Nemesis Games

“I was at an airlock on Ceres Station. Rigged it to open. All I needed to do was step out. It was an old-style one. Blue and gray. And it smelled like fake apple. Something about the recycler there. And, anyway, I did it. I triggered it. Only the station had put in a fail-safe I didn’t know about. So.” She shrugged. “That was when I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That I couldn’t save you. You could have a gone mother or a dead one. Those were all the options.”

“Some people aren’t meant to be soldiers,” Filip said. It was meant to cut, but she was past feeling now.

“The only right you have with anyone in life is the right to walk away. I would have taken you with me if I could. But I couldn’t. I would have stayed if I could. But I couldn’t. I would have saved you if I could.”

“I didn’t need saving.”

“You just killed a quarter of a billion people,” she said. “Someone should have kept that from happening.”

Filip stood, his motions wooden. For a moment, she saw what he would look like as a man. And what he had been as a boy. There was a deep pain in his eyes. Not like her own. His pain was his, and she could only hope he would feel it. That he would at least learn to regret.

“Before you kill yourself,” she said, “come find me.”

He pulled back a centimeter, as if she’d shouted. “Con que I do something stupid like that? Soy no coward, me.”

“When it comes,” she said, “find me. Nothing can ever take it back, but I’ll help you if I can.”

“You’re merde to me, puta,” Filip snapped and stalked away. Around the galley, the others stared or pretended not to. Naomi shook her head. Let them look. She was past caring. She didn’t even hurt. Her heart was vast and dry and empty as a desert. For the first time since she’d taken Marco’s call on Tycho, her mind was clear.

She’d almost forgotten Cyn was there until he spoke. “Harsh words for his big day.”

“Life’s like that,” she said. But she thought, This isn’t the big day.

In her memory, Marco spoke. In order to be heard by the oppressing class, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. But he hadn’t made his pronouncement yet. Not in any diction. She didn’t know his plans. Likely no one but Marco knew all of them.

But whatever his grand design was, it wasn’t over yet.

Chapter Twenty-six: Amos

Sullivan died when they were about fifteen meters up the shaft.

The plan, if you wanted to call it that, was open the elevator shaft doors, then boost up a level and pry those open. Each level could be a staging area for getting to the next, and by the time they got to where the car was stuck at the very top level, they’d have enough experience with the layout they’d maybe be able to find a way to get past it or get the guards posted in it to let them through. Anyway, it was a problem they could solve once they got there.

It took about an hour to get the first set of doors opened. They defaulted to locked, for one thing. For another, the mass of the doors was a lot more than the usual lift gates. In the end, it had taken Amos, Sullivan, and Morris on one door and Konecheck with his modifications on the other to pry them open enough to slip through. Twice, the ground had shaken, and the second time harder than the first; the whole damned planetary mantle was ringing like a struck bell. By the end, Amos was starting to get thirsty, but he didn’t see the point in mentioning it.

The shaft was in darkness, which Amos had expected. It was also wet, which he hadn’t. Black drops like filthy rain pattered down from above, smearing the walls and making them slick. He couldn’t tell if it was leaking through from one of the floors above them or if the building at the ground level had been sheared off. The guards had flashlights, but all the beams showed were dirty steel walls and a recessed track that the car ran on. A set of repeating steel access panels ran along beside the track looking like cabinets stacked one on top of the other, going up forever into the gloom.

“That’s the maintenance ladder,” Rona said, playing a circle of white light over the cabinet doors. “The doors retract, and there’s handholds.”

“That’s great,” Amos replied, leaning out into the empty air. The shaft went down another three meters or so. The black soup at the bottom might have gone deeper than that, but he was hoping not to find out. The air smelled like ashes and paint. He didn’t want to think too much about what was leaking into the shaft or where it was coming from. If the whole place was ass-deep in toxic crap, it didn’t change what they had to do.

The gap between floors was maybe half a meter. Craning his neck, he could see the lines of the elevator doors set flush into the wall. Not so much as a fingerhold. He thought maybe there was something way at the top of the shaft – a spot of brightness that came and went in an eyeblink.