Expanse: Nemesis Games Part 44

"We going to lose them now?"

"Don't think so."

"Good."

He stopped at the base of the stairs. Scarf Boy crouched behind him, reloading his a.s.sault rifle. When he had the new magazine in, Amos plucked it out of his hands and pointed at the stairway with his chin. Scarf Boy nodded thanks and scuttled up the steps, his head low. Shadows danced on the windows, and the side door burst in with a three-person team rushing in. Amos mowed them down. Half a dozen of Erich's people were on the stairs now, some still shooting as they climbed. One of them Butch stumbled as she got to the fourth step up. Blood soaked her arm and the side of her neck. Amos held the a.s.sault rifle up, spraying the walls, and knelt beside her.

"Come on," he said. "Time to go."

"Don't think that's happening," Butch said.

Amos sighed. He put his hand terminal in his pocket, took the woman's collar in one hand and the rifle's grip in the other, and ran up the steps to the rattle of his own gunfire. The woman screamed and bounced. Something exploded, but Amos didn't pause to figure out what. At the airlock, he hauled Butch through, fired one last burst down the stairway, and hit the controls to cycle the lock closed.

All around him, Erich's people and the house servants were huddled. Some were covered in blood. He was covered in blood. He was pretty sure it was all Butch's, but not a hundred percent. Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, he missed things like getting shot. He let Butch down to the deck and pulled out his hand terminal.

"Okay," he said. "Now would be good."

"The exhaust's going to kill everyone out there," Erich said.

"Are we caring about that?" Amos shouted.

"I guess not."

The drive roared to life. "Lay down!" Amos shouted. "We don't have time to get to couches. Everyone lay down. You want the thrust spread out over your whole body!"

He lay down beside Butch. Her eyes were on him with something that might have been pain or anger. She didn't speak, and neither did he. Erich's voice came over the ship's system, telling them to brace, and then Amos weighed a whole lot more than he had a few seconds before. A loud crunching sound rattled the deck the Zhang Guo pushing through the hangar's roof on her way to the sky. The ship rattled, dropped, rose again. The deck pressed into Amos' back. If they had to make any hard turns, there were going to be at least a dozen people all mushed together in the corner where the deck met the wall.

The screen over the engineering controls flickered to life; clouds and rain falling down onto the forward cameras as the ship rose. Lightning flickered, the thunder rolling through the ship. He couldn't remember if a standard orbital escape called for three gs or four, but whatever it was would have been a whole h.e.l.l of a lot more fun in a crash couch. His jaw ached, and he had to remember to clench his arms and legs to keep from pa.s.sing out. All around him, the others weren't remembering that in time, or more likely never knew. Most of them, this was their first time up the well.

Over the course of long minutes, the rain and clouds on the screen faded. The lightning fell away behind them. Then, through the featureless gray, the first shining stars. Amos laughed and whooped, but no one joined him. Looking around, he seemed to be the only one still conscious, so instead, he lay back on the deck and waited for the thrust gravity to drop out when they hit orbit.

The stars slowly grew brighter, twinkling at first as the last gritty layers of atmosphere pa.s.sed by them, and then growing steady. The Milky Way appeared like a dark cloud lit from behind. The thrust gravity began to ease and he got to his feet. Around him, other people were starting to come back to themselves. Scarf Boy and the others were hauling Butch out to the lift and the med bay, a.s.suming the Zhang Guo had one of those. Stokes and the others were laughing or weeping or staring off in shock and disbelief. Amos checked himself for wounds and, apart from a series of four deep, gouging sc.r.a.pes along his left thigh whose origins he couldn't recall, felt fine.

He turned his hand terminal to the open channel. "This is Amos Burton. You guys mind if I come up to ops?"

"You can do that, Burton," Erich said. There was maybe just a hint of smug in his voice. This saving face for Erich thing was going to get old fast, but right at the moment, he was feeling too high to care.

The ops deck was offensively lush. The anti-spalling had been made to look like red-velvet wallpaper and the light came from silver-and-gold sconces all along the walls. Erich sat in the captain's couch. His good hand was moving over the deck in his lap, his bad one holding on to the straps. Peaches was in the navigator's couch, her eyes closed and her smile beatific.

"Grab a couch," Erich said with a grin. His old friend and not the criminal boss who needed to keep Amos in his place. He switched to the ship system. "Brace for maneuvers. Repeat, brace for maneuvers."

"That's not how they really do that," Amos said, strapping in at communications. "That's just something they say in the movies."

"It's good enough for now," Erich said, and the couches shifted under them as the thrusters turned the ship. Slowly, the moon hove into view, and behind it, the sun. Silhouetted, Luna was a disk of black from here except for a thin limn of white along one edge and a webwork of city lights. Peaches chuckled like a brook, her eyes open now, her hands pressed to her lips. The tears welling up in her eyes glittered.

"Didn't think you'd see this again, did you Peaches?"

"It's beautiful," she said. "Everything's beautiful, and I didn't think anything ever would be again."

They were all silent for a moment, and then Erich switched the view, pulling it slowly down. Below them, Earth was a smear of white and of gray. Where the continents should have burned in the permanent fire of lights, there were only a scattering of dim, dull glowing points. The seas were hidden, and the land. A funeral shroud was over the planet, and they all knew what was happening beneath it.

"f.u.c.k," Erich said, and it carried a weight of awe and despair.

"Yeah," Amos said. They were all quiet for a long moment. The birthplace of humanity, the cradle of life in the solar system, was beautiful in its death throes, but none of them had any doubt that was what they were seeing.

The comm controls interrupted them. Amos accepted the connection and a young woman in UN naval uniform appeared in a high-priority panel.

"Zhang Guo, this is Luna Base. We do not have an approved flight plan for you. Be advised this s.p.a.ce is under military restriction. Identify yourselves immediately, or be fired upon."

Amos opened the channel. "Hey there, Luna Base. Name's Amos Burton. Didn't mean to step on anybody's toes. If you've got someone up there named Chrissie Avasarala, pretty sure she'll vouch for me."

Chapter Forty-six: Alex.

"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."

Alex shut off the mic, and rubbed his cheek. They were on the float now, course matched with the mysterious ship only about fifty kilometers above them on the relative z-axis. The sun, larger by far than he'd ever seen it from Mars, glowed below them, heating the little pinnace almost to the limit of its ability to shed the energy. Behind him, Bobbie was watching the same feed he was.

"That doesn't look good," she said.

"Nope."

As a boy, back on Mars, there had been a little improvised firework that his friends would sometimes make for fun. All it took was a length of light-duty pipe, a mining spike, and a single-use rocket motor. The way it worked, they'd spike one end of the pipe to a flat section of wall, fix the motor to the other end with industrial tape or epoxy with the thrust pointing off to one side. Fire the motor, and the whole thing turned into a ring of smoke and fire, the pipe spinning around its axis faster than the eye could follow, the flare of the motor exhaust blinding and flickering. Sometimes the motor came loose and bounced along the corridor, posing a threat to everyone watching. Sometimes the spike came loose. Most times, it just left a circle of sc.r.a.pes and scorch marks on the stone of the wall that p.i.s.sed off the maintenance crews. They called them fire weasels. He didn't know why.

Above them, the Chetzemoka was spinning like a fire weasel. She wasn't quite tumbling, but the circle she was burning in was tight. All the acceleration she'd been using to burn hard out toward the Belt and Holden was getting eaten now, each point on her pathway canceling out the point a hundred and eighty degrees off from it. Her exhaust plume was a jet of flame and plasma that would gla.s.s anything that tried to approach her unless it came from above or below. And if they did that...

"What do you think happened?" Bobbie asked.

"Maneuvering thruster fired off, never got balanced."

"Can you match course with that? I mean even if we decided we wanted to?"

Alex pressed the tip of his tongue to the back of his teeth and willed Naomi to call him. To give him a sign that she was still alive. That he wasn't about to risk his ship and his life and the lives of the people with him to rescue a corpse. "Might have to come up with something clever."

He pulled up the tactical display. The Razorback and her cloud of missiles with no one left to shoot at. The Chetzemoka chasing its tail like a terrier that had gulped down its own body weight in uppers. Then, far distant, the UN escort decelerating in from the sun toward a matching course, and the Roci doing the same from the Belt. Everything was coming together right here the head of the OPA, the prime minister of Mars, Avasarala's best cavalry because it was where Naomi Nagata was, and as long as Alex and Holden were drawing breath, they'd be looking out for their own.

The screen lit up with an incoming message, but not from the Chetzemoka. Alex accepted it, and Holden appeared on the screen. For about four seconds, the captain didn't do anything but look into the camera and scratch his nose. He looked tired and thin. Alex felt the same way himself. Then a smile bloomed on Holden's face, and he seemed more like himself again. "Alex! Good. Tell me what we're looking at."

"Well, we haven't had any new messages since their radio cut out, but if that was an intentional message, this looks like about the worst definition of 'in control' I've seen in a while. This mystery ship's not quite on the tumble, but she's d.a.m.ned close. The way she's chasing her tail, it's not going to be easy making an approach, but I'm working on an idea. The Razorback wasn't built for airlock to airlock. This here's the kind of ride you land in a hangar. But we've got EVA suits for me and Nate. That's the prime minister. I call him Nate now. Don't be jealous. Anyway, I figure we put the Razorback at the center of the circle Naomi's making with our nose up and our a.s.s down, then match roll to the circle she's making. Then as long as no one pukes in their helmet, we can send someone over to the airlock. Not sure it'll work, but it's the best idea I've got so far."

He leaned forward while the tightbeam laser flew the four light-seconds out to the Rocinante, then the four light-seconds back. To judge from the shape of Holden's face, he was probably at more than one g. Even if the Chetzemoka hadn't gone into its surprise spin, the Razorback would have been the first to reach it. Holden's temporary pilot was going to be buying Alex a beer, provided nothing new and unexpected blew up on them. Not that he'd have given good odds on that.

Five seconds in, he remembered that he'd wanted to mention that Bobbie had power armor. He didn't say it, though, since it would just interrupt whatever Holden was saying right then that wouldn't be back to Alex for a few more seconds. Light-delay conversations were all about etiquette and taking turns.

"Why don't we try that as proof of concept?" Holden said. "If it looks like something we can do, I can have the Roci take your place when we get there. Then if we need to cut in through the hull, we can. Have you had any sign from Naomi?"

"Not yet -" Alex began, but it turned out Holden hadn't been finished, just pausing for breath.

"Because that whole 'Tell James Holden I'm in control' thing was weird on a lot of levels. I checked the vocal profile of the message coming off the Chetzemoka well, actually Fred did. It wouldn't have occurred to me. Anyway, the way she said James Holden in the first warning message about the bad bottle drivers and the way it was in this new one? Exactly the same. Fred thinks the new message may have been faked. Only then the way it got modified before it shut off... I'm seeing something here, Alex. But I don't know what it is."

This time Alex waited until he was sure Holden was done before he started talking. "We haven't had any sign at all, but it seems to me that someone on the ship's been trying to raise a flag. And this flying in circles bit makes it seem a lot less like a Trojan horse. Nothing to gain by doing it, other than make everyone inside feel powerfully like throwing up. Honestly, I don't know what we're looking at here either, Cap'n, and I don't think we're going to know until we get someone inside."

Eight long seconds there and back again. "I'm just worried that if she is in there and the ship's out of control, we're going to be sitting out here dithering while she needs us. I can't stand the idea that we've come this close, and now we're going to lose her. I know it's a little crazy, but I'm a little crazy right now. I keep thinking of her being smashed up against the wall by the spin, and me out here where I can't do anything."

"Yeah, thruster misfires don't work like that," Alex said. "You don't get any sideways impulse unless the thruster's actually going. After that, you've got a little spin station action pushing the folks behind the center of spin down and the folks forward of it up, but all that is gonna be in line with the thrust from the drive, so all you actually get is -"

"Alex!" Bobbie said. "We've got something."

He twisted on his couch, then turned it to face her. Bobbie's eyes were on the wall screen. A panel was there, opened to the view from the upper camera. The Chetzemoka was still in its mad spin, but something had come off, floating now across the clear, empty void, stars behind it like the glittering pupil of a vast eye. The eye of the storm. Bobbie tried to zoom in on it the same moment Alex did, and the system made a confused, upset chime, the focus fluctuating wildly before coming to rest. A figure in an EVA suit. There were no lights on the suit, and its back was turned to them, the intense sunlight making the gray material shine almost too brightly to make out details.

"Is she alive?" Alex said.

"She's moving."

"How long ago did she come out?"

"Not long," Bobbie said. "Seconds."

The figure in the EVA suit lifted her arms, crossing them over her head. The Belter signal for danger. Alex felt his heart speed up.

"Alex!" Holden said, from four seconds ago. "What's going on?"

"Someone came out of the ship. Let me figure this out, and I'll be back with a report," Alex said, then cut the connection. On Bobbie's screen, the figure had shifted to a time signal. Five minutes.

"What have we got?" Alex said.

"She's making the same signs," Bobbie said. "Here we go. 'Danger. Do not approach. Explosion hazard.' But then here's 'Low air,' and 'five'... s.h.i.t, 'four minutes.' "

"Is it her?" Alex said, knowing there wasn't an answer for that. Even if the figure turned its face to them, Alex wasn't certain between glare and the suit's helmet if he'd have been able to identify Naomi. It was just a person in an EVA suit, running out of air and warning them over and over again that it was a trap.

But Alex thought that whoever it was, they sure moved like Naomi. And they'd both been calling the figure "she." They might not know, but they were both pretty certain. The body of the Razorback felt suddenly claustrophobic. Like the appearance of Naomi right there where he could see her required more room to move. Enough s.p.a.ce to reach her. Alex set the pinnace's system to the diamond-bright suit and started it calculating.

"Where's she going to go?" Bobbie asked.

"Looks like she's set to drift across into the path of the ship again," Alex said. "If it don't hit her, maybe she gets past and the drive plume gets her."

"Or we watch her suffocate?" Bobbie said.

"I can take the ship in," Alex said.

"And crisp her decelerating?"

"Well... yeah."

"Get your helmets on," Bobbie yelled loud enough to carry into the back cabin. "I'm going in."

"That suit's got enough thrust to do a fifty-klick flip-and-burn in under four minutes?" Alex asked, but he was already sealing his suit as he said it.

"Nope," Bobbie said, reaching for her helmet with one hand and a spare bottle of air with the other. "But it's got really good mag boots and gloves."

Alex checked his seals and got ready to open the Razorback to the void. "Don't see how that's going to help."

The prime minister's cabin showed it was sealed. On the monitor, the figure Naomi signaled Danger. Do not approach. Explosion hazard. Bobbie yelped, took a deep shuddering breath. Her voice was coming through the EVA suit's radio now. "G.o.d d.a.m.n, it's been a long time since I was on the juice. This is some powerfully unpleasant s.h.i.t."

"Bobbie, we're running out of time here. How are mag boots going to get you to Naomi?"

Behind her helmet's visor, Bobbie grinned. "How good's your control on those missiles?" she asked.

Chapter Forty-seven: Naomi.

Leaving the airlock this one last time was the most peaceful thing Naomi could imagine doing. As soon as she'd cleared the outer door, the sun and stars had stopped their gut-sickening whirl. She had taken her tangent from the whirling circle of life, and now her path was a line. Well, not a tangent, really. A secant, and doomed to cross paths with the ship again, only maybe not in her lifetime.

For a moment, she let herself enjoy drifting. The sun pressed against her back, the light radiating past her as she cast a shadow on whole stars, galaxies. The sense of whirling faded a little, and she wondered where Alex was, out among all these stars. She remembered to start counting. One thousand and... how long had she already been out? Seven? Eight? Well, she might as well think the worst. One thousand and thirty. Why not? She lifted her hands over her head. Danger. Then Do not approach. Then Explosion hazard. She felt like she was trying to warn the stars. The Milky Way. Don't come here. Stay away. There are humans here, and you can't trust them.

She stretched with every motion, letting it all go. She should have been scared, but she wasn't. She was going to her death, and that sucked. She would have liked to live longer. To see Jim again. And Alex. And Amos. She would have liked to tell Jim all the things she'd been so careful for so long not to say. One thousand and sixty. Time to change her signs. Four minutes left. Four minutes and a lifetime.

Somewhere out there, Filip was with his father, the way he had been for years. Since he was a baby. And Cyn, poor Cyn, already as dead as she was going to be because he'd seen her in the airlock and thought stopping her would have been saving her. Thought the life she had with Marco was worth having. She wondered what would have happened if she'd stayed. If the Chetzemoka had flown without her. Would Jim have set off the bomb? She had to think he would have. He wasn't a man who reined in his curiosity well. The stars shuddered, blurred. She was weeping. Danger. Do not approach. Explosion hazard.

If the suit had been powered, it would have been screaming alerts at her. She was almost glad now that it wasn't. She wasn't even light-headed yet. She'd seen people pa.s.s out. As long as her CO2 scrubbers kept working, it would be a peaceful way to go. No choking, no panic. Just a moment's disorientation and then, softly, out. Here she was, after so many years, throwing herself out another airlock. She could still remember that first one, back on Ceres. It had been set in the floor, of course, but she could still conjure up the feeling of pressure on her fingers when she'd told it to cycle open, still believing that it meant her own death. And even then, she hadn't wanted to die. She'd just wanted it to be over. To be free of it all. For the pain and guilt to be over. And the feeling of being trapped. She might have been able to stand all the rest of it, but not the sense of being caught.

This death wasn't at all like that. This was throwing herself in front of a bullet so that it wouldn't hit her friends. Her family. The family she'd chosen. The one built from people who had risked their lives for her. She wished Cyn could have met Jim. Could have understood how far she'd come from the girl he'd known on Ceres, back in the day. How much she wasn't just Knuckles anymore.

She wasn't religious, but she'd known any number of people who were. Explosion hazard. Low air. Three minutes. She wondered whether they would have thought what she was doing now was sinful. Giving herself over to the void in hopes that Alex would see her, would understand, would save himself.

And her. It would be nice if somehow he found a way to save her back. Or if Jim suddenly swept down from the stars to gather her up. She chuckled. G.o.d knew he'd try. Always blundering into being the hero, her Jim. Now he'd know what it had felt like for her all those times he'd squared his jaw and run off into near-certain death because it was the right thing. Pity she wouldn't be there to point it out to him. He might not connect those dots himself. Or he might. He'd changed over the years, and he wouldn't change back.

Danger. Do not approach. Explosive hazard. She'd lost count again. Two minutes? One? She didn't know. She found herself humming a melody she'd heard as a child. She didn't know the words to it. They might not have even been in a language she knew. It didn't matter. She was glad for the song's company. Grateful. More than that, she was grateful that she wasn't going to die nauseated. Okay, fine. If this is what I get, this is what I get. Not a life without regrets, but none I can't live with. None I can't die with.

Still, she thought to the universe, if it isn't a problem, I wouldn't say no to a little more.

Something moved off to her left, streaking out from behind her. Huge and metal and shining brightly in the sun. It looked like a missile, pointing back toward the sun as it retreated. Its drive wasn't firing. That seemed weird and kind of random. She wondered if - The impact came in the center of her back, hard as an a.s.sault. An arm wrapped around her shoulder and a leg around her waist locking her immobile. She squirmed by reflex, trying to escape the attack, but whoever it was had her cold. She couldn't escape. She felt the other person's free hand fumbling at her suit. Something hard and metal pressed against her thigh where the air bottles would go.

Her ears popped as the pressure in the suit suddenly changed. A clean, vaguely astringent smell filled her nose. A fresh bottle. She almost laughed. She was being held in a rescue hold. The newcomer did something else she couldn't quite figure, and then locked a tether to her waist and released her. When they rotated together, face-to-face, the newcomer grabbed Naomi's helmet and pressed her own against it.