Expanse: Nemesis Games Part 43

Naomi lay on the deck, her head resting on her hands, and her eyes closed. The ship had been constructed for one use and as an insurance write-off. Its working life had begun with it being disposable, and it had been looted from there. Even the physical panels and monitors had been salvaged and carried away. As presents to Filip went, it was actually pretty c.r.a.ppy. The deck shook under her, the vibration of thrust setting up resonances that no system even tried to damp down. Between the high g and the vacuum damage leaking fluid into her lungs, breathing took more effort than it should have.

The ship wasn't a ship. She needed to stop thinking of it that way. It was a bomb. It was what she'd done to the Augustin Gamarra years ago and had carried with her ever since like a weight around her throat. Jim had known the kind of person that landed on water haulers like the Canterbury. He'd said that everyone there had reasons for being there. There were reasons the ship she'd tried to give to her son was stripped empty and triggered to kill. Not just her but anyone who came close to her. There were reasons. If she could defuse it, undo the threat, then she could follow it back, though. Take it to Ceres, where it had all started. There should be a way through the machine shop. All machine shops were supposed to be connected at the back.

She reached out her hands, only they weren't her hands. She was dreaming. She forced her eyes open and rolled to her back with an exhausted sob.

Okay. If she stopped moving now, she was going to sleep. That was good to know. She sat up, rested her head against the wall. Sleep later. Sleep when you're dead. Or even better, sleep when you're safe. She grinned to herself. Safe. That sounded like a good plan. She should try that for a change. She balled her hands into tight fists. The joints all screamed in pain, but when she opened them, her fingers moved better. That was probably a metaphor for something.

She had to set priorities. She didn't have a lot of resources. If she just grabbed at the first idea that came to her, it would be easy to exhaust herself without getting the critical work done. She needed to get food and water and make sure the air supply was reliable. She needed to warn anyone coming to save her not to approach. She needed to disarm the trap. Maybe dump core, maybe replace the drivers with a copy that didn't carry her poisoned code.

And she needed to do it before the ship blew up. At two g. Without tools or access to the controls. Or... was that right? Access to the controls was going to be hard, but she should be able to improvise some tools. The EVA suits weren't powered and didn't have bottles, but they had seals and reinforcement. She could take the cloth apart, and salvage some lengths of wire. Maybe something solid enough to cut with. And could she use the helmet clamps as a kind of vise grip or clamp? She wasn't sure.

Even if she could, what would that gain her?

"More than you've got now," she said aloud. Her voice reverberated in the empty s.p.a.ce.

All right. Step one, make tools. Step two, drop core. Or warn anyone coming in. She stood up and forced herself back to the airlock lockers.

Five hours later, she was on the ship's perfunctory little engineering deck, sealing the hatch manually. Two of the EVA suits had given up what little they had to offer to make a tiny, sketchy tool kit. Doing anything with the controls had failed. So she could be a rat in a box, or she could take out the middleman. After all, the controls all connected to machinery, and the machinery some of it was where she could put her hands on it.

The s.p.a.ce between the hulls was in vacuum, and she didn't have any great faith that the outer hull was actually sealed. The one remaining suit held about five minutes' worth of air without a bottle and she could set the radio to pa.s.sive and pick up the faintest echo of her own voice making the false message with the residual charge in the wires. The lock that should have let her get into and out of the maintenance access had been hauled off as salvage, but she could turn the full engineering deck into a makeshift airlock. Close the hatch to the rest of the ship, force the access panel into the s.p.a.ce between hulls. She budgeted two minutes to locate something useful a power repeater she could sabotage to force the drive to shut down, the wiring for the comm system, an unsecured console that was talking to the computers then two minutes to get back out. Thirty seconds to close and seal the maintenance panel and pop the engineering hatch. She'd lose a roomful of air every time, but she'd only lose a roomful.

She put on the helmet and checked the seals, then opened the access panel. It fought her at first, then gave all at once. She thought she felt a rush of escaping air go past her, but it was probably her imagination. Twenty seconds already gone. She crawled into the vacuum between the hulls. The darkness was so complete, it was like closing her eyes. She tapped the suit's controls, but no beam of light came from them.

She backed out, closed the access panel, opened the hatch, and took off her helmet.

"Light," she said to the empty s.p.a.ce. "Going to need some light."

The monitor hung from wires, asking for her pa.s.sword. It just fit past the lip of the access panel, and filled the s.p.a.ce between the hulls with light so dim, she couldn't see colors in it. Shadows of struts and spars made deeper darkness all around, and shapes she couldn't make sense of. She had forty-five seconds before she had to head back. It was the fifth time she'd been down trying to sc.r.a.pe through the coating on the wires. In a real ship, it would all have been protected by conduit. On this piece of c.r.a.p, the wiring had all been fixed directly to the hull with a layer of yellowed silicone epoxy. On the one hand, it was a blessing. On the other, she was horrified that she'd ever trusted her life to the ship. If she'd inspected between the hulls before they left Ceres, she'd have been sleeping in an environment suit the whole way to the Pella.

The coating peeled free. Thirty seconds. She took a bit of salvaged wire and shorted the circuit. A fat spark leaped out and the world lurched. Across the s.p.a.ce, maybe four meters away, an indicator light went amber, and she was falling sideways. With the extra illumination, she could see the round, tree-thick body of the maneuvering thruster. She put out her arms, catching herself against a steel strut. When she pressed her helmet to it, the rumble of the drive drowned out the ghost-quiet radio. She reached for the wire, broke the connection, and the rumble stopped.

Out of time, she turned back, her head swimming. The ship was spinning, then. She had no way to know how quickly, but the Coriolis was enough to make her stumble on the way back.

With the panel closed, the hatch open, and her helmet off again, she sat still until her balance came close to returning. Then, moving carefully, drunkenly, she scratched the new information on the wall. She was developing a crude map of the ship's secret interior and keeping track of all she learned. She was tired enough not to trust her memory. From the count she'd started, she knew she'd been on thirty sorties. Now, for the first time, she'd done something. It was only one thruster, but the ship was spinning now, tumbling in circles instead of burning ahead in a line. All the acceleration would be bled into the changing angular momentum, and she wouldn't be going toward Jim as quickly. So maybe she'd bought a little time. It would make things harder for her, but she'd grown up in the Belt and on ships. Coriolis and coping with the sick dizziness was nothing new to her. She knew that the feeling of power and accomplishment she felt was out of scale with what she'd actually managed, but she grinned all the same.

Thirty sorties. Two and a half hours just of time spent in vacuum. That didn't count the minutes refreshing the air in her suit or planning out the next run. Maybe five hours total since she'd started this. She was exhausted. She felt it in her muscles and the pain in her joints. She hadn't eaten couldn't eat. She was thirsty with the first strains of a dehydration headache coming on. There was no reason to think she would survive this. So she was surprised to notice that she was happy. Not the powerful, irrational, and dangerous joy of a euphoric attack, but a kind of pleasure and release all the same.

At first, she thought it was because there wasn't anyone there with her, guarding her, judging her. And that, she decided, was part of it. But more than that, she was simply doing what needed to be done without having to concern herself about what anyone else thought. Even Jim. And wasn't that odd? She wanted nothing in the world more than for Jim to be there followed by Amos and Alex and a good meal and a bed at a humane gravity but there was a part of her that was also expanding into the silence of simply being herself and utterly alone. There were no dark thoughts, no guilt, no self-doubt tapping at the back of her mind. Either she was too tired for that, or something else had happened to her while she'd been paying attention to other things.

This was the difference, she thought, between solitude and isolation. And now she knew something about herself she hadn't known before. It was an unexpected victory, and all the better for that.

She started getting ready for the thirty-first sortie.

She had almost a minute, because she'd figured out that coming up the comm array power supply took a lot longer than it did going back down. It was the sort of thing she'd have realized much more quickly if her mind hadn't been a little on the compromised side.

The comm system was held in place by more than epoxy. Long strips of metal tape lashed the transmitter in place, the welds still bright as if they'd been made yesterday. Three sorties ago number forty-four she'd thought there might be a diagnostic handset. Not that she could speak into it, but she might have been able to tap out a message. But despite the fact that handsets like that were standard and required, there wasn't one.

It had taken her some time to put together a backup plan.

For hours, the looped message had played in her ear, whispering on the back of residual charge. "This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. If you get this message, please retransmit. Tell James Holden I am in distress. Comm is not responding. I have no nav control. Please retransmit..."

Thirteen seconds long, and barely louder than the sound of her breath, even with her head less than a meter from the transmitter. With the leads to the transmitter exposed, she was ready. She'd have four times through. It had to be enough that it wouldn't be mistaken for random interference. She pressed her head to the hull to distract from the whirling of her inner ear.

"This is Naomi Nagata," she said, matching the timing and cadence of her false self. "If you get this message, please retransmit. Tell James Holden I am in -" She slammed the wire onto the exposed leads. A shiver of electricity bit her fingertips even through the suit's gloves. The radio was silent, but she kept mouthing the words, replaying them like a song stuck in her head until the right moment, then yanked the wire free "- control. Please retransmit. This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. If you get this message, please retransmit. Tell James Holden I am in -" Cut, pause. "- control. Please retransmit."

After the fourth time, she took the length of steel spring she'd been using as a knife and cut the transmitter. Her false voice went dead. She scrambled down, moving from strut to strut, watching her hands and feet with every movement so she wouldn't misjudge. The acceleration gravity made her ankles and wrists feel unstable. The air in her suit didn't feel stale or close; the carbon dioxide scrubbers worked well enough on pa.s.sive that she wouldn't feel the panic of asphyxiation. She'd just gently pa.s.s out and die.

She ducked into the engineering deck, closed the access panel. On the way to the hatch, her knee buckled. She popped the hatch open, ripped off her helmet, and sank down, gasping. Her vision narrowed, bright sparkles filling in her peripheral vision. She dry heaved once, paused, did it again, and let her body's weight sink deep into the deck below her.

Tell James Holden I'm in control for some really broad definition of control, she thought and laughed. Then coughed until her ribs hurt even worse. Then laughed again.

At her seventy-first sortie, she hit the wall. It wasn't subtle. She had closed the hatch to the main body of the ship, closed the seals, and put her helmet onto the environment suit. Before she fixed it into place and started the next five-minute count, her hands dropped to her sides. She hadn't consciously intended to do that; it had just happened. Alarmed in a vague, distant kind of way, she sat on the deck with her back against the wall and tried moving them. If she'd just become paralyzed or something, that would change the situation. Give her permission to stop. But her hands still flexed; her shoulders still moved. She was just exhausted. Even the effort to swallow seemed heroic. She closed her eyes, wondering if she'd instantly fall asleep, but she was too weary for that. So she sat.

If the suit had a battery, it would probably be cataloging the failures of her body right now. The dehydration headache was worse now, and moving in toward nausea. Her skin felt raw where the unshielded sun had burned her. Though she wasn't producing as much, she was still coughing. And she figured her blood was probably about equal parts plasma and fatigue poisons by now.

Her two little victories the thruster, the transmitter had been the end. Since then, either her efforts had degraded or things had genuinely gotten more complicated, or both. The repeaters that would cause the core to shut down had either been omitted in the build or were tucked someplace that couldn't be reached from between the hulls. The sensor array that would trigger the bottle failure when a rescue ship got too close would have been a lovely thing to access, but it appeared to be mounted on the exterior where she couldn't get to it. There were half a dozen places she could have tried tapping into the computer system, but none of them had interfaces, and she didn't have any she could bring. Other plans and strategies flickered through her mind from time to time like fireflies. Some of them might have been good. She couldn't keep hold of them long enough to say.

She might have slept or the timeless skipping might just have been how her brain worked now. The voice she heard was just a whisper fainter than her own voice had been, but it snapped her back to herself.

"Hey there, Chetzemoka. This is Alex Kamal presently of the Razorback. Naomi? If you're there, I'd appreciate you giving me a sign. I'd sort of like to make sure it's you before we come over. Your ship's been acting a mite odd, and we're a little on the jumpy side. And, just in case it's not Naomi Nagata? I've got fifteen missiles locked on you right now, so whoever you are, you might want to talk with me."

"Don't," she said, knowing he couldn't hear her. "Stay away. Stay away."

Everything hurt. Everything whirled. Nothing was easy. When she got to her feet, her head swam. She was afraid she was going to pa.s.s out, but if she bent over, she wasn't sure she'd have the strength to stand back up. She had to find a way to wave him off. She had to keep him from getting close enough to be caught in the blast. Whether it saved her life or not didn't matter. She'd had her good day. It was more than she'd expected, and she was so deeply weary...

Breathing hard, she opened the engineering hatch for the last time and stumbled for the lift. And after the lift, the airlock.

Chapter Forty-five: Amos.

Even though it was strictly local, running off the Zhang Guo's system, it was nice having working hand terminals again. Amos lay on a support wedged in the narrow s.p.a.ce between the hulls. The rest of his work team was only the soft clanging of magnetic clamps and the gentle, soothing smell of a welding torch. The meter he had clipped to the power line was at zero.

"Now?" Peaches said.

"Nothing."

A couple seconds pa.s.sed.

"Now?"

"Nothing."

Another second. The meter chirped, the indicator going from zero to eighty-nine. Amos grinned. "That's it, Peaches. I'm a little shy of ninety."

"Locking that in," she said, and even though the hand terminals were set for audio, he knew she was smiling. He plucked the meter free and sprayed sealant over the holes he'd made for the leads. "Erich? If you're there, we're ready for another run."

"Of course I'm here," Erich said. "Where would I go? Starting the diagnostics run now. You two go stretch your legs or something."

Amos whistled once between his teeth, the shrill echo making the sound seem larger. "I'm taking a break. You guys get that conduit open, just wait for me. Don't try to do something smart."

There was a rough clatter of agreement as he swung out and up, climbing to the access panel with the handholds and the structural supports. The B-team wasn't much by way of help, but they could do some of the time-consuming easy stuff while Amos and Peaches and Erich made the Zhang Guo skyworthy. So far, it had been as much cleaning up the servants' half-a.s.sed attempts to fix the ship as it had been finding why she'd been grounded in the first place. As showy as the ship was, her internal design was pretty nearly off-the-shelf. On the engineering deck, Amos dug up a cleaning rag and wiped the hardening sh.e.l.l of sealant off his fingers and wrist. Where it was thinnest, it was already solid, coming away from his skin like the sh.e.l.l off a shrimp.

Both doors of the airlock were open, and a portable stairway led down to the hangar floor. The windows were still dark, and a filthy, gritty rain tapped against the panes. The air smelled of ozone and cold, and Amos' breath ghosted. The overhead LEDs cast a harsh light, cutting shadows so distinct they looked fake. Stokes and the other household servants were cl.u.s.tered against one wall, clutching bags and hard cases and talking anxiously among themselves. Butch leaned against one wall, her hand to her ear in an att.i.tude of concentration. Amos watched her as he came down the stairs. The woman radiated a sense of barely restrained violence. Amos had known a lot of people who had the same air about them. Some of them were criminals. Some were cops. She caught him staring and lifted her chin in something between a greeting and a challenge. He smiled amiably and waved.

He got to the hangar floor about the same time Peaches climbed out the airlock onto the stair. Stokes broke free of the huddled group and trotted over toward Amos, smiling anxiously. "Mr. Burton? Mr. Burton?"

"You can call me Amos."

"Yes, thank you. I wondered whether Natalia could perhaps go to the Silas house? Her husband is a janitor there, and she is afraid if she leaves without him, they will never see each other again. She's very worried, sir."

Peaches came down the stairs behind him with footsteps soft as a cat's. Her shadow spilled down the walkway in front of her. Amos scratched his arm. "Here's the thing. Pretty sure we're going to be able to start the final run-through in maybe forty-five minutes. Anyone who's here when we're done, they can b.u.m a lift so long as there's room. Anybody not here should be far enough away they don't get burned down to their component atoms when we take off. Between those, I don't actually give a s.h.i.t what any of you people do."

Stokes chuckled and made a short birdlike bob with his head. "Very good, Mr. Burton. Thank you." Amos watched him scamper away.

"Mr. Burton, is it?" Peaches said.

"Apparently," Amos said, then lifted a thumb to point after Stokes. "Did he think I was joking about something? 'Cause I was just telling him how the sun comes up in the east."

Peaches lifted a shoulder. "In his mind, we're the good guys. Everything we say, he interprets that way. If you say you don't care if he lives or dies, it must be your dry gallows humor."

"Seriously?"

"Yep."

"That's a really stupid way to go through life."

"It's how most people do."

"Then most people are really stupid."

"And yet we made it to the stars," Peaches said.

Amos stretched out his arms, the muscles across his shoulders hurting pleasantly. "You know, Peaches, it's nice how we got all this help and stuff, but I kind of liked it better when it was only you and me."

"You say the sweetest things. I'm going to track down some coffee or tea. Or amphetamines. You need anything?"

"Nope. I'm solid." He watched her walk away. She was still way too thin, but since he'd stepped into the room in the Pit at Bethlehem, she'd taken on a kind of confidence. He wondered, if she had to go back, whether she still wanted him to kill her. Probably something worth asking about. He stifled a yawn and tapped his hand terminal. "How's it looking up there?"

"Not throwing any errors yet," Erich said. "So this is what you do now?"

"This is what I've been doing for years."

"And you can make a living this way?"

"Sure, if you don't mind weird-a.s.s aliens and corporate security a.s.sholes trying to kill you now and then."

"Never minded before," Erich said. "Okay, that's it. We're at the end of the run. I got that one hiccup from the water recycler, but everything else is good to go."

"If we're in this brick long enough to recycle the water, something will have gone badly wrong."

"That's what I was thinking too. You want me to start firing the reactor up? They've got scripts and a checklist."

"Yeah, why don't you let me take -"

The hand terminal squawked and a man's voice Amos didn't recognize came on. "Boss? I think we've got company."

"What're you seeing?" Erich snapped.

"Three trucks."

"Okay, f.u.c.k it," Erich said. "I'm starting up the reactor."

Amos trotted toward the front of the hangar. The lookouts at the windows were all standing and tense. They knew. The servants were still milling in their corner, out of the way. "Yeah, I'd go ahead and run the check first," he said. "It'd be a shame to do all this just so we could give the folks in Vermont a nice light show."

The silence was harsh. Amos didn't understand what the problem was until Erich spoke again. "I don't take orders from you. Burton."

Amos rolled his eyes. He shouldn't have said that on an open channel. So many years and so many catastrophes, and it was still all about not losing face. "I was thinking of it more as expert opinion," Amos said. And then, "Sir."

"Noted. While I take my time to do that, how about you go help hold the perimeter," Erich said, and Amos grinned. Like he wasn't already on his way to do that. Erich went on. "Walt, start getting the pa.s.sengers in the ship. Clarissa can a.s.sist with the start-up."

"On my way," she said, and Amos saw her running across the hangar for the stairs. Stokes was watching her with alarm. Amos waved him over.

"Mr. Burton?" the man said.

"That girl going after her old man? Yeah, she might need to rethink that."

Stokes went pale and searchlights brighter than the sun flooded through the hangar windows. A voice echoed through bullhorns, barking syllables too muddled by the echo to be words. It didn't matter. They all got the gist. By the time Amos got to the front doors, there were figures in the lights. Men in riot gear approaching the hangar with a.s.sault rifles in their hands that looked a little more heavy-duty than crowd control demanded. The servants were lined up on the stairs to the ship's airlock, but they weren't moving fast. One of Erich's men maybe twenty years old with a red scarf at his neck handed Amos a rifle and grinned.

"Aim for the lights?"

"Any plan's better than no plan," Amos said, and broke the windowpane out with the b.u.t.t of the rifle. The gunfire started before he could flip the barrel around to take aim. It roared like a storm, no gap between one report and the next. Somewhere people were screaming, but Erich and Peaches were in the ship and Holden and Alex and Naomi were somewhere off-planet and Lydia was safely dead. There was only so much to worry about. The guy next to him was screaming a wordless war cry. Amos took aim, breathed out, squeezed. The rifle kicked, and one of the glaring lights went out. Then someone else got another one. One of the Pinkwater soldiers pulled back an arm to throw something, and Amos shot them in the hip. A second after they went down, the grenade they dropped flashed and a plume of tear gas rose up through the falling rain.

Someone Butch, it sounded like yelled "Push 'em back!" and Amos crouched down, squinting back at the Zhang Guo. The civilians were almost all on, Stokes at the back waving his arms and yelling to hurry them. Something detonated, blowing the gla.s.s out of the remaining windows. The shock wave thudded through Amos' chest like the explosion had kicked him. He stood up, glanced through the window, and shot the nearest figure in the face. The deeper rattle came from outside, and stuttering muzzle flash brighter than the remaining lights. Holes appeared in the wall, beams of light shining through into the vast cathedral s.p.a.ce of the hangar.

"We got to get out of here!" Scarf Boy shouted.

"Sounds good," Amos said, and started walking backward, firing through the window. A half second later, Scarf Boy was with him. The others either noticed them or had already reached the same conclusion. Two were already on the stairs, shooting as they climbed. At this point, no one was trying to hit anything; they were just keeping the others from advancing too fast for everyone to get on board. Amos' rifle went dry. He dropped it and jogged back to the stairs, holding his hand terminal to his ear as he went.

"How're we doing?" he shouted.

"You're very clever," Peaches yelled back. "We had a power hiccup on start-up. Would have lost maneuvering thrusters."