Expanse: Nemesis Games Part 7

"Okay."

"Sorry if things are... rough."

"I'll be fine," she said.

He lifted his hand again, the same gesture he'd made walking up to her, but with a different meaning now. He turned. He walked away. The humiliation was like a weight on his chest. The urge to turn back, to have one last look in case maybe she was looking at him was almost too much to resist.

He resisted it.

She was right. It was why he'd appeared on her doorstep without warning. Because he'd known that if she said no, he had to respect that, and somewhere in the back of his mind, he'd thought that if they were there, breathing the same air, it would be harder for her to turn him away. And maybe it had been. Maybe what he'd done was actually make it worse for her.

The first bar he came to was named Los Compadres, and the air inside it smelled of hops and overheated cheese. The man behind the bar looked barely old enough to drink, his sallow skin set off by ruddy hair and a mustache that could generously be called aspirational. Alex took a high stool and ordered a whiskey.

"Little early in the day for celebration," the barkeep said as he poured. "What's the occasion?"

"It turns out," Alex said, exaggerating his Mariner Valley drawl just a little for the effect, "that sometimes I'm an a.s.shole."

"Hard truth."

"It is."

"You expect drinking alone to improve that?"

"Nope. Just observing the traditions of alienated masculine pain."

"Fair enough," the barkeep said. "Want some food with it?"

"I'd look at a menu."

Half an hour later, he was only halfway through the drink. The bar was starting to fill up, which meant maybe twenty people in a s.p.a.ce that would have taken seventy. Ranchero music played from hidden speakers. The thought of going back to his cousin's and pretending to be cheerful was only a half a degree worse than continuing to sit in the bar, waiting for his self-pity to fade. He kept trying to think about what he could have said or done differently that would have made any difference. So far the best he'd come up with was Don't walk out on your wife, which was about the same as saying Be someone else.

His hand terminal buzzed. He pulled it up. A written message tagged from Bobbie Draper.

HEY, ALEX. SORRY IT TOOK SO LONG TO GET BACK TO YOU. THINGS ARE WEIRDLY BUSY. YES, IF YOU'RE IN TOWN, I'D LIKE TO MEET WITH YOU. MAY HAVE A FAVOR TO ASK, IF YOU'RE UP FOR IT. SWING BY ANYTIME.

Her address was in Londres Nova. Alex tapped it, and the screen shifted to a map. He wasn't far from the express tube. He could be out there by supper. He touched the bar top with his hand terminal, paid for the drink, and stretched. In the corridor, a cart had broken down, and half a dozen maintenance workers were clumped around it. A woman with skin the color of milk walking past did a subtle double take when Alex nodded. Wondering, he guessed, whether he was the pilot for James Holden. He walked on before she could ask the question.

Yeah. It would be good to see Bobbie.

Chapter Seven: Amos.

The s.p.a.ceport had been built a kilometer outside Lovell City a century before. Now, it was the geographical heart of Luna's largest metropolis, though you wouldn't have been able to tell that from s.p.a.ce. Luna boasted very few actual domes. The constant rain of micro-meteors turned a dome into a randomly firing atmosphere ejection port. So as the shuttle descended, the only visible signs of the city were the occasional surface access points and the s.p.a.ceport itself. The docks weren't the originals, but they were still d.a.m.ned old. The decking had all been white once. Gray pathways marked where years of boots and carts had worn down tracks. The union office looked down over the long hall through pockmarked windows, and the air had the gunpowder stink of lunar dust.

The extortion boys showed up at the disembarking area in force to stare Amos down as he left the ship. He smiled and waved and kept Rico, Jianguo, and Wendy close to him until they were out of the long flight terminal.

"Hermano," Rico said, shaking hands with Amos. "Where you headed to now?"

"Down the well," Amos said. "You fellas take care of that little girl, right? And good luck with the new jobs."

Jianguo hugged Wendy close. "We will. Xie xie usted ha hecho."

Rico and Jianguo stared at him like they expected something else, but Amos had nothing left to say so he turned and walked away toward the terminal for planetary drops. The waiting area was housed in a large false dome designed to impress the tourists. The whole thing was underground, but the ma.s.sive chamber was covered floor to ceiling with ultra-high-definition video screens showing the outside view. The hills and craters of the lunar surface stretched off in all directions, but it was the blue-and-green half-circle hanging in the sky that drew the most attention. It was beautiful at this distance. The cities nothing but firefly twinkles on the dark side. Where the sun struck the Earth, almost nothing man had made was visible from the lunar orbit. The planet looked clean, unspoiled.

It was a pretty lie.

Seemed like a fact of the universe that the closer you got to anything, the worse it looked. Take the most beautiful person in the solar system, zoom in on them at the right magnification and they were an apocalyptic cratered landscape crawling with horrors. That's what the Earth was. A shining jewel from s.p.a.ce, up close a blasted landscape covered with mites living by devouring the dying.

"One ticket to New York," he said to the automated kiosk.

The drop to Earth was short enough that no one tried to run an extortion racket on him, so that was nice. The flight itself was b.u.mpy and nauseating, so that was less nice. One thing about s.p.a.ce: it might be a big radiation-filled vacuum that'd kill you in a heartbeat if you weren't paying attention, but at least it never had turbulence. There weren't any windows on the shuttle, but the front of the cabin had a big viewscreen showing the descent through the forward external cameras. New York grew from a gray smudge to a visible cityscape. The s.p.a.ceport on the artificial land ma.s.s south of Staten Island went from a silver postage stamp to a vast network of landing pads and launching rails surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean just past the entrance to Lower New York Bay. Tiny toy ships of suitable size for bobbing in a child's bath grew into the vast solar-powered cargo ships that crawled back and forth across the oceans. Everything visible on the descent was clean and technologically sleek.

That was a lie too.

By the time the shuttle landed he was ready to get into the grunge of the city if only to see something that was honest about itself. When he stood up in the full gravity of Earth to walk off the shuttle, he wanted it to feel wrong, oppressive after all his years away. But the truth was that something deep in him, maybe down at the genetic level, rejoiced. His ancestors had spent a few billion years building all their internal structures around the constant of one g downward pull, and his organism breathed a sigh of relief at the amazing rightness of it.

"Thank you for flying with us," a pleasantly nondescript face said from the video screen next to the exit. The voice was carefully crafted to have no specific regional dialect or obvious gender markers. "We hope to see you again soon."

"Go f.u.c.k yourself," Amos said to the screen with a smile.

"Thank you, sir," the face replied, actually seeming to look him in the eye. "TransWorld Interplanetary takes your comments and suggestions seriously."

A short tube ride from the landing pad to the s.p.a.ceport visitors center later and he was in the customs line to enter New York City and officially walk on Earth soil for the first time in twenty-some years. The visitor center stank of too many bodies pressed too tightly together. But under it there was a faint, not-unpleasant odor of rotting seaweed and salt. The ocean, just outside, seeped into everything. An olfactory reminder to everyone pa.s.sing through the Ellis Island of the s.p.a.ce age that Earth was absolutely unique to the human race. The birthplace of everything. The salt water flowing in everyone's veins first pulled from the same oceans right outside the building. The seas had been around longer than humans, had helped create them, and then when they were all dead, it'd take their water back without a thought.

That, at least, wasn't a lie.

"Citizenship, guild, or union docs," the bored-looking man at the customs kiosk said. It appeared to be the only job left in the building not done by a robot. Computers, it seemed, could be programmed to do almost anything but sense when someone was up to no good. Amos had no doubt a full body scanner was looking him over, measuring his heart rate, his skin moisture levels, his respiration. But all of those things could be faked with drugs or training. The human behind the counter would be looking to see if he just seemed wrong.

Amos smiled at him. "Sure," he said, then pulled up his UN citizenship records on his hand terminal and the customs officer's computer grabbed them and compared them to the database. The officer read his screen, his face betraying nothing. Amos hadn't been home in almost three decades. He waited to be directed off to the additional security line for a more thorough search. It wouldn't be the first unfamiliar finger up his a.s.s.

"Okay," the customs officer said. "Have a good one."

"You do the same," Amos replied, not able to fully keep the surprise off his face. The customs guy waved an impatient hand at him, telling him to move along. The person waiting behind him in line cleared their throat loudly.

Amos shrugged and moved across the yellow line that legally separated Earth from the rest of the universe.

"Amos Burton?" someone said. An older woman in an inexpensive gray suit. It was the sort of thing mid-level bureaucrats and cops wore, so he wasn't surprised when the next thing she said was, "You need to come with us now."

Amos smiled at her and considered his options. Half a dozen other cops were converging on him in the tactical body armor high-risk entry teams wore. Three of them had tasers out, the other three semiautomatic handguns. Well, at least they were taking him seriously. That was sort of flattering.

Amos raised his hands over his head. "You got me, Sheriff. What are the charges?"

The plainclothes officer didn't respond, and two members of the tactical team pulled his hands behind his back and cuffed him.

"I'm wondering," Amos said, "because I just got here. Any crimes I'm going to commit are theoretical at this point."

"Shush now," the woman said. "You're not under arrest. We're going to take a ride."

"And if I don't want to?"

"Then you'll be under arrest."

The port authority police station was pretty much exactly like every other police station Amos had ever spent time in. Sometimes the walls were industrial taupe; sometimes they were government green. But the concrete walls and gla.s.s-fronted offices looking out over a crowded bull pen of desks would have been just as comfortable on Ceres as it was on Earth. Even the burnt-coffee smell was the same.

The plainclothes cop took him past the desk sergeant with a nod and deposited him in a small room that didn't look like the interrogation rooms he was used to. Other than a table and four chairs, the only other furnishing was a ma.s.sive video screen covering most of one wall. Plainclothes sat him in a chair across from it, then left the room, closing the door behind her.

"Huh," Amos said, wondering if this was some new interrogation technique in the cop playbook. He leaned back in the chair to get comfortable, maybe try to catch some shut-eye after the nauseating shuttle ride.

"What is this? Nap time? Someone wake him the f.u.c.k up," a familiar voice said.

Chrisjen Avasarala was on the screen, looking down on him, her face four times its real size on the giant monitor.

"Either I'm not in any trouble, or I'm in all of it," Amos said with a grin. "How you doin', Chrissie?"

"Good to see you too. Call me that again and I'll have an officer beat you gently with a cattle prod," Avasarala replied, though Amos thought he caught a hint of a smile on her face.

"Sure thing, Madam Uber Secretary. This a social call, or...?"

"Why," Avasarala said, all traces of humor gone, "are you on Earth?"

"Came to pay respects to a friend who died. Did I forget to file a form or something?"

"Who? Who died?"

"None of your f.u.c.king business," Amos said with a false amiability.

"Holden didn't send you?"

"Nope," Amos replied, feeling the anger start to warm his belly like a slug of good scotch. He tested the restraints, calculating his odds of getting out of them. Of fighting his way past a room full of cops. It made him smile without realizing it.

"If you're here for Murtry, he isn't on Earth right now," Avasarala said. "He claims you beat him half to death in the Rocinante's airlock during the flight back. Do you mean to finish the job?"

"Murtry swung first, so technically, that was self-defense. And if I'd wanted him dead, don't you think he'd be dead? It's not like I quit hitting him because I was tired."

"So what, then? If you have a message for me from Holden just spit it out. If Holden is sending messages to someone else, tell me who and what they are right now."

"Holden didn't send me to do s.h.i.t," Amos said. "Am I repeating myself? I feel like I'm repeating myself."

"He -" Avasarala started, but Amos cut her off.

"He's the captain of the ship I sail on, he ain't the boss of my f.u.c.king life. I've got personal s.h.i.t to do, and I came here to do it. Now either book me for something or let me go."

Amos hadn't realized Avasarala was leaning forward in her chair until she relaxed back into it. She let out a long breath that turned into a sigh. "You're f.u.c.king serious, aren't you?"

"Not known for my comic stylings."

"All right. But you understand my concern."

"That Holden is up to something? Have you met that guy? He's never done anything secretly in his life."

Avasarala laughed at that. "True. But if he's sending his hired killer to Earth, we -"

"Wait, what?"

"If Holden was -"

"Forget Holden. You called me his hired killer. Is that how you guys think of me? The killer on Holden's payroll?"

Avasarala frowned. "You're not?"

"Well, mostly I'm a mechanic. But the idea that the UN has a file on me somewhere that lists me as the Rocinante's killer? That's kind of awesome."

"You say that kind of thing, it doesn't make me think we're wrong, you know."

"So," Amos said, shrugging with his shoulders like an Earther, his hands still behind his back, "we done here?"

"Mostly," Avasarala said. "How was everyone when you left? Good?"

"Roci got beat to s.h.i.t during the Ilus thing. But crew's good. Alex is trying to reconnect with an ex. Captain and Naomi are still rubbing uglies pretty regular. Same same, mostly."

"Alex is on Mars?"

"Well, his ex is. I a.s.sume he'd head over there, but he was still on Tycho last I saw him."

"That's interesting," Avasarala said. "Not the part where he's reconnecting with his ex-wife, though. No one ever tries that without seeming like an a.s.shole."

"Right?"

"Well," Avasarala said, then looked up at someone offscreen. She smiled and accepted a steaming cup from a disembodied hand, then took a long sip and sighed with pleasure. "Thank you for meeting with me, Mr. Burton."

"Oh, it was my pleasure."

"Please keep in mind that my name is pretty closely connected with the Rocinante, Captain Holden, and his crew at this point."

"So?" Amos said with another shrug.

"So," Avasarala said, then put her steaming cup down and leaned forward again. "If you're about to do something I'll need to cover up later, I'd appreciate a call first."

"You got it, Chrissie."

"Honestly. f.u.c.king stop that," she said with a smile.