Nemesis Games (Expanse 5)

“According to Chrissie, it ain’t salvage.”

“I liberated one, then. I was going to get one myself, but I can’t. I’ve got nothing to connect to.”

“Could use it like a disposable,” Amos said, starting to key his configuration information. “Get you access to feeds anyway.”

“Does it matter?”

“Well, if you don’t think it does, then maybe not.”

She sighed. There were tears in her eyes and a smile on her face. “We did it. We made it safely to Luna. Just like we hoped.”

“Yeah.”

“You know what I really missed when I was in the Pit? Anything that actually meant anything. They fed me, and they kept me alive, and we had this kind of support group thing where we could talk about our childhood traumas and shit. But I couldn’t do anything that mattered. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t talk to people outside the prison. I was just being and being and being until sooner or later, I’d die and they’d put someone else in my cell.”

She leaned forward, her elbows on the workbench. She’d burned the side of her thumb on something – a soldering iron, the barrel of a gun, something – and the skin was smooth and pink and painful-looking. “I won’t go back there.”

“Peaches, there’s no there to go back to. And anyway, I’m pretty sure Chrissie knows you’re on board here. She’s not pushing the issue, so as long as we stay cool and act casual —”

Her laugh was short and bitter. “Then what? You can’t take me with you anymore, Amos. I can’t go on the Rocinante. I tried to kill Holden. I tried to kill all of you. And I did kill people. Innocent people. That’s never going away.”

“In my shop, that’s just fitting in,” Amos said. “I appreciate that seeing the crew again could leave you feeling a little antsy, but we all know what you are. What you did. Including all the shit you did to us. This isn’t new territory. We’ll talk it through. Work something out.”

“I’m just afraid that if he doesn’t back your play, they’ll send me back, and —”

Amos lifted a hand. “You’re missing some shit here, Peaches. Lot of folks seem to be. Let me lay this out again. There’s no back, and it ain’t just the real estate. The government that put you in prison only sort of exists anymore. The planet that put you in prison is going to be having billions of people die in the next little bit. Making sure you serve your whole term doesn’t mean shit to them. There’s a new Navy between us and the Ring, and there’s still a thousand solar systems out there to fuck up the way we fucked up this one. Because what you’re doing right now? Yeah, you’re worrying about how it would go for you if none of that happened. And I’m thinking that you’re doing it because you’re not looking at the facts.”

“What facts?”

“It ain’t like that anymore.”

“What isn’t?”

“Any of it,” Amos said. “With Earth puking itself to death and Mars a ghost town, everything’s up for grabs. Who owns what. Who decides who owns what. How money works. Who gets to send people to prison. Erich just called it the queen of all churns, and he ain’t wrong about that. It’s a new game, and —”

His hand terminal chimed. Amos looked at it. The design was nicer than his old one, but the interface was a little different. It took him a few seconds to figure out what the alert meant. He whistled between his teeth.

“What is it?” Peaches asked.

He turned the screen toward her. “Seventy messages and twenty-three connection requests. Going back to before the rock dropped.”

“Who from?”

Amos looked at the list. “Alex, mostly. A few from the captain. Fuck. I got six hours of stored video with just Alex trying to talk to me.”

Peaches’ smile was thin, but it was a smile. “At least you have people.”

Chapter Fifty: Alex

“A bicycle?”

Amos leaned on the breakfast bar. “Sure. They don’t need fuel, they don’t get sick. Most of the repairs, you can handle on your own. You’re looking for post-apocalyptic transportation, bikes are the way to go.”

Alex sipped his beer. It was a local brew from a pub just down the corridor with a rich hoppy flavor and a reddish color. “I guess I never thought about it that way.”

The suite on Luna was bigger than their rooms on Tycho Station had been, but of the same species. Four bedrooms opened onto a wide, recessed common area. A wall screen bent around the curve of the room, set to an idealized lunar landscape that was more photogenic than the real one. Every now and then, an animated “alien” girl would pop out from behind a rock, look surprised, and dart away again. It was cute, he supposed, but he would have preferred the real moonscape.

“So anyway, I didn’t want to go through Washington. Too many people there, and if the pumps stopped working, I didn’t want to be pedaling through knee-high sludge, right?”