Thirty sorties. Two and a half hours just of time spent in vacuum. That didn’t count the minutes refreshing the air in her suit or planning out the next run. Maybe five hours total since she’d started this. She was exhausted. She felt it in her muscles and the pain in her joints. She hadn’t eaten – couldn’t eat. She was thirsty with the first strains of a dehydration headache coming on. There was no reason to think she would survive this. So she was surprised to notice that she was happy. Not the powerful, irrational, and dangerous joy of a euphoric attack, but a kind of pleasure and release all the same.

At first, she thought it was because there wasn’t anyone there with her, guarding her, judging her. And that, she decided, was part of it. But more than that, she was simply doing what needed to be done without having to concern herself about what anyone else thought. Even Jim. And wasn’t that odd? She wanted nothing in the world more than for Jim to be there – followed by Amos and Alex and a good meal and a bed at a humane gravity – but there was a part of her that was also expanding into the silence of simply being herself and utterly alone. There were no dark thoughts, no guilt, no self-doubt tapping at the back of her mind. Either she was too tired for that, or something else had happened to her while she’d been paying attention to other things.

This was the difference, she thought, between solitude and isolation. And now she knew something about herself she hadn’t known before. It was an unexpected victory, and all the better for that.

She started getting ready for the thirty-first sortie.

She had almost a minute, because she’d figured out that coming up the comm array power supply took a lot longer than it did going back down. It was the sort of thing she’d have realized much more quickly if her mind hadn’t been a little on the compromised side.

The comm system was held in place by more than epoxy. Long strips of metal tape lashed the transmitter in place, the welds still bright as if they’d been made yesterday. Three sorties ago – number forty-four – she’d thought there might be a diagnostic handset. Not that she could speak into it, but she might have been able to tap out a message. But despite the fact that handsets like that were standard and required, there wasn’t one.

It had taken her some time to put together a backup plan.

For hours, the looped message had played in her ear, whispering on the back of residual charge. “This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. If you get this message, please retransmit. Tell James Holden I am in distress. Comm is not responding. I have no nav control. Please retransmit…”