Expanse 05 - Nemesis Games

  Avasarala’s face went calm, her eyes focused a few centimeters to Amos’ left. The security chief started to say something, but Avasarala put out a palm to stop her. After a few seconds, Avasarala grunted, shook her head, and turned to the security force. “You can skip this one. Go get a beer instead or something. It’s all right.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the security chief said.

  “Burton? You make goddamned sure there isn’t any trouble from this, and you get her the fuck off my moon without anyone seeing her.”

  “You got it, Chrissie.”

  “Don’t fucking call me that. I’m the acting secretary-general of the United Nations, not your favorite stripper.”

  Amos spread his hands. “Could be room for both.”

  Avasarala’s laughter rang out through the dock. The security force broke up, moved on. The loading mechs repositioned. The carts continued on their various paths, busy as a kicked anthill. “I’m glad you made it,” she said when she regained herself. “The universe would be less interesting without you.”

  “Likewise. How’s the recovery going?”

  “It sucks donkey balls,” she said, shaking her head. “We’re still losing thousands of people every day. Maybe tens of thousands. The food’s running out down there, and even if I had enough rice to feed them all, the infrastructure’s so fucked there’s no good way to distribute it. Not to mention that there could still be more of those fucking rocks dropping anytime.”

  “Your kid okay?”

  “Ashanti and her family are fine. They’re here on Luna already. Thank you for asking.”

  “And your guy? Arjun?”

  Avasarala smiled, and it didn’t reach her eyes. “I remain optimistic,” she said. “The Rocinante is on its way. You’ll have something to ride on that doesn’t make your cock look as small as that gaudy turd.”

  “That’s good to hear. This boat’s not my style anyway.”

  Avasarala turned away, shuffling awkwardly into the crowd. The low gravity didn’t seem natural to her. He figured she probably hadn’t spent all that much of her life up the well. Space was an acquired skill. Amos stretched, rolled on the balls of his feet, and waited until the last of the security force was out of sight. Chances were pretty slim they were going to press the issue once they’d been slapped down, but he still felt better watching them get gone.

  While he was waiting, two Belters in Aldrin dockworker uniforms scurried by staying close together, their heads bowed. Luna was going to be a shitty, shitty place to be a Belter for a while, Amos thought. Still, it probably hadn’t been that great before. He headed back to the Zhang Guo, and the entry lock opened as he got close to it, welcoming him back in.

  The ship’s interior was ugly as hell. The anti-spalling in the corridors was deep red and fake-velvet fuzzy with gold fleur-de-lis scattered over them in a weird, non-repeating pattern. The hatchways were enameled in royal blue and gold. Oversized crash couches were all over the place – in the corners of rooms, in niches in the hallways. The air recyclers added the stink of sandalwood incense without the smoke. All told, the ship was the embodiment of a stereotypical whorehouse done by a designer who’d never been to a real one. The security station was perfunctory, poorly designed, and barely stocked, but Erich’s people were placed around it as well as they could manage. Even Butch, still in pressure bandages, had a rifle with fresh rounds trained down the hallway.

  “Hey,” Amos said. “We’re cool. They’re not coming in.”

  The release of tension was like a soft breeze, if soft breezes came with the sounds of magazines getting pulled from assault rifles.

  “Okay,” Erich said, lifting a pistol in his good hand. “Tyce. Police up all the guns. Joe and Kin, put a watch on the lock. I don’t want to be surprised if anyone shows up unexpected.”

  “They won’t,” Amos said. “But hey, knock yourselves out.”

  “You got a minute?” Erich said, handing the pistol to a thick-necked man who Amos figured was Tyce.

  “Sure,” Amos said. They fell into step, ambling toward the lift.

  “That was really the woman who’s running Earth now?”

  “Until she lets ’em have an election, I guess. I never really paid much attention to how that whole thing works.”

  Erich made a soft, noncommittal grunt. His bad arm was curled up against his chest, the tiny fist tight. His good hand was stuffed deep in his pocket. Both made him look like something was eating him.

  “And you… You know her. Like asking-favors know her.”

  “Yup.”

  At the lift, Erich punched for the ops deck. It wasn’t where Amos meant to go, but it seemed like the conversation was leading toward something, so he went with it. The lift made a stuttering start, then rose gently past the high-ceilinged decks.

  “I can’t tell if this thing’s a ship or a fucking throw pillow,” Amos said.

  “Wouldn’t know,” Erich said. “It’s the first one I’ve been in.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Never been out of atmosphere before. The low-gravity thing. That’s weird.”

  Amos bounced gently on his toes. It was only about a sixth of a g. He hadn’t really thought about it much. “You get used to it.”

  “You did, anyway,” Erich said. “So how did you meet her?”

  “We got in over our heads on some shit, and some folks she was against were trying to kill us. She came in and tried to keep us alive.”

  “So now you’re friends.”

  “Friendly acquaintances,” Amos said. “I don’t have all that many what you’d call friends.”

  The lift stopped with a small lurch that it really shouldn’t have had. The ops deck was all dark surfaces, the decking a deep chocolate brown, the walls an artificial wood grain, the consoles and couches lined in fake leather. Or hell, maybe real leather. It wasn’t like he knew the difference to look at. Erich lowered himself into one of the couches and ran his good hand over his scalp.

  “You know,” he said. “You couldn’t have done this without us. Me and your prisoner friend. And now the head of the fucking government, which excuse me if that still breaks my head a little.”

  “Well, I —”

  “No, I know you would have done something. Just not this. You couldn’t have done this exact thing. This plan? For it, you needed to have us. All of us. And the only thing we had in common was you.”

  Amos sat across from him. Erich wouldn’t meet his eyes straight on.

  “Plan’s kind of a strong word for it,” he said. “I was just grabbing whatever I could.”

  “Yeah, the thing is you had things to grab. I spent a lot of years in Baltimore. Know it like the back of my hand. Knew it. Now, I’ve got all my best people here and no fucking clue what here looks like, you know? Who controls the drugs around here? How do you fake an ID? I mean, I figure that underlying logic’s the same anywhere, but…”

  Erich stared at the wall like there was something to see there. Amos craned his neck to look, just to be sure.

  “I don’t know what we do from here. I don’t know what I do from here. I’ve got people counting on me to get them through the queen of all churns, and I don’t know where to take them or what we’re gonna do.”

  “Yeah, that sucks.”

  “You do,” Erich said.

  “I suck?”

  “You know. You’ve been out here. This? All this? It’s your neighborhood. You know people. You know how things work. You know how to keep people alive.”

  “You may be overestimating the amount of time I’ve put into analyzing stuff,” Amos said. “I got one ship and three people. That’s been kind of a handful. All the rest of this just happened along the way.”

  “But it got us here.” Erich shifted his gaze. His eyes were hard. “I’ve got enough cash squirreled away that if I get access to it, I might be able to buy a small ship. Not a good one, but something. Or relocate the team somewhere. One of the Lagrange stations or Pallas or… wherever. Star
t over. Make a new niche. If you want to take the lead, I’ll give it up.”

  “Oh,” Amos said. “Yeah, no.”

  “They’d be better off with you leading than with me.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know them enough to give a shit. I’ve got my own thing going. I’m sticking with it.”

  He couldn’t tell if the release in Erich’s eyes was relief or disappointment. Maybe both. Lydia would have known. Or Naomi. Or Holden. Alex, probably. For him, it was just a little change in muscle tension. Could have meant anything.

  “I’ll find my own way then,” Erich said. “We’ll be out of here in a couple days, if I can manage it.”

  “Okay, then,” Amos said. It felt like there should be something more. He’d known Erich as long as he’d known anyone alive. Even if they saw each other again a time or two, the conversation they’d just had was the mark of the end. Both of their lives could have looked a lot different if Amos had said a few different words. It seemed like there should have been something to say about that. But since he couldn’t come up with anything, he went back to the lift and headed down for the machine shop.

  Going to the technical end of the Zhang Guo – the places where the owners and their guests wouldn’t spend their time – was like stepping into a different ship. All the glitter and beauty gave way to a clean utilitarian design that wasn’t as good as the Roci, but better than any other ship Amos had worked. All the corners were curved and softened in expectation of impacts. All the handholds were double-bolted. The drawers and cabinets in the machine shop were latched in two planes. The air smelled like fresh filters and lubricant. Someone had kept the place clean and in better order than a glorified orbital shuttle really deserved. Amos wondered if whoever that had been was still alive. It wasn’t a question he could answer, though, so he didn’t spend a lot of energy on it.

  Peaches was sitting at a workbench. The outfit they’d gotten during their bike trip to Baltimore looked pretty sketchy in the clean and tidy surroundings. Torn at the shoulder and still too big for her. She looked like she was swimming in it. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail with a zip tie and her hands were moving quickly and carefully over an open case of modular electronics. Her movements were as precise and flowing as an old recording of a piano player at the keys. She didn’t look up as he came in, but she smiled.

  “Got something for you. Salvaged a hand terminal. Nice one. Even got it talking to the local network. Finish the configuration, and you’re good to go.”

  Amos pulled the seat next to her out from the body of the ship. She handed him the terminal, but still didn’t meet his eyes.

  “According to Chrissie, it ain’t salvage.”

  “I liberated one, then. I was going to get one myself, but I can’t. I’ve got nothing to connect to.”

  “Could use it like a disposable,” Amos said, starting to key his configuration information. “Get you access to feeds anyway.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Well, if you don’t think it does, then maybe not.”

  She sighed. There were tears in her eyes and a smile on her face. “We did it. We made it safely to Luna. Just like we hoped.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know what I really missed when I was in the Pit? Anything that actually meant anything. They fed me, and they kept me alive, and we had this kind of support group thing where we could talk about our childhood traumas and shit. But I couldn’t do anything that mattered. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t talk to people outside the prison. I was just being and being and being until sooner or later, I’d die and they’d put someone else in my cell.”

  She leaned forward, her elbows on the workbench. She’d burned the side of her thumb on something – a soldering iron, the barrel of a gun, something – and the skin was smooth and pink and painful-looking. “I won’t go back there.”

  “Peaches, there’s no there to go back to. And anyway, I’m pretty sure Chrissie knows you’re on board here. She’s not pushing the issue, so as long as we stay cool and act casual —”

  Her laugh was short and bitter. “Then what? You can’t take me with you anymore, Amos. I can’t go on the Rocinante. I tried to kill Holden. I tried to kill all of you. And I did kill people. Innocent people. That’s never going away.”

  “In my shop, that’s just fitting in,” Amos said. “I appreciate that seeing the crew again could leave you feeling a little antsy, but we all know what you are. What you did. Including all the shit you did to us. This isn’t new territory. We’ll talk it through. Work something out.”

  “I’m just afraid that if he doesn’t back your play, they’ll send me back, and —”

  Amos lifted a hand. “You’re missing some shit here, Peaches. Lot of folks seem to be. Let me lay this out again. There’s no back, and it ain’t just the real estate. The government that put you in prison only sort of exists anymore. The planet that put you in prison is going to be having billions of people die in the next little bit. Making sure you serve your whole term doesn’t mean shit to them. There’s a new Navy between us and the Ring, and there’s still a thousand solar systems out there to fuck up the way we fucked up this one. Because what you’re doing right now? Yeah, you’re worrying about how it would go for you if none of that happened. And I’m thinking that you’re doing it because you’re not looking at the facts.”

  “What facts?”

  “It ain’t like that anymore.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Any of it,” Amos said. “With Earth puking itself to death and Mars a ghost town, everything’s up for grabs. Who owns what. Who decides who owns what. How money works. Who gets to send people to prison. Erich just called it the queen of all churns, and he ain’t wrong about that. It’s a new game, and —”

  His hand terminal chimed. Amos looked at it. The design was nicer than his old one, but the interface was a little different. It took him a few seconds to figure out what the alert meant. He whistled between his teeth.

  “What is it?” Peaches asked.

  He turned the screen toward her. “Seventy messages and twenty-three connection requests. Going back to before the rock dropped.”

  “Who from?”

  Amos looked at the list. “Alex, mostly. A few from the captain. Fuck. I got six hours of stored video with just Alex trying to talk to me.”

  Peaches’ smile was thin, but it was a smile. “At least you have people.”

  Chapter Fifty: Alex

  “A bicycle?”

  Amos leaned on the breakfast bar. “Sure. They don’t need fuel, they don’t get sick. Most of the repairs, you can handle on your own. You’re looking for post-apocalyptic transportation, bikes are the way to go.”

  Alex sipped his beer. It was a local brew from a pub just down the corridor with a rich hoppy flavor and a reddish color. “I guess I never thought about it that way.”

  The suite on Luna was bigger than their rooms on Tycho Station had been, but of the same species. Four bedrooms opened onto a wide, recessed common area. A wall screen bent around the curve of the room, set to an idealized lunar landscape that was more photogenic than the real one. Every now and then, an animated “alien” girl would pop out from behind a rock, look surprised, and dart away again. It was cute, he supposed, but he would have preferred the real moonscape.

  “So anyway, I didn’t want to go through Washington. Too many people there, and if the pumps stopped working, I didn’t want to be pedaling through knee-high sludge, right?”

  “Right,” Alex said.

  Holden was on the Rocinante. Naomi was asleep in her room. She’d been sleeping a lot since the Rocinante had plucked them all out of the vacuum. The medical system said she was getting better and that the rest was good. It worried Alex, though. Not because she needed the sleep, but because maybe she didn’t actually need it and was pretending to. Being here with Holden and Amos and Naomi was a bone-deep relief. He wanted it to be the end of their separation, everything come back into its right pl
ace like nothing had ever happened.

  But it wasn’t. Even talking to Amos, Alex thought he could feel little differences in the man. A kind of abstraction, like he was thinking of something else all the time and only pretending to give Alex his undivided attention. Naomi had been in medical debriefing since they’d arrived, and the physicians hadn’t allowed anyone in to see her except Holden. If Naomi was finding excuses to stay isolated from them, that could be a very bad sign. They still didn’t know all of what she’d been through that she’d wound up with the Free Navy and then escaped from it, but that it had been a trauma seemed obvious. And so he tried to enjoy the peace and pleasure of having his crew again and ignore the anxiety growing in the back of his mind, the sense that – just like with the governments and planets and system of the solar system – things here had changed.

  Amos’ hand terminal chirped. He sucked down half a glass of beer then bared his teeth. “I gotta go do a thing.”

  “All right,” Alex said, pouring the rest of his beer into the sink. “Where are we going?”

  Amos hesitated, but only for a fraction of a second. “Dock. Got something I need to move into my shop.”

  “Great,” Alex said. “Let’s go.”

  The stations on Luna were the oldest non-terrestrial habitation humanity had. They sprawled across the face of the moon and sank below its surface. The lights set into the walls glowed with a warm yellow and splashed across vaulted ceilings. The gravity – even lighter here than on Mars or Ceres or Tycho – felt strange and pleasant, like a ship ambling on without being in a rush to get anywhere. It was almost possible to forget the tragedy still playing out a little under four hundred thousand klicks over their heads. Almost, but not quite.

  Amos went on about everything that had happened while he was down the well, and Alex listened with half his attention. The details of the story would be grist for a hundred conversations once they were back in the ship and going somewhere. It didn’t matter that he get all of it now, and the familiar cadences of Amos’ voice were like hearing a song he liked and hadn’t listened to in a long time.