Part 47 (1/2)

”You know. You've been out here. This? All this? It's your neighborhood. You know people. You know how things work. You know how to keep people alive.”

”You may be overestimating the amount of time I've put into a.n.a.lyzing stuff,” Amos said. ”I got one s.h.i.+p and three people. That's been kind of a handful. All the rest of this just happened along the way.”

”But it got us here.” Erich s.h.i.+fted his gaze. His eyes were hard. ”I've got enough cash squirreled away that if I get access to it, I might be able to buy a small s.h.i.+p. Not a good one, but something. Or relocate the team somewhere. One of the Lagrange stations or Pallas or... wherever. Start over. Make a new niche. If you want to take the lead, I'll give it up.”

”Oh,” Amos said. ”Yeah, no.”

”They'd be better off with you leading than with me.”

”Yeah, but I don't know them enough to give a s.h.i.+t. I've got my own thing going. I'm sticking with it.”

He couldn't tell if the release in Erich's eyes was relief or disappointment. Maybe both. Lydia would have known. Or Naomi. Or Holden. Alex, probably. For him, it was just a little change in muscle tension. Could have meant anything.

”I'll find my own way then,” Erich said. ”We'll be out of here in a couple days, if I can manage it.”

”Okay, then,” Amos said. It felt like there should be something more. He'd known Erich as long as he'd known anyone alive. Even if they saw each other again a time or two, the conversation they'd just had was the mark of the end. Both of their lives could have looked a lot different if Amos had said a few different words. It seemed like there should have been something to say about that. But since he couldn't come up with anything, he went back to the lift and headed down for the machine shop.

Going to the technical end of the Zhang Guo the places where the owners and their guests wouldn't spend their time was like stepping into a different s.h.i.+p. All the glitter and beauty gave way to a clean utilitarian design that wasn't as good as the Roci, but better than any other s.h.i.+p Amos had worked. All the corners were curved and softened in expectation of impacts. All the handholds were double-bolted. The drawers and cabinets in the machine shop were latched in two planes. The air smelled like fresh filters and lubricant. Someone had kept the place clean and in better order than a glorified orbital shuttle really deserved. Amos wondered if whoever that had been was still alive. It wasn't a question he could answer, though, so he didn't spend a lot of energy on it.

Peaches was sitting at a workbench. The outfit they'd gotten during their bike trip to Baltimore looked pretty sketchy in the clean and tidy surroundings. Torn at the shoulder and still too big for her. She looked like she was swimming in it. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail with a zip tie and her hands were moving quickly and carefully over an open case of modular electronics. Her movements were as precise and flowing as an old recording of a piano player at the keys. She didn't look up as he came in, but she smiled.

”Got something for you. Salvaged a hand terminal. Nice one. Even got it talking to the local network. Finish the configuration, and you're good to go.”

Amos pulled the seat next to her out from the body of the s.h.i.+p. She handed him the terminal, but still didn't meet his eyes.

”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 s.h.i.+t. 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+t 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 s.h.i.+t 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 s.h.i.+t to them. There's a new Navy between us and the Ring, and there's still a thousand solar systems out there to f.u.c.k up the way we f.u.c.ked 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. f.u.c.k. 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 Was.h.i.+ngton. Too many people there, and if the pumps stopped working, I didn't want to be pedaling through knee-high sludge, right?”

”Right,” Alex said.

Holden was on the Rocinante. Naomi was asleep in her room. She'd been sleeping a lot since the Rocinante had plucked them all out of the vacuum. The medical system said she was getting better and that the rest was good. It worried Alex, though. Not because she needed the sleep, but because maybe she didn't actually need it and was pretending to. Being here with Holden and Amos and Naomi was a bone-deep relief. He wanted it to be the end of their separation, everything come back into its right place like nothing had ever happened.

But it wasn't. Even talking to Amos, Alex thought he could feel little differences in the man. A kind of abstraction, like he was thinking of something else all the time and only pretending to give Alex his undivided attention. Naomi had been in medical debriefing since they'd arrived, and the physicians hadn't allowed anyone in to see her except Holden. If Naomi was finding excuses to stay isolated from them, that could be a very bad sign. They still didn't know all of what she'd been through that she'd wound up with the Free Navy and then escaped from it, but that it had been a trauma seemed obvious. And so he tried to enjoy the peace and pleasure of having his crew again and ignore the anxiety growing in the back of his mind, the sense that just like with the governments and planets and system of the solar system things here had changed.

Amos' hand terminal chirped. He sucked down half a gla.s.s of beer then bared his teeth. ”I gotta go do a thing.”

”All right,” Alex said, pouring the rest of his beer into the sink. ”Where are we going?”

Amos hesitated, but only for a fraction of a second. ”Dock. Got something I need to move into my shop.”