Chapter 20: ROCINANTE
"Rocinante."
Alex said the name like he was tasting it, rolling the syllables around his mouth. We'd been running silent for three days, crossing the void between the Donnager's grave and Tycho Station, and the question of what to call our stolen ship had become oddly urgent.
"Don Quixote's horse," he continued. "The noble steed of a crazy old man tilting at windmills. Seemed fitting."
Holden considered it. "I like it. Idealistic. Determined. Slightly insane."
"That's us," Amos agreed. "Slightly insane."
Naomi was already working on the technical side—new transponder codes, falsified registration, the digital sleight-of-hand that would transform a missing Martian corvette into a legitimate independent vessel. She was good at this kind of work, better than I'd expected. Her OPA background included skills she didn't advertise.
"Rocinante it is," I said. "But we should probably avoid situations where anyone runs the registration too carefully. This ship is still on Mars's stolen property list."
"That's why we're going to Tycho." Holden had taken to the captain's chair like he'd been born for it—not with arrogance, but with the particular weight of someone who'd accepted responsibility they hadn't asked for. "Fred Johnson has the resources to make our registration problems go away. Among other things."
The ship hummed around us, systems running smoothly despite the circumstances of our acquisition. The Tachi—Rocinante now—was a beautiful piece of engineering. Fast, well-armed, designed for independent operations far from supply lines. The kind of ship that could disappear into the vastness of space and reappear wherever it was needed.
I found myself appreciating it in ways I hadn't expected. In my old life, ships had been abstractions—CGI models on screens, plot devices that moved characters from one location to another. But living inside one, feeling the subtle vibration of the reactor, hearing the whisper of recycled air through the vents, smelling the particular blend of metal and lubricant and human habitation—that was different. That was real.
This was my home now. These people were my crew.
The roles crystallized over those three days.
Alex flew. He spent most of his time in the pilot's seat even when there was nothing to pilot, running simulations, familiarizing himself with the Rocinante's handling characteristics, becoming one with the ship in a way that seemed almost mystical. Former MCRN pilots were rare outside the military, and his skills were worth more than our entire cargo capacity.
Naomi engineered. She'd taken over the technical systems like she'd been designing them herself, optimizing efficiency, identifying potential problems before they became actual problems, making the Rocinante run better than her Martian designers had intended. Her Belter instincts for conservation and improvisation merged with the ship's military precision into something uniquely effective.
Amos maintained and fought. He moved through the ship like a ghost, appearing wherever something needed fixing, disappearing when the work was done. His hands knew machines the way Alex's knew controls—intimately, instinctively. And when the conversation turned to combat, his eyes got a particular flatness that said he was ready for whatever came.
And me?
"You're not a specialist," Naomi observed on the second day. We were in the galley, sharing a meal that was better than it had any right to be—Alex had found the good rations. "Maintenance tech, but you fight like special forces. Know things you shouldn't know. See angles others miss." She studied me with those careful eyes. "What are you, exactly?"
"Useful," I said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have right now." I met her gaze without flinching. "I've had an unusual life. Learned things in unusual ways. Some of it I can explain, some of it I can't. But everything I know, everything I can do—it's pointed in the same direction you're pointing. Finding out who did this. Making sure they can't do it again."
"And if our directions diverge?"
"Then we'll deal with that when it happens. Until then, I'm crew. I pull my weight. I watch your backs. That's the job."
She was quiet for a long moment. Then she nodded once—not acceptance exactly, but acknowledgment. The investigation would continue, but the open conflict was postponed.
Small victories. I'd take them.
The investigation itself was frustrating.
We had data—flight recorder information from the Tachi, sensor logs from the Donnager's final battle, the scattered pieces of intelligence I'd gathered from the Scopuli. But putting it together into a coherent picture was like assembling a puzzle where half the pieces were missing and the rest were from different boxes.
"The stealth ships," Naomi said, pulling up analysis on the main display. "Their drive signatures don't match anything in the MCRN or UNN databases. Custom builds, probably. Expensive as hell."
"So we're looking for someone with money," Holden said. "That narrows it down to about a million possibilities."
"More than money. Access to advanced shipyards, engineers who can work outside normal channels, and the ability to keep it all secret." I'd been thinking about this constantly, trying to map what I knew from my old life onto what we'd discovered. "That's not a government operation. Too deniable. This is corporate."
"Protogen," Amos said. He'd been quiet through most of the discussion, but he'd been listening. "You mentioned that name before. From the Scopuli files."
"It keeps coming up." I pulled together the fragments I could safely share. "Protogen Corporation. Officially, they're a biotech firm—medical research, pharmaceutical development, the usual. But they have contracts with both Earth and Mars governments, access to classified projects, and enough money to fund almost anything."
"You think they built the stealth ships?"
"I think they're connected to whatever the stealth ships were protecting. The Canterbury, the Scopuli, the Donnager—they're all linked to something Protogen doesn't want found."
"The protomolecule," Naomi said.
"Yes."
She was watching me again, that careful evaluation that never quite stopped. "You know more about this than you're saying."
"I know enough to point us in the right direction. The rest, we'll have to find together."
It wasn't a denial, but it wasn't a confession either. The careful balance I'd been maintaining since I woke up in this universe—revealing enough to be useful, hiding enough to survive.
Naomi seemed to accept it, or at least to file it away for later consideration. "Tycho, then. Fred Johnson has intelligence networks throughout the Belt. If anyone can fill in the gaps, it's him."
"And if he wants something in return?" Holden asked.
"He will. That's how this works." I'd dealt with people like Fred Johnson before—pragmatists who measured everything in terms of advantage. "The question is whether what he wants is something we can give."
The Rocinante hummed around us, carrying us toward answers we might not want to find.
Alex's coffee was excellent.
He made it every morning—or what passed for morning in the perpetual twilight of space travel—using a complicated process involving precise temperatures and careful timing. The result was better than anything I'd tasted since transmigration, rich and dark and exactly what a body needed after a night of uneasy sleep.
"Martian secret," he said when I asked about it. "We don't have much on Mars, but we've got time. Lots of time to perfect the little things while we're terraforming."
We sat in the galley during the quiet hours, when Holden was sleeping and Naomi was running diagnostics and Amos was doing whatever Amos did when no one was watching. Just two men sharing coffee and the particular peace of empty space.
"You're handling this well," Alex observed. "Most people would be falling apart after what we've been through."
"Training." The half-truth came easily. "And compartmentalization. Deal with what's in front of you. Worry about the rest later."
"Military?"
"Something like that."
He nodded slowly, not pushing. Alex was good at that—accepting what people offered without demanding more. "Well, whatever you are, I'm glad you're with us. Holden needs someone who can see the angles. Naomi's too focused on the technical stuff. Amos is..." He searched for the right word.
"Amos is Amos."
"Yeah." Alex smiled. "Exactly that."
The stars wheeled slowly past the galley's viewport, ancient light from dead suns reaching across the void to touch our small bubble of warmth and life. In moments like this, I could almost forget the horrors we'd witnessed, the threats still hunting us, the weight of knowledge I couldn't share.
Almost.
"Tycho tomorrow," Alex said finally. "You ready?"
"As ready as I'll ever be."
He raised his coffee cup in a mock toast. "To surviving long enough to figure out what the hell is going on."
I touched my cup to his. "To surviving."
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