Expanse 05 - Nemesis Games

  Then, for a moment, Amos was there, stronger in her memory than the surrounding ship. It don’t matter what’s inside, boss. They only care what you do. She didn’t know if it was a memory or just her mind reaching for a place of certainty in an environment where nothing could be relied upon.

  If Amos has become my personal touchstone for wisdom, I’m fucked, she thought, and laughed. Karal ventured a smile.

  “Thank you for telling it straight,” Naomi said. “New start. Scrape off the rust.”

  And if I ever get the chance to leave you behind in a fire, Karal, then good God you will burn.

  A chime sounded, then the acceleration warning came on. She hadn’t noticed when the ship had made its flip. Might have been when she was asleep, or slowly over the course of hours so that the rotation was subliminal. It didn’t matter. She was cargo here. It didn’t matter what she knew.

  “Strap in, yeah?” Karal said.

  “On my way,” she said, launching herself gently to the ceiling, and then back to the deck at the crash couch between Cyn and Wings. It had turned out Wings’ real name was Alex, but that space was taken in her mind, so he was Wings forever to her. He smiled to her and she smiled back as she strapped herself in against the gel.

  The warning went from an amber glow to a ten-count in soft amber numbers, and at zero the couch lurched up against her, folding her a few centimeters in. The deceleration burn had started. When it stopped, they’d be where Marco was.

  After the passageway linked the airlocks, she’d thought there would be some kind of farewell. Hugs and lies and all the things people did at the parting after a long journey. When it didn’t happen, she understood that it had only been a long journey for her. The flight from Ceres to the empty space sunward of Mars and the Hungaria asteroids was like going from the couch to the head for them.

  Filip emerged from the ops deck looking sharp and hard. No, that wasn’t true. Looking like a boy trying to look sharp and hard.

  “Check her for weapons,” Filip said, biting at the words.

  Cyn looked from Filip to Naomi and back. “Verdad? Knuckles been packing, she’s been for a long time. Doesn’t seem —”

  “No prisoners on the Pella without a check,” Filip said, pulling a fléchette gun from his pocket and not pointing it at her in particular. “Way it is, yeah?”

  Cyn shrugged and turned to her. “Way it is.”

  Filip looked at her, his lips pressed thin. His fingers too aware of the trigger on his gun. He should have looked threatening, but he mostly looked scared. And angry. Sending a son on a kidnap job was the sort of thing Marco would do. It wasn’t that it was cruel, though it was cruel. It wasn’t that it would corrode any relationship that they might have had, though it did that too. It was only that it would work. Even putting Filip on Ceres looked like a manipulation now. Here is your son, where you left him. Come into the mousetrap and take him back.

  And she’d done it. She didn’t know if she was more disappointed in Filip or herself. They were two very different kinds of disappointment, and the one pointed at her had more poison in it. She could forgive Filip anything. He was a boy, and living with Marco in his head. Forgiving herself was going to be harder, and she didn’t have much practice.

  When the outer airlock cycled, she suffered a wave of disorientation. The passage was the usual design of inflated Mylar and titanium ribs. There was nothing about it that looked strange. It wasn’t until they’d nearly reached the other side that she recognized the smell of it: tangy and deep and probably carcinogenic. The outgassing of volatile organics from the cloth.

  “This is new?” she said.

  “We don’t talk about it,” Filip said.

  “We don’t talk about much, do we?” she snapped, and he looked back at her, surprised by the bite in her voice. You think you know what I am, she thought, but all you’ve got is stories.

  The airlock of the other ship was weirdly familiar. The curve was like the airlock on the Roci, and the design of the latch. Martian design. And more than that, Martian Navy. Marco had come into a military ship. Inside, soldiers waited. Unlike the ragged group on Ceres, they wore a rough kind of uniform: gray jumpsuits with the split circle on their arms and breasts. Against the clean design of the ship’s corridor, they looked like bad costumes in a play with good set design. The guns were real though, and she didn’t doubt they’d use them.

  The bridge looked like the Rocinante’s younger brother. After the cheap, barely-enough aesthetic of the Chetzemoka, military-grade crash couches and terminal displays looked solid and reassuring. And there, in the center of it all like he’d posed himself, floated Marco. He wore something like a military uniform, but without any insignia.

  He was beautiful as a statue. Even now, she had to give him that. She could still remember when those lips and the softness in those eyes had made her feel safe. Lifetimes ago, that was. Now he smiled, and a strange relief spread through her. She was with him again, and unquestionably in his power. Her nightmare had come true, so at least she didn’t have to dread it anymore.

  “I’ve brought her, sir,” Filip said, all his consonants sharp enough to cut with. “Mission accomplished.”

  “I never had a doubt,” Marco said. In person, his voice had a richness that recorded messages lost. “Good work, mijo.”

  Filip gave a little salute, and spun to leave.

  “Ah!” Marco said, pulling the boy up short. “Don’t be rude, Filip. Kiss your mother before you go.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Naomi said, but – eyes blank and empty – Filip floated over and pecked her cheek with dry lips before returning to the lift. The guards went with him, except for two that took up stations behind her.

  “It’s been a long time,” Marco said. “You look good. The years have been kind to you.”

  “You too,” she said. “Sound different too. When did you stop talking like a Belter?”

  Marco spread his hands. “In order to be heard by the oppressing class, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. The accusation of tyranny, however well-founded in fact, is dismissed unless it is delivered in the manner that power recognizes as powerful. That’s why Fred Johnson was useful. He was already iconic of an authority that the authorities understood.”

  “So you’ve been practicing, then,” she said, folding her arms.

  “It’s my job.” Marco reached up, pushed his fingertips against the upper deck, and floated down toward the control couches. “Thank you for coming.”

  Naomi didn’t answer that. She could feel him already rewriting the past. Treating her like she’d chosen to join him. Like she was responsible for being here. Instead, she nodded toward the ops deck. “Nice ride. Where’d you get it?”

  “Friends in high places,” Marco said, and then chuckled. “And strange, strange alliances. There are always people who understand that when the world changes, the rules change with it.”

  Naomi tugged at her hair, pulling it down over her eyes, and then, angry with herself, pushed it back. “So then. To what do I owe this setup bullshit?”

  Marco’s hurt expression could have passed for genuine. “No setup. Filip was in trouble, you were in a position to get our son out of a bad place that had the potential to get a whole lot worse.”

  “And paid for it by being pulled on your ship against my will? I can’t really thank you for that.”

  “You should,” Marco said. “We brought you because you’re one of ours. To keep you safe. If we could have explained it all, we would have, but things are delicate, and you don’t stop to explain why you’re protecting someone when the danger’s close. The stakes are the lives of millions of Belters, and —”

  “Oh please,” Naomi said.

  “You don’t think so?” Marco said, a harshness coming into his voice. “You’re the one who killed us. You and your new captain. The minute those gates opened, all the rest of us were dead.”

  “You’re still breathing,?
?? Naomi said, but her anger sounded like petulance even to herself. He heard it that way too.

  “You didn’t grow up down a well. You know how little the inners cared about us. The Chesed. Anderson Station. The Cielo mine fire. Belter lives don’t mean shit to inners. Never have. You know that.”

  “They’re not all like that.”

  “Some that pretend they aren’t, yeah?” The accents of the Belt slipped into his voice. And a rattling anger with them. “But they can still go down the wells. There’re a thousand new worlds, and billions of inners who can just step onto them. No training, no rehab, no drugs. You know how many Belters can tolerate a full g? Give them everything, all the medical care, the exoskeleton support mechs, nursing homes? Two-thirds. Two-thirds of us could go be cripples on these brave néo worlds, if the inners pulled together and threw all their money at it. You think that’s going to happen? Never has before. Last year, three pharmaceutical plants stopped even making their low-end bone density cocktails. Didn’t open the patents. Didn’t apologize to any ships don’t have budget for the high-end stuff. Just stopped. Needed the capacity for colony ships and all the new ganga they’re making with the data coming back from the rings.

  “We’re leftovers, Naomi. You and me and Karal and Cyn. Tia Margolis. Filip. They’re moving on, and they’re forgetting us because they can. They write the histories, you know what we’ll be? A paragraph about how much it sucks when a race of people go obsolete, and how it would have been more humane to put us down.

  “Come. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  It was the same ranting he’d done before, but perfected by years. A new variation of the same arguments he’d made on Ceres. She half expected him to say The Gamarra had it coming. This is war, and anyone who helps choke out the enemy is a soldier whether they know it or not. Her gut felt like it was made from water. It was a feeling she remembered from the dark times. Something in the back of her head shifted. The serpent of learned helplessness long asleep starting to wake. She pretended it wasn’t there, in hopes that if she denied it enough, it wouldn’t exist.

  “What’s it got to do with me?” Naomi asked, less forcefully than she intended.

  Marco smiled. When he spoke, it was back in the voice of the cultured leader. The rough-cut Belter thug vanished behind his mask. “You’re one of us. Estranged, yes, but one of us all the same. You’re the mother of my son. I didn’t want you in harm’s way.”

  She was supposed to ask what that meant. The path was laid out before her in lights. What do you mean, harm’s way? she’d say, and he’d tell her. Watch her eyes go wide. See the fear in her.

  Fuck that.

  “Didn’t want me,” she said. “Wanted the Rocinante, only that didn’t work out. Was it the ship? Or was it Holden? You can tell me. Did you want to show off in front of my new boyfriend? Because that would be kind of sad.”

  She felt her breath coming fast, adrenaline pumping through her. Marco’s expression hardened, but before he could speak, the comms chimed and a voice she didn’t recognize echoed on the deck.

  “Hast contact,” the woman said.

  “Que?”

  “Little one. Pinnace out from Mars. Talking to the Andreas Hofer.”

  “Scout ship?” Marco snapped.

  The pause stretched for seconds. Then, “Looks like just some pinché asshole wrong-placing it. Seen one, seen the whole strike force, though, yeah?”

  “How long before the trigger impact?”

  “Twenty-seven minutes.” There had been no hesitation. Whoever was on the other end of the comms had known the question was coming. Marco scowled at the control panel.

  “Couldn’t have waited a little longer. Would have been prettier without. But fine. Take out the pinnace.”

  “Toda?”

  Marco looked over at Naomi, his dark eyes on her. A smile touched his lips. Theatrical asshole that he was.

  “No. No es toda. Launch the assault on the Martian prime minister’s ship too. And tell the hunt group to get ready, so that when the duster runs, we can take him down.”

  “Sabez,” the woman said. “Orders out.”

  Marco waited, hand out like a challenge. “This is the way,” he said. “Make it so they can’t forget us. Take chains they fashioned to bind us and use them as whips. We won’t go down to darkness. They’ll respect us now.”

  “And do what? Shut down the Ring?” Naomi said. “Start making your cheap bone drugs again? What do you think shooting a Martian politician’s going to do for ‘our people’? How does that help anybody?”

  Marco didn’t laugh, but he softened. She had the sense that she’d said something stupid, and it had pleased him. Despite it all, she felt a twinge of embarrassment.

  “I’m sorry, Naomi. We’re going to have to take this up later. But I really am glad you’ve come back. I know there’s a lot of harsh between us, and that we don’t see the world the same way. But you’ll always be the mother of my son, and I will always love you for that.”

  He lifted a fist to the guards. “Make sure she’s secure, then get ready for hard burn. We’re heading to the fight.”

  “Sir,” one guard said as the other took Naomi by the elbow. Her first instinct was to resist, pull back, but what would the point have been? She pushed off for the lift, her jaw tight, her teeth aching.

  “One thing,” Marco said, and she turned, thinking he was speaking to her. He wasn’t. “When you lock her down, make sure it’s someplace she can watch a newsfeed. Today everything changes. Wouldn’t want her to miss it, yeah?”

  Chapter Twenty-two: Amos

  Reports at this hour are that a massive asteroid has impacted northern Africa. The Oxford Center in Rabat, five hundred kilometers west of the event, is estimating eight point seven five on the Richter scale at the epicenter.”

  Amos tried again to lean back in his chair. It was an uncomfortable little piece of furniture. Just crappy lightweight plastic to start with, then molded in a factory by a machine that didn’t have to sit in it. His first guess was that it had been designed specifically to be awkward and ineffective if you tried to hit someone with it. And then they’d bolted it to the floor. So every five minutes or so, he placed his heels on the textured concrete and pushed back without even knowing he was doing it. The chair bent a little under the pressure, but didn’t get more comfortable, and when he gave up, it bounced right back into its old shape.

  “— unseen since Krakatoa. Air traffic is being severely affected as the debris plume threatens both civilian and commercial craft. For further analysis of the situation on the ground, we are going now to Kivrin Althusser in Dakar. Kivrin?”

  The screen jumped to an olive-skinned woman in a sand-colored hijab. She licked her lips, nodded, and started talking.

  “The shock wave hit Dakar just under an hour ago, and authorities are still taking stock of the damage. My experience is that the city is devastated. We have reports that many, many of the local structures have not survived the initial shock. The power grid has also collapsed. The hospitals and emergency medical centers are overwhelmed. The Elkhashab Towers are being evacuated as I speak, and there are fears that the north tower may have become unstable. The sky… the sky here —”

  Amos tried to lean back in his chair, sighed, and stood up. The waiting room was empty apart from him and an old woman in the far corner who kept coughing into the crook of her elbow. It wasn’t what you’d call a big place. The windows looked out on an uninspiring two hundred meters of North Carolina, bare from the entrance facility to the perimeter gate. Two rows of monofilament hurricane fencing blocked the path to a two-story concrete wall. Sniper nests stood at each corner, the automatic defense and control weapons stiller than tree trunks. The building was low – a single story peeking up out of the ground with administrative offices and a massive service entrance. Most of what happened here happened underground. It was exactly the kind of place Amos had never hoped to be.

  Good thing was, when he was done, he could leave aga
in.

  “In other news, a distress call from the convoy carrying the Martian prime minister appears to be genuine. A group of unidentified ships —”

  Behind him, the admin door swung open. The man inside looked like he was one hundred kilos of sculpted muscle and also tremendously bored. “Clarke!”

  “Here!” the coughing old woman said, rising to her feet. “I’m Clarke!”

  “This way, ma’am.”

  Amos scratched his neck and went back to looking at the prison yard. The newsfeed kept on being excited about shitty things going on. He’d have paid more attention to it if the back of his head hadn’t been planning the ways he’d have pushed to get out of here if they’d sent him, and where he’d have died trying. From the parts he caught, though, it sounded like a good day for reporters.

  “Burton!”

  He walked over slowly. The big guy checked his hand terminal.

  “You Burton?”

  “Today I am.”

  “This way, sir.”

  He led him to a small room with more chairs bolted to the floor and a table too. The table was solidly made, anyway.

  “So. Visitation?”

  “Yup,” Amos said. “Looking for Clarissa Mao.”

  The big guy looked up under his eyebrows. “We don’t have names here.”

  Amos opened his hand terminal. “I’m looking for 42-82-4131.”

  “Thank you. You’ll need to surrender all personal effects including any food or beverages, your hand terminal, and any clothing with more than seven grams of metal. No zippers, arch supports, anything like that. While you are inside the prison grounds, you are subject to reduced civil rights, as outlined in the Gorman code. A copy of the code will be made available to you at your request. Do you request a copy of the code?”

  “That’s all right.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I need a yes or no.”

  “No.”

  “Thank you, sir. While in the prison, you are required to follow the directives of any guard or prison employee without hesitation or question. This is for your own safety. If you fail to comply, the guards and prison employees are authorized to use any means they deem necessary to ensure your safety and the safety of others. Do you understand and consent?”