Expanse: Nemesis Games Part 23

Amos was about to start trying to get his hand free when the Klaxons went off. Clarissa's eyes shot open and she sat up, present and alert and not even sort of groggy. So maybe she hadn't been asleep after all.

"What is that?" she said.

"I was about to ask you."

She shook her head. "I haven't heard that one before."

It seemed like the right time to get his hand back. He went to the door, but his escort was already there coming in. She had her weapon drawn, but not pointing at anything.

"I'm sorry, sir," she said, and her voice was higher than it had been before. She was scared. Or maybe excited. "This facility has been put on lockdown. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to remain in here for the time being."

"How long are we talking about?" he asked.

"I don't know the answer to that, sir. Until the lockdown is lifted."

"Is there a problem?" Clarissa asked. "Is he in danger?"

That was a good move. No guard ever gave a f.u.c.k whether the prisoner was in danger, so she was asking about the civilian. Even so, the escort wasn't going to say a G.o.dd.a.m.n thing unless she wanted to.

Turned out, she wanted to.

"A rock came down outside Morocco about three hours ago," she said, her sentence curling up at the end like it was a question.

"I saw something about that," Amos said.

"How did it get through?" Clarissa asked.

"It was going very, very fast," the escort said. "Accelerated."

"Jesus," Clarissa said, like someone had punched her in the chest.

"Someone dropped a rock on purpose?" Amos said.

"Rocks. Plural," the escort said. "Another one came down about fifteen minutes ago in the middle of the Atlantic. There're tsunami and flood warnings going out everywhere from Greenland to f.u.c.king Brazil."

"Baltimore?" Amos said.

"Everyplace. Everywhere." The escort's eyes were getting watery and wild. Panic maybe. Maybe grief. She gestured with her gun, but it just looked impotent. "We're on lockdown until we know."

"Know what?" Amos said.

It was Clarissa that answered. "If that was the last one. Or if the hits are going to keep on coming."

In the silence that came afterward, they weren't guard, prisoner, and civilian. They were just three people in a room.

The moment pa.s.sed.

"I'll be back with an update as soon as I have one, sir."

Amos' brain ran through all the scenarios that came easy and didn't see many options. "Hey, wait. I know it ain't for pleasure viewing or nothing, but that screen over there catch newsfeeds?"

"Prisoners only get access in the common area."

"Sure," Amos said. "But I'm not a prisoner, right?"

The woman looked down, then shrugged. She took out her hand terminal, tapped in a few lines of text, and the empty gray screen flickered to life. A pale man with broad, soft lips was in the middle of his report.

"- undetected by the radar arrays, we are getting reports that there was a temperature anomaly that may have been related to the attack."

The guard nodded to him and closed the door. He couldn't hear it lock, but he was pretty sure it had. He sat back in his chair and propped his heels on the side of the hospital bed. Clarissa sat forward, her bone-thin hands knotted together. The feed switched over to a white-haired man talking earnestly about the importance of not jumping to conclusions.

"Do you know where the first one hit?" Clarissa asked. "Do you remember anything from the news?"

"I wasn't paying attention. I think they said Krakatoa? Is that a place?"

Clarissa closed her eyes. If anything, she went a little paler. "Not exactly. It's a volcano that blew itself up a long, long time ago. Sent ash eighty kilometers up. Shock waves went around the world seven times."

"But it's not North Africa?"

"No," she said. "I can't believe they really did it. They're dropping rocks. I mean, who would even do that? You can't... you can't replace Earth."

"Maybe you kind of can now," Amos said. "Lot of planets out there now weren't around before."

"I can't believe someone would do this."

"Yeah, but they did."

Clarissa swallowed. There had to be stairs around here. They'd be locked up so that prisoners couldn't get to them, but Amos figured there'd have to be stairs. He went to the window to the hall and pressed his head against it. He couldn't see anything down the hall either way. Kicking the gla.s.s out seemed unlikely too. Not that he was looking to try. Just thinking.

On the screen, a mushroom cloud rose over a vast and empty sea. Then, as a woman's voice calmly talked about megatonnage and destructive capacity, a map was displayed with one bright red dot on North Africa, another in the ocean.

Clarissa hissed.

"Yeah?" Amos said.

"If the s.p.a.cing's even," Clarissa said, "if there's another one, it's going to be close."

"Okay," Amos said. "Can't do anything about that, though."

The hinges were on the other side of the door too, because of course they were. It was a f.u.c.king prison. He clicked his tongue against his teeth. Maybe they'd take it off lockdown and send him on his way. Might happen. If it didn't, though... Well, this was going to be a stupid way to die.

"What're you thinking?" she asked.

"Well, Peaches. I'm thinking that I stayed on this mudball a day too long."

Chapter Twenty-three: Holden.

Holden sat back, light-headed, his eyes still on the screen. The immensity of the news made Fred's office seem fresh and unfamiliar: the desk with the fine black lines of wear at the corner; the captain's safe set into the wall like a little privacy window; the industrial carpeting. It was like he was seeing Fred, leaning forward on his elbows, grief in his eyes, for the first time. Less than an hour earlier, reports had come through with red frames around the feed windows to show how serious everything was. The previous headlines a meteor or possibly a small comet had struck North Africa were forgotten. The ships carrying the prime minister of the Martian Republic were being approached by an unknown and apparently hostile force, his escort moving to intercept. It was the news of the year.

Then the second rock hit Earth, and what might have been a natural disaster was revealed as an attack.

"They're connected," Holden said. Every word came out slow. Every thought. It was like the shock had dropped his mind in resistance gel. "The attack on the prime minister. This. They're connected, aren't they?"

"I don't know. Maybe," Fred said. "Probably."

"This is what they were planning. Your dissident OPA faction," Holden said. "Tell me you didn't know about this. Tell me you're not part of it."

Fred sighed and turned to him. The weariness in his expression was vast. "f.u.c.k you."

"Yeah. Okay. Just had to ask." And then a moment later, "Holy s.h.i.t."

On the newsfeed, images of Earth's upper atmosphere showed the strike like a bruise. The cloud of dust was smearing off to the west as the planet turned under it. The dust plume would keep widening until it covered the whole northern hemisphere and maybe more but for now it was just a blackness. His mind kept bouncing off the image, rejecting it. His family was on Earth his mothers and his fathers and the land he'd grown up on. He hadn't been back in too long, and now - He couldn't finish the thought.

"We have to get in front of this," Fred said, to himself as much as Holden. "We have to -"

A communication request popped onto the side of the screen, and Fred accepted it. Drummer's face filled a small window.

"Sir, we have a problem," she said. "One of the ships we've got parked out there waiting to dock just put target locks on the main engines and the upper habitation ring."

"Defense grid up?"

"That's the problem, sir. We're seeing -"

The door of the office opened. The three people who came in wore Tycho Station security uniforms. One carried a large duffel bag; the other two had instruments in their hands that Holden struggled to make sense of. Strange hand terminals, or some sort of compact tool.

Or, guns.

Like someone speaking through the radio, a voice in the back of Holden's mind said This is a coordinated, system-wide attack just as the first woman fired. The sound alone was like being struck, and Fred toppled back in his seat. Holden scrambled for his own sidearm, but the second woman had already turned to him. He tried to drop down, to take cover behind the desk, but the two women fired almost simultaneously. Holden caught his breath. Something kicked him just below the rib, and he didn't know if he'd hit the edge of the desk or he'd been shot. He fired wild, and the man dropped the duffel bag. The first woman's head snapped back and she dropped to her knees. Someone else was shooting, and it took what seemed like minutes and was probably less than a second to realize it was Fred, supine behind the desk and firing between his feet. Holden had no idea where Fred had acquired a gun in the seconds since the attack started.

The second woman turned her gun toward Fred, but Holden took a breath and remembered how to aim, hitting her in the ribs. The man fled out the office door. Holden let him go and slid to the ground. There didn't seem to be any blood on him, but he still wasn't sure whether he'd taken a bullet. The first woman struggled to her knees, one blood-soaked hand pressing her ear. Fred shot her again. She dropped. Like it was happening in a dream, Holden noticed that the duffel bag had fallen open. It had emergency environment suits in it.

When Fred shouted, his voice was strangely high and very far away. The gunfire had left them both almost deaf. "You're a s.h.i.tty bodyguard, Holden. Do you know that?"

"No formal training," Holden shouted back. The words felt louder in his throat than they sounded in his ears. He became aware of another voice shouting, but not from here. From the desk console. Drummer. He stooped over Fred, ignoring her. Blood covered the man's side, but Holden couldn't see where the wound was.

"Are you okay?" Holden shouted.

"Just ducky," Fred growled, hauling himself up. He winced, clenched his teeth, and took his seat. On the monitor, Drummer blanched.

"You'll have to speak up," Fred said. "Things got a little loud here. Holden! Secure the G.o.dd.a.m.n door."

"Doors and corners," Holden said, stepping over the bodies. "Always doors and corners."

Outside, the security office was empty. A light was flashing on the wall. Emergency signal of some kind. Now that he knew to listen for it, he could hear the alarm. Evacuation warning. Someone was evacuating the station ring. That couldn't be good. He wondered if the good guys had sounded the alert, or if it was just part of the plan. A distraction while something even worse happened. He was having a hard time catching his breath. He had to keep checking to make sure he hadn't been shot.

He looked at the gun in his fist. I think I just killed someone, he thought. And someone dropped a rock on Earth. And then they tried to kill Fred. It was bad. It was all just bad.

He didn't notice Fred coming up behind him until he took Holden's elbow, leaning against him for support and pushing him forward at the same time.

"Look alive, sailor," Fred said. "We've got to go. They've fired a torpedo at us, and some ratf.u.c.ker sabotaged my defense grid." Fred was cursing more than usual. The stress of combat waking up the long-dormant marine inside of him.

"They're shooting the ring?" Holden said.

"Yes. And in particular, they're shooting at my office. I'm starting to get the feeling they don't like me."

Together, they struggled forward. In the wide corridor, people were scampering to hardened shelters and evacuation stations.

An older man with close-shaved hair and a mouth set in a permanent grimace saw Fred and the blood. Without a word, he took Fred's far arm across his shoulder.

"Are we heading to medical bay or evac?" Grimace asked.

"Neither one," Fred said. "The bad guys are trying to take engineering. My men got jumped. They're pinned down, and there are two enemy torpedoes on their way to disable the engines. We've got to relieve our people, and get the grid back up. See if we can't start firing back."

"Are you joking?" Holden said. "You've been shot. You're bleeding."

"I'm aware of that," Fred said. "There's a security transfer up here to the left. We can take it. Get to the construction sphere. What's your name, chief?"

Grimace looked at Holden, asking by his expression who Fred was talking to. Holden shook his head. Fred knew his name already. "Electrician First Cla.s.s Garret Ming, sir. Been working for you about ten years, one way and another."

"Sorry I haven't met you before," Fred said. "You know how to use a gun?"

"I'm a quick study, sir."

Fred's face was gray. Holden didn't know if it was blood loss or shock or the first symptoms of a deeper despair. "That's good."

Tycho Station was built like a ball half a kilometer across. The construction sphere was big enough to accommodate almost any ship smaller than a battleship in its interior s.p.a.ce. At rest, the two rings at its equator gave spin gravity to a city's worth of the Belt's best engineers and technicians. The great drives at the sphere's base could move the station anywhere in the system. Or out of it, now. Tycho had overseen the spinning up of Ceres and Pallas. It was the beating heart of the Belt and its loudest boast. The Nauvoo, the ship that would have taken humans to the stars, had been too large to fit inside the construction sphere, but it had been built in s.p.a.ce next to the ma.s.sive station. There was no better place for the construction of grand dreams than Tycho. Along with the terraforming of Mars and the farms of Ganymede, it was a living testament to humanity's ambition and skill.

Holden would never have imagined it could feel fragile.

The transfer from ring to construction dome was like taking a particularly awkward lift. They began at the full one-third g of the station, lurched, and their weight began to leach away. When doors opened again, they were in free fall. The blood that had started dripping from Fred's arm was a fluid coating now, the liquid held to his body by surface tension as it gradually thickened into a kind of jelly. Garret was covered with it. Holden was too. He kept expecting Fred to pa.s.s out, but the old man didn't lose focus or determination.

Visible from the long translucent tube of the access corridor, the construction sphere looked like a network of purified functionality. Other corridors curved between the ship berths, the walls tiled with a subtly repeating pattern of access panels, power transfers, storage and equipment lockers, and mech parking plates. The steel and ceramic bones of the station showed everywhere, and the light was as bright and harsh as sunlight in vacuum. The air in the access corridor was sweet with the scent of carbon lubricant and electrical discharge. Together, the three of them pulled themselves headfirst toward station south, the engineering decks, and the ma.s.sive fusion reactors. Holden's body couldn't decide if he was falling down a long, bent well or swimming along an underground river of air.

"Drummer!" Fred snapped. "Report."

The audio feed from his hand terminal was confused for a moment, then the woman's voice came, her syllables clipped, calm, and measured in a way that sounded like the professional version of raw panic.

"Understood. Main engineering has been shut down by the hostiles. They are holding auxiliary engineering with a force of approximately twenty well-armed enemy, sir. We're in a mutual holding action."

"Can you disengage?"