Expanse: Nemesis Games Part 22

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.

f.u.c.k 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 pinche a.s.shole 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 a.s.shole that he was.

"No. No es toda. Launch the a.s.sault 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 embarra.s.sment.

"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 ma.s.sive 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 c.r.a.ppy 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 ma.s.sive 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 again.

"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 s.h.i.tty 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?"

"Sure," Amos said. "Why not?"

The big guy pushed a hand terminal across the table, and Amos mashed his thumb onto it until the print read. A little indicator on the side of the form went green. The big guy took it back along with Amos' hand terminal and shoes. The slippers were made out of paper and glue.

"Welcome to the Pit," the big guy said, smiling for the first time.

The elevator was steel and t.i.tanium with a harsh set of overhead lights that flickered just a little too quickly to be sure it was really flickering. Two guards apparently lived in it, going up and down whenever it did. So that seemed like a s.h.i.tty job. At the tenth level down, they let him out, and an escort was waiting for him: a gray-haired woman with a wide face, light armor, and a gun in her holster that he didn't recognize. Something beeped twice as he stepped into the hall, but none of the guards tried to shoot anyone, so he figured it was supposed to do that.

"This way, sir," the escort said.

"Yeah. Okay," Amos said. Their footsteps echoed off the hard floor and ceiling. The lights were recessed into metal cages, making a mesh of shadows over everything. Amos found himself flexing his hands and balling them into fists, thinking about how exactly he'd have to bounce the guard's head against the wall in order to get the gun off her. Nothing more than habit, really, but the place brought it out in him.

"First time down?" the escort asked.

"It show?"

"Little."

From down the hall, a man's voice lifted in a roar. A familiar calmness came over him. The escort's eyebrows went up, and he smiled at her. Her lips turned up in answer, but there was a different a.s.sessment behind it.

"You'll be fine," she said. "Right through here."

The hallway was brutal concrete; green-gray metal doors in a line with identical windows of thick green-tinted gla.s.s that made the rooms beyond look like they were underwater. In the first, four guards in the same armor Amos' escort wore were forcing a man to the ground. The woman from the waiting room huddled in the corner, her eyes closed. She seemed to be praying. The prisoner a tall, thin man with long hair and a flowing beard the color of iron roared again. His arm flashed out, quicker than Amos' eye could follow, grabbing one of the guards by the ankle and pulling. The guard toppled, but two of the others had what looked like cattle prods out. One of them landed on the prisoner's back, the other at the base of his skull. With one last obscenity, the iron-bearded man collapsed. The fallen guard rose back to her feet, blood pouring from her nose as the others teased her. The old woman sank to her knees, her lips moving. She took a long, shuddering breath, and when she spoke, she wailed, her voice sounding like it came from kilometers away.

Amos' escort ignored it, so he did too.

"Yours is there. No exchange of goods of any sort. If at any point you feel threatened, raise your hand. We'll be watching."

"Thanks for that," Amos said.

Until he saw her, Amos hadn't realized how much the place reminded him of a medical clinic for people on basic. A cheap plastic hospital bed, a steel toilet on the wall without so much as a screen around it, a battered medical expert system, a wall-mounted screen set to an empty glowing gray, and Clarissa with three long plastic tubes snaking into her veins. She was thinner than she'd been on the ride back from Medina Station before it had been Medina Station. Her elbows were thicker than her arms. Her eyes looked huge in her face.

"Hey there, Peaches," Amos said, sitting in the chair at her bedside. "You look like s.h.i.t on a stick."

She smiled. "Welcome to Bedlam."

"I thought it was called Bethlehem."

"Bedlam was called Bethlehem too. So what brings you to my little state-sponsored apartment?"

On the other side of the window, two guards hauled the iron man past. Clarissa followed Amos' gaze and smirked.

"That's Konecheck," she said. "He's a volunteer."

"How'd you figure?"

"He can leave if he wants to," she said, lifting her arm to display the tubes. "We're all modified down here. If he let them take out his mods, he could transfer up to Angola or Newport. Not freedom, but there'd be a sky."

"They couldn't just take 'em?"

"Body privacy's written into the const.i.tution. Konecheck's a bad, bad monkey, but he'd still win the lawsuit."

"What about you? Your... y'know. Stuff?"

Clarissa bowed her head. Her laugh shook the tubes. "Apart from the fact that every time I used them, I wound up puking and mewling for a couple minutes afterward, they've got some other drawbacks. If we pull them out, I'd survive, but it would be even less pleasant than this. Turns out there's a reason the stuff I got isn't in general use."

"s.h.i.t. That's got to suck for you."

"Among other things, it means I'm here until... well. Until I'm not anywhere. I get my blockers every morning, lunch in the cafeteria, half an hour of exercise, and then I can sit in my cell or in a holding tank with nine other inmates for three hours. Rinse, repeat. It's fair. I did bad things."

"All that s.h.i.t the preacher pitched about redemption, getting reformed -"

"Sometimes you don't get redeemed," she said, and her voice made it clear she'd thought about the question. Tired and strong at the same time. "Not every stain comes out. Sometimes you do something bad enough that you carry the consequences for the rest of your life and take the regrets to the grave. That's your happy ending."

"Huh," he said. "Actually, I think I know what you mean."

"I really hope you don't," she said.

"Sorry I didn't put a bullet in your head when I had the chance."

"Sorry I didn't know to ask. What brings you down here, anyway?"

"Was in the neighborhood saying goodbye to a bunch of my past, mostly. Don't see how I'm coming back this way, so thought I'd better say hi now if I was going to at all."

Tears welled up in her eyes, and she took his hand. The contact was weird. Her fingers felt too thin, waxy. Seemed rude to push her away though, so he tried to remember what people were like when they had an intimate moment like this. He pretended he was Naomi and squeezed Clarissa's hand.

"Thank you. For remembering me," she said. "Tell me about the others. What's Holden doing?"

"Well, s.h.i.t," Amos said. "How much they tell you about what happened on Ilus?"

"The censors don't let me see anything that involves him. Or you. Or anything involving Mao-Kwikowski or the protomolecule or the rings. It might be disruptive for me."

Amos settled in. "All right. So a while back, Cap'n gets this call..."

For maybe forty-five minutes, maybe an hour, he laid out all the stuff that had happened since the Rocinante turned Clarissa Mao over to the authorities. Telling stories that didn't have a punch line wasn't something he had much practice with, so he was pretty sure that as story time went, it sucked. But she drank it up like he was pouring water on beach sand. The medical system beeped every now and then, responding to whatever was happening in her bloodstream.

Her eyes started to close like she was going to sleep, but her fingers didn't lose their grip on his. Her breath got deeper too. He wasn't sure if that was part of the medical whatever it was they were doing to her or something else. He stopped talking, and she didn't seem to notice. It felt weird to sneak out without saying anything, but he also didn't want to wake her up just to do it. So he sat for a while, looking at her because there wasn't anything else to look at.

The weird thing was, she looked younger. No wrinkles at the sides of her mouth or eyes. No sagging in her cheeks. Like the time she'd spent down in the prison didn't count. As if she'd never get old, never die, just be here wishing for it. It was probably some kind of side effect of the s.h.i.t they'd pumped into her. There were kinds of environmental poisoning that did that too, not that he knew the details. She'd killed a lot of people, but he had too, one way and another. Seemed a little weird that she'd be staying and he'd be walking out. She felt bad about all the things she'd done. Maybe that was the difference. Regret and punishment the flip sides of the karmic coin. Or maybe the universe was just that f.u.c.king random. Konecheck didn't look like he had a lot of regrets, and he was locked up just the same.