“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.