James Corey - Nemesis Games

“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-assed 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 shell of sealant off his fingers and wrist. Where it was thinnest, it was already solid, coming away from his skin like the shell 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 clustered 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 attitude 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 bum 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 shit 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-ass aliens and corporate security assholes 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, fuck 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 passengers in the ship. Clarissa can assist 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 assault 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 butt 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.