe. Everything narrowed down to the ship and the people in it. For long stretches, there would be nothing but the basic maintenance work to do, and so life lost all its urgency. Everything was working according to the plan, and the plan was for nothing critical to happen. Traveling through the vacuum of space gave him an irrational sense of peace and well-being. It was why he could do the job.

He’d known other people, usually young men and women, whose experience was different. Back when he’d been in the Navy there had been a pilot who’d done a lot of work in the inner planets, running between Earth, Luna, and Mars. He’d transferred in for a trip out to the Jovian moons under Alex. Just about the time an inner planet run would have ended, the young man started falling apart: getting angry over trivial slights, eating too much or not at all, passing restlessly through the ship from command center to engine room and back again like a tiger pacing its cage. By the time they’d reached Ganymede, the ship’s doctor and Alex agreed to start putting sedatives in the guy’s food just to keep things from getting out of hand. At the end of the mission, Alex had recommended the pilot never be assigned a long run again. Some kinds of pilots couldn’t be trained as much as tested for.

Not that there weren’t stresses and worries that he carried with him. Ever since the death of the Canterbury, Alex had carried a certain amount of baseline anxiety. With just the four of them, the Rocinante was structurally undercrewed. Amos and Holden were two strong masculine personalities that, if they ever locked horns, could blow the crew dynamic apart. The captain and the XO were lovers, and if they ever broke up, it would mean the end of more than just the job. It was the same sort of thing he’d always worried about, whatever crew he was with. With the Roci, it had been the same worries for years now without any of them ever being how it went off the rails, and that in itself was a kind of stability. As it was, Alex always felt relieved to get to the end of a run and he always felt relieved to start the next one. Or if not always, at least usually.