Nemesis Games

Stokes leaned in from behind Peaches, his expression apologetic. “About that? There is a small problem.”

The hangar was as tall as a cathedral, and the Zhang Guo stood in the middle of it like a piece of gargantuan art. The surface of the ship was worked to look like gold-and-silver filigree over a body of lapis. The drive cones had golden ideograms written on them in something that looked like gold but apparently didn’t melt at high temperature. He could tell from looking it didn’t have an Epstein drive. Twice as big as the Rocinante and maybe – maybe – a quarter as functional, it was as much an orbital shuttle as it was a confession of decadence.

And, more to the point, it didn’t run.

“The house power supplies are exhausted,” Stokes explained. “Without power, there’s no water recyclers. No heat. No network connections.”

“So,” Amos said. “You figured the smart move was to get a bunch of people who’ve never seen a working fusion drive to just fire one up so you could top off the batteries? That’s the kind of suicidal optimism you just don’t see every day.”

Stokes shrugged. “The ship was here only because it needed repair. We were never able to make it run.”

Amos clapped the man on the shoulder. “You just go get me all the tools you were using. This is something I know how to do.”

Stokes trotted away, shouting to the others from his group. Erich’s people seemed to be equally divided between setting up a defensive perimeter and looking for the most expensive things that would fit in their pockets. Erich and Peaches came to stand beside him.

“How fucked are we?” Erich said.

“Don’t know,” Amos said. “First guess, there’s something hinky with the power supply. Too much noise. A bad coupler. Something that’s triggering the safety shutdown. But I’ve got to get between her hulls and take a peek.”

“I’ll help you ring the circuits,” Peaches said. Erich looked over at her, confused. “I spent a few months as an electrochemical technician,” she said.

“Well of fucking course you did,” Erich said.

“You bring a deck?” Amos asked.

“Sure,” Erich said. “Why?”

Amos pointed at the drive cone with his chin. “You can get the diagnostics running, and I can tell you what the output means.”

Erich frowned and scratched his neck thoughtfully with his tiny arm. “Sure. Figure I can do that.”

Peaches coughed once, then chuckled. “Erich? Did you ever, you know, kill anyone?”

“I run a drug empire in Baltimore,” Erich said. “Of course I’ve killed someone. Why?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just here we are, three murderers, and what’s going to save our asses if anything does is that we happen to have the skill set to repair a fusion drive.”

Erich smiled. “We are kind of well suited to this, aren’t we?”

“Well, we’d better set up some lookouts while we do it, though,” Amos said. “My plan to get out of here before trouble comes back may not work out.”

“I can have Stokes help with that too,” Peaches said. “They can’t fight, but they can watch. And I can get a few of the savvy ones to help us put the ship together if you want.”

“More the merrier,” Amos said. “Long as they don’t touch anything unless we tell them.”

“When we go, are we taking them with us?” Peaches asked.

“Yup,” Amos said.

She smirked. “Because they’re tribe?”

“Shit no. My tribe is the crew on the Roci, maybe you two, and a dead woman. I don’t actually give a shit if every damned one of ’em dies.”

“So why take them?”

One of Erich’s people called out. Another one laughed, and one of the servants tentatively joined in. Amos rubbed the raw spots on his knuckles and shrugged. “Seems like the sort of thing Holden’d do.”

Chapter Forty-one: Naomi

Naomi lifted the handles of the resistance machine over her head then let them slowly down. Sárta sat on the box of resistance gel and watched her like someone a little bit bored at a zoo. Naomi didn’t care. They didn’t talk. For every purpose but the ones that mattered most, Naomi was alone.

The trick, she’d decided, was not to remove just one EVA suit, but all of them. Corrupt the data, and no one would know whether she’d taken something or not. But if she only broke the inventory for the suits, that would be telling too. She lifted the handles. The muscles in her arms and shoulders ached. She let the handles down, savoring the pain. If she could get one of the scanners she’d used before, she might be able to feed false data into the system. Fill it with a few thousand phantoms. A million EVA suits filling every square centimeter of the ship. Then even if she couldn’t erase the data, she could render it useless. The problem was —