Part 11 (1/2)
The elevator dinged and opened, and one of his two remaining guards pointed inside. ”After you.”
”Gracias,” Amos said and leaned against the back wall of the car. The guards followed, one of them sliding a metal card into the elevator controls and hitting the top b.u.t.ton.
On the way up, Amos entertained himself by figuring out how he'd get the gun away from the guard closest to him and kill the other. He had a pretty workable strategy in mind when the elevator dinged again and the doors slid open.
”This way,” one guard said, and pointed down a hallway.
”The club level,” Amos replied. ”Fancy.”
The top floor had been redesigned with plush furnis.h.i.+ngs and a maroon velvet carpet. At the end of the hall the guards opened a door that looked like wood but seemed heavy enough that it was probably steel core. Still fancy, but not at the cost of security.
After the luxury of the hallway, the office on the other side of the door was almost utilitarian. A metal desk dominated by screens for a variety of network decks and terminals, a wall screen with an ocean view pretending to be a window, and a big rubber ball instead of an office chair.
Erich always had been twitchy sitting still too long.
”Timmy,” Erich said, standing behind the desk like it was a barricade. The two guards moved off to flank the door.
”People call me Amos now.”
Erich laughed. ”Guess I knew that, right?”
”Guess you did,” Amos said. Erich looked good. Healthy in a way he'd never looked as a kid. He even had a middle-aged man's spare tire around the gut. He still had the small, shriveled left arm. And from the way he was standing, he looked like he'd still walk with a limp. But now, surrounded by his success and his well-fed chubbiness, they looked like trophies of a past life instead of disabilities in the current one.
”So,” Erich said, ”kind of wondering what you're doing in town.”
”He beat up Troy,” one of the guards said. ”And Laci says he manhandled her some too.”
”Did he kill anyone?” Erich asked. When neither guard answered, he said, ”Then he's still being polite.”
”That's right,” Amos agreed with an amiable nod. ”Not here to mess up your s.h.i.+t, just here to chat.”
”So,” Erich said, sitting back down on his rubber ball chair, ”let's chat.”
Chapter Eleven: Alex.
Three days after he'd seen Talissa for what he had to think now was the last time and gone afterward to eat with Bobbie Draper, Alex knew it was time to go home. He'd had dinners with family and a couple old friends; he'd seen the ways his old hometown had changed and the ways it hadn't. And he'd determined once again that sometimes a broken thing couldn't be fixed. That was the closest he was going to get to having it be okay.
But before he left, there was one more person he was going to disappoint.
The express tube to Londres Nova hummed to itself, the advertis.e.m.e.nts above the seats promising to make the lives of the riders better in a hundred different ways: technical certifications, improved undergarments, tooth whitening. The facial-recognition software didn't seem to know what to make of him. None of the ads spoke to him. The closest was a thin lawyer in an olive-green suit offering to help people find pa.s.sages to the new systems beyond the Ring. Start a new life in the off-world colonies! We can help!
Across from him, a boy of about seventeen was staring quietly into s.p.a.ce, his eyes half-open at the edge of boredom and sleep. When Alex had been about the boy's age, he'd been deciding whether to go into the Navy or apply for upper university. He'd been dating Kerry Trautwine even though Mr. Trautwine was a religious zealot who hated him for not belonging to the right sect. He'd spent his nights playing battle simulations with Amal Shah and Korol Nadkarni.
This boy across from him was traveling the same corridors that Alex had, eating at some of the same restaurants, thinking about s.e.x in likely more or less the same terms, but he also lived in a different universe. Alex tried to imagine what it would have been like to include travel to an alien planet in among his options at seventeen. Would he have still enlisted? Would he have met Talissa?
A gentle, mechanical voice announced their arrival at the Aterpol terminal. The boy's eyes opened, roused back to full consciousness, and he shot a distrustful look at Alex. The deceleration pushed Alex's back, feeling almost like a long att.i.tude burn. Almost but not quite.
Aterpol was the downtown of Londres Nova, the only station with connections to all of the neighborhoods that made up the city. The vaulted ceilings curved over the common areas, the access doors along the walls double-sealed to keep air from leaking into the evacuated tubes. The terminal itself opened into a wide public park with real trees rising from the soil into the artificial twilight. Benches made to look like wood and iron stood scattered along the winding paths, and a pond filled the air with the smells of algae and moisture. The rea.s.suring breeze-murmur of the air recyclers pa.s.sed under everything like a constant and eternal prayer. Windows rose up along the walls, light streaming out of them or not. The rooms that looked out over Alex as he walked were businesses and apartments, restaurants and maintenance halls.
Alex crossed the park to the farther gates, where the local tubes ran to the other neighborhoods. Innis Shallow, where Bobbie lived, didn't have the best reputation. The worst that Mars had to offer wasn't as bad as an iffy sector on Ceres Station, though, and regardless anyone who took on Bobbie was either suicidal or had an army behind them.
At the Innis Shallow station, Alex shrugged into his jacket and went on foot. There were carts for rent and a girl of no more than fourteen with a scavenged rickshaw calling on the corner. It was a short walk, though, and Alex was dreading the conversation at the end of it.
He'd walked the same path three days before, still smarting from his abortive meeting with Tali, following his hand terminal's directions to Bobbie's rooms. He hadn't seen the former marine since Luna the night that the Ring had lifted itself off the ruins of Venus and flown out toward the far edge of the system, and he'd been looking forward to anything that would distract him from the day he'd been having until then.
Bobbie was living in a very pleasant side corridor with its own greenway in the center and lights that had been fas.h.i.+oned to look like wrought-iron lamps from someone's imagined 1800s London. He'd only had to stand at her door for a few seconds before it opened.
Bobbie Draper was a big woman, and while years of civilian life had lost her a little of her muscle definition, she radiated competence and strength the way a fire did heat. Every time he saw her, he remembered a story from ancient history about the native Samoans armed with rocks and spears driving the gun-toting Spanish conquistadors into the sea. Bobbie was a woman who made that s.h.i.+t seem plausible.
”Alex! Come in. I'm sorry the place is a mess.”
”Ain't worse than my cabin at the end of a long run.”
The main room was wider than the ops deck back on the Roci, and done in shades of terra-cotta and gray that shouldn't have worked together, but did. The dining table didn't seat more than four, and there were only two chairs beside it. Through an archway across from the front door, a wall monitor was set to a slowly s.h.i.+fting spray of colors, like Monet's water lilies animated. Where most places would have had a couch, a resistance-training machine dominated the s.p.a.ce, a rack of chrome free weights beside it. A spiral staircase led up and down in the den's corner, bamboo laminate steps glowing warmly in the light.
”Fancy digs,” Alex had said.
Bobbie's glance at her own rooms seemed almost apologetic. ”It's more than I need. A lot more than I need. But I thought I'd like the s.p.a.ce. Room to stretch out.”
”You thought you would?”
She shrugged. ”It's more than I need.”
She put on a brown leather jacket that looked professional and minimized the breadth of her shoulders, then led him to a fish shack with shredded trout in black sauce that had been some of the best he'd ever had. The beer was a local brew, served cold. Over the course of two hours, the sting of Talissa's voice and his feeling of self-loathing lost their edges, if they didn't quite vanish. Bobbie told stories about working veterans' outreach. A woman who'd come in to get psychiatric help for her son who wouldn't stop playing console games since he'd finished his deployment. Bobbie had made contact with the boy's first drill sergeant, and now the kid had a job at the s.h.i.+pyards. Or the time a man came in claiming that the s.e.x toy lodged in his colon was service related. When Bobbie laughed, Alex laughed with her.
Slowly, he'd started taking his turn too. What it had been like on the far side of the Ring. Watching Ilus or New Terra or whatever the h.e.l.l they wound up calling it as it went through its paroxysms. What it had been like s.h.i.+pping back with a prisoner, which led into the first time they'd s.h.i.+pped a prisoner Clarissa Mao, daughter of Jules-Pierre and sister to the protomolecule's patient zero, that one had been and how Holden and Amos and Naomi were all doing these days.
That had been when the ache hit. The homesickness for his crew and their s.h.i.+p. He enjoyed Bobbie's wit and the easy physicality of her company, but what he'd really wanted then and in the days since was to be back on the Rocinante. Which was why the end of their conversation had been so awkward for him.
”So, Alex,” Bobbie said, her attempt to make the words as casual and friendly as everything that had gone before flagging them at once, ”are you still in touch with anyone over at the naval yard?”
”I know a few guys still serving at Hecate, sure.”
”So I was wondering if I could get you to do a little favor for me.”
”Sure, of course,” Alex said. And then a fraction of a second later, ”What is it?”
”I've got a kind of hobby thing going on,” she said, looking pained. ”It's... unofficial.”
”Is it for Avasarala?”
”Sort of. The last time she was through, we had dinner, and some of the things she said got me thinking. With the new worlds opening up, there's a lot of change going on. Strategies s.h.i.+fting. Like that. And one of the big resources Mars has one of the things that there's going to be a market for is the Navy.”
”I don't understand,” Alex said, leaning back in his chair. ”You mean like mercenary work?”
”I mean like things going missing. Black market. We've been through a couple pretty major wars in the last few years. A lot of s.h.i.+ps got sc.r.a.pped. Some of them it seems like we just lost track of. And the Navy's stretched pretty thin. I don't know how much energy they're putting into tracking things right now. You know there was an attack on the Callisto s.h.i.+pyards?”