Amos went on about everything that had happened while he was down the well, and Alex listened with half his attention. The details of the story would be grist for a hundred conversations once they were back in the ship and going somewhere. It didn’t matter that he get all of it now, and the familiar cadences of Amos’ voice were like hearing a song he liked and hadn’t listened to in a long time.

At the dock, Amos looked up and down the halls until he saw someone he knew sitting on a plastic storage crate. The crate was blue with white curls of scrapes along the side like a painting of waves. The woman was thickly built with black cornrows, dark brown skin, and an arm in a cast.

“Hey, Butch,” Amos said.

“Big man,” the woman said. She didn’t acknowledge Alex at all. “This is this.”

“Thanks, then.”

The woman nodded and walked off, her low-g shuffle a little stiffer than the people around her. Amos rented a loading mech, grabbed the crate, and started for the Roci, Alex trotting along beside him.

“Should I ask what’s in that?” Alex said.

“Probably not,” Amos said. “So anyway, there we are on this island where all the rich people used to be before they fucked off up the well, right? And the ships are pretty much not there…”

The Rocinante had an actual hangar bay complete with atmosphere, not just a space on a pad and a tube to her airlocks. The new outer hull was titanium alloy and ceramic, the polished metal and flat black paint of the hull studded with PDCs and sensor arrays. The maw of the keel-mounted rail gun was like a little surprised o at her bow. In the artificial light of the hangar, she looked less dramatic than she had in the unfiltered light of the sun, but no less beautiful. Her scars were gone now, but it didn’t make the ship seem less herself. Amos drove the mech to the aft airlock and cycled it open without breaking the slow, easy lope of his story. Inside, Amos lowered the crate to the deck, but didn’t turn on the electromagnetic clamps that would hold it there. Instead, he slipped out of the mech and went into the ship itself. Engineering, cargo bay, the machine shop. The stern had always been Amos’ domain.

“So those others,” Amos said. “Johnson’s people? They’re done messing with my shit now, right?”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “She’s ours again. Just ours.”

“Good.” Amos shuffled into the cargo bay.

“So the servants, the maids and chauffeurs and whatever,” Alex said. “They called security and then they just changed sides? Or… I mean how did that work?”

“Well,” Amos said, popping the latches on the crate. “We had an introduction, see?”