Expanse: Nemesis Games Part 40

When they actually got to the water's edge, it wasn't as pretty. The water stank of dead fish and a coating of ash lay across the surface like someone had sifted chalk dust over the whole place. Erich's people waded in up to their thighs and dropped three packages that unfolded into hard, black pontoon boats. By the time they started toward the enclave on Rattlesnake Island, the sky was a perfect black. No stars, no moon, no backsplash of light pollution. The night was like sticking his head in a sack.

They spun to the north side of the island where a wide bridge on a coated steel pier ran out toward the launching pad. Hangars and boathouses encrusted the sh.o.r.e, boxes for the toys of the wealthy as big as basic housing blocks for a thousand people. The pontoon boat they were in surged forward over the chop of the water. The boathouse they chose was painted bright blue, but outside the circles of their lights, it could have been anything. It only took a minute to find the keypad on a pole that poked up from the dark water. Peaches leaned over, stretched her thin arm, and tapped out a series of numbers. For a second, it looked like it hadn't worked, then the boathouse doors silently rose and automatic lights came on. The interior was all wood paneling, rich red cedar, and enough room for a tennis court. An angry barking came out from the darkness as they steered inside.

A wolfhound stood on the deck of a little powerboat, its paws on the rail. The pontoon boats snugged up in the s.p.a.ce next to the powerboat. Amos hauled himself up and the wolfhound darted toward him, growling and snarling. It was a beautiful animal, genetically engineered, he figured, for the gloss of its fur and the graceful lines of its face.

"Hey there," Amos said, squatting down to its level. "Someone didn't bother taking you along when they left, huh? That s.h.i.t's gotta suck."

The dog shied back, uncertain and frightened.

"How about this," Amos said. "Don't start anything with us, we won't shoot you."

"It doesn't talk," Erich said as the dog retreated, barking over its shoulder.

"How do you know? a.s.sholes with this much money, maybe they put some kind of translator into its brain."

"They can't do that," Erich said, then turned to Peaches. "They can't, can they?"

"This is the Cook estate," Peaches said. "Darwa and Khooni lived here. I used to sleep over on Wednesday nights in the summer." She shuddered a little and Amos c.o.c.ked his head. "It's a long time since I've been here. It seems like it should have changed more."

"You know how to get to their hangar?" Erich asked.

"I do."

But when they got there, the s.p.a.ce was empty. When they crossed the broad gravel yard to the next hangar over the Davidovics' it was empty too. The third one didn't have a ship, but it did have a dozen people. They stood in the center of the s.p.a.ce with handguns and the kind of cheap suppression sprays they sold over the counter at grocery stores. The man in front was maybe fifty with graying hair and the beginnings of a new beard.

"You, all of you, stay back!" the man yelled as Amos and Butch and three more came in through the side door. "This is private property!"

"Oh, it belongs to you?" Butch sneered. "This all your place?"

"We work for the Quartermans. We have a right to be here." The man waggled his handgun. "You, all of you, get out!"

Amos shrugged. Another half dozen of Erich's people had come in, most of them with a.s.sault rifles held calmly at their sides. The servants were all huddled together in the middle of the room. If they'd had any skill or practice, there would have been two or three snipers up in the rafters, ready to start picking the bad guys off while these folks kept their attention low, but Amos didn't see anyone. "I kinda don't think the Quartermans are coming back. We're going to take some of their stuff. But anything we can't use, you should feel welcome to."

The man's face hardened, and Amos got ready for there to be a lot of dead people. But before Erich's people lifted their guns, Peaches interrupted.

"You're... you're Stokes, right?" The front man Stokes, apparently lowered the gun, confused as Peaches stepped forward. "It's me. Clarissa Mao."

"Miss Clarissa?" Stokes blinked. The gun wavered. He heard Butch mutter "f.u.c.king seriously?" under her breath, but no one started firing. "Miss Clarissa! What are you doing here?"

"Trying to leave," Peaches said, with a laugh in her voice. "What are you here for?"

Stokes smiled at her, and then nervously at Amos and Erich and all the others, shining his teeth at them like the beam from a deeply insecure lighthouse. "The evacuation order came when the second rock came down. The Quartermans all left. Took the ship, and gone. They all went. The Cooks, the Falkners, old man Landborn. Everyone, they took their ships and left. Told us the security would keep us safe until relief came. But there's no relief, and the security? They're thugs. They tell us we have to pay them since the Quartermans are gone, but what do we have?"

"All the Quartermans' s.h.i.t," Amos said. "Which brings me back to my first point."

"Are there any ships?" Peaches said. "We need a ship. Just to get us to Luna. That's why we came here."

"Yes. Yes, of course. The Bergavins left the Zhang Guo. It is in their hangar. We can take you there, Miss Clarissa, but -"

A sharp whistle came from the side door. From the street outside it. Butch met Amos' gaze. "Company," she said.

The streets on the island were wide. Roomy. Big enough to haul a ship down to the bridge. The security patrol car had the claw-and-eye logo of Pinkwater. Its headlights cut a wide cone through the darkness. Erich stood with his good hand up to shield his eyes. Two men were swaggering up toward him.

"Well now," the first man said. "What have we got here?"

Erich backed away, limping. "No trouble, sir," he said.

"How about if I determine that," the lead man said. "Get on the f.u.c.king ground." He had a cowboy hat on and his hand on the b.u.t.t of his pistol. Amos smiled. The warmth in his belly and his arms was the same kind he got when he heard a familiar song after a long time. It was just pleasant. "I said get on the ground you crippled sonofab.i.t.c.h! You do it now, or I'll f.u.c.k your f.u.c.king eyeholes!"

"Peaches?" Amos called as he strode out into the light. The two security men drew their pistols and pointed them at him. "Hey, Peaches, you back there?"

"Yes?" she said. It sounded like she was in the side door. That was fine. He saw the pair of security men clock the rest of Erich's people in the gloom. They were mostly silhouetted, but their bodies went tense. Always a bad moment, seeing you brought a knife to a gunfight.

"See, this is what I was talking about," Amos called. "Things start falling apart, and the tribes get small. These guys, probably good upstanding folks when there's a boss to answer to. Clients. Shareholders." He turned to the man in the hat and grinned amiably. "Hey," he said.

"Um. Hey," Hat said.

Amos nodded and called back toward the hangar. "Thing is you take that away, they're guys with guns. They act like guys with guns. Do guys-with-guns stuff. Right?"

"I follow you," Peaches said.

"You should put your guns down," Amos said to Hat. "We've got just a s.h.i.tload more of them than you do. So really."

"You heard the man," Butch said. "Guns on the ground, please."

The security men glanced at each other.

"We could have just shot you," Amos said. As Hat and his partner slowly lowered their guns to the pavement, Amos raised his voice again. "So Peaches, these guys? They go from being protectors of this big tribe with what's-his-name and them inside the tribe to being protectors of their own little tribe, and those folks on the outside of it. It's all about who's in and who's out."

Hat lifted his hands, palms out, about shoulder high. Amos. .h.i.t him in the jaw. It was a solid punch, and his knuckles ached from it. Hat staggered back, and Amos stepped forward twisting his body into the kick. It landed on Hat's left kneecap and the man screamed.

"Thing is," Amos called, "most of us don't got room in our lives for more than six" he straight-kicked Hat in the middle of the back as he tried to stand up "maybe seven people. You get bigger than that, you got to start telling stories about it."

Hat was crawling back toward the car. Amos put his knee on the man's back, leaned down, and started emptying Hat's pockets and belt. Chemical mace. A Taser. A wallet with ID cards. A two-way radio. He found the unregistered drop gun strapped to the guy's ankle. Each thing he took, he threw out to the edge of the water, listening for the splash. Hat was weeping, and Amos' weight made it hard for him to breathe. The other one was standing perfectly still, like if he didn't move Amos wouldn't notice him. Wasn't like he had a better strategy at this point.

Amos grinned at him. "Hey."

The guy didn't say anything.

"It's okay," Amos said. "You didn't say you were gonna skullf.u.c.k my friends, right?"

"Right," the other one said.

"Okay, then." Amos stood up. "You should probably get him to a doctor. And then whoever else you've got on this s.h.i.thole of an island, tell them what I did, and how I didn't f.u.c.k you up because you hadn't f.u.c.ked with me. Okay?"

"All right."

"Great. And then don't come back around here."

"I won't."

"We won't," Amos said. "You mean we won't. Not you and not your tribe."

"We won't."

"Perfect. No problems, then. And give Butch your stuff, all right? Drop gun too."

"Yes, sir."

Amos walked back toward the hangar. Sure enough, Peaches was standing in the doorway, her arms crossed. He wiped his hand. His knuckles were bleeding.

"See, that's what civilization is," he said. "Bunch of stories. That's all."

"So what if it is?" Peaches said. "We're really good at telling stories. Everything just turned to s.h.i.t, and we're already finding ways to put it back together. Stokes and the other servants were ready to fight us or get killed, but then I knew his name and he remembered me, and now there's a story where he wants to help us. You go out there and you send a message about how those guys should leave us alone. All of us. More than just six or seven. And, side note here, you know the Pinkwater guys are going to come back and try to kill you for that, right?"

"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 f.u.c.ked 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 f.u.c.king 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 a.s.ses 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?"

"s.h.i.t no. My tribe is the crew on the Roci, maybe you two, and a dead woman. I don't actually give a s.h.i.t if every d.a.m.ned 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. Sarta 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.

"h.e.l.l 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 Sarta 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 Sarta. 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. Sarta was already shouting.