Nemesis Games

“Nope,” Amos replied, feeling the anger start to warm his belly like a slug of good scotch. He tested the restraints, calculating his odds of getting out of them. Of fighting his way past a room full of cops. It made him smile without realizing it.

“If you’re here for Murtry, he isn’t on Earth right now,” Avasarala said. “He claims you beat him half to death in the Rocinante’s airlock during the flight back. Do you mean to finish the job?”

“Murtry swung first, so technically, that was self-defense. And if I’d wanted him dead, don’t you think he’d be dead? It’s not like I quit hitting him because I was tired.”

“So what, then? If you have a message for me from Holden just spit it out. If Holden is sending messages to someone else, tell me who and what they are right now.”

“Holden didn’t send me to do shit,” Amos said. “Am I repeating myself? I feel like I’m repeating myself.”

“He —” Avasarala started, but Amos cut her off.

“He’s the captain of the ship I sail on, he ain’t the boss of my fucking life. I’ve got personal shit to do, and I came here to do it. Now either book me for something or let me go.”

Amos hadn’t realized Avasarala was leaning forward in her chair until she relaxed back into it. She let out a long breath that turned into a sigh. “You’re fucking serious, aren’t you?”

“Not known for my comic stylings.”

“All right. But you understand my concern.”

“That Holden is up to something? Have you met that guy? He’s never done anything secretly in his life.”

Avasarala laughed at that. “True. But if he’s sending his hired killer to Earth, we —”

“Wait, what?”

“If Holden was —”

“Forget Holden. You called me his hired killer. Is that how you guys think of me? The killer on Holden’s payroll?”

Avasarala frowned. “You’re not?”

“Well, mostly I’m a mechanic. But the idea that the UN has a file on me somewhere that lists me as the Rocinante’s killer? That’s kind of awesome.”

“You say that kind of thing, it doesn’t make me think we’re wrong, you know.”

“So,” Amos said, shrugging with his shoulders like an Earther, his hands still behind his back, “we done here?”

“Mostly,” Avasarala said. “How was everyone when you left? Good?”

“Roci got beat to shit during the Ilus thing. But crew’s good. Alex is trying to reconnect with an ex. Captain and Naomi are still rubbing uglies pretty regular. Same same, mostly.”

“Alex is on Mars?”

“Well, his ex is. I assume he’d head over there, but he was still on Tycho last I saw him.”

“That’s interesting,” Avasarala said. “Not the part where he’s reconnecting with his ex-wife, though. No one ever tries that without seeming like an asshole.”

“Right?”

“Well,” Avasarala said, then looked up at someone offscreen. She smiled and accepted a steaming cup from a disembodied hand, then took a long sip and sighed with pleasure. “Thank you for meeting with me, Mr. Burton.”

“Oh, it was my pleasure.”

“Please keep in mind that my name is pretty closely connected with the Rocinante, Captain Holden, and his crew at this point.”

“So?” Amos said with another shrug.

“So,” Avasarala said, then put her steaming cup down and leaned forward again. “If you’re about to do something I’ll need to cover up later, I’d appreciate a call first.”

“You got it, Chrissie.”

“Honestly. Fucking stop that,” she said with a smile.

The screen went black, and the woman who’d stopped him at the port came in. Amos pointed to the screen with his chin.

“I think she likes me.”

The street level view of New York wasn’t all that different from the Baltimore streets he’d grown up on. Lots of tall buildings, lots of automated street traffic, lots of people stratified into two distinct groups: those who had someplace to be, and those who didn’t. The employed scuttled from public transit to office buildings and back again at shift change. They bought things from street vendors, the simple fact of having currency a mark of status. Those on basic drifted and bartered, living on the excess created by the productive, and adding to it where they could with under-the-table industry too small for the government to notice.

Drifting among them like ghosts, invisible to anyone not from their world, was a third group. The ones who lived in the cracks. Thieves looking for an easy score. Pushers and con artists and prostitutes of every age group, every point on the spectrum of gender and sexual orientation. The kind of people Amos had once been. A corner pusher saw him looking and frowned back, seeing Amos for what he was without recognizing him. It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be in town long enough for it to get to anyone who’d come demanding to know where he fit in their ecosystem.