“We got to get out of here!” Scarf Boy shouted.
“Sounds good,” Amos said, and started walking backward, firing through the window. A half second later, Scarf Boy was with him. The others either noticed them or had already reached the same conclusion. Two were already on the stairs, shooting as they climbed. At this point, no one was trying to hit anything; they were just keeping the others from advancing too fast for everyone to get on board. Amos’ rifle went dry. He dropped it and jogged back to the stairs, holding his hand terminal to his ear as he went.
“How’re we doing?” he shouted.
“You’re very clever,” Peaches yelled back. “We had a power hiccup on start-up. Would have lost maneuvering thrusters.”
“We going to lose them now?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Good.”
He stopped at the base of the stairs. Scarf Boy crouched behind him, reloading his assault rifle. When he had the new magazine in, Amos plucked it out of his hands and pointed at the stairway with his chin. Scarf Boy nodded thanks and scuttled up the steps, his head low. Shadows danced on the windows, and the side door burst in with a three-person team rushing in. Amos mowed them down. Half a dozen of Erich’s people were on the stairs now, some still shooting as they climbed. One of them—Butch—stumbled as she got to the fourth step up. Blood soaked her arm and the side of her neck. Amos held the assault rifle up, spraying the walls, and knelt beside her.
“Come on,” he said. “Time to go.”
“Don’t think that’s happening,” Butch said.
Amos sighed. He put his hand terminal in his pocket, took the woman’s collar in one hand and the rifle’s grip in the other, and ran up the steps to the rattle of his own gunfire. The woman screamed and bounced. Something exploded, but Amos didn’t pause to figure out what. At the airlock, he hauled Butch through, fired one last burst down the stairway, and hit the controls to cycle the lock closed.
All around him, Erich’s people and the house servants were huddled. Some were covered in blood. He was covered in blood. He was pretty sure it was all Butch’s, but not a hundred percent. Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, he missed things like getting shot. He let Butch down to the deck and pulled out his hand terminal.
“Okay,” he said. “Now would be good.”
“The exhaust’s going to kill everyone out there,” Erich said.
“Are we caring about that?” Amos shouted.
“I guess not.”
The drive roared to life. “Lay down!” Amos shouted. “We don’t have time to get to couches. Everyone lay down. You want the thrust spread out over your whole body!”
He lay down beside Butch. Her eyes were on him with something that might have been pain or anger. She didn’t speak, and neither did he. Erich’s voice came over the ship’s system, telling them to brace, and then Amos weighed a whole lot more than he had a few seconds before. A loud crunching sound rattled the deck—the Zhang Guo pushing through the hangar’s roof on her way to the sky. The ship rattled, dropped, rose again. The deck pressed into Amos’ back. If they had to make any hard turns, there were going to be at least a dozen people all mushed together in the corner where the deck met the wall.
The screen over the engineering controls flickered to life; clouds and rain falling down onto the forward cameras as the ship rose. Lightning flickered, the thunder rolling through the ship. He couldn’t remember if a standard orbital escape called for three gs or four, but whatever it was would have been a whole hell of a lot more fun in a crash couch. His jaw ached, and he had to remember to clench his arms and legs to keep from passing out. All around him, the others weren’t remembering that in time, or more likely never knew. Most of them, this was their first time up the well.
Over the course of long minutes, the rain and clouds on the screen faded. The lightning fell away behind them. Then, through the featureless gray, the first shining stars. Amos laughed and whooped, but no one joined him. Looking around, he seemed to be the only one still conscious, so instead, he lay back on the deck and waited for the thrust gravity to drop out when they hit orbit.
The stars slowly grew brighter, twinkling at first as the last gritty layers of atmosphere passed by them, and then growing steady. The Milky Way appeared like a dark cloud lit from behind. The thrust gravity began to ease and he got to his feet. Around him, other people were starting to come back to themselves. Scarf Boy and the others were hauling Butch out to the lift and the med bay, assuming the Zhang Guo had one of those. Stokes and the others were laughing or weeping or staring off in shock and disbelief. Amos checked himself for wounds and, apart from a series of four deep, gouging scrapes along his left thigh whose origins he couldn’t recall, felt fine.
He turned his hand terminal to the open channel. “This is Amos Burton. You guys mind if I come up to ops?”
“You can do that, Burton,” Erich said. There was maybe just a hint of smug in his voice. This saving face for Erich thing was going to get old fast, but right at the moment, he was feeling too high to care.
The ops deck was offensively lush. The anti-spalling had been made to look like red-velvet wallpaper and the light came from silver-and-gold sconces all along the walls. Erich sat in the captain’s couch. His good hand was moving over the deck in his lap, his bad one holding on to the straps. Peaches was in the navigator’s couch, her eyes closed and her smile beatific.
“Grab a couch,” Erich said with a grin. His old friend and not the criminal boss who needed to keep Amos in his place. He switched to the ship system. “Brace for maneuvers. Repeat, brace for maneuvers.”
“That’s not how they really do that,” Amos said, strapping in at communications. “That’s just something they say in the movies.”
“It’s good enough for now,” Erich said, and the couches shifted under them as the thrusters turned the ship. Slowly, the moon hove into view, and behind it, the sun. Silhouetted, Luna was a disk of black from here except for a thin limn of white along one edge and a webwork of city lights. Peaches chuckled like a brook, her eyes open now, her hands pressed to her lips. The tears welling up in her eyes glittered.
“Didn’t think you’d see this again, did you Peaches?”
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Everything’s beautiful, and I didn’t think anything ever would be again.”
They were all silent for a moment, and then Erich switched the view, pulling it slowly down. Below them, Earth was a smear of white and of gray. Where the continents should have burned in the permanent fire of lights, there were only a scattering of dim, dull glowing points. The seas were hidden, and the land. A funeral shroud was over the planet, and they all knew what was happening beneath it.
“Fuck,” Erich said, and it carried a weight of awe and despair.
“Yeah,” Amos said. They were all quiet for a long moment. The birthplace of humanity, the cradle of life in the solar system, was beautiful in its death throes, but none of them had any doubt that was what they were seeing.
The comm controls interrupted them. Amos accepted the connection and a young woman in UN naval uniform appeared in a high-priority panel.
“Zhang Guo, this is Luna Base. We do not have an approved flight plan for you. Be advised this space is under military restriction. Identify yourselves immediately, or be fired upon.”
Amos opened the channel. “Hey there, Luna Base. Name’s Amos Burton. Didn’t mean to step on anybody’s toes. If you’ve got someone up there named Chrissie Avasarala, pretty sure she’ll vouch for me.”
Chapter Forty-six: Alex