James Corey - Nemesis Games

“Is there a problem?” Clarissa asked. “Is he in danger?”

That was a good move. No guard ever gave a fuck whether the prisoner was in danger, so she was asking about the civilian. Even so, the escort wasn’t going to say a goddamn thing unless she wanted to.

Turned out, she wanted to.

“A rock came down outside Morocco about three hours ago,” she said, her sentence curling up at the end like it was a question.

“I saw something about that,” Amos said.

“How did it get through?” Clarissa asked.

“It was going very, very fast,” the escort said. “Accelerated.”

“Jesus,” Clarissa said, like someone had punched her in the chest.

“Someone dropped a rock on purpose?” Amos said.

“Rocks. Plural,” the escort said. “Another one came down about fifteen minutes ago in the middle of the Atlantic. There’re tsunami and flood warnings going out everywhere from Greenland to fucking Brazil.”

“Baltimore?” Amos said.

“Everyplace. Everywhere.” The escort’s eyes were getting watery and wild. Panic maybe. Maybe grief. She gestured with her gun, but it just looked impotent. “We’re on lockdown until we know.”

“Know what?” Amos said.

It was Clarissa that answered. “If that was the last one. Or if the hits are going to keep on coming.”

In the silence that came afterward, they weren’t guard, prisoner, and civilian. They were just three people in a room.

The moment passed.

“I’ll be back with an update as soon as I have one, sir.”

Amos’ brain ran through all the scenarios that came easy and didn’t see many options. “Hey, wait. I know it ain’t for pleasure viewing or nothing, but that screen over there catch newsfeeds?”

“Prisoners only get access in the common area.”

“Sure,” Amos said. “But I’m not a prisoner, right?”

The woman looked down, then shrugged. She took out her hand terminal, tapped in a few lines of text, and the empty gray screen flickered to life. A pale man with broad, soft lips was in the middle of his report.

“— undetected by the radar arrays, we are getting reports that there was a temperature anomaly that may have been related to the attack.”

The guard nodded to him and closed the door. He couldn’t hear it lock, but he was pretty sure it had. He sat back in his chair and propped his heels on the side of the hospital bed. Clarissa sat forward, her bone-thin hands knotted together. The feed switched over to a white-haired man talking earnestly about the importance of not jumping to conclusions.

“Do you know where the first one hit?” Clarissa asked. “Do you remember anything from the news?”

“I wasn’t paying attention. I think they said Krakatoa? Is that a place?”

Clarissa closed her eyes. If anything, she went a little paler. “Not exactly. It’s a volcano that blew itself up a long, long time ago. Sent ash eighty kilometers up. Shock waves went around the world seven times.”

“But it’s not North Africa?”

“No,” she said. “I can’t believe they really did it. They’re dropping rocks. I mean, who would even do that? You can’t… you can’t replace Earth.”

“Maybe you kind of can now,” Amos said. “Lot of planets out there now weren’t around before.”

“I can’t believe someone would do this.”

“Yeah, but they did.”

Clarissa swallowed. There had to be stairs around here. They’d be locked up so that prisoners couldn’t get to them, but Amos figured there’d have to be stairs. He went to the window to the hall and pressed his head against it. He couldn’t see anything down the hall either way. Kicking the glass out seemed unlikely too. Not that he was looking to try. Just thinking.

On the screen, a mushroom cloud rose over a vast and empty sea. Then, as a woman’s voice calmly talked about megatonnage and destructive capacity, a map was displayed with one bright red dot on North Africa, another in the ocean.

Clarissa hissed.

“Yeah?” Amos said.

“If the spacing’s even,” Clarissa said, “if there’s another one, it’s going to be close.”

“Okay,” Amos said. “Can’t do anything about that, though.”

The hinges were on the other side of the door too, because of course they were. It was a fucking prison. He clicked his tongue against his teeth. Maybe they’d take it off lockdown and send him on his way. Might happen. If it didn’t, though… Well, this was going to be a stupid way to die.

“What’re you thinking?” she asked.

“Well, Peaches. I’m thinking that I stayed on this mudball a day too long.”

Chapter Twenty-three: Holden

Holden sat back, light-headed, his eyes still on the screen. The immensity of the news made Fred’s office seem fresh and unfamiliar: the desk with the fine black lines of wear at the corner; the captain’s safe set into the wall like a little privacy window; the industrial carpeting. It was like he was seeing Fred, leaning forward on his elbows, grief in his eyes, for the first time. Less than an hour earlier, reports had come through with red frames around the feed windows to show how serious everything was. The previous headlines – a meteor or possibly a small comet had struck North Africa – were forgotten. The ships carrying the prime minister of the Martian Republic were being approached by an unknown and apparently hostile force, his escort moving to intercept. It was the news of the year.

Then the second rock hit Earth, and what might have been a natural disaster was revealed as an attack.

“They’re connected,” Holden said. Every word came out slow. Every thought. It was like the shock had dropped his mind in resistance gel. “The attack on the prime minister. This. They’re connected, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” Fred said. “Probably.”

“This is what they were planning. Your dissident OPA faction,” Holden said. “Tell me you didn’t know about this. Tell me you’re not part of it.”

Fred sighed and turned to him. The weariness in his expression was vast. “Fuck you.”

“Yeah. Okay. Just had to ask.” And then a moment later, “Holy shit.”

On the newsfeed, images of Earth’s upper atmosphere showed the strike like a bruise. The cloud of dust was smearing off to the west as the planet turned under it. The dust plume would keep widening until it covered the whole northern hemisphere – and maybe more – but for now it was just a blackness. His mind kept bouncing off the image, rejecting it. His family was on Earth – his mothers and his fathers and the land he’d grown up on. He hadn’t been back in too long, and now —

He couldn’t finish the thought.

“We have to get in front of this,” Fred said, to himself as much as Holden. “We have to —”

A communication request popped onto the side of the screen, and Fred accepted it. Drummer’s face filled a small window.

“Sir, we have a problem,” she said. “One of the ships we’ve got parked out there waiting to dock just put target locks on the main engines and the upper habitation ring.”

“Defense grid up?”

“That’s the problem, sir. We’re seeing —”

The door of the office opened. The three people who came in wore Tycho Station security uniforms. One carried a large duffel bag; the other two had instruments in their hands that Holden struggled to make sense of. Strange hand terminals, or some sort of compact tool.

Or, guns.

Like someone speaking through the radio, a voice in the back of Holden’s mind said This is a coordinated, system-wide attack just as the first woman fired. The sound alone was like being struck, and Fred toppled back in his seat. Holden scrambled for his own sidearm, but the second woman had already turned to him. He tried to drop down, to take cover behind the desk, but the two women fired almost simultaneously. Holden caught his breath. Something kicked him just below the rib, and he didn’t know if he’d hit the edge of the desk or he’d been shot. He fired wild, and the man dropped the duffel bag. The first woman’s head snapped back and she dropped to her knees. Someone else was shooting, and it took what seemed like minutes and was probably less than a second to realize it was Fred, supine behind the desk and firing between his feet. Holden had no idea where Fred had acquired a gun in the seconds since the attack started.