Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

“I won’t,” she said, and crossed her arms.

Ilich seemed to deflate. For

a second, she thought she’d won.

“You will,” he said, “or I’ll kill your dog.”

He lowered his pistol a degree. It was like the volume of the world turned down. Teresa could still hear everything, but at a distance. She waited for the gunshot, sure it was coming. That she wouldn’t be able to stop it. Don’t do it, I’ll come tried to find its way to her throat, but she was frozen. Her throat wouldn’t work any better than her legs. Ilich shook his head once, just a centimeter one way and then the other. He turned to check his sights on Muskrat, but the shot that rang out wasn’t from him.

Back at the cart, something was happening. Teresa couldn’t tell what it was at first. Her mind tried to make it into the two guards wrestling with each other, except one of them toppled out the side of the cart and fell into the snow. The violence in the cart kept going on. In her peripheral vision, she saw Holden step in front of Muskrat, his arms still lifted, but Ilich wasn’t paying attention to that now.

“Captain Erder! Report!” Ilich barked, but no one answered. Instead, the guard still in the cart shrieked once. Something wet snapped, and the screaming stopped. Everything was perfectly still. Ilich took a step toward the cart, then another.

Timothy boiled out from the shadows behind the cart, sprinting through the snow. His eyes were black, his skin gray. Ilich fired and a smear of blackness appeared on Timothy’s bare ribs. He hit Ilich like he’d fallen from a great height and sent the man’s legs up in the air as Timothy bore his torso down into the snow.

It had all happened too fast. She didn’t know if the pistol belonged to one of the guards or if he’d taken it from Ilich. Only that it looked smaller in Timothy’s hand. Muskrat barked happily and wagged her tail, scattering the snow.

Holden slowly let down his arms. “Amos?”

Timothy—Amos—stood up over Ilich and went perfectly still for a moment, then said, “Hey, Cap. You look like shit.” Below him, Ilich gasped, the wind knocked out of him by the violence of Timothy’s charge.

“You’ve been prettier yourself, one time and another.”

“Well, you know how it is.” Amos turned his dark eyes to her and nodded down at the snow where Ilich lay, still wheezing. “Hey there, Tiny. This guy a friend of yours?”

Teresa started to say yes, and then no, and then she understood what he was asking.

“No,” she said. “He’s not on my side.”

“All right,” Amos said, and fired the pistol twice. The muzzle flash was the brightest thing in the world.

“How did you find us?” Holden asked, swaying on his feet.

“This asshole,” Amos said. “I been tracking him every time he came out from the compound over there. Figured sooner or later, I’d get a shot at him. You made a good distraction.”

“Did you have to kill him?” Holden asked.

“Just evening up the score, is all. Are you sure you’re okay, Cap? You seem kind of fucked.”

A dozen questions pressed at Teresa’s mind—where have you been living, how did you survive without any of your things, how badly are you hurt, why aren’t you dead—but what came out of her mouth was, “Aren’t you cold?”

Amos looked at her, thought about the question. Snowflakes were landing on his bare chest and melting there. The hole in his ribs where he’d been shot wasn’t bleeding. After a moment, he shrugged. “I’ll live.”

Before Teresa could say anything more, a powerful, deep roar came from somewhere high above them. Her first thought was that they’d started an avalanche. She imagined herself and all the others wiped away by tons of snow rushing down the mountain. But then she saw the lights in the sky.

Amos took her elbow, leaned close, and shouted in her ear, “We should get back to the tree line.”

She let herself be led, Holden and Muskrat following close behind, as a huge ship fell from the sky. The plumes of its maneuvering thrusters melted the snow in the clearing away in an instant and set the security cart rolling. Teresa huddled back among the dormant trees, her hands over her ears, until the roaring stopped and Amos tapped her shoulder.

The ship was a fast-attack frigate. A very old Martian design. Its sides were a patchwork of different plating materials. Steam rose all around it, and the cooling metal and carbon-silicate lace ticked and popped. Teresa walked out toward it with a sense of awe and joy and profound accomplishment. She’d done it.

The airlock opened, and a man in no kind of uniform looked down into the darkness and the mist and the snowfall.

“Who’s there?” the man’s voice called.

“Alex?” Holden shouted.

Almost conversationally, the voice said, “Well, holy shit.”