Nemesis Games

The old woman sat back in her seat, her eyes fiery and defiant. The reporter glanced into the camera and then back to his notes. “The relief effort on Earth is, of course, a massive undertaking.”

“It is,” she said. “We have reactors in every major city on the planet running at top efficiency to provide power for —”

The screen went blank. Cyn put his hand terminal down on the table with an angry click. Naomi looked up at him from behind her hair.

“Esá bitch needs sa yutak cut,” Cyn said. His face was dark with rage. “Lesson á totas like her, yeah?”

“For for?” Naomi said, shrugging. “Kill her, and another one will take her place. She’s good at what she does, but even if you did slit her throat, there’d just be someone else in the same chair saying the same things.”

Cyn shook his head. “Not like that.”

“Close by.”

“No,” he said, his chin jutting a centimeter forward. “Not like that. Alles la about big social movements y ages of history y sa? Stories they make up later so it makes sense. Not like that, not real. It’s people do things. Marco. Filipito. You. Me.”

“You say so,” Naomi said.

“Esá coyo on Mars who traded us for all the ships and told us where to find supplies? He’s not ‘Martian economic despair’ o ‘rising debt ratios’ o ‘income and access inequality.’ ” With each pretentious invented term, Cyn wagged his finger like a professor lecturing a class, and it was funny enough that Naomi chuckled. He blinked at the sound, and then smiled a little shyly. “La coyo la is just some coyo. He’s a man made a deal with a man who talked up some otras, and we did things. Who people are, it matters, yeah? Can’t replace them.”

His gaze was on her now, not a professor lecturing a class, but Cyn lecturing her. She scooped the last bite of pudding into her mouth. “Get the feeling you’re saying something,” she said around it. Cyn looked down, gathered himself. She could see the effort more than she could understand it.

“Filipito, he needs you. No sabez la, but he does. You and Marco are you and Marco, but no you take the coward’s out.”

Her heart jumped a little. He thought she was in despair, that she might give in to the dark thoughts. She wondered what brought him to the conclusion, and whether it was a mistake he was making or something he could see in her that she couldn’t. She swallowed. “You telling me not to kill myself?”

“Be a bad thing to say?”

She stood up, her soiled bowl in her hand. He rose with her, following as she headed for the recycler. The weight of her body was reassuring. There was still time. They hadn’t cut the drives yet. She could still figure her way over. “What should I do, then?”

It was Cyn’s turn to shrug. “Come with. Be Free Navy. We go where they need us, do what needs doing. Help where they need help, yeah? Already eight colony ships on target.”

“Target for what?”

“Redistribué, yeah? Alles la food and supplies they got heading out for the Ring? Más a anyone ever gave the Belt. Take that, feed the Belt, build the Belt. See what es vide when we’re not scrabbling for air y ejection mass. Gardens in the vacuum. Cities make Tycho Station look some rock hopper’s head. New world without a world to it, yeah? None of this alien bok. Blow the Ring. Burn it. Get back to people being people, yeah?”

Two women walked by, heads bent toward each other in passionate conversation. The nearer one glanced up, then away, then back. There was venom in her gaze. Hatred. The contrast was stark. On one hand, Cyn’s vision of a future where Belters were free of the economic oppression of the inner planets – of the central axioms that had formed everything in Naomi’s childhood. In her life. Civilization built by them and for them, a remaking of human life. And on the other, actual Belters actually hating her because she had dared to act against them. Because she wasn’t Belter enough. “Where does it end, Cyn? Where does it all end?”

“Doesn’t. Not if we do it right.”

There was nothing in her cabin that could help her, but since she was confined there and alone, it was where she searched. Hours. Not days.

The crash couch was bolted to the deck with thick steel and reinforced ceramic canted so that any direction the force came from was compression on one leg or another. Any individual strut might have been usable as a pry bar, but she didn’t have any way to unbolt the couch or break one free. So not that. The drawers were thinner metal, the same gauge, more or less, as the lockers. She pulled them out as far as they would open, examining the construction of the latches, the seams where the metal had been folded, searching for clues or inspiration. There was nothing.

The tiny black thumb of the decompression kit, she kept tucked at her waist, ready to go if she could just find a way. She felt the time slipping away, second by second, as she came up blank. She had to find a way. She would find a way. The Chetzemoka was so close to still be too far away.