Babylon's Ashes

Holden’s jaw shifted just a little. It wasn’t much. Probably wouldn’t even have lost him a hand of poker, except Amos had known when to look for it. So that was something to remember. He took another spoonful of his soup.

“Those torpedoes that Bobbie fired off at the end,” he said. “One of ’em scored a direct hit.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Okay.”

“I didn’t check.”

“It hit,” Amos said. “But it didn’t go off. A dud is a serious problem. So I started looking at why it failed.”

“I disarmed them,” Holden said.

Amos put down his bowl, abandoned his spoon in it. The display Holden and Bobbie had been looking over shifted, trying to guess what Holden wanted to be shown.

“But that was the righteous thing to do,” Amos said. He didn’t make it a question, exactly. Just a statement that Holden could agree with or not. He didn’t want it to sound like anything was riding on it. Holden ran his hands through his hair. He looked like he was seeing something that wasn’t in the room. Amos didn’t know what it was.

“He showed me her kid,” Holden said. “Marco? He showed me Naomi’s son. Showed me that he was on the ship right then. Right there. And… I don’t know. He looks like her. Not like her like her, but family resemblance. In the moment, I couldn’t take that away from her. I couldn’t kill him.”

“I get that. She’s one of us. We take care of us,” Amos said. “I’m only asking because those are the bad guys we’re planning to go up against again. If we’re not willing to win the fight, I’m not sure what we’re doing in the cage.”

Holden nodded, swallowed. The display gave up and shut down, leaving the galley just a little bit darker. “That was before we got here.”

“Yeah,” Amos said carefully. “Who your tribe is got kind of weird all of a sudden. If you’re the new Fred Johnson, that’s going to change what it means when you decide not to blow people up.”

“It is,” Holden said. The distress in his expression was like the growl of a power coupler starting to fail. “I don’t know that I’d do it differently if we were back there, in that same moment. I don’t regret what I did. But I know next time can’t be like that.”

“Naomi should probably be good with that too.”

“I was planning to talk to her about it,” Holden said. “I may have been putting it off.”

“So I gotta ask this,” Amos said.

“Shoot.”

“Are you the right guy for this job?”

“No,” Holden said. “But I’m the guy who got it. So I’m going to do it.”

Amos waited for a few moments, seeing how that answer sat with him.

“Okay,” he said, and stood up. The soup had gotten cold enough to have a little film forming on the top. He dropped it and the spoon into the recycler. “Glad we got that cleared up. Anything me and Peaches need to put on the schedule? Feeling like we should maybe give Bobbie’s stuff the once-over.”

“Pretty sure she’s already done that a few hundred times,” Holden said, forcing a smile.

“Probably true,” Amos said. “Well, all right, then.”

He started out the door. Holden’s voice stopped him. “Thank you.”

He looked back. Holden looked like he was hunched, protecting something. Or like someone had kicked him in the chest. Funny how everyone else’s image of the guy got bigger and it made the real one seem small. Like there was only so much food to share between the two of them. “Sure,” he said, not certain what he was being thanked for, but pretty solid this was a good answer. “And hey. If you want, I can change the permissions so that you can’t disarm the torpedoes next time. If taking it out of your hands would help.”

“No,” Holden said. “My hands are fine.”

“Cool, then.” He headed out.

In the machine shop, Peaches was putting away her tools and running the closing sequences for her diagnostics. “Tested the new seals,” she said.

“They good?”

“Within tolerance,” she said, which was as close as she was probably ever going to get to saying they were good. “I’ll check them again tomorrow when the polymerization’s totally done.”

“Okay.”

The system chirped. She checked the readout, okayed it, and closed the display. “You heading out to the station?”

“Nope,” Amos said. Now that he bothered to notice, his body was feeling heavy and slow. Like coming out of a hot bath he’d stayed in a little too long. He wondered if Maddie was awake yet. If he got there quick enough, maybe he could finish up his night there. Except no. She’d be going on shift again about the time he was nodding off, and then it wouldn’t be clear if he’d come back to screw again, and that’d just be awkward. Unless… He considered intellectually whether he wanted to screw again, then shook his head. “Nah, I’m just coming in. Going to grab some sack time now.”

Peaches cocked her head. “You came back early?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “But I can now.”

Chapter Thirty-Six: Filip