Expanse 05 - Nemesis Games

  A gentle, mechanical voice announced their arrival at the Aterpol terminal. The boy’s eyes opened, roused back to full consciousness, and he shot a distrustful look at Alex. The deceleration pushed Alex’s back, feeling almost like a long attitude burn. Almost but not quite.

  Aterpol was the downtown of Londres Nova, the only station with connections to all of the neighborhoods that made up the city. The vaulted ceilings curved over the common areas, the access doors along the walls double-sealed to keep air from leaking into the evacuated tubes. The terminal itself opened into a wide public park with real trees rising from the soil into the artificial twilight. Benches made to look like wood and iron stood scattered along the winding paths, and a pond filled the air with the smells of algae and moisture. The reassuring breeze-murmur of the air recyclers passed under everything like a constant and eternal prayer. Windows rose up along the walls, light streaming out of them or not. The rooms that looked out over Alex as he walked were businesses and apartments, restaurants and maintenance halls.

  Alex crossed the park to the farther gates, where the local tubes ran to the other neighborhoods. Innis Shallow, where Bobbie lived, didn’t have the best reputation. The worst that Mars had to offer wasn’t as bad as an iffy sector on Ceres Station, though, and regardless anyone who took on Bobbie was either suicidal or had an army behind them.

  At the Innis Shallow station, Alex shrugged into his jacket and went on foot. There were carts for rent and a girl of no more than fourteen with a scavenged rickshaw calling on the corner. It was a short walk, though, and Alex was dreading the conversation at the end of it.

  He’d walked the same path three days before, still smarting from his abortive meeting with Tali, following his hand terminal’s directions to Bobbie’s rooms. He hadn’t seen the former marine since Luna the night that the Ring had lifted itself off the ruins of Venus and flown out toward the far edge of the system, and he’d been looking forward to anything that would distract him from the day he’d been having until then.

  Bobbie was living in a very pleasant side corridor with its own greenway in the center and lights that had been fashioned to look like wrought-iron lamps from someone’s imagined 1800s London. He’d only had to stand at her door for a few seconds before it opened.

  Bobbie Draper was a big woman, and while years of civilian life had lost her a little of her muscle definition, she radiated competence and strength the way a fire did heat. Every time he saw her, he remembered a story from ancient history about the native Samoans armed with rocks and spears driving the gun-toting Spanish conquistadors into the sea. Bobbie was a woman who made that shit seem plausible.

  “Alex! Come in. I’m sorry the place is a mess.”

  “Ain’t worse than my cabin at the end of a long run.”

  The main room was wider than the ops deck back on the Roci, and done in shades of terra-cotta and gray that shouldn’t have worked together, but did. The dining table didn’t seat more than four, and there were only two chairs beside it. Through an archway across from the front door, a wall monitor was set to a slowly shifting spray of colors, like Monet’s water lilies animated. Where most places would have had a couch, a resistance-training machine dominated the space, a rack of chrome free weights beside it. A spiral staircase led up and down in the den’s corner, bamboo laminate steps glowing warmly in the light.

  “Fancy digs,” Alex had said.

  Bobbie’s glance at her own rooms seemed almost apologetic. “It’s more than I need. A lot more than I need. But I thought I’d like the space. Room to stretch out.”

  “You thought you would?”

  She shrugged. “It’s more than I need.”

  She put on a brown leather jacket that looked professional and minimized the breadth of her shoulders, then led him to a fish shack with shredded trout in black sauce that had been some of the best he’d ever had. The beer was a local brew, served cold. Over the course of two hours, the sting of Talissa’s voice and his feeling of self-loathing lost their edges, if they didn’t quite vanish. Bobbie told stories about working veterans’ outreach. A woman who’d come in to get psychiatric help for her son who wouldn’t stop playing console games since he’d finished his deployment. Bobbie had made contact with the boy’s first drill sergeant, and now the kid had a job at the shipyards. Or the time a man came in claiming that the sex toy lodged in his colon was service related. When Bobbie laughed, Alex laughed with her.

  Slowly, he’d started taking his turn too. What it had been like on the far side of the Ring. Watching Ilus or New Terra or whatever the hell they wound up calling it as it went through its paroxysms. What it had been like shipping back with a prisoner, which led into the first time they’d shipped a prisoner – Clarissa Mao, daughter of Jules-Pierre and sister to the protomolecule’s patient zero, that one had been – and how Holden and Amos and Naomi were all doing these days.

  That had been when the ache hit. The homesickness for his crew and their ship. He enjoyed Bobbie’s wit and the easy physicality of her company, but what he’d really wanted – then and in the days since – was to be back on the Rocinante. Which was why the end of their conversation had been so awkward for him.

  “So, Alex,” Bobbie said, her attempt to make the words as casual and friendly as everything that had gone before flagging them at once, “are you still in touch with anyone over at the naval yard?”

  “I know a few guys still serving at Hecate, sure.”

  “So I was wondering if I could get you to do a little favor for me.”

  “Sure, of course,” Alex said. And then a fraction of a second later, “What is it?”

  “I’ve got a kind of hobby thing going on,” she said, looking pained. “It’s… unofficial.”

  “Is it for Avasarala?”

  “Sort of. The last time she was through, we had dinner, and some of the things she said got me thinking. With the new worlds opening up, there’s a lot of change going on. Strategies shifting. Like that. And one of the big resources Mars has – one of the things that there’s going to be a market for – is the Navy.”

  “I don’t understand,” Alex said, leaning back in his chair. “You mean like mercenary work?”

  “I mean like things going missing. Black market. We’ve been through a couple pretty major wars in the last few years. A lot of ships got scrapped. Some of them it seems like we just lost track of. And the Navy’s stretched pretty thin. I don’t know how much energy they’re putting into tracking things right now. You know there was an attack on the Callisto shipyards?”

  “Saw something about that, yeah.”

  “So that’s an example, right? Here’s a big incident, and the first response is all about identifying who was behind it and rebuilding the defenses.”

  “Sure,” Alex said. “You’d want to do that, right?”

  “So figuring out exactly what was lost in the attack is on someone’s to-do list, but it’s not the top. And with all the shit going on, it may never get to the top. And everyone kind of knows that, even if they aren’t saying it.”

  Alex drank, put down the bottle, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “So if there’s a profiteer on the base, they could take the opportunity to lift some equipment that survived, sell it on the black market, and call it lost.”

  “Exactly. I mean to some degree, that’s always happening, but right now, with things a little chaotic and getting weirder all the time?”

  “And with Mars losing a lot of its people to colony ships.”

  “Yeah, that too,” Bobbie said. Her expression was hard. Alex sat forward, his elbows on the table. The smell of trout and black sauce still hung in the air, though the plates were gone by then. On the screen at the front of the restaurant, a young woman in a parody of business wear danced to a computer-generated pop tune. Alex hadn’t been able to make out the language; at a certain speed every language sounded equally meaningless.

  “You’re telling me that you’re investigating the sources of bla
ck market military equipment flowing off Mars.”

  “Weapons,” Bobbie said. “Medical supplies. Ammunition. Power suits. Even ships.”

  “And you’re doing it on your own, for fun, because of something Chrisjen Avasarala said to you.”

  “I’m kind of working for her.”

  Alex laughed. “I’m almost afraid to point this out, but you started off saying you needed a favor. You haven’t told me what the favor is.”

  “A lot of the guys on Hecate won’t talk to me. I’m a marine, they’re Navy. There’s that whole thing. But you know them, and even if you don’t, you’re one of them in a way I’m not going to manage this lifetime. I was wondering, as a favor, if you could help me dig a little.”

  Alex had nodded at the time, but what he’d said was “Let me think about it.”

  And now, because it was Bobbie and because he needed something in his life to actually have a moment of real closure, he was going to see her one last time to tell her the answer was no. He had a ship to get back to. If there was something he could do for her from there, he’d be pleased to lend a hand. His first priority now was getting off Mars and not coming back.

  He reached the end of her corridor. The iron lanterns were glowing, creating the illusion of a street back on Earth centuries before. The echo of a place that neither he nor Bobbie had ever been, and still it was pleasant and comforting. He walked slowly, listening to the almost-silent chucking of the recyclers as if, just behind them, he could catch the murmur of the flowing Thames.

  Somewhere nearby a man shouted once and briefly. It was Innis Shallow after all. Alex walked a little faster. At Bobbie’s door, he paused.

  It was closed, but not solidly. A black smudge, perfectly round and dented into the flesh of the panel, marked it just where the latch met the frame. A thin line of light at the door’s edge showed where the frame had bent, the ceramic shattering. The man’s voice came again, a low mutter rising to a final, powerful snap. It was coming from inside Bobbie’s rooms.

  Alex’s heart beat triple time as he pulled out his hand terminal and tapped quickly, quietly to the local system’s emergency services link. He thumbed in an alert request and a confirmation, but didn’t fill in the details screen. There wasn’t time for it. He stood before the door, his hands in fists, wishing as hard as he’d ever wished anything that Amos was there too.

  He pushed the door open and rushed in.

  Bobbie was at the table, sitting in one of the two chairs. Her arms were behind her. Her legs were splayed out before her, too long for the chair to accommodate. There was blood on her mouth and down the side of her neck. A man in gray coveralls was pointing a gun at the back of her head.

  Two other men, dressed in the same gray, turned toward Alex. Both of them had automatic pistols in their fists. A fourth man, this one in a causal suit the color of ash and a bright blue shirt, turned to Alex, his expression equal parts surprise and annoyance. When he saw Alex, his eyes went wide.

  “Fuck!” the man in the suit said, the syllable almost lost in the noise of cracking wood. Bobbie moved faster than Alex could follow, shrugging the chair she was bound to into splinters and grabbing the gunman behind her by the wrist. He screamed and something wet happened to his arm.

  One of the pistol men fired wildly, the stuttering report assaulting Alex’s ears. He rushed forward shouting and barreled into the man in the suit. Together, they staggered back. The other man’s knee rammed into Alex’s groin, and the world dissolved into blinding pain. Alex slid to his knees, trying to hold the man by his suit jacket. The guns continued their barrage and the stink of spent powder filled the air.

  The man in the suit dug for a shoulder holster, and Alex grabbed his arm. The man’s wrist was like holding concrete. There was a gun in his fist. Someone shouted, and the roar of gunfire became the roar of something else, deeper and more animal. Alex pulled himself forward, the pain in his testicles fading to merely excruciating. He bit the solid wrist, sinking teeth into the raw silk sleeve and digging until his incisors met. The man in the suit didn’t even cry out, just brought his other hand down hard on Alex’s temple.

  Everything got a little quieter, a little more distant. Alex felt his grip slip off the man’s arm, felt himself falling back, landing hard on his tailbone. The pain was there, but foggy. The man in the suit lifted his pistol to point at Alex. The barrel looked wide as a cave.

  Oh, Alex thought, I die like this.

  The man’s head twitched forward in a curt nod and he crumpled. Then it was Bobbie standing before him, a six-kilo free weight curled in one hand. The chrome had blood on it and what looked like hair. No one was shooting guns anymore.

  “Hey,” Alex said.

  “You all right?” Bobbie asked, sitting next to him. One of the gunmen staggered past her, cradling his forearm, and bolted out the door. She didn’t go after him.

  “Little achy,” Alex said, then rolled to his side and retched.

  “It’s okay,” Bobbie said. “You did really well.”

  “Been a long time since hand-to-hand. I probably could have done better if I’d had some practice.”

  “Yeah, well. There were four of them with guns and two of us without. All things considered, we did okay.”

  She blew out a long breath, her head sinking low. Alex tried to sit up.

  “You all right?”

  “Got shot a couple times,” she said. “Smarts.”

  “Shit. You’re hurt?”

  “Yeah. I’m going to get over to the console there in a minute. Call emergency services before blood loss makes me woozy.”

  “I already did that,” Alex said. “Before I came in.”

  “Good planning.”

  “Not sure planning had much to do with it,” Alex said. And then, “Bobbie? Stay with me here.”

  “I’m here,” she said, her voice sleepy. “I’m all right.”

  In the distance, Alex heard the rising tritone of sirens. Breath by breath, they grew closer. For a long moment, he thought the deck was being shaken, then realized it was just his body, trembling. At the side of the room, one of the gunmen lay slumped against the wall. His neck was at a strange angle, and blood was drying on his chest. He wasn’t bleeding though. Dead, then. The man in the suit coughed and gagged, choking. The sirens got louder. There were voices now too. A woman identifying herself as police and warning them that people were coming in.

  “I was coming to tell you,” Alex said. “I’ll stay. I’ll help.”

  “Thanks.”

  “This was about the black market stuff, wasn’t it?” Alex said. “I guess you’ve been asking the right questions.”

  Bobbie managed a smile. Looking at her now, there was a lot of blood on her shirt.

  “Don’t know,” she said. “All they asked me about was you.”

  Chapter Twelve: Amos

  “Want some coke?” Erich asked. “Not synth. Real stuff that came from a plant.”

  “Nope. But I’d take a drink if one is handy,” Amos replied. The pleasantries were just ritual, but ritual was important. In Amos’ experience the more dangerous any two people were, the more carefully polite their social interactions tended to be. The loud, blustering ones were trying to get the other guy to back down. They wanted to stay out of a fight. The quiet ones were figuring out how to win it.

  “Tatu, bring the El Charros,” Erich said, and one of the two guards slipped out the door. To Amos he added, “Been on a tequila kick lately.”

  “I haven’t,” Amos said. “Earth is still the only place you can get good tequila. The Belter stuff is undrinkable.”

  “Not a lot of blue agave up there, I guess.”

  Amos shrugged and waited. Tatu returned with a tall skinny bottle and two narrow shot glasses. Erich filled both then lifted one in salute.

  “To old friends.”

  “Old friends,” Amos repeated and tossed back his shot.

  “Another?” Erich asked, pointing at the bottle.

  “
Sure.”

  “Seen much of the neighborhood?”

  “Just what was between here and the train station.”

  “Hasn’t changed much,” Erich said, then paused while they both drank off their shots. He refilled their glasses. “Faces change, but the corners stay the same.”

  “Funny, I was just thinking that same thing on my way in. Things have changed for you though.”

  “Not the important ones,” Erich said with a grin and wiggled his small, withered left arm.

  Amos gestured at the room, the guards, the renovated building around them. “When I left, you were running for your life. So, at least one thing’s different.”

  “You guys can go,” Erich said to Tatu and his partner. They slipped out quietly and shut the door behind them. That seemed like a good sign. Either it meant that Erich was sure Amos wasn’t there to kill him, or Erich had a way of protecting himself that didn’t require other people. It wouldn’t be a gun under the desk. That was too direct for Erich. Amos started casually scanning for wires or suspicious lumps on his chair or the floor beneath it.

  Erich poured two more shots of tequila then said, “I learned something important from you, when you left.”

  “Do tell.”

  “I’ll never be the toughest guy in any room, unless I’m by myself,” Erich said, waving his small arm again. “But I’m usually the smartest. Executing a plan can be subcontracted out. Making the plan in the first place, not as much.”

  “True enough,” Amos agreed. “It’s why I’ll never be the captain of a ship.”

  Erich reacted to that. He didn’t change his expression or flinch, but Amos could see the words getting taken in and filed as important.

  “But always useful, you,” Erich said. “You were always useful. You on a crew now?”