Nemesis Games

“Chow,” he said, then dumped the bags on the table in front of Holden. “Hey, Cap’n, when do I get my ship back?”

“Is that food?” Alex said in a loud, groggy voice from the living room. Amos didn’t answer; he was already taking foam cartons out of the bags and setting them around the table. Holden had thought he was too annoyed to eat, but the spicy smell of Indian food changed his mind.

“Not for a long time,” Naomi said to Amos around a mouthful of bean curd. “We bent the mount.”

“Shit,” Amos said, sitting and grabbing a pair of chopsticks. “I leave you guys alone for a couple weeks and you fuck my girl up.”

“Alien superweapons were used,” Alex said, walking into the room, sleep-sweaty hair standing out from his skull in every direction. “The laws of physics were altered, mistakes were made.”

“Same shit, different day,” Amos replied and handed the pilot a carton of curried rice. “Turn the sound up. That looks like Ilus.”

Naomi turned up the sound on the video feed, and the voice of a newscaster filled the apartment. “— partial power restored, but sources on the ground say this setback will —”

“Is that real chicken?” Alex asked, grabbing at one of the cartons. “Splurgin’ a bit, are we?”

“Shush,” Amos said. “They’re talking about the colony.”

Alex rolled his eyes, but said nothing as he piled spicy strips of chicken on his plate. “— in other news, a draft report detailing the investigation into last year’s attack on the Callisto shipyards was leaked this week. While the text is not finalized, the early reports suggest that a splinter faction of the Outer Planets Alliance was involved, and places blame for the high casualty —”

Amos shut off the sound with an angry stab at the table’s controls. “Shit, wanted to hear more about what’s going on with Ilus, not some dumbass OPA cowboys getting themselves blown up.”

“I wonder if Fred knows who was behind that,” Holden said. “The OPA hardliners are having trouble getting over their ‘us against the solar system’ theology.”

“What did they want there anyway?” Alex said. “Callisto didn’t have any of the heavy munitions. No nukes. Nothing worth a raid like that.”

“Oh, now we’re expecting this shit to make sense?” Amos asked. “Gimme that naan.”

Holden sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I know it makes me a naïve idiot, but after Ilus I actually thought we might get a moment’s peace. No one needing to blow anyone else up.”

“This is what that looks like,” Naomi said, then stifled a burp and put her chopsticks down. “Earth and Mars are in a prickly detente, the legitimate wing of the OPA is governing instead of fighting. The colonists on Ilus are working with the UN instead of everyone shooting each other. This is as good as it gets. Can’t expect everyone to be on the same page. We’re still humans after all. Some percentage of us are always going to be assholes.”

“Truer words were never spoken, boss,” Amos said.

They finished eating and sat in companionable silence for several minutes. Amos pulled beers out of the small refrigerator and handed them around. Alex picked his teeth with his pinky fingernail. Naomi went back to her repair projections.

“So,” she said after a few minutes poring over the numbers, “the good news is that even if the UN and the OPA decide that we’re responsible for our own repair bills, we’ll be able to cover them with just what we have in the ship’s emergency fund.”

“Lots of work flyin’ colonists out through the rings,” Alex said. “When we’re flyin’ again.”

“Yeah, because we can stuff so much compost in our tiny cargo hold,” Amos said with a snort. “Plus, broke-as-hell-and-desperate is maybe not the customer base we should be chasing.”

“Let’s face it,” Holden said, “if things keep going the way they are, finding work for a private warship may get pretty tough.”

Amos laughed. “Let me get a preemptive I-told-you-so in here. Since when that turns out not to be true, like it always does, I might not be there to say it.”

Chapter Two: Alex

The thing Alex Kamal liked most about the long haul was how it changed the experience of time. The weeks – sometimes months – spent on the burn were like stepping out of history into some small, separate universe. Everything narrowed down to the ship and the people in it. For long stretches, there would be nothing but the basic maintenance work to do, and so life lost all its urgency. Everything was working according to the plan, and the plan was for nothing critical to happen. Traveling through the vacuum of space gave him an irrational sense of peace and well-being. It was why he could do the job.