Expanse: Nemesis Games Part 21

"They're not shooting either," Alex said. "As long as they think we're just some yahoo out joyriding, we'll be fine. Probably."

Bobbie's couch hissed on its gimbals as she shifted her weight. She didn't believe it either. The moments stretched. Alex opened the channel again. "Hey out there, unidentified ship. I'm going to cut thrust here until I hear from you. I'm just letting you know so I don't startle anyone. I'd really appreciate a ping back, just so we all know we're good here. No offense meant."

He cut the drive; the grip of acceleration gravity loosened its hold on him. The gel of the couch launched him gently against his restraints. He could feel his heartbeat in his neck. It was going fast.

"They're deciding what to do about us," Bobbie said.

"That's my guess too."

"Taking them a while."

The Razorback announced a visual match, but it wasn't with the data Holden had sent them. The ship with its sights on them wasn't any of the colony ships that had gone missing out in the gates. With an eighty-nine percent certainty, it was a Martian naval corvette, floating dark. Behind him, Bobbie saw the same thing and drew the same conclusions.

"Well," she said. "f.u.c.k."

Profile match completed, the Razorback returned to its scanning arc. Another pa.s.sive contact. If the corvette was the Pau Kant, it wasn't out here alone. And then two more. And then six. The Razorback picked the nearest one and cheerfully started matching its profile. By reflex, Alex went to activate his point defense cannons. Only, of course, he didn't have any.

"Maybe they'll talk," Bobbie said. He could hear it in her voice that she didn't expect them to. He didn't either. Half a second later, the Razorback announced two fast-movers coming from the corvette.

He spun the pinnace away from the missiles and punched the drive. The couch slammed into his back like a blow. Behind him, Bobbie grunted. With a mental apology to her, he pushed them to ten g, and the pinnace leaped forward eagerly.

It wasn't going to be enough.

As light as the Razorback was, the missiles were an order of magnitude less ma.s.s to accelerate. And they didn't carry anything as fragile as a human body. They could pull a much heavier burn and close the gap to target in a matter of hours. He didn't have countermeasures to shoot them down, and there was nothing to hide behind. He didn't even have a load of cargo to drop out the back in hopes the missiles might blunder into it.

His vision started to narrow, darkening at the edges and dancing gold and fractured in the center. He felt the couch's needles slide into his thighs and neck, the juice like pouring ice water into his veins. His heart labored and he was fighting to breathe, but his vision was clear. And his mind. He had to think. His ship was fast, as ships went, but nothing compared to a missile. There was no cover he could reach in time, and if the missiles were half as good as the ship that fired them, they'd be able to guide themselves right up his drive cone, no matter what he tried to huddle behind.

He could run away, draw the attackers into a line behind him, and then drop core. The vented fusion reaction would probably take out at least the first one. Maybe more. But then they'd be on the float, and at the mercy of a second volley.

Well. A bad plan was better than no plan at all. His finger twitched on the controls. The layout was unfamiliar and the fear that he was coding in the wrong information just because he wasn't on his own d.a.m.ned boat was like a stake in his heart.

Bobbie grunted. He wasn't strong enough to look back at her. He hoped it wasn't pain. High g wasn't a good thing for someone who'd had a bunch of holes pushed through her recently. He told himself it was just the needles feeding her the juice.

An alert popped onto his screen from Bobbie's console. PRIME MINISTER. GUARD SHIPS.

Between the drugs and the panic and the compromised blood flow in his brain, it took Alex a few seconds to understand what she meant. The Razorback didn't have point defense cannons or interceptor missiles, but the flotilla heading for Luna did. Alex pulled the data into the plotting system. There was no way they could reach the Martian ships before the missiles caught up with them, but it was just possible barely to get inside the range of their antimissile defenses. If he turned course now. If the Martians figured out what was going on and launched almost immediately. And the burn was going to be at the outer limit of what he or Bobbie could handle.

Almost without thinking, he engaged the maneuvering thrusters and the crash couches clicked to match the new vector. The missiles seemed to leap closer, correcting for the new course and antic.i.p.ating where the pinnace would be. He sent an emergency signal, broadcast on all standard frequencies, and hoped whoever saw it on the flotilla was a quick thinker. The two spheres time-to-collision and Martian antimissile range didn't overlap, but there were only a few hundred klicks between them. Barely an eyeblink at their relative speeds. He shifted to medical control and switched Bobbie from juice to life support protocol.

Sorry, Bobbie, he thought. I'd warn you if I had time, but you're gonna need to take a little nap if we don't want you bleeding out. He watched her vital signs spike and then drop, her blood pressure and core temperature falling like a stone in the ocean. He pushed the ship to fifteen g.

His head hurt. He hoped he wasn't having a stroke, but it'd be fair if he did. Sustained fifteen g was a stupid, suicidal thing to do. He felt the air pressed out of his chest under the weight of his ribs, his skin. The sound of his gasping was like gagging. But the spheres touched now. Minutes stretched. Then fast-movers from the Martian flotilla. It had taken d.a.m.ned long enough, but the defenses were on the way. He tried to type in a message, warning the Martians that there were more ships out there, a dark fleet. He couldn't keep hold of the thought long enough to send it. His consciousness kept blinking, like the universe stuttering.

The medical system flashed up a warning, and he thought it was Bobbie, her old wounds reopening after all. But it was tagged for him. Something in his gut had ripped free. He canceled the alert and went back to watching death get closer.

They weren't going to make it. The lead missile was too close. It was going to take out the Razorback before the rescuers could come. Hadn't he had an idea about that? Something...

He wasn't aware of changing course. His fingers just did it. The spheres didn't touch anymore, until he switched to collision to track the second missile. Then, maybe. Maybe.

He waited. The lead missile closed. Five thousand kilometers. Four thousand. He vented the core.

Two hundred kilometers - The crush of gravity vanished. The Razorback, still hurtling through s.p.a.ce, stopped accelerating. Behind him, the lead missile died in the nuclear furnace of the rapidly diffusing core. The second missile jittered and turned to avoid the expanding cloud of superhot gas, and four lights burned before him, streaking across his screens so quickly he only knew them by their afterimages.

A fraction of a second later the Martian antimissile defenses destroyed the pursuing torpedo, but he had already lost consciousness.

Chapter Twenty-one: Naomi.

"Bist bien, Knuckles?" Karal asked.

The thin, slapped-together galley was too big for so small a crew. Bad design, waste of s.p.a.ce. It wasn't worn; it was cheap. She looked at him from behind the veil of her hair and smiled. "Fine, things being," she said, making a joke. "Como sa?"

Karal shrugged with his hands. His hair had gotten gray over the years. And the stubble of his beard. It had been as black as the s.p.a.ce between the stars once.

He looked at her eyes and she didn't flinch. "Something to say, me."

"No secrets between us now," she replied, and he laughed. She smiled back. The prisoner flirting with the turnkey, hoping a kind thought in his head would help her later. Maybe it would.

The thing that frightened her most was how well she knew how to play it. From the moment she'd come back to consciousness, she talked when people talked to her, laughed when someone told a joke. She acted like her abduction was just one of those things that happens, like using someone's tools without asking first. She pretended to sleep. Ate as much as she could past the tightness in her gut. And they all treated her like she was the girl she'd been, like they could all ignore the years and the differences, fold her back in as though she'd never gone away. As if she'd never been anyone else. Hiding her fear and her outrage slipped back on so easily, it was as if she'd never stopped.

It made her wonder whether perhaps she hadn't.

"So I was one," he said. "Helped with Filipito. Took care."

"Good."

"No," Karal said. "Before that. Sometimes, he was with me."

Naomi smiled. She'd been trying not to remember those desperate days after she'd told Marco she was leaving. The days after he'd taken Filip. To keep the boy safe, he'd said. Until she got her emotions under control, he'd said. A knot filled her throat, but she smiled past it.

"Those days. You had him?"

"Immer, no. But sometimes. Hijo moved, yeah? Night here, two nights there."

Her baby pa.s.sed around among the people she knew. The manipulation of it was brilliant. Marco using his child as a marker of how much trust he placed in them and at the same time painting her as the crazed one. The dangerous one. Making sure the story in their community was about how solid he was and how close to cracked she'd come. She had the sudden powerful memory of Karal looking in from the kitchen while she broke down in his wife's arms. Souja, her name had been. What must her tears and profanity have looked like to him then?

"Kept it quiet," Naomi said, "and I wouldn't have known. So why say it here?"

Karal's hands shrugged again. "New day. New start. Looking to sc.r.a.pe off some old rust."

She tried to read from his face whether that was true, or if this was just another little cruelty in a form she couldn't call out without looking like the crazy one. If it had been back on the Roci, she would have known. But here, now, the balance between fear and anger and trying to control herself swamped little things like truth. It was the beauty of the way Marco had set her against herself. Tell her she was broken as a way to break her, and here they were a decade and a half past, and it still worked.

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 f.u.c.ked, she thought, and laughed. Karal ventured a smile.

"Thank you for telling it straight," Naomi said. "New start. Sc.r.a.pe off the rust."

And if I ever get the chance to leave you behind in a fire, Karal, then good G.o.d 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sageway 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 s.p.a.ce 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 flechette 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 pa.s.sage was the usual design of inflated Mylar and t.i.tanium 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 outga.s.sing 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s. 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 rea.s.suring. 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 cla.s.s, 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 bulls.h.i.t?"

Marco's hurt expression could have pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.t 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 neo 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 c.o.c.ktails. 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."