The message halted, cut off by the suit’s medical systems. Warnings for increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure. She chinned the override, and his voice stuttered softly into her ears, smoothing as the feed cohered.
“I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to hear from me. If it helps, I’d just point out that I haven’t done it before this. And I’m not doing it lightly now.”
Shut it off, she thought. Stop the feed. Erase it. It would all be lies anyway. Lies or only what parts of the truth served him. Forget it ever came. Marco looked away from the camera as if he’d read her mind, or known what she would be thinking.
“Naomi, I don’t agree with your decision to leave, but I’ve always respected it. Even when you showed up in the news so everyone knew where you were, I didn’t reach out. And I’m not coming to you now for myself.”
The words were all crisp and warm and careful: the flawless grammar of someone speaking a second language so well it sounded uncanny. He had none of his Belter patois. So there was another way the years had changed him.
“Cyn and Karal send their love and respect, but they’re the only ones who know I’m reaching out. And why. They’re on Ceres Station right now, but they can’t stay long. I need you to meet their team there and— No. I’m sorry. That’s wrong. I shouldn’t have put it that way. It’s just that I’m at loose ends. I don’t know what to do, and you’re the only one I can turn to. It’s Filip. He’s in trouble.”
Chapter Four: Amos
His throat ached.
Amos swallowed, trying to force the lump away with a mouthful of saliva, but all that got him was a thick new pain like swallowing sand. The Roci’s med bay had shot him full of all the booster vaccines and bacterial prophylactics three months ago, right on schedule. He didn’t figure he could be sick. But there it was, a spot in the back of his throat that felt like he’d swallowed a golf ball and it got stuck halfway down.
All around him, the citizens and travelers of the Ceres Station Spaceport milled like ants on their hill, their voices making an undifferentiated roar that was just as good as silence. It amused Amos that this metaphor was one that no one on Ceres would actually understand. Himself, he hadn’t seen an ant in close on two decades, but the childhood memories of watching them take down a cockroach or clean the carcass of a rat were vivid and sharp. Like the roaches and the rats, ants had learned to live with their human neighbors without much trouble. When the concrete of human cities spread across the globe and half the animals on Earth were on endangered lists, no one had worried about the ants. They were doing fine, thanks, and spilled fast food was just as plentiful and delicious as dead forest animals had once been.
Adapt or die.
If Amos could be said to have a philosophy, it would be that. The concrete replaces the forest. You get in its way, you get paved over. If you can find a way to live in the cracks, you can thrive anywhere. There were always cracks.
The anthill of Ceres bustled around him. There were people at the top of the food chain buying snacks at the kiosks or tickets for the shuttles and long-flight ships leaving the station. The people in the cracks were there too. A girl no older than ten with long dirty hair and a pink jumpsuit two sizes too small eyed the travelers without staring at them. Waiting for someone to set their luggage or their hand terminal down long enough to be snatched away. She saw Amos looking at her and bolted for a maintenance hatch set low in the wall.
Living in the cracks, but living. Adapting, not dying.
He swallowed again, grimacing at the ache. His hand terminal beeped, and he looked up at the flight board that dominated the station’s public space. Bright yellow letters against black, a font designed for legibility over beauty. His long-haul flight to Luna was confirmed for a launch window in three hours. He tapped on his terminal’s screen to let the automated system know he’d be on board when it left, and walked off looking for something to kill three hours.
There was a bar by the gate. So that was easy.
He didn’t want to get drunk and miss his flight, so he stuck to beer, drinking slowly and methodically and waving at the bartender as he approached the bottom of one glass so that the next was waiting when he finished. He was aiming for fuzzy and relaxed, and he knew exactly how to get there in the shortest possible time.
The bar didn’t offer much in the way of entertainments or distractions, so he could focus on the glass, the bartender, the next drink. The lump in his throat thickened with each swallow. He ignored it. The other patrons in the bar were quiet, reading hand terminals or whispering in small groups as they drank. Everyone on the way to somewhere else. This place wasn’t a destination; it was something you bumped into in your travels, accidental and forgettable.
Lydia was dead.
He’d spent twenty years thinking about her. The tattoo of her face over his heart was some of that, of course. Every look in a mirror without his shirt on was a reminder. But beyond that, every day had choices in it. And every choice he made started with the little voice in his head asking what Lydia would want him to do. When he’d received the message from Erich, he realized he hadn’t seen or spoken to her in over two decades. That meant she was twenty years older than when he’d left. How old had she been then? He could remember the gray in her hair, the lines around her eyes and mouth. Older than him. But he’d been fifteen, and “older than him” had been a wide space most people fell into.
And now she was dead.
Maybe someone twenty years older than the woman he remembered was old enough to die of natural causes. Maybe she’d died in a hospital, or her own bed, warm and comfortable and surrounded by friends. Maybe she’d had a cat sleeping on her feet. Amos hoped that was true. Because if it wasn’t – if it was anything other than natural causes – he was going to kill every single person even remotely involved. He examined the idea in his mind, rotating it this way and that, waiting to see if Lydia stopped him. He took another long swallow of beer and burned his throat. He really hoped he wasn’t getting sick.
You’re not sick, Lydia’s voice said in his mind, you’re sad. Grieving. The lump in your throat. The hollow space behind your sternum. The empty feeling in your stomach no matter how much beer you put there. That’s grief.
“Huh,” Amos said out loud.
“Need something, buddy?” the bartender asked with professional disinterest.
“Another,” Amos said, pointing at the half-full beer he still had.
You don’t process grief well, another voice said. Holden, this time. That was the truth. That’s why Amos trusted the captain. When he said something, it was because he believed it. No need to analyze it or figure out what he really meant by it. Even when the captain fucked up, he was acting in good faith. Amos hadn’t met many people like that.
The only really strong emotion Amos had felt in longer than he could remember was anger. That was always there, waiting for him. Processing his grief that way was simple and direct. He understood it. The man sitting a few stools away at the bar had the rough, rawboned look of a rock jock. He’d been nursing the same beer for an hour. Every time Amos ordered another, the man shot him a glance that was half annoyance, half envy. Coveting his apparently bottomless credit account. It would be so easy. Say something to him, cutting and loud, put him in a position where backing down embarrassed him in front of everyone. The poor fucker would feel obligated to take the bait, and then Amos would be free to process his grief all over the guy. Some time in stir might even be a nice way to unwind.
That guy didn’t kill Lydia, Holden’s voice said. But maybe someone else did, Amos thought. And I need to find out.
“Need to cash out here, amigo,” Amos said to the bartender, waving his hand terminal at him. He pointed at the rock jock. “Put that guy’s next two on my tab.”
The rock jock frowned, looking for the insult, but when he couldn’t find it he said, “Thanks, brother.”
“Anytime, hermano. You be safe out there.”
“Sa sa,” the jock
said, finishing off his beer and reaching for one of the two Amos had just bought. “Do the same, sabe dui?”
Amos missed his bunk on the Roci.
The long-haul transport was named the Lazy Songbird, but its birdlike qualities began and ended at the white letters painted on its side. From the outside, it looked like a giant garbage can with a drive cone on one end and a tiny ops deck on the other. From the inside, it looked like the inside of a giant garbage can except that it was divided into twelve decks, fifty people to a deck.
The only privacy to be had was thin curtains in the shower stalls, and people only ever seemed to use the head when uniformed crew members were around.
Ah, Amos thought, Prison rules.
He selected a bunk, just a crash couch with a little storage under it and a tiny entertainment screen on the bulkhead next to it, as far from the head and the commissary as possible. He tried to stay out of high traffic areas. The people sharing his space were a family of three on one side, and an ancient crone on the other.
The crone spent the entire flight high on little white pills, staring at the ceiling all day and tossing and sweating through fever dreams all night. Amos introduced himself to her. She offered him some pills. He declined. This ended their association.
The family on the other side was much nicer. Two men in their early thirties and their daughter of about seven. One of the men was a structural engineer named Rico. The other a stay-at-home dad called Jianguo. The girl’s name was Wendy. They eyed Amos with some suspicion when he first claimed the bunk, but he smiled and shook their hands and bought Wendy an ice cream bar from a commissary vending machine and then didn’t follow up by being creepy. He knew what men who had too much interest in little kids were like, and so he knew how not to ever be mistaken for one of them.
Rico was traveling to Luna to take one of the new job openings at the Bush orbital shipyards. “Lots of coyos heading downwell. Beaucoup jobs now, everybody trying to grab a ring for themselves. New colonies. New worlds.”
“That’ll dry up when the rush dies down,” Amos said. He was lying back on his couch, half listening to Rico rattle on, half watching a video feed on his wall screen with the sound off.
Rico gave a Belter shrug of the hands and tilted his head toward his daughter, sleeping in her bunk. “For her, sabe? Later is for later. For now I put some yuan aside. School, ring trip, whatever she needs.”
“I hear that. Later is later.”
“Oh, hey, they’re cleaning the head. Gonna grab a shower.”
“What’s with that, man?” Amos asked. “What’s the rumpus?”
Rico cocked his head, like Amos had asked why space was a vacuum. In fairness, Amos knew the answer, but it was interesting to see whether Rico did too. “Long-haul gangs, coyo. Price of flying on the cheap. Sucks to be poor.”
“The crew watches for that shit, right? Anyone gets in a tussle, they gas us all, tie up the perps. No fuss, no muss.”
“Don’t watch the showers. No cameras. If you don’t pay when the shakedown comes, that’s where they get you. Better to go when crew is around.”
“No shit,” Amos said, pretending surprise. “Haven’t seen the shakedown yet.”
“You will, hombre. Watch Jian and Wendy while I’m out, yeah?”
“Both eyes, brother.”
Rico was right. After the first rush of the flight, when the initial bustle of people finding bunks, deciding they hated their neighbor, then finding a new one was over, people were mostly settled in. The Belters bunking on Belter decks. The inners on decks split between Earth and Mars. Amos was on a Belter deck, but he seemed to be the only one mixing.
Prison rules for sure.
On the sixth day, a small group of toughs from a deck up came down the lift together and fanned out through the compartment. With fifty people on the deck, it took them a while to hit everyone. Amos pretended to sleep in his crash couch and watched them out of the corner of his eye. It was a basic scam. A tough walked up to a passenger, explained about in-flight insurance policies, then took a credit transfer with a cheap disposable terminal. All the threats were implied. Everyone paid. It was a stupid racket, but simple enough that it worked anyway.
One of the extortionists who looked like he wasn’t a day over fourteen headed their direction. Rico started to pull out his hand terminal, but Amos sat up in bed and waved him off. To the junior extortionist he said, “We’re all good over here. No one in this corner pays.”
The thug stared at him without speaking. Amos smiled back. He didn’t particularly want to be gassed and tied up, but if that’s how it had to happen, he’d live with it.
“Dead man,” the thug said. He put as much macho as he could into it, and Amos respected the commitment. But much scarier people than a skinny pubescent Belter had tried intimidating him. Amos nodded as if considering the threat.
“So there was this one time I got caught in a reactor crawlspace when a coolant pipe blew,” he said.
“What?” the kid asked, baffled. Even Rico and Jianguo were looking at Amos like he’d lost his mind. Amos shifted, and the couch’s gimbals squeaked as they reoriented.
“See, the coolant is radioactive as fuck. Hits the open air and it vaporizes. Getting it on your skin ain’t good for you, but you can survive that. Washes off, mostly. You don’t want to breathe it in though. Get a bunch of radioactive particles down in the lungs where you can’t get ’em out? Yeah, you pretty much melt from the inside.”
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.