“You haven’t seen me in the news?”
“I have. You look different. Shaved your head, got your nose broke a few more times. But I’ll never forget a name.”
“Well, not this one anyway,” Amos said, and then tossed his shot back in a toast to Erich. “Gracias for that, by the way.”
“So, you still with that crew?” Erich said.
“I am. Why?”
“Because you’re sitting in my office right now drinking my tequila. Still playing that out in my head. Useful guy like you can always get work. If that’s what you want, I’ve got it. But if you’re not here looking for work, what are you looking for?”
Amos grabbed the bottle and poured himself another drink. Erich tried very hard not to look nervous. He’d had a lot of practice, because he almost pulled it off. Time can change a lot. Erich had gone from twitchy little hacker with a price on his head to the boss of a respectable chunk of Baltimore’s harbor-front property. But some things don’t change. Some tells never go away. While Erich sat very still and looked him in the eye without blinking, the tiny hand on his deformed left arm opened and closed like a baby grabbing at a toy just out of reach.
“Went to Lydia’s house,” Amos said, sipping slowly at the tequila.
“Not Lydia’s house anymore. She’s dead,” Erich said. “That what this is about? I treated her like you would have after you left.”
“Yeah?” Amos asked, eyebrows going up.
“Well,” Erich admitted with an embarrassed look to the side. “Not exactly like you would have.”
“Thank you for that too,” Amos said.
“You didn’t kill me once when you had every reason to, and after that, you couldn’t have stayed,” Erich said, leaning forward. His left hand had stopped clenching. “Walking away from her was part of the favor you did for me. I never forgot that. And she helped me, at first. Helped me build what I have now. Taught me to use brains to beat brawn. She never lacked for a thing it was in my power to give.”
“And I appreciate that,” Amos repeated. Erich’s eyes narrowed and his right hand came up from under the desk with a short-barreled automatic in it. Amos found himself surprised and a little proud of his friend. Erich rested his hand on the desk, the gun pointed away from Amos, more a warning than a threat.
“If you’ve got some beef you came here to settle,” Erich said, “you won’t be the first guy to leave this office in a bag.”
Amos raised his hands a little in mock surrender. “Not even armed, chief. I came here to talk.”
“So talk.”
“What you did for Lydia was real nice,” Amos said, putting his hands back down slowly but keeping his eye on the gun. “But you’re wrong. She’s not all dead. Some of her’s left.”
Erich cocked his head to the side, frowning. “Gonna need to walk me through that one.”
“There’s an old man loved her and lived with her and kissed her goodnight before she died. A house with a little rose garden they worked together. Maybe some dogs. I saw a picture, but not sure if they’re still around.”
“I still don’t get it,” Erich said.
Amos rubbed his thumb against his knuckle, trying to find the words. It wasn’t a thought he’d said out loud before, and if he screwed it up and Erich misunderstood, there was a chance they’d wind up trying to kill each other. So it was worth thinking about some.
“It’s like this. The old man keeps the house until he dies. He’s the only thing she left behind. He’s the last bit of her. He keeps the house.”
Erich put the little gun flat on the desk and poured himself another drink. He leaned back, holding the glass with his right hand. He couldn’t pick the weapon back up without dropping the drink and he couldn’t do that faster than Amos could reach him. It was a signal, and Amos felt the tension leave the muscles in his neck and shoulders.
“That’s more sentimental than I would have guessed,” Erich said.
“I’m not sentimental about much,” Amos agreed. “But when I am, I’m pretty passionate.”
“So I’ve heard the request. What’s the payoff for me? I had something of a debt to Lydia, but I don’t owe the old man shit. What does this win me, I keep him on the dole?”
Amos sighed, and gave his oldest friend a sad smile. “Really?”
“Really.”
“I don’t kill you, kill those two guys outside. I don’t dismantle this organization from the top down and rebuild it with someone who’ll owe me a favor.”
“Ah,” Erich said. “There he is.”
Amos had to admit, Erich had grown some stones. He didn’t even look down at the gun on the desk as he was being threatened. Just gave Amos his own version of the tragic smile.
“There who is?” Amos asked.
“Timmy.”
“Yeah, I guess. It wouldn’t be my first choice, though. So how’s this go?”
“Costs me almost nothing to keep the old man’s house,” Erich said, then shook his head as if disagreeing with himself. “But even if it did, I’d still do it. Just to keep Timmy off my streets.”
“Again, thanks.”
Erich shooed the gratitude away with a wave of his good hand, then stood up and walked to the office’s large screen pretending to be a window. The gun still lay on the desk, ignored now. Amos considered it briefly, then leaned farther back in his chair and put his hands behind his head, elbows spread out wide.
“Funny, right?” Erich said, pointing out the window at something Amos couldn’t see. “All those new faces and old corners. Shit changes and doesn’t. I did, you didn’t.”
“I live on a spaceship and fight alien monsters sometimes,” Amos said with a shrug of his elbows. “So that’s different.”
“Anything out there scarier than a hype with no money when you’re holding his fix? Scarier than a street boss thinks you skimmed?” Erich laughed and turned around, putting his back to the window. “Fuck that. Anything out there scarier than a life on basic?”
“No,” Amos admitted.
“So you got what you wanted,” Erich said, his voice going flat and dead. “Get the fuck out of my city or it’s open season.”
Amos stood. He was closer to the gun than Erich now. Could feel it pull at him like gravity. He could pick it up, kill Erich, kill the two guards waiting outside. By the end of the day he’d own a chunk of Erich’s old territory and have the muscle and credibility to take the rest. In a flash, the whole scenario played out in his mind.
Instead, he hooked his thumbs in his pants pockets and backed toward the door. “Thanks for the drink,” he said. “I forgot how good tequila was.”
“I’ll have Tatu give you a couple bottles on the way out. To take with you,” Erich said.
“Shit, I won’t turn that down.”
“It was good to see you,” Erich said, then paused a moment. “The gun was empty.”
“Yeah?”
“Fléchette turret hidden in the light,” Erich said, with a flick of his eyes at the inset LED housing above them. “Poisoned darts. I say a word, it kills everyone in the room isn’t me.”
“Nice. Thanks for not saying it.”
“Thanks for still being my friend.”
It felt like goodbye, so Amos gave Erich one last smile, and left the room. Tatu was waiting in the corridor with a box full of tequila bottles. The guards must have been monitoring the whole thing.
“Need help on your way out?” the guard asked.
“Naw,” Amos replied and hoisted the box over one shoulder. “I’m good at leaving.”
Amos let his hand terminal take him to the nearest flophouse and got a room. He dumped his booze and bag on the bed and then hit the streets. A short walk took him to a food cart where he bought what the sign optimistically called a Belgian sausage. Unless the Belgians were famous for their flavored bean curd products, the optimism seemed misplaced. Not that it mattered. Amos realized that while he knew the orbital period of every Jovian moon by heart, he had no idea where B
elgium was. He didn’t think it was a North American territory, but that was about the best he could do. He was hardly in a position to criticize assertions about their cuisine.
He walked toward the old rotting docks he played on as a child, not for any reason more profound than needing a destination and knowing which direction the water was. He finished the last of his sausage and then, not seeing a convenient recycling bin, he chewed up and swallowed the wrapper too. It was made of spun corn starch and tasted like stale breakfast cereal.
A small knot of teens passed him, then paused and turned to follow. They were in that awkward age between being a victim on legs and capable of real adult crimes. The right age for petty theft and running for the dealers mixed with the occasional mugging when opportunity presented itself without too much risk. Amos ignored them and climbed down onto the rusting steel of an old bayfront jetty.
The teens hung back, arguing in quiet but tense voices. Probably deciding if the reward of a solitary mark with an outsider’s credit balance – it being an article of faith that anyone from outside the docks of Baltimore had more money than anyone in them – was worth the risk of taking on a man of his size. He knew the calculus of that equation well. He’d been in on that very argument himself, once upon a time. He continued to ignore them and listened instead to the gentle lap of the water against the pilings of his jetty.
In the distance, the sky lit up with a line of fire like a lightning bolt drawn with a ruler. A sonic boom rolled across the bay a few moments later, and Amos had a sudden and intense memory of sitting on those very docks with Erich, watching the rail-gun supply lifts fired into orbit, and discussing the possibility of leaving the planet.
To everyone outside the gravity well, Amos was from Earth. But that wasn’t true. Not in any way that mattered. Amos was from Baltimore. What he knew about the planet outside of a few dozen blocks of the poor district would fit on a napkin. The first steps he’d ever taken outside the city were when he’d climbed off a high-speed rail line in Bogotá and onto the shuttle that had flown him to Luna.
He heard quiet footsteps on the jetty behind him. The discussion was over. The yeas outweighing the nays. Amos turned around and faced the approaching teens. A few of them held improvised clubs. One had a knife. “Not worth it,” he said. He didn’t flex or raise his fists. He just shook his head. “Wait for the next one.” There was a tense moment as they stared at him and he stared back. Then, moving as though they’d reached some sort of telepathic consensus, they drifted away in a group.
Erich was wrong about him being the same. The man he’d once been wasn’t a collection of personality traits. He was the things he knew, the desires of his heart, the skills he had. The person he’d been before he left knew where the good basement booze was brewed. Which dealers had a consistent supply of quality black market marijuana and tobacco. The brothels that serviced the locals, and the ones that were there only to rob thrill-seeking poverty tourists. That person knew where to rent a gun for cheap, and that the price tripled if you used it. Knew it was cheaper to rent time in a machine shop and make your own. Like the shotgun he’d used the first time he killed a man.
But the person he was now knew how to keep a fusion reactor running. How to tune the magnetic coils to impart maximum energy to ionized exhaust particles, and how to fix a hull breach. That guy didn’t care about these streets or the pleasures and risks they offered. Baltimore could look exactly the same, and be as foreign to him as the mythical land of Belgium.
And in that moment, he knew it was his last time on Earth. He was never coming back.
He woke up in his rented flop the next morning with half a bottle of tequila on his nightstand and the first hangover he’d had in years. For a moment he thought he’d been so drunk he wet the bed, but realized that in the stifling heat of the room he’d sweated out about a liter. His throat felt dry and his tongue swollen.
He rinsed off the night’s sweat and drank steaming-hot water out of the shower, tilting his head back to let it fill his mouth. After decades of filtered and sterilized ship and space station water, he marveled at all the flavors in it. He hoped not too many of them were microbes or heavy metals.
He pulled the remaining tequila bottles out of their box and stuffed them into his duffel bag, wrapping his clothes around them to protect them. Then he picked up his hand terminal and started looking for a hop back to Luna, then a connecting long flight to Tycho. He’d said goodbye to Lydia, or the pieces of her that she’d left behind anyway. He’d said a goodbye of sorts to Erich. There was no one left on the entire planet he gave half a shit about.
Well, no. That wasn’t true. Maybe half.
He called the number Avasarala had used, and a sculpted young man with a perfect haircut, pale skin, and gigantic teeth appeared. He looked like an expensive store mannequin. “Secretary Avasarala’s office.”
“Gimme Chrissie, kid, and make it snappy.”
The mannequin was stunned into silence for two long breaths. “I’m sorry, but the secretary can’t —”
“Kid,” Amos said with a smirk, “I just called on her private line, right? My name is Amos Burton.” A lie, but one he’d told often enough it had become a sort of truth. “I work for James Holden. I bet if you don’t tell her I’m on the line right now that you’re applying for basic by the end of the day.”
“One moment please,” the mannequin said and then the screen displayed the blue-and-white logo of the UN.
“Burton,” Chrisjen Avasarala said, appearing on the screen less than thirty seconds later. “Why the fuck are you still on my planet?”
“Getting ready to leave, chief, but figured I got one more person to check in on before I go.”
“Was it me? Because I don’t like you enough to consider that charming. I have a flight to Luna waiting on the pad for me so I can go do fucking party arrangements before the Martian prime minister arrives.”
“They make you do that?”
“I do everything, and every second I talk to you costs ten thousand dollars.”
“Really?”
“No, I just made that number up. But I fucking hate flying to Luna so I’ve been putting it off to finish other work anyway. Do you need a ride? If it gets you off my planet, I can give you a ride. What? Did I say something funny?”
“Naw, just reminded me of somebody,” Amos said. “Anyway, I get the feeling this is the only trip down the well I’m ever going to take.”
“I’m crushed,” she said.
“Since I’m here, I figured anything I might want to do, better do it now. Anyone I wanted to see, you know,” Amos continued. “Where did you guys wind up locking Peaches away?”
“Peaches?”
“The Mao girl. Clarissa. She flew with us for a few months back after she stopped trying to kill the captain. And I have to admit, she grew on me a little.”
“You fucked your prisoner?” Avasarala said, her expression evenly divided between amusement and disgust.
“Nah,” Amos said. “I don’t tend to do that with people I like.”
Chapter Thirteen: Holden
The systems that the gate network had opened up were scattered across what everyone was pretty sure was the Milky Way galaxy. Cartography was still working out their relative locations, but even the initial findings put some of the new systems tens of thousands of light-years from Earth and with some distinct weirdness about time and location. Confronted by such unimaginably vast distances, it was easy to forget how much space was in just one solar system. Until you tried to find something in it.
Legally, any spaceship on the move had to register a flight plan and run an active transponder. That made ships traveling from place to place relatively easy to track. And with a transponder pinging away so you knew where to point your telescope, an active drive was visible from across the solar system. But ships would power down for repairs in dock, so transponders disappeared off the grid all the time. Ships were decommissioned, so a transponder might go black an
d never return for entirely legitimate reasons. Newly commissioned ships showed up with brand-new names and ships that were sold registered name changes. Some were cobbled together from scrap, some were built in shipyards, some were salvaged. And all of it was happening scattered across roughly one hundred quintillion square kilometers of space, give or take a few quadrillion. And that was only if you ignored that space had a third dimension.
So, seventeen ships had vanished going through ring gates, and if Holden was right, they were probably back in the home system with new names. In theory, there was a path to the information he wanted, but unless he was interested in spending several hundred lifetimes sifting through the raw data, he’d need help.
Specifically, he needed a computer plowing through a number of different massive databases on new ships, decommissioned ships, sold ships, repaired ships, and lost ships, looking for anything that didn’t add up. Even with a good computer and very smart data sorting software, it was what a programmer would call a nontrivial task.
And, unfortunately, the best software engineer that Holden knew had flown off to parts unknown and wasn’t answering his messages. He didn’t have the skills to do it himself, the time to learn them, or a crew to do it for him. What he had, was money.
After his shift working with Sakai’s people on the Roci refit, Holden called up Fred yet again. “Fred, hey, I have a software problem. Can I hire some of your programming wonks for a short-term gig?”
“Your ship need an update?” Fred asked. “Or is this something that will piss me off?”
“Something that’ll piss you off. So, who’s available for custom script writing?”
Paula Gutierrez had the elongated body and slightly oversized head of a low-g childhood. Her smile was sharp and professional. She was a freelance software engineer who’d taken a six-month consulting job on Tycho five years before and then just stayed on the station picking up the odd bit of piecework. On Holden’s hand terminal, her wide face filled the screen with dark bushy eyebrows and blindingly white teeth.