Amos’ brow lowered and his mouth rose, squeezing his face into something smaller and thoughtful.

“You want to hook back up with your ex?”

“No, I really don’t.”

“You horny?”

“No, they’re not sex dreams.”

“You’re on your own, then. That’s all I got.”

“It started back there,” Alex said, meaning on the other side of the rings, orbiting above New Terra. “She came up in conversation, and ever since then… I failed her.”

“Yup.”

“She spent years waiting on me, and I just wasn’t the man I wanted to be.”

“Nope. You want some coffee?”

“I really do,” Alex said.

Amos poured a cup for him. The mechanic didn’t add sugar, but knew to leave a third of the cup for cream. One of the little intimacies of crew life.

“I don’t like how I left things with her,” Alex said. It was a simple statement, and not revelation, but it had the weight of a confession.

“Nope,” Amos agreed.

“There’s a part of me that thinks this is a chance.”

“This?”

“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.”

Amos’ shrug was massive. “So go.”

A flood of objections crowded his mind. The four of them hadn’t been apart since they’d become a crew, and splitting the group now felt like bad luck. The repair crew on Tycho might need him or want him or make some change to the ship that he wouldn’t know about until it became a critical point somewhere down the line. Or worse, leaving might mean never coming back. 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’m going 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 crown jewels of the Outer Planets Alliance. Ceres was larger, and Medina Station held the weird null-zone between rings, but Tycho Station was what the OPA had taken pride in from the start. The wide sweeping lines, more like a sailing 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 humanity. The men and women who, not so many generations ago, had braved the abyss beyond Mars for the first time were smart and powerful enough to make this.

Alex made his way down a long promenade. The people who passed him were Belters, their bodies longer than Earth standard, their heads wider. Alex himself had grown up in the relatively low Martian gravity, but even he didn’t quite match the physiology that a childhood rich in null g gave.