James Corey - Nemesis Games

The kid glanced over his shoulder, looking for support dealing with the crazy ranting guy. The rest of team extortion was still busy.

“So,” Amos continued, leaning forward, “I had to get into a maintenance airlock, open an emergency locker, and get a rebreather strapped to my face without breathing any of that shit in.”

“So what? You still —”

“The point of this little tale of woe is that I learned some facts about myself.”

“Yeah?” The situation had gotten weird enough that the kid actually seemed interested in finding out.

“I learned that I can hold my breath for almost two minutes while engaging in stressful physical activity.”

“So —”

“So you need to ask yourself, how much damage can I do to you in two minutes before the knockout gas gets me. Because I’m betting it’s a lot.”

The kid didn’t respond. Rico and Jianguo seemed to be holding their breath. Wendy was staring at Amos with a wide-eyed grin.

“There a problem?” One of the junior thug’s buddies had finally come over to check on him.

“Yeah, he —”

“No problem,” Amos said. “Just explaining to your associate here that this corner of the room doesn’t pay for insurance.”

“Says you?”

“Yeah. Says me.”

The senior thug looked Amos over, sizing him up. They were about the same height, but Amos outweighed him by a solid twenty-five kilos. Amos stood up and spread himself out a little, making the point.

“What crew you run with?” senior thug asked, mistaking him for a rival banger.

“ Rocinante ,” Amos replied.

“Never heard of ’em.”

“Yeah, you have, but context is everything, ain’t it?”

“Might be you fucked up, coyo,” the thug said.

Amos gave an expansive Belter shrug of the hands. “I guess we’ll find out sooner or later.”

“Sooner or later,” the thug agreed, then grabbed his junior partner and headed off to the rest of his crew. When they took the lift to the next deck, they left junior behind. He openly stared at Amos from across the room, not trying to hide anything.

Amos sighed and grabbed his towel out of his duffel. “Gonna go take a shower.”

“You crazy,” Jianguo said. “No crew in there. They’ll jump you.”

“Yep.”

“Then why?”

“Because,” Amos said, standing up and throwing the towel over his shoulder, “I hate waiting.”

As soon as Amos walked toward the head with his prominently displayed towel, junior started talking on his hand terminal. Calling the troops.

The head was five flimsy sheet plastic shower stalls against one bulkhead, and ten vacuum flush toilets against the other. Sinks lined the bulkhead directly across from the door. The open space in the middle had benches for sitting while you waited your turn in the shower or dressed afterward. Not the best space for hand-to-hand. Lots of hard projections to get mashed into, and the benches were a tripping hazard.

Amos tossed his towel onto a sink and leaned against it, arms crossed. He didn’t have to wait long. A few minutes after junior had made the call he and five of the thugs from team extortion filed into the room.

“Only six? I’m a little insulted.”

“You not a little anything,” the oldest one said. The leader then, speaking first. “But big dies too.”

“True that. So how does this go? I’m on your turf, so I’ll respect the house rules.”

The leader laughed. “You funny, man. Dead soon, but funny.” He turned to junior thug and said, “Your beef, coyo.”

Junior pulled a shiv out of his pocket. No weapons made it into the passenger compartment through security, but this was a jagged piece of metal torn off of something in the ship then sharpened down. Prison rules, again.

“I’m not going to disrespect you,” Amos said to him. “I killed my first guy at about your age. Well, a few guys really, but that’s not the issue. I know to take you and that knife seriously.”

“Good.”

“No,” Amos said sadly, “it really isn’t.”

Before anyone could move, Amos crossed the space between them and grabbed junior’s knife arm. The ship was only at about a third of a g thrust, so Amos yanked the kid off the floor and spun, hitting the edge of a shower stall with the kid’s arm. His body kept traveling and Amos didn’t let go, so the arm folded around the impact point. The sound of tendons in his elbow snapping was like hitting wet plywood with a hammer. The knife drifted to the floor from nerveless fingers, and Amos let go of the arm.

There was a long second where the five thugs stared at the knife on the floor at Amos’ feet, and he stared back at them. The emptiness in his belly was gone. The hollow space behind his sternum, gone. His throat had stopped hurting.

“Who’s next?” he said, flexing his hands, his face in a grin he didn’t know he had.

They came in a rush. Amos spread his arms and welcomed them like long-lost lovers.

“You okay?” Rico asked. He was dabbing at a small cut on Amos’ head with an alcohol swab.

“Mostly.”

“They okay?”

“Less so,” Amos said, “but still mostly. Everyone will walk out of there when they wake up.”

“You didn’t have to do that for me. I would have paid.”

“Didn’t,” Amos said. At Rico’s puzzled look he added, “Didn’t do it for you. And Rico? That money goes into the Wendy fund, or I come looking for you too.”

Chapter Five: Holden

One of Holden’s grandfathers had spent his youth riding in rodeos. All of the pictures they had of him were of a tall, muscular, robust-looking man with a big belt buckle and a cowboy hat. But the man Holden had known when he was a child was thin, pale, and hunched over. As if the years had stripped away everything extraneous and rendered the younger man down into the skeletal older man he became.

It struck him that Fred Johnson had been rendered.

He was still a tall man, but the heavy muscles he’d once had were mostly gone, leaving loose skin at the backs of his arms and on his neck. His hair had gone from mostly black to mostly gray to mostly not there at all. That he could still project an air of absolute authority meant that very little of it had come from his physicality in the first place.

Fred had two glasses and a bottle of something dark on the desk when Holden sat. He offered a drink with a small tilt of his head, and Holden accepted with a nod. While Fred poured, Holden leaned back in his chair with a long sigh, then said, “Thank you.”

Fred shrugged. “I was looking for an excuse.”

“Not the drink, but thanks for that too. Thank you for helping with the Roci . The money from Avasarala came, but we have damage we didn’t know about when I wrote the bill. Without our favored client discount, we’d been in trouble.”

“Who says you’re getting a discount?” Fred said as he handed Holden the drink, but he smiled as he said it. He sank into his own chair with a grunt. Holden hadn’t realized coming in how much he was dreading the conversation. Even if he knew it was just good business negotiation, it felt like asking for a handout. That the answer had been yes was good. That Fred hadn’t made him squirm about it was even better. Made him feel more like he was sitting with a friend.

“You look old, Fred.”

“I feel old. But it’s better than the alternative.”

Holden raised his glass. “Those who aren’t with us.”

“Those who aren’t with us,” Fred repeated, and they both drank. “That list is getting longer every time I see you.”

“I’m sorry about Bull, but I think he may have saved the solar system. From what I knew of him, he’d think that was pretty kick-ass.”