Expanse: Nemesis Games Part 47

"You know. You've been out here. This? All this? It's your neighborhood. You know people. You know how things work. You know how to keep people alive."

"You may be overestimating the amount of time I've put into a.n.a.lyzing stuff," Amos said. "I got one ship and three people. That's been kind of a handful. All the rest of this just happened along the way."

"But it got us here." Erich shifted his gaze. His eyes were hard. "I've got enough cash squirreled away that if I get access to it, I might be able to buy a small ship. Not a good one, but something. Or relocate the team somewhere. One of the Lagrange stations or Pallas or... wherever. Start over. Make a new niche. If you want to take the lead, I'll give it up."

"Oh," Amos said. "Yeah, no."

"They'd be better off with you leading than with me."

"Yeah, but I don't know them enough to give a s.h.i.t. I've got my own thing going. I'm sticking with it."

He couldn't tell if the release in Erich's eyes was relief or disappointment. Maybe both. Lydia would have known. Or Naomi. Or Holden. Alex, probably. For him, it was just a little change in muscle tension. Could have meant anything.

"I'll find my own way then," Erich said. "We'll be out of here in a couple days, if I can manage it."

"Okay, then," Amos said. It felt like there should be something more. He'd known Erich as long as he'd known anyone alive. Even if they saw each other again a time or two, the conversation they'd just had was the mark of the end. Both of their lives could have looked a lot different if Amos had said a few different words. It seemed like there should have been something to say about that. But since he couldn't come up with anything, he went back to the lift and headed down for the machine shop.

Going to the technical end of the Zhang Guo the places where the owners and their guests wouldn't spend their time was like stepping into a different ship. All the glitter and beauty gave way to a clean utilitarian design that wasn't as good as the Roci, but better than any other ship Amos had worked. All the corners were curved and softened in expectation of impacts. All the handholds were double-bolted. The drawers and cabinets in the machine shop were latched in two planes. The air smelled like fresh filters and lubricant. Someone had kept the place clean and in better order than a glorified orbital shuttle really deserved. Amos wondered if whoever that had been was still alive. It wasn't a question he could answer, though, so he didn't spend a lot of energy on it.

Peaches was sitting at a workbench. The outfit they'd gotten during their bike trip to Baltimore looked pretty sketchy in the clean and tidy surroundings. Torn at the shoulder and still too big for her. She looked like she was swimming in it. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail with a zip tie and her hands were moving quickly and carefully over an open case of modular electronics. Her movements were as precise and flowing as an old recording of a piano player at the keys. She didn't look up as he came in, but she smiled.

"Got something for you. Salvaged a hand terminal. Nice one. Even got it talking to the local network. Finish the configuration, and you're good to go."

Amos pulled the seat next to her out from the body of the ship. She handed him the terminal, but still didn't meet his eyes.

"According to Chrissie, it ain't salvage."

"I liberated one, then. I was going to get one myself, but I can't. I've got nothing to connect to."

"Could use it like a disposable," Amos said, starting to key his configuration information. "Get you access to feeds anyway."

"Does it matter?"

"Well, if you don't think it does, then maybe not."

She sighed. There were tears in her eyes and a smile on her face. "We did it. We made it safely to Luna. Just like we hoped."

"Yeah."

"You know what I really missed when I was in the Pit? Anything that actually meant anything. They fed me, and they kept me alive, and we had this kind of support group thing where we could talk about our childhood traumas and s.h.i.t. But I couldn't do anything that mattered. I couldn't work. I couldn't talk to people outside the prison. I was just being and being and being until sooner or later, I'd die and they'd put someone else in my cell."

She leaned forward, her elbows on the workbench. She'd burned the side of her thumb on something a soldering iron, the barrel of a gun, something and the skin was smooth and pink and painful-looking. "I won't go back there."

"Peaches, there's no there to go back to. And anyway, I'm pretty sure Chrissie knows you're on board here. She's not pushing the issue, so as long as we stay cool and act casual -"

Her laugh was short and bitter. "Then what? You can't take me with you anymore, Amos. I can't go on the Rocinante. I tried to kill Holden. I tried to kill all of you. And I did kill people. Innocent people. That's never going away."

"In my shop, that's just fitting in," Amos said. "I appreciate that seeing the crew again could leave you feeling a little antsy, but we all know what you are. What you did. Including all the s.h.i.t you did to us. This isn't new territory. We'll talk it through. Work something out."

"I'm just afraid that if he doesn't back your play, they'll send me back, and -"

Amos lifted a hand. "You're missing some s.h.i.t here, Peaches. Lot of folks seem to be. Let me lay this out again. There's no back, and it ain't just the real estate. The government that put you in prison only sort of exists anymore. The planet that put you in prison is going to be having billions of people die in the next little bit. Making sure you serve your whole term doesn't mean s.h.i.t to them. There's a new Navy between us and the Ring, and there's still a thousand solar systems out there to f.u.c.k up the way we f.u.c.ked up this one. Because what you're doing right now? Yeah, you're worrying about how it would go for you if none of that happened. And I'm thinking that you're doing it because you're not looking at the facts."

"What facts?"

"It ain't like that anymore."

"What isn't?"

"Any of it," Amos said. "With Earth puking itself to death and Mars a ghost town, everything's up for grabs. Who owns what. Who decides who owns what. How money works. Who gets to send people to prison. Erich just called it the queen of all churns, and he ain't wrong about that. It's a new game, and -"

His hand terminal chimed. Amos looked at it. The design was nicer than his old one, but the interface was a little different. It took him a few seconds to figure out what the alert meant. He whistled between his teeth.

"What is it?" Peaches asked.

He turned the screen toward her. "Seventy messages and twenty-three connection requests. Going back to before the rock dropped."

"Who from?"

Amos looked at the list. "Alex, mostly. A few from the captain. f.u.c.k. I got six hours of stored video with just Alex trying to talk to me."

Peaches' smile was thin, but it was a smile. "At least you have people."

Chapter Fifty: Alex.

"A bicycle?"

Amos leaned on the breakfast bar. "Sure. They don't need fuel, they don't get sick. Most of the repairs, you can handle on your own. You're looking for post-apocalyptic transportation, bikes are the way to go."

Alex sipped his beer. It was a local brew from a pub just down the corridor with a rich hoppy flavor and a reddish color. "I guess I never thought about it that way."

The suite on Luna was bigger than their rooms on Tycho Station had been, but of the same species. Four bedrooms opened onto a wide, recessed common area. A wall screen bent around the curve of the room, set to an idealized lunar landscape that was more photogenic than the real one. Every now and then, an animated "alien" girl would pop out from behind a rock, look surprised, and dart away again. It was cute, he supposed, but he would have preferred the real moonscape.

"So anyway, I didn't want to go through Washington. Too many people there, and if the pumps stopped working, I didn't want to be pedaling through knee-high sludge, right?"

"Right," Alex said.

Holden was on the Rocinante. Naomi was asleep in her room. She'd been sleeping a lot since the Rocinante had plucked them all out of the vacuum. The medical system said she was getting better and that the rest was good. It worried Alex, though. Not because she needed the sleep, but because maybe she didn't actually need it and was pretending to. Being here with Holden and Amos and Naomi was a bone-deep relief. He wanted it to be the end of their separation, everything come back into its right place like nothing had ever happened.

But it wasn't. Even talking to Amos, Alex thought he could feel little differences in the man. A kind of abstraction, like he was thinking of something else all the time and only pretending to give Alex his undivided attention. Naomi had been in medical debriefing since they'd arrived, and the physicians hadn't allowed anyone in to see her except Holden. If Naomi was finding excuses to stay isolated from them, that could be a very bad sign. They still didn't know all of what she'd been through that she'd wound up with the Free Navy and then escaped from it, but that it had been a trauma seemed obvious. And so he tried to enjoy the peace and pleasure of having his crew again and ignore the anxiety growing in the back of his mind, the sense that just like with the governments and planets and system of the solar system things here had changed.

Amos' hand terminal chirped. He sucked down half a gla.s.s of beer then bared his teeth. "I gotta go do a thing."

"All right," Alex said, pouring the rest of his beer into the sink. "Where are we going?"

Amos hesitated, but only for a fraction of a second. "Dock. Got something I need to move into my shop."

"Great," Alex said. "Let's go."

The stations on Luna were the oldest non-terrestrial habitation humanity had. They sprawled across the face of the moon and sank below its surface. The lights set into the walls glowed with a warm yellow and splashed across vaulted ceilings. The gravity even lighter here than on Mars or Ceres or Tycho felt strange and pleasant, like a ship ambling on without being in a rush to get anywhere. It was almost possible to forget the tragedy still playing out a little under four hundred thousand klicks over their heads. Almost, but not quite.

Amos went on about everything that had happened while he was down the well, and Alex listened with half his attention. The details of the story would be grist for a hundred conversations once they were back in the ship and going somewhere. It didn't matter that he get all of it now, and the familiar cadences of Amos' voice were like hearing a song he liked and hadn't listened to in a long time.

At the dock, Amos looked up and down the halls until he saw someone he knew sitting on a plastic storage crate. The crate was blue with white curls of sc.r.a.pes along the side like a painting of waves. The woman was thickly built with black cornrows, dark brown skin, and an arm in a cast.

"Hey, Butch," Amos said.

"Big man," the woman said. She didn't acknowledge Alex at all. "This is this."

"Thanks, then."

The woman nodded and walked off, her low-g shuffle a little stiffer than the people around her. Amos rented a loading mech, grabbed the crate, and started for the Roci, Alex trotting along beside him.

"Should I ask what's in that?" Alex said.

"Probably not," Amos said. "So anyway, there we are on this island where all the rich people used to be before they f.u.c.ked off up the well, right? And the ships are pretty much not there..."

The Rocinante had an actual hangar bay complete with atmosphere, not just a s.p.a.ce on a pad and a tube to her airlocks. The new outer hull was t.i.tanium alloy and ceramic, the polished metal and flat black paint of the hull studded with PDCs and sensor arrays. The maw of the keel-mounted rail gun was like a little surprised o at her bow. In the artificial light of the hangar, she looked less dramatic than she had in the unfiltered light of the sun, but no less beautiful. Her scars were gone now, but it didn't make the ship seem less herself. Amos drove the mech to the aft airlock and cycled it open without breaking the slow, easy lope of his story. Inside, Amos lowered the crate to the deck, but didn't turn on the electromagnetic clamps that would hold it there. Instead, he slipped out of the mech and went into the ship itself. Engineering, cargo bay, the machine shop. The stern had always been Amos' domain.

"So those others," Amos said. "Johnson's people? They're done messing with my s.h.i.t now, right?"

"Yeah," Alex said. "She's ours again. Just ours."

"Good." Amos shuffled into the cargo bay.

"So the servants, the maids and chauffeurs and whatever," Alex said. "They called security and then they just changed sides? Or... I mean how did that work?"

"Well," Amos said, popping the latches on the crate. "We had an introduction, see?"

The folds of the crate's lid rose of their own accord. Alex jumped back, misjudged the gravity, stumbled. A dark-haired head came up over the crate's edge, a thin ghost-pale face with ink-black eyes. Alex's heart started going triple time. Clarissa Mao, psychopath and murderer, smiled at him tentatively.

"Hey," she said.

Alex took a long, shuddering breath. "Ah. Hey?"

"See?" Amos said, clapping the girl's shoulder. "Told you it wouldn't be a problem."

"You have to tell him," Alex said, keeping his voice low. Bobbie was telling Holden about the work she'd been doing with veterans' affairs in Londres Nova, so he wasn't paying attention to them.

"I'm gonna," Amos said.

"You have to tell him now. She's on our ship."

Amos shrugged. "She was on our ship for months when we were coming back from the slow zone."

"She was a prisoner. Because of all the people she killed. And now she's on our ship by herself."

"I'll give you that does make this situation a little different," Amos said.

"Is there a problem?" Holden asked. "What are we talking about?"

"Little something I wanted to run past you," Amos said. "It'll wait until after the dog and pony show."

The meeting room in the security compound was built in an outdated architectural fashion: open archways and wide, sky-blue ceilings with indirect light and subtle geometric patterning. Everything about it was pointedly artificial, like the idea of an afternoon courtyard without the afternoon or the courtyard. Avasarala's voice came before she did, staccato and impatient. When she stepped through one of the archways, a young, seriously dressed man at her side, Bobbie stood up. Holden followed her lead.

"- if they want a voice in the decision. We're not going to f.u.c.k around bulls.h.i.t electoral posturing."

"Yes, ma'am," the young man said.

Avasarala waved that they should sit back down as she took her own seat even as she kept talking to her a.s.sistant. "Take it to Kleinmann first. Once he's behind me, Castro and Najjar will have the cover they need."

"If you say so, ma'am."

"If I say so?"

The a.s.sistant inclined his head. "With permission, Chung is in a stronger position than Kleinmann."

"Are you second-guessing me, Martinez?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Avasarala shrugged. "Chung, then. Now go." As the young man left, she turned her attention to them. "Thank you all for Where's Nagata?"

"Medical bay," Holden said. "The doctors are still deciding whether she's stable enough to release."

Avasarala hoisted an eyebrow and tapped a message onto her hand terminal. "They can make a f.u.c.king exception. I want her here. Thank most of you for coming. I'd beat around the bush and make everyone feel at home, but I've been in meetings for the last thirty-six hours, and I'm cranky. We're all clear that Earth is f.u.c.ked, yes?"

"h.e.l.l yeah," Amos said.

"Good," Avasarala said. "Then I won't belabor the point. Along with that, the Martian Navy just shattered into tiny little pieces and Smith's too scared to call it treason."

"Can I ask," Bobbie said, sitting forward. Her hands, splayed on the table, seemed like she was trying to brace herself against a blow. "How bad does that look?"

"We're not making any official statements, especially when James Holden's in the room. No offense, but your track record for blurting information at inopportune moments is the stuff of legend."

"I'm getting better about that," Holden said. "But yeah. I understand."

"There's a thing that happens," Avasarala said, "when unthinkable things become thinkable. We're in a moment of chaos. Everything's up for grabs. Legitimacy itself is up for grabs. That's where we are now. This t.u.r.d biscuit Inaros? He's out tooling around the Jovian moons where we can watch him play pirate. He's made his play to set the narrative. The Belt has risen up after generations of oppression, and is now taking its rightful wah, wah, wah. The position I'm in -"

"He's not wrong, though," Holden said, and Avasarala's eyes hardened. If looks could kill, Holden would have left in a bag, but he shook his head. "If the Belters fall in line with this Free Navy thing, it's going to be because they're all out of any other kind of hope. The new systems and colonies -"