Nemesis Games

Chapter Forty-five: Amos

Even though it was strictly local, running off the Zhang Guo’s system, it was nice having working hand terminals again. Amos lay on a support wedged in the narrow space between the hulls. The rest of his work team was only the soft clanging of magnetic clamps and the gentle, soothing smell of a welding torch. The meter he had clipped to the power line was at zero.

“Now?” Peaches said.

“Nothing.”

A couple seconds passed.

“Now?”

“Nothing.”

Another second. The meter chirped, the indicator going from zero to eighty-nine. Amos grinned. “That’s it, Peaches. I’m a little shy of ninety.”

“Locking that in,” she said, and even though the hand terminals were set for audio, he knew she was smiling. He plucked the meter free and sprayed sealant over the holes he’d made for the leads. “Erich? If you’re there, we’re ready for another run.”

“Of course I’m here,” Erich said. “Where would I go? Starting the diagnostics run now. You two go stretch your legs or something.”

Amos whistled once between his teeth, the shrill echo making the sound seem larger. “I’m taking a break. You guys get that conduit open, just wait for me. Don’t try to do something smart.”

There was a rough clatter of agreement as he swung out and up, climbing to the access panel with the handholds and the structural supports. The B-team wasn’t much by way of help, but they could do some of the time-consuming easy stuff while Amos and Peaches and Erich made the Zhang Guo skyworthy. So far, it had been as much cleaning up the servants’ half-assed attempts to fix the ship as it had been finding why she’d been grounded in the first place. As showy as the ship was, her internal design was pretty nearly off-the-shelf. On the engineering deck, Amos dug up a cleaning rag and wiped the hardening shell of sealant off his fingers and wrist. Where it was thinnest, it was already solid, coming away from his skin like the shell off a shrimp.

Both doors of the airlock were open, and a portable stairway led down to the hangar floor. The windows were still dark, and a filthy, gritty rain tapped against the panes. The air smelled of ozone and cold, and Amos’ breath ghosted. The overhead LEDs cast a harsh light, cutting shadows so distinct they looked fake. Stokes and the other household servants were clustered against one wall, clutching bags and hard cases and talking anxiously among themselves. Butch leaned against one wall, her hand to her ear in an attitude of concentration. Amos watched her as he came down the stairs. The woman radiated a sense of barely restrained violence. Amos had known a lot of people who had the same air about them. Some of them were criminals. Some were cops. She caught him staring and lifted her chin in something between a greeting and a challenge. He smiled amiably and waved.

He got to the hangar floor about the same time Peaches climbed out the airlock onto the stair. Stokes broke free of the huddled group and trotted over toward Amos, smiling anxiously. “Mr. Burton? Mr. Burton?”

“You can call me Amos.”

“Yes, thank you. I wondered whether Natalia could perhaps go to the Silas house? Her husband is a janitor there, and she is afraid if she leaves without him, they will never see each other again. She’s very worried, sir.”

Peaches came down the stairs behind him with footsteps soft as a cat’s. Her shadow spilled down the walkway in front of her. Amos scratched his arm. “Here’s the thing. Pretty sure we’re going to be able to start the final run-through in maybe forty-five minutes. Anyone who’s here when we’re done, they can bum a lift so long as there’s room. Anybody not here should be far enough away they don’t get burned down to their component atoms when we take off. Between those, I don’t actually give a shit what any of you people do.”

Stokes chuckled and made a short birdlike bob with his head. “Very good, Mr. Burton. Thank you.” Amos watched him scamper away.

“Mr. Burton, is it?” Peaches said.

“Apparently,” Amos said, then lifted a thumb to point after Stokes. “Did he think I was joking about something? ’Cause I was just telling him how the sun comes up in the east.”

Peaches lifted a shoulder. “In his mind, we’re the good guys. Everything we say, he interprets that way. If you say you don’t care if he lives or dies, it must be your dry gallows humor.”

“Seriously?”

“Yep.”

“That’s a really stupid way to go through life.”

“It’s how most people do.”

“Then most people are really stupid.”

“And yet we made it to the stars,” Peaches said.

Amos stretched out his arms, the muscles across his shoulders hurting pleasantly. “You know, Peaches, it’s nice how we got all this help and stuff, but I kind of liked it better when it was only you and me.”

“You say the sweetest things. I’m going to track down some coffee or tea. Or amphetamines. You need anything?”

“Nope. I’m solid.” He watched her walk away. She was still way too thin, but since he’d stepped into the room in the Pit at Bethlehem, she’d taken on a kind of confidence. He wondered, if she had to go back, whether she still wanted him to kill her. Probably something worth asking about. He stifled a yawn and tapped his hand terminal. “How’s it looking up there?”

“Not throwing any errors yet,” Erich said. “So this is what you do now?”

“This is what I’ve been doing for years.”

“And you can make a living this way?”

“Sure, if you don’t mind weird-ass aliens and corporate security assholes trying to kill you now and then.”

“Never minded before,” Erich said. “Okay, that’s it. We’re at the end of the run. I got that one hiccup from the water recycler, but everything else is good to go.”

“If we’re in this brick long enough to recycle the water, something will have gone badly wrong.”

“That’s what I was thinking too. You want me to start firing the reactor up? They’ve got scripts and a checklist.”

“Yeah, why don’t you let me take—”

The hand terminal squawked and a man’s voice Amos didn’t recognize came on. “Boss? I think we’ve got company.”

“What’re you seeing?” Erich snapped.

“Three trucks.”

“Okay, fuck it,” Erich said. “I’m starting up the reactor.”

Amos trotted toward the front of the hangar. The lookouts at the windows were all standing and tense. They knew. The servants were still milling in their corner, out of the way. “Yeah, I’d go ahead and run the check first,” he said. “It’d be a shame to do all this just so we could give the folks in Vermont a nice light show.”

The silence was harsh. Amos didn’t understand what the problem was until Erich spoke again. “I don’t take orders from you. Burton.”

Amos rolled his eyes. He shouldn’t have said that on an open channel. So many years and so many catastrophes, and it was still all about not losing face. “I was thinking of it more as expert opinion,” Amos said. And then, “Sir.”

“Noted. While I take my time to do that, how about you go help hold the perimeter,” Erich said, and Amos grinned. Like he wasn’t already on his way to do that. Erich went on. “Walt, start getting the passengers in the ship. Clarissa can assist with the start-up.”

“On my way,” she said, and Amos saw her running across the hangar for the stairs. Stokes was watching her with alarm. Amos waved him over.

“Mr. Burton?” the man said.

“That girl going after her old man? Yeah, she might need to rethink that.”

Stokes went pale and searchlights brighter than the sun flooded through the hangar windows. A voice echoed through bullhorns, barking syllables too muddled by the echo to be words. It didn’t matter. They all got the gist. By the time Amos got to the front doors, there were figures in the lights. Men in riot gear approaching the hangar with assault rifles in their hands that looked a little more heavy-duty than crowd control demanded. The servants were lined up on the stairs to the ship’s airlock, but they weren’t moving fast. One of Erich’s men—maybe twenty years old with a red scarf at his neck—handed Amos a rifle and grinned.

“Aim for the lights?”

“Any plan’s better than no plan,” Amos said, and broke the windowpane out with the butt of the rifle. The gunfire started before he could flip the barrel around to take aim. It roared like a storm, no gap between one report and the next. Somewhere people were screaming, but Erich and Peaches were in the ship and Holden and Alex and Naomi were somewhere off-planet and Lydia was safely dead. There was only so much to worry about. The guy next to him was screaming a wordless war cry. Amos took aim, breathed out, squeezed. The rifle kicked, and one of the glaring lights went out. Then someone else got another one. One of the Pinkwater soldiers pulled back an arm to throw something, and Amos shot them in the hip. A second after they went down, the grenade they dropped flashed and a plume of tear gas rose up through the falling rain.

Someone—Butch, it sounded like—yelled “Push ’em back!” and Amos crouched down, squinting back at the Zhang Guo. The civilians were almost all on, Stokes at the back waving his arms and yelling to hurry them. Something detonated, blowing the glass out of the remaining windows. The shock wave thudded through Amos’ chest like the explosion had kicked him. He stood up, glanced through the window, and shot the nearest figure in the face. The deeper rattle came from outside, and stuttering muzzle flash brighter than the remaining lights. Holes appeared in the wall, beams of light shining through into the vast cathedral space of the hangar.

“We got to get out of here!” Scarf Boy shouted.

“Sounds good,” Amos said, and started walking backward, firing through the window. A half second later, Scarf Boy was with him. The others either noticed them or had already reached the same conclusion. Two were already on the stairs, shooting as they climbed. At this point, no one was trying to hit anything; they were just keeping the others from advancing too fast for everyone to get on board. Amos’ rifle went dry. He dropped it and jogged back to the stairs, holding his hand terminal to his ear as he went.

“How’re we doing?” he shouted.

“You’re very clever,” Peaches yelled back. “We had a power hiccup on start-up. Would have lost maneuvering thrusters.”

“We going to lose them now?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Good.”

He stopped at the base of the stairs. Scarf Boy crouched behind him, reloading his assault rifle. When he had the new magazine in, Amos plucked it out of his hands and pointed at the stairway with his chin. Scarf Boy nodded thanks and scuttled up the steps, his head low. Shadows danced on the windows, and the side door burst in with a three-person team rushing in. Amos mowed them down. Half a dozen of Erich’s people were on the stairs now, some still shooting as they climbed. One of them—Butch—stumbled as she got to the fourth step up. Blood soaked her arm and the side of her neck. Amos held the assault rifle up, spraying the walls, and knelt beside her.

“Come on,” he said. “Time to go.”

“Don’t think that’s happening,” Butch said.

Amos sighed. He put his hand terminal in his pocket, took the woman’s collar in one hand and the rifle’s grip in the other, and ran up the steps to the rattle of his own gunfire. The woman screamed and bounced. Something exploded, but Amos didn’t pause to figure out what. At the airlock, he hauled Butch through, fired one last burst down the stairway, and hit the controls to cycle the lock closed.

All around him, Erich’s people and the house servants were huddled. Some were covered in blood. He was covered in blood. He was pretty sure it was all Butch’s, but not a hundred percent. Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, he missed things like getting shot. He let Butch down to the deck and pulled out his hand terminal.

“Okay,” he said. “Now would be good.”

“The exhaust’s going to kill everyone out there,” Erich said.

“Are we caring about that?” Amos shouted.

“I guess not.”

The drive roared to life. “Lay down!” Amos shouted. “We don’t have time to get to couches. Everyone lay down. You want the thrust spread out over your whole body!”

He lay down beside Butch. Her eyes were on him with something that might have been pain or anger. She didn’t speak, and neither did he. Erich’s voice came over the ship’s system, telling them to brace, and then Amos weighed a whole lot more than he had a few seconds before. A loud crunching sound rattled the deck—the Zhang Guo pushing through the hangar’s roof on her way to the sky. The ship rattled, dropped, rose again. The deck pressed into Amos’ back. If they had to make any hard turns, there were going to be at least a dozen people all mushed together in the corner where the deck met the wall.

The screen over the engineering controls flickered to life; clouds and rain falling down onto the forward cameras as the ship rose. Lightning flickered, the thunder rolling through the ship. He couldn’t remember if a standard orbital escape called for three gs or four, but whatever it was would have been a whole hell of a lot more fun in a crash couch. His jaw ached, and he had to remember to clench his arms and legs to keep from passing out. All around him, the others weren’t remembering that in time, or more likely never knew. Most of them, this was their first time up the well.

Over the course of long minutes, the rain and clouds on the screen faded. The lightning fell away behind them. Then, through the featureless gray, the first shining stars. Amos laughed and whooped, but no one joined him. Looking around, he seemed to be the only one still conscious, so instead, he lay back on the deck and waited for the thrust gravity to drop out when they hit orbit.

The stars slowly grew brighter, twinkling at first as the last gritty layers of atmosphere passed by them, and then growing steady. The Milky Way appeared like a dark cloud lit from behind. The thrust gravity began to ease and he got to his feet. Around him, other people were starting to come back to themselves. Scarf Boy and the others were hauling Butch out to the lift and the med bay, assuming the Zhang Guo had one of those. Stokes and the others were laughing or weeping or staring off in shock and disbelief. Amos checked himself for wounds and, apart from a series of four deep, gouging scrapes along his left thigh whose origins he couldn’t recall, felt fine.

He turned his hand terminal to the open channel. “This is Amos Burton. You guys mind if I come up to ops?”

“You can do that, Burton,” Erich said. There was maybe just a hint of smug in his voice. This saving face for Erich thing was going to get old fast, but right at the moment, he was feeling too high to care.

The ops deck was offensively lush. The anti-spalling had been made to look like red-velvet wallpaper and the light came from silver-and-gold sconces all along the walls. Erich sat in the captain’s couch. His good hand was moving over the deck in his lap, his bad one holding on to the straps. Peaches was in the navigator’s couch, her eyes closed and her smile beatific.

“Grab a couch,” Erich said with a grin. His old friend and not the criminal boss who needed to keep Amos in his place. He switched to the ship system. “Brace for maneuvers. Repeat, brace for maneuvers.”

“That’s not how they really do that,” Amos said, strapping in at communications. “That’s just something they say in the movies.”

“It’s good enough for now,” Erich said, and the couches shifted under them as the thrusters turned the ship. Slowly, the moon hove into view, and behind it, the sun. Silhouetted, Luna was a disk of black from here except for a thin limn of white along one edge and a webwork of city lights. Peaches chuckled like a brook, her eyes open now, her hands pressed to her lips. The tears welling up in her eyes glittered.

“Didn’t think you’d see this again, did you Peaches?”

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Everything’s beautiful, and I didn’t think anything ever would be again.”

They were all silent for a moment, and then Erich switched the view, pulling it slowly down. Below them, Earth was a smear of white and of gray. Where the continents should have burned in the permanent fire of lights, there were only a scattering of dim, dull glowing points. The seas were hidden, and the land. A funeral shroud was over the planet, and they all knew what was happening beneath it.

“Fuck,” Erich said, and it carried a weight of awe and despair.

“Yeah,” Amos said. They were all quiet for a long moment. The birthplace of humanity, the cradle of life in the solar system, was beautiful in its death throes, but none of them had any doubt that was what they were seeing.

The comm controls interrupted them. Amos accepted the connection and a young woman in UN naval uniform appeared in a high-priority panel.

“Zhang Guo, this is Luna Base. We do not have an approved flight plan for you. Be advised this space is under military restriction. Identify yourselves immediately, or be fired upon.”

Amos opened the channel. “Hey there, Luna Base. Name’s Amos Burton. Didn’t mean to step on anybody’s toes. If you’ve got someone up there named Chrissie Avasarala, pretty sure she’ll vouch for me.”