Nemesis Games

Chapter Twenty-two: Amos

“Reports at this hour are that a massive asteroid has impacted northern Africa. The Oxford Center in Rabat, five hundred kilometers west of the event, is estimating eight point seven five on the Richter scale at the epicenter.”

Amos tried again to lean back in his chair. It was an uncomfortable little piece of furniture. Just crappy lightweight plastic to start with, then molded in a factory by a machine that didn’t have to sit in it. His first guess was that it had been designed specifically to be awkward and ineffective if you tried to hit someone with it. And then they’d bolted it to the floor. So every five minutes or so, he placed his heels on the textured concrete and pushed back without even knowing he was doing it. The chair bent a little under the pressure, but didn’t get more comfortable, and when he gave up, it bounced right back into its old shape.

“—unseen since Krakatoa. Air traffic is being severely affected as the debris plume threatens both civilian and commercial craft. For further analysis of the situation on the ground, we are going now to Kivrin Althusser in Dakar. Kivrin?”

The screen jumped to an olive-skinned woman in a sand-colored hijab. She licked her lips, nodded, and started talking.

“The shock wave hit Dakar just under an hour ago, and authorities are still taking stock of the damage. My experience is that the city is devastated. We have reports that many, many of the local structures have not survived the initial shock. The power grid has also collapsed. The hospitals and emergency medical centers are overwhelmed. The Elkhashab Towers are being evacuated as I speak, and there are fears that the north tower may have become unstable. The sky… the sky here—”

Amos tried to lean back in his chair, sighed, and stood up. The waiting room was empty apart from him and an old woman in the far corner who kept coughing into the crook of her elbow. It wasn’t what you’d call a big place. The windows looked out on an uninspiring two hundred meters of North Carolina, bare from the entrance facility to the perimeter gate. Two rows of monofilament hurricane fencing blocked the path to a two-story concrete wall. Sniper nests stood at each corner, the automatic defense and control weapons stiller than tree trunks. The building was low—a single story peeking up out of the ground with administrative offices and a massive service entrance. Most of what happened here happened underground. It was exactly the kind of place Amos had never hoped to be.

Good thing was, when he was done, he could leave again.

“In other news, a distress call from the convoy carrying the Martian prime minister appears to be genuine. A group of unidentified ships—”

Behind him, the admin door swung open. The man inside looked like he was one hundred kilos of sculpted muscle and also tremendously bored. “Clarke!”

“Here!” the coughing old woman said, rising to her feet. “I’m Clarke!”

“This way, ma’am.”

Amos scratched his neck and went back to looking at the prison yard. The newsfeed kept on being excited about shitty things going on. He’d have paid more attention to it if the back of his head hadn’t been planning the ways he’d have pushed to get out of here if they’d sent him, and where he’d have died trying. From the parts he caught, though, it sounded like a good day for reporters.

“Burton!”

He walked over slowly. The big guy checked his hand terminal.

“You Burton?”

“Today I am.”

“This way, sir.”

He led him to a small room with more chairs bolted to the floor and a table too. The table was solidly made, anyway.

“So. Visitation?”

“Yup,” Amos said. “Looking for Clarissa Mao.”

The big guy looked up under his eyebrows. “We don’t have names here.”

Amos opened his hand terminal. “I’m looking for 42-82-4131.”

“Thank you. You’ll need to surrender all personal effects including any food or beverages, your hand terminal, and any clothing with more than seven grams of metal. No zippers, arch supports, anything like that. While you are inside the prison grounds, you are subject to reduced civil rights, as outlined in the Gorman code. A copy of the code will be made available to you at your request. Do you request a copy of the code?”

“That’s all right.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I need a yes or no.”

“No.”

“Thank you, sir. While in the prison, you are required to follow the directives of any guard or prison employee without hesitation or question. This is for your own safety. If you fail to comply, the guards and prison employees are authorized to use any means they deem necessary to ensure your safety and the safety of others. Do you understand and consent?”

“Sure,” Amos said. “Why not?”

The big guy pushed a hand terminal across the table, and Amos mashed his thumb onto it until the print read. A little indicator on the side of the form went green. The big guy took it back along with Amos’ hand terminal and shoes. The slippers were made out of paper and glue.

“Welcome to the Pit,” the big guy said, smiling for the first time.

The elevator was steel and titanium with a harsh set of overhead lights that flickered just a little too quickly to be sure it was really flickering. Two guards apparently lived in it, going up and down whenever it did. So that seemed like a shitty job. At the tenth level down, they let him out, and an escort was waiting for him: a gray-haired woman with a wide face, light armor, and a gun in her holster that he didn’t recognize. Something beeped twice as he stepped into the hall, but none of the guards tried to shoot anyone, so he figured it was supposed to do that.

“This way, sir,” the escort said.

“Yeah. Okay,” Amos said. Their footsteps echoed off the hard floor and ceiling. The lights were recessed into metal cages, making a mesh of shadows over everything. Amos found himself flexing his hands and balling them into fists, thinking about how exactly he’d have to bounce the guard’s head against the wall in order to get the gun off her. Nothing more than habit, really, but the place brought it out in him.

“First time down?” the escort asked.

“It show?”

“Little.”

From down the hall, a man’s voice lifted in a roar. A familiar calmness came over him. The escort’s eyebrows went up, and he smiled at her. Her lips turned up in answer, but there was a different assessment behind it.

“You’ll be fine,” she said. “Right through here.”

The hallway was brutal concrete; green-gray metal doors in a line with identical windows of thick green-tinted glass that made the rooms beyond look like they were underwater. In the first, four guards in the same armor Amos’ escort wore were forcing a man to the ground. The woman from the waiting room huddled in the corner, her eyes closed. She seemed to be praying. The prisoner—a tall, thin man with long hair and a flowing beard the color of iron—roared again. His arm flashed out, quicker than Amos’ eye could follow, grabbing one of the guards by the ankle and pulling. The guard toppled, but two of the others had what looked like cattle prods out. One of them landed on the prisoner’s back, the other at the base of his skull. With one last obscenity, the iron-bearded man collapsed. The fallen guard rose back to her feet, blood pouring from her nose as the others teased her. The old woman sank to her knees, her lips moving. She took a long, shuddering breath, and when she spoke, she wailed, her voice sounding like it came from kilometers away.

Amos’ escort ignored it, so he did too.

“Yours is there. No exchange of goods of any sort. If at any point you feel threatened, raise your hand. We’ll be watching.”

“Thanks for that,” Amos said.

Until he saw her, Amos hadn’t realized how much the place reminded him of a medical clinic for people on basic. A cheap plastic hospital bed, a steel toilet on the wall without so much as a screen around it, a battered medical expert system, a wall-mounted screen set to an empty glowing gray, and Clarissa with three long plastic tubes snaking into her veins. She was thinner than she’d been on the ride back from Medina Station before it had been Medina Station. Her elbows were thicker than her arms. Her eyes looked huge in her face.

“Hey there, Peaches,” Amos said, sitting in the chair at her bedside. “You look like shit on a stick.”

She smiled. “Welcome to Bedlam.”

“I thought it was called Bethlehem.”

“Bedlam was called Bethlehem too. So what brings you to my little state-sponsored apartment?”

On the other side of the window, two guards hauled the iron man past. Clarissa followed Amos’ gaze and smirked.

“That’s Konecheck,” she said. “He’s a volunteer.”

“How’d you figure?”

“He can leave if he wants to,” she said, lifting her arm to display the tubes. “We’re all modified down here. If he let them take out his mods, he could transfer up to Angola or Newport. Not freedom, but there’d be a sky.”

“They couldn’t just take ’em?”

“Body privacy’s written into the constitution. Konecheck’s a bad, bad monkey, but he’d still win the lawsuit.”

“What about you? Your… y’know. Stuff?”

Clarissa bowed her head. Her laugh shook the tubes. “Apart from the fact that every time I used them, I wound up puking and mewling for a couple minutes afterward, they’ve got some other drawbacks. If we pull them out, I’d survive, but it would be even less pleasant than this. Turns out there’s a reason the stuff I got isn’t in general use.”

“Shit. That’s got to suck for you.”

“Among other things, it means I’m here until… well. Until I’m not anywhere. I get my blockers every morning, lunch in the cafeteria, half an hour of exercise, and then I can sit in my cell or in a holding tank with nine other inmates for three hours. Rinse, repeat. It’s fair. I did bad things.”

“All that shit the preacher pitched about redemption, getting reformed—”

“Sometimes you don’t get redeemed,” she said, and her voice made it clear she’d thought about the question. Tired and strong at the same time. “Not every stain comes out. Sometimes you do something bad enough that you carry the consequences for the rest of your life and take the regrets to the grave. That’s your happy ending.”

“Huh,” he said. “Actually, I think I know what you mean.”

“I really hope you don’t,” she said.

“Sorry I didn’t put a bullet in your head when I had the chance.”

“Sorry I didn’t know to ask. What brings you down here, anyway?”

“Was in the neighborhood saying goodbye to a bunch of my past, mostly. Don’t see how I’m coming back this way, so thought I’d better say hi now if I was going to at all.”

Tears welled up in her eyes, and she took his hand. The contact was weird. Her fingers felt too thin, waxy. Seemed rude to push her away though, so he tried to remember what people were like when they had an intimate moment like this. He pretended he was Naomi and squeezed Clarissa’s hand.

“Thank you. For remembering me,” she said. “Tell me about the others. What’s Holden doing?”

“Well, shit,” Amos said. “How much they tell you about what happened on Ilus?”

“The censors don’t let me see anything that involves him. Or you. Or anything involving Mao-Kwikowski or the protomolecule or the rings. It might be disruptive for me.”

Amos settled in. “All right. So a while back, Cap’n gets this call…”

For maybe forty-five minutes, maybe an hour, he laid out all the stuff that had happened since the Rocinante turned Clarissa Mao over to the authorities. Telling stories that didn’t have a punch line wasn’t something he had much practice with, so he was pretty sure that as story time went, it sucked. But she drank it up like he was pouring water on beach sand. The medical system beeped every now and then, responding to whatever was happening in her bloodstream.

Her eyes started to close like she was going to sleep, but her fingers didn’t lose their grip on his. Her breath got deeper too. He wasn’t sure if that was part of the medical whatever it was they were doing to her or something else. He stopped talking, and she didn’t seem to notice. It felt weird to sneak out without saying anything, but he also didn’t want to wake her up just to do it. So he sat for a while, looking at her because there wasn’t anything else to look at.

The weird thing was, she looked younger. No wrinkles at the sides of her mouth or eyes. No sagging in her cheeks. Like the time she’d spent down in the prison didn’t count. As if she’d never get old, never die, just be here wishing for it. It was probably some kind of side effect of the shit they’d pumped into her. There were kinds of environmental poisoning that did that too, not that he knew the details. She’d killed a lot of people, but he had too, one way and another. Seemed a little weird that she’d be staying and he’d be walking out. She felt bad about all the things she’d done. Maybe that was the difference. Regret and punishment the flip sides of the karmic coin. Or maybe the universe was just that fucking random. Konecheck didn’t look like he had a lot of regrets, and he was locked up just the same.

Amos was about to start trying to get his hand free when the Klaxons went off. Clarissa’s eyes shot open and she sat up, present and alert and not even sort of groggy. So maybe she hadn’t been asleep after all.

“What is that?” she said.

“I was about to ask you.”

She shook her head. “I haven’t heard that one before.”

It seemed like the right time to get his hand back. He went to the door, but his escort was already there coming in. She had her weapon drawn, but not pointing at anything.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, and her voice was higher than it had been before. She was scared. Or maybe excited. “This facility has been put on lockdown. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to remain in here for the time being.”

“How long are we talking about?” he asked.

“I don’t know the answer to that, sir. Until the lockdown is lifted.”

“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.”