Part 44 (1/2)
”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 a.s.sault 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sault 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 s.h.i.+p'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 pus.h.i.+ng through the hangar's roof on her way to the sky. The s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p rose. Lightning flickered, the thunder rolling through the s.h.i.+p. He couldn't remember if a standard orbital escape called for three gs or four, but whatever it was would have been a whole h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sing 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.sed 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, a.s.suming 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 sc.r.a.pes 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+fted under them as the thrusters turned the s.h.i.+p. 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.
”f.u.c.k,” 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 s.p.a.ce 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.”
Chapter Forty-six: Alex.
”Hey there, Chetzemoka. This is Alex Kamal presently of the Razorback. Naomi? If you're there, I'd appreciate you giving me a sign. I'd sort of like to make sure it's you before we come over. Your s.h.i.+p's been acting a mite odd, and we're a little on the jumpy side. And, just in case it's not Naomi Nagata? I've got fifteen missiles locked on you right now, so whoever you are, you might want to talk with me.”
Alex shut off the mic, and rubbed his cheek. They were on the float now, course matched with the mysterious s.h.i.+p only about fifty kilometers above them on the relative z-axis. The sun, larger by far than he'd ever seen it from Mars, glowed below them, heating the little pinnace almost to the limit of its ability to shed the energy. Behind him, Bobbie was watching the same feed he was.
”That doesn't look good,” she said.
”Nope.”
As a boy, back on Mars, there had been a little improvised firework that his friends would sometimes make for fun. All it took was a length of light-duty pipe, a mining spike, and a single-use rocket motor. The way it worked, they'd spike one end of the pipe to a flat section of wall, fix the motor to the other end with industrial tape or epoxy with the thrust pointing off to one side. Fire the motor, and the whole thing turned into a ring of smoke and fire, the pipe spinning around its axis faster than the eye could follow, the flare of the motor exhaust blinding and flickering. Sometimes the motor came loose and bounced along the corridor, posing a threat to everyone watching. Sometimes the spike came loose. Most times, it just left a circle of sc.r.a.pes and scorch marks on the stone of the wall that p.i.s.sed off the maintenance crews. They called them fire weasels. He didn't know why.
Above them, the Chetzemoka was spinning like a fire weasel. She wasn't quite tumbling, but the circle she was burning in was tight. All the acceleration she'd been using to burn hard out toward the Belt and Holden was getting eaten now, each point on her pathway canceling out the point a hundred and eighty degrees off from it. Her exhaust plume was a jet of flame and plasma that would gla.s.s anything that tried to approach her unless it came from above or below. And if they did that...
”What do you think happened?” Bobbie asked.
”Maneuvering thruster fired off, never got balanced.”
”Can you match course with that? I mean even if we decided we wanted to?”
Alex pressed the tip of his tongue to the back of his teeth and willed Naomi to call him. To give him a sign that she was still alive. That he wasn't about to risk his s.h.i.+p and his life and the lives of the people with him to rescue a corpse. ”Might have to come up with something clever.”
He pulled up the tactical display. The Razorback and her cloud of missiles with no one left to shoot at. The Chetzemoka chasing its tail like a terrier that had gulped down its own body weight in uppers. Then, far distant, the UN escort decelerating in from the sun toward a matching course, and the Roci doing the same from the Belt. Everything was coming together right here the head of the OPA, the prime minister of Mars, Avasarala's best cavalry because it was where Naomi Nagata was, and as long as Alex and Holden were drawing breath, they'd be looking out for their own.
The screen lit up with an incoming message, but not from the Chetzemoka. Alex accepted it, and Holden appeared on the screen. For about four seconds, the captain didn't do anything but look into the camera and scratch his nose. He looked tired and thin. Alex felt the same way himself. Then a smile bloomed on Holden's face, and he seemed more like himself again. ”Alex! Good. Tell me what we're looking at.”
”Well, we haven't had any new messages since their radio cut out, but if that was an intentional message, this looks like about the worst definition of 'in control' I've seen in a while. This mystery s.h.i.+p's not quite on the tumble, but she's d.a.m.ned close. The way she's chasing her tail, it's not going to be easy making an approach, but I'm working on an idea. The Razorback wasn't built for airlock to airlock. This here's the kind of ride you land in a hangar. But we've got EVA suits for me and Nate. That's the prime minister. I call him Nate now. Don't be jealous. Anyway, I figure we put the Razorback at the center of the circle Naomi's making with our nose up and our a.s.s down, then match roll to the circle she's making. Then as long as no one pukes in their helmet, we can send someone over to the airlock. Not sure it'll work, but it's the best idea I've got so far.”
He leaned forward while the tightbeam laser flew the four light-seconds out to the Rocinante, then the four light-seconds back. To judge from the shape of Holden's face, he was probably at more than one g. Even if the Chetzemoka hadn't gone into its surprise spin, the Razorback would have been the first to reach it. Holden's temporary pilot was going to be buying Alex a beer, provided nothing new and unexpected blew up on them. Not that he'd have given good odds on that.
Five seconds in, he remembered that he'd wanted to mention that Bobbie had power armor. He didn't say it, though, since it would just interrupt whatever Holden was saying right then that wouldn't be back to Alex for a few more seconds. Light-delay conversations were all about etiquette and taking turns.