“You crazy,” Jianguo said. “No crew in there. They’ll jump you.”
“Yep.”
“Then why?”
“Because,” Amos said, standing up and throwing the towel over his shoulder, “I hate waiting.”
As soon as Amos walked toward the head with his prominently displayed towel, junior started talking on his hand terminal. Calling the troops.
The head was five flimsy sheet plastic shower stalls against one bulkhead, and ten vacuum flush toilets against the other. Sinks lined the bulkhead directly across from the door. The open space in the middle had benches for sitting while you waited your turn in the shower or dressed afterward. Not the best space for hand-to-hand. Lots of hard projections to get mashed into, and the benches were a tripping hazard.
Amos tossed his towel onto a sink and leaned against it, arms crossed. He didn’t have to wait long. A few minutes after junior had made the call he and five of the thugs from team extortion filed into the room.
“Only six? I’m a little insulted.”
“You not a little anything,” the oldest one said. The leader then, speaking first. “But big dies too.”
“True that. So how does this go? I’m on your turf, so I’ll respect the house rules.”
The leader laughed. “You funny, man. Dead soon, but funny.” He turned to junior thug and said, “Your beef, coyo.”
Junior pulled a shiv out of his pocket. No weapons made it into the passenger compartment through security, but this was a jagged piece of metal torn off of something in the ship then sharpened down. Prison rules, again.
“I’m not going to disrespect you,” Amos said to him. “I killed my first guy at about your age. Well, a few guys really, but that’s not the issue. I know to take you and that knife seriously.”
“Good.”
“No,” Amos said sadly, “it really isn’t.”
Before anyone could move, Amos crossed the space between them and grabbed junior’s knife arm. The ship was only at about a third of a g thrust, so Amos yanked the kid off the floor and spun, hitting the edge of a shower stall with the kid’s arm. His body kept traveling and Amos didn’t let go, so the arm folded around the impact point. The sound of tendons in his elbow snapping was like hitting wet plywood with a hammer. The knife drifted to the floor from nerveless fingers, and Amos let go of the arm.
There was a long second where the five thugs stared at the knife on the floor at Amos’ feet, and he stared back at them. The emptiness in his belly was gone. The hollow space behind his sternum, gone. His throat had stopped hurting.
“Who’s next?” he said, flexing his hands, his face in a grin he didn’t know he had.
They came in a rush. Amos spread his arms and welcomed them like long-lost lovers.
“You okay?” Rico asked. He was dabbing at a small cut on Amos’ head with an alcohol swab.
“Mostly.”
“They okay?”
“Less so,” Amos said, “but still mostly. Everyone will walk out of there when they wake up.”
“You didn’t have to do that for me. I would have paid.”
“Didn’t,” Amos said. At Rico’s puzzled look he added, “Didn’t do it for you. And Rico? That money goes into the Wendy fund, or I come looking for you too.”
Chapter Five: Holden
One of Holden’s grandfathers had spent his youth riding in rodeos. All of the pictures they had of him were of a tall, muscular, robust-looking man with a big belt buckle and a cowboy hat. But the man Holden had known when he was a child was thin, pale, and hunched over. As if the years had stripped away everything extraneous and rendered the younger man down into the skeletal older man he became.
It struck him that Fred Johnson had been rendered.
He was still a tall man, but the heavy muscles he’d once had were mostly gone, leaving loose skin at the backs of his arms and on his neck. His hair had gone from mostly black to mostly gray to mostly not there at all. That he could still project an air of absolute authority meant that very little of it had come from his physicality in the first place.
Fred had two glasses and a bottle of something dark on the desk when Holden sat. He offered a drink with a small tilt of his head, and Holden accepted with a nod. While Fred poured, Holden leaned back in his chair with a long sigh, then said, “Thank you.”
Fred shrugged. “I was looking for an excuse.”
“Not the drink, but thanks for that too. Thank you for helping with the Roci. The money from Avasarala came, but we have damage we didn’t know about when I wrote the bill. Without our favored client discount, we’d been in trouble.”
“Who says you’re getting a discount?” Fred said as he handed Holden the drink, but he smiled as he said it. He sank into his own chair with a grunt. Holden hadn’t realized coming in how much he was dreading the conversation. Even if he knew it was just good business negotiation, it felt like asking for a handout. That the answer had been yes was good. That Fred hadn’t made him squirm about it was even better. Made him feel more like he was sitting with a friend.
“You look old, Fred.”
“I feel old. But it’s better than the alternative.”
Holden raised his glass. “Those who aren’t with us.”
“Those who aren’t with us,” Fred repeated, and they both drank. “That list is getting longer every time I see you.”
“I’m sorry about Bull, but I think he may have saved the solar system. From what I knew of him, he’d think that was pretty kick-ass.”
“Bull,” Fred said, raising his glass again.
“And Sam,” Holden added, raising his own.
“I’m leaving soon, so I wanted to check in with you.”
“Wait. Leaving? Like leaving leaving, or like Bull and Sam leaving?”
“You’re not rid of me yet. I need to get back out to Medina Station,” Fred said. He poured himself a little more bourbon, frowning down at the glass like it was a delicate operation. “That’s where all the action is.”
“Really? I thought I heard something about the UN secretary-general and the Martian prime minister having a sit-down. I thought you’d be heading to that.”
“They can talk all they want. The real power’s in the geography. Medina’s in the hub where all the rings connect. That’s where the power is going to be for a good long time.”
“How long do you think the UN and Mars keep letting you run that show? You have a head start, but they have a bunch of really dangerous ships to throw at you if they decide they want your stuff.”
“Avasarala and I are back channeling a lot of this. We’ll keep it from getting out of hand.” Fred paused to take a long drink. “But we have two big problems.”
Holden put down the glass. He was starting to get the sense that him asking for—and getting—the discount on repairs might not actually have been the end of the negotiation after all.
“Mars,” Holden said.
“Yes, Mars is dying,” Fred agreed with a nod. “No stopping that. But we also have a bunch of OPA extremists making noise. The Callisto attack last year was their work. The water riot on Pallas Station. And there have been other things. Piracy’s up, and more of those ships have a split circle painted on them than I’d like.”
“I’d think any problems they had would be solved by everyone getting their own free planet.”
Fred took another pull of his drink before he answered. “Their position is that the Belter culture is one adapted to space. The prospect of new colonies with air and gravity reduces the economic base that Belters depend on. Forcing everyone to go down a gravity well is the moral equivalent of genocide.”
Holden blinked. “Free planets are genocide?”