Expanse 05 - Nemesis Games
“Just need ’em to take a long time gearing up,” Amos said. “Figure we’ll be off the ground by then.”
Stokes leaned in from behind Peaches, his expression apologetic. “About that? There is a small problem.”
The hangar was as tall as a cathedral, and the Zhang Guo stood in the middle of it like a piece of gargantuan art. The surface of the ship was worked to look like gold-and-silver filigree over a body of lapis. The drive cones had golden ideograms written on them in something that looked like gold but apparently didn’t melt at high temperature. He could tell from looking it didn’t have an Epstein drive. Twice as big as the Rocinante and maybe – maybe – a quarter as functional, it was as much an orbital shuttle as it was a confession of decadence.
And, more to the point, it didn’t run.
“The house power supplies are exhausted,” Stokes explained. “Without power, there’s no water recyclers. No heat. No network connections.”
“So,” Amos said. “You figured the smart move was to get a bunch of people who’ve never seen a working fusion drive to just fire one up so you could top off the batteries? That’s the kind of suicidal optimism you just don’t see every day.”
Stokes shrugged. “The ship was here only because it needed repair. We were never able to make it run.”
Amos clapped the man on the shoulder. “You just go get me all the tools you were using. This is something I know how to do.”
Stokes trotted away, shouting to the others from his group. Erich’s people seemed to be equally divided between setting up a defensive perimeter and looking for the most expensive things that would fit in their pockets. Erich and Peaches came to stand beside him.
“How fucked are we?” Erich said.
“Don’t know,” Amos said. “First guess, there’s something hinky with the power supply. Too much noise. A bad coupler. Something that’s triggering the safety shutdown. But I’ve got to get between her hulls and take a peek.”
“I’ll help you ring the circuits,” Peaches said. Erich looked over at her, confused. “I spent a few months as an electrochemical technician,” she said.
“Well of fucking course you did,” Erich said.
“You bring a deck?” Amos asked.
“Sure,” Erich said. “Why?”
Amos pointed at the drive cone with his chin. “You can get the diagnostics running, and I can tell you what the output means.”
Erich frowned and scratched his neck thoughtfully with his tiny arm. “Sure. Figure I can do that.”
Peaches coughed once, then chuckled. “Erich? Did you ever, you know, kill anyone?”
“I run a drug empire in Baltimore,” Erich said. “Of course I’ve killed someone. Why?”
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just here we are, three murderers, and what’s going to save our asses if anything does is that we happen to have the skill set to repair a fusion drive.”
Erich smiled. “We are kind of well suited to this, aren’t we?”
“Well, we’d better set up some lookouts while we do it, though,” Amos said. “My plan to get out of here before trouble comes back may not work out.”
“I can have Stokes help with that too,” Peaches said. “They can’t fight, but they can watch. And I can get a few of the savvy ones to help us put the ship together if you want.”
“More the merrier,” Amos said. “Long as they don’t touch anything unless we tell them.”
“When we go, are we taking them with us?” Peaches asked.
“Yup,” Amos said.
She smirked. “Because they’re tribe?”
“Shit no. My tribe is the crew on the Roci, maybe you two, and a dead woman. I don’t actually give a shit if every damned one of ’em dies.”
“So why take them?”
One of Erich’s people called out. Another one laughed, and one of the servants tentatively joined in. Amos rubbed the raw spots on his knuckles and shrugged. “Seems like the sort of thing Holden’d do.”
Chapter Forty-one: Naomi
Naomi lifted the handles of the resistance machine over her head then let them slowly down. Sárta sat on the box of resistance gel and watched her like someone a little bit bored at a zoo. Naomi didn’t care. They didn’t talk. For every purpose but the ones that mattered most, Naomi was alone.
The trick, she’d decided, was not to remove just one EVA suit, but all of them. Corrupt the data, and no one would know whether she’d taken something or not. But if she only broke the inventory for the suits, that would be telling too. She lifted the handles. The muscles in her arms and shoulders ached. She let the handles down, savoring the pain. If she could get one of the scanners she’d used before, she might be able to feed false data into the system. Fill it with a few thousand phantoms. A million EVA suits filling every square centimeter of the ship. Then even if she couldn’t erase the data, she could render it useless. The problem was —
The warning Klaxon sounded. Naomi’s heart sank into her belly. They were preparing to go to free fall. She was out of time. She wasn’t ready. Outside the ship right now, the umbilical was still in place. As soon as it was hauled in, the Pella and the Chetzemoka would peel apart, and all her fragile hopes would die. She let the handles drop. The cable pulled them back into place, ready for the next person.
She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t going to be ready. It didn’t mean she wouldn’t try.
She walked the few steps to the resistance gel and nodded at the guard. “Going to the head.”
“Just been, you.”
“Going again,” she said, turning away.
“Hell you are. Hey!” Naomi pretended to ignore the woman, listening as she scrambled down to come after her. She’d been a model prisoner up to now, and the defiance took Sárta by surprise. Well, it was meant to. The warning sounded again, and the count. Zero g in three. Two. Naomi put both hands on the doorframe. One. Up and down vanished, and she pulled her body into a tight curl and exploded out toward Sárta. Both her feet hit the guard in the belly, sending her back through the wide empty air of the room. She grabbed Naomi’s left shoe, prying it off as she spun away. It would take her seconds to reach the other side of the room and something to push against. That was her head start. Sárta was already shouting.
Naomi flipped herself through the hatch, then down the hall, too fast for safety. She had minutes. She had less than minutes. Had she really thought she could pry open a locker, pull on a suit, and cycle the airlock? The math had worked at the time. She couldn’t imagine it now.
Sárta was somewhere behind her, shouting. Raising the alarm. But Naomi was already around the corner. With sight lines broken, Sárta would have to guess where she’d gone. With luck, it would buy her a few more seconds. She only needed seconds. She only had them. The crew airlock was closed. She cycled the inner door open, then started pulling at lockers. If someone – anyone – had slipped up. Left one unlocked. The metal clanked and rattled under her fingertips as she tugged and tugged and tugged. Was the umbilical unhooked yet? Were they pulling it in? It seemed like they must be.
There were voices raised from down the hallway. Men and women shouting. One of them was Sárta. Another one was Cyn. She felt herself sobbing and ignored it. She couldn’t fail. She couldn’t. Not this time. Not now.
For a sickening second, she didn’t feel the decompression kit at her waist. She slapped the place where it had been pressed against her skin, and it was there. If she could just get a suit. She tried another locker. Her heart skipped as it opened. A simple EVA suit hung there, suspended in the null g by thin bands of elastic. She reached for it.
She stopped.
They’ll know the suit is missing, a small voice said in the back of her mind. They’ll know where you’ve gone. They’ll come after you.
Her breath was heavy and fast, her heart racing. The thing she’d been trying not to think for the last hours came to the front of her mind like an old friend. Fewer than fifty meters. It isn’t far. You can make it.
She c
losed the locker. The inner door of the airlock was open now. She launched herself toward it, forcing herself to pant. To hyperoxygenate. She couldn’t tell if the dizziness she felt was from too much oxygen or a kind of existential vertigo. She was really going to do this. Naked in the void. She braced her palms against the outer door of the lock. She expected it to be cold. That it was the same temperature as any decking seemed wrong.
Fifty meters in hard vacuum. Maybe less. Maybe it was possible. She couldn’t depressurize first. The long seconds matching the airlock to the outer nothingness would take more time than she had. She’d have to blow it out. Full pressure to nothing in a fraction of a second. If she held her breath, it would pop her lungs. She would have to blow herself empty first, let the void into her. All around her heart. Even if it worked, it would do her damage.
She could handle that.
The voices were loud and getting louder. Someone shouted, “Find the fucking bitch!” Cyn sloped in past the lockers. His eyes widened. Sárta was behind him. Good, she thought. Perfect. Let them see. The indicator went from green to red under her thumb. Cyn launched across the room with a wordless cry as the inner door started to close. For a moment, she thought he wouldn’t make it, but his hands caught the edge of the door and hauled himself through. She tried to push him back, but he forced his way in.
The airlock door closed behind him, the magnetic seals clacking. Naomi held the handhold by the control panel, waiting for him to hit her. To kick. To put her in a chokehold. The lock was small enough he could put flat palms on both doors. She couldn’t get away from him if he attacked, but he didn’t. On the other side of the door, Sárta was shouting. Naomi thumbed the emergency override. Three options appeared: OPEN SHIP DOOR, OPEN OUTER DOOR, RETURN TO CYCLE.
“Knuckles, no you hagas eso.” His hands were spread before him, wide and empty. “Bist bien. Bist bien alles.”
“What are you doing?” Naomi said, surprised to hear the pain in her voice. “Why did you do that?”
“Because you my people, yeah? We’re Belt. Born on the float. You, me. Alles la.” Tears were welling up in his eyes, waves sheeting over pupil and iris with no gravity to fight the surface tension. “We travel so far, vide – uns the promised land. And we go all of us together. Tu y mé y alles.”
“You aren’t saving me,” she said.
The big man crossed his arms. “Then I’m die trying. You’re my people. We look out for each other. Take care. Not going to stand by while you die. Won’t.”
She should have been panting, forcing oxygen into her blood. She should have been flying across the emptiness. Cyn floated, turning slowly clockwise a degree at a time, his lips pressed tight, daring her to deny him. Daring her not to see that she was loved here, that she had family here, that she belonged.
Someone hit the inner door of the lock. The voices were louder. More numerous. Naomi knew she could open the door, but if she did, Cyn wouldn’t be the only one going out it. If he’d wanted to, he could have beaten her down by now. That he hadn’t meant he’d chosen not to. Naomi’s heart felt trapped between stones. She couldn’t blow the door. She had to. She couldn’t kill Cyn. She couldn’t save him. Whatever you do now, she thought, you will regret it forever. Seconds passed.
Another voice. Filip on the other side of the airlock door. She could hear him shouting, telling her to open the door. He sounded frantic.
How the hell did she keep getting into these situations?
“Be strong,” Cyn said. “For Filipito, be strong.”
“Okay,” she said. She pushed her jaw forward in a yawn, opening her throat and her Eustachian tubes. Cyn yelped as she hit OPEN OUTER DOOR. Air tugged at her once, hard, as it evacuated. Adrenaline flooded her blood as she was assaulted invisibly on every square centimeter of flesh. The breath in her lungs rushed out of her, trying to pull her lungs along with it. Cyn grabbed at the airlock frame to keep himself inside, spun, screaming, was gone.
With her lungs empty, there was no reserve. She wasn’t holding her breath, surviving off the gas held inside her. Someone could hold their breath for a couple minutes. In the vacuum, she could make it maybe fifteen seconds unaided.
One thousand one. Naomi shifted, hand over hand, to brace against the inner door and look out. The void was there, the great dome of stars. The Chetzemoka glowed in sunlight brighter than the Earth had ever seen. The umbilical hung to her left, too bright to look at directly and more than halfway retracted. Her ribs ached; her eyes ached. Her diaphragm tugged at her gut, trying to inflate lungs squeezed to knots. If she’d had an EVA suit, it would have had attitude thrusters. Without them, she had one chance and no time to think about it. One thousand two. She launched.
For a moment, she saw Cyn in the corner of her eye, a flicker of pale movement. The sun was below her, vast and bright. Radiant heat pressed against her throat and face. The Milky Way spread out, arching across the endless sky. Carbon dioxide built up in her blood; she could feel it in the burning drive to breathe. The Chetzemoka grew slowly larger. One thousand five. Shadows streaked its side, every protrusion and rivet cutting the sunlight into strips of darkness. Everything fell slightly out of focus as her eyes deformed. The stars shifted from diamond points of light to halos to clouds, like the whole universe dissolving. She’d thought it would be silent, but she heard her heartbeat like someone hammering in the next deck.
If I die here, she thought, at least it’s beautiful. This would be a lovely way to die. One thousand eight.
The lines of the Chetzemoka’s airlock became clear enough to make out. Without magnetic boots, she’d have to reach it with bare handholds, but she was close. She was almost there. The world began to narrow, lights going out in her peripheral vision even as the bright ship grew larger. Passing out. She was passing out. She plucked the black thumb out of her belt, twisted it to expose the needle, and slammed it into her leg. One thousand ten.
A coldness spread through her, but the colors came back as the sip of hyperoxygenated blood poured through her. An extra bit of breath without having the luxury of breathing out first. The airlock indicator on the Chetzemoka’s skin blinked, the emergency response received, the cycle starting. The ship loomed up. She was going to hit, and she couldn’t afford to bounce. She put her hands out fingers first, and prepared to crumple as she struck. There were handholds on the surface – some were designed, but others were the protrusions of antennae and cameras. She hit with all the same energy she’d kicked off with, the ship slamming into her. She’d known to expect that. She was ready. Her fingers closed on a handhold. The force of the body wrenched her shoulder and elbow, but she didn’t lose her grip. One thousand thirteen.
Across the gap, the umbilical was in the Pella. Maneuvering thrusters lit along the warship’s side, an ejection mass of superheated water glowing as it jetted out. Cyn’s body – he would have lost consciousness by now – was out there somewhere, but she couldn’t see it. He was already lost, and at least Sárta and Filip and maybe others had seen them both. Cyn and Naomi in the airlock without suits, and then gone. Spaced. Dead.
Not dead yet. She had to get moving. Her mind had skipped a fraction of a second. She couldn’t do that. Naomi pulled herself carefully, skimming along centimeters from the skin of the ship. Too fast, and she wouldn’t be able to stop. Too slow and she’d pass out before she reached safety. All she could do was hope there was a golden middle ground. One thousand… She didn’t know anymore. Fifteen? Her whole body was a confusion of pain and animal panic. She couldn’t make out the stars at all anymore. The Pella was a blur. The saliva in her mouth bubbled. Boiled. A high, thin whine filled her ears, an illusion of sound where no sound was.
A lot of things happen, she thought, vaguely aware she’d said it to someone else, not long ago. Even this. She felt a wave of peace wash over her. Euphoria. It was a bad sign.
The airlock was there, five meters away. Then four. Her mind skipped, and it was flashing past her. She shot out her arm, grabbing for it, and
the frame hit her wrist. She clutched for it, snatching the way Cyn had. She was spinning, the impact turning all her forward momentum angular. But she was over the airlock. Its pale mouth rose up from under her feet and vanished overhead, and back again, and back again. When she reached out, her hand was actually inside the ship, but she couldn’t touch the frame. Couldn’t pull herself in. The Pella was drifting away, losing its color as her consciousness began to fade. So close. She’d come so very close. Centimeters more, and she might have lived. But space was unforgiving. People died there all the time. The Pella loosed another plume from its maneuvering thrusters, as if in solemn agreement.
Without thinking, she drew up her leg, the spin increasing as she bent tight. She pulled off the shoe that Sárta hadn’t gotten. Her hands felt weird. Clumsy, awkward, more than half numbed. When she stretched back out, the spin slowed to what it had been. She tried to judge the timing, but too little of her mind was left. In the end, she saw the Pella at the end of a distant and darkening hall and threw the shoe at it as hard as her failing strength allowed.
Ejection mass. The spin slowed. Her hands reached farther into the airlock. She was drifting in. Her heel hit the steel frame and the pain was excruciating and very far away. Her mind blinked. She had an impression of the airlock control panel, the lights trying to impart some critical information. She couldn’t see the colors or the symbols on the pad. Her consciousness faded and was gone.
Naomi woke herself up coughing. The deck was pressing against her face. She couldn’t tell if she was desperately weak or under high burn. The edges of the airlock around her were fuzzy. She coughed again, a deep wet sound. Images of hemorrhaging lungs filled her mind, but the fluid she brought up was clear. Her hands were almost unrecognizable as hands. Her fingers were thick as sausages, filled with plasma and fluid. Her skin was too hurt to touch, like a bad sunburn. Her joints ached from her toes to the vertebrae in her neck. Her belly felt like someone had kicked her in the gut a couple dozen times.