Amos shrugged and moved across the yellow line that legally separated Earth from the rest of the universe.
“Amos Burton?” someone said. An older woman in an inexpensive gray suit. It was the sort of thing mid-level bureaucrats and cops wore, so he wasn’t surprised when the next thing she said was, “You need to come with us now.”
Amos smiled at her and considered his options. Half a dozen other cops were converging on him in the tactical body armor high-risk entry teams wore. Three of them had tasers out, the other three semiautomatic handguns. Well, at least they were taking him seriously. That was sort of flattering.
Amos raised his hands over his head. “You got me, Sheriff. What are the charges?”
The plainclothes officer didn’t respond, and two members of the tactical team pulled his hands behind his back and cuffed him.
“I’m wondering,” Amos said, “because I just got here. Any crimes I’m going to commit are theoretical at this point.”
“Shush now,” the woman said. “You’re not under arrest. We’re going to take a ride.”
“And if I don’t want to?”
“Then you’ll be under arrest.”
The port authority police station was pretty much exactly like every other police station Amos had ever spent time in. Sometimes the walls were industrial taupe; sometimes they were government green. But the concrete walls and glass-fronted offices looking out over a crowded bull pen of desks would have been just as comfortable on Ceres as it was on Earth. Even the burnt-coffee smell was the same.
The plainclothes cop took him past the desk sergeant with a nod and deposited him in a small room that didn’t look like the interrogation rooms he was used to. Other than a table and four chairs, the only other furnishing was a massive video screen covering most of one wall. Plainclothes sat him in a chair across from it, then left the room, closing the door behind her.
“Huh,” Amos said, wondering if this was some new interrogation technique in the cop playbook. He leaned back in the chair to get comfortable, maybe try to catch some shut-eye after the nauseating shuttle ride.
“What is this? Nap time? Someone wake him the fuck up,” a familiar voice said.
Chrisjen Avasarala was on the screen, looking down on him, her face four times its real size on the giant monitor.
“Either I’m not in any trouble, or I’m in all of it,” Amos said with a grin. “How you doin’, Chrissie?”
“Good to see you too. Call me that again and I’ll have an officer beat you gently with a cattle prod,” Avasarala replied, though Amos thought he caught a hint of a smile on her face.
“Sure thing, Madam Uber Secretary. This a social call, or…?”
“Why,” Avasarala said, all traces of humor gone, “are you on Earth?”
“Came to pay respects to a friend who died. Did I forget to file a form or something?”
“Who? Who died?”
“None of your fucking business,” Amos said with a false amiability.
“Holden didn’t send you?”
“Nope,” Amos replied, feeling the anger start to warm his belly like a slug of good scotch. He tested the restraints, calculating his odds of getting out of them. Of fighting his way past a room full of cops. It made him smile without realizing it.
“If you’re here for Murtry, he isn’t on Earth right now,” Avasarala said. “He claims you beat him half to death in the Rocinante’s airlock during the flight back. Do you mean to finish the job?”
“Murtry swung first, so technically, that was self-defense. And if I’d wanted him dead, don’t you think he’d be dead? It’s not like I quit hitting him because I was tired.”
“So what, then? If you have a message for me from Holden just spit it out. If Holden is sending messages to someone else, tell me who and what they are right now.”
“Holden didn’t send me to do shit,” Amos said. “Am I repeating myself? I feel like I’m repeating myself.”
“He—” Avasarala started, but Amos cut her off.
“He’s the captain of the ship I sail on, he ain’t the boss of my fucking life. I’ve got personal shit to do, and I came here to do it. Now either book me for something or let me go.”
Amos hadn’t realized Avasarala was leaning forward in her chair until she relaxed back into it. She let out a long breath that turned into a sigh. “You’re fucking serious, aren’t you?”
“Not known for my comic stylings.”
“All right. But you understand my concern.”
“That Holden is up to something? Have you met that guy? He’s never done anything secretly in his life.”
Avasarala laughed at that. “True. But if he’s sending his hired killer to Earth, we—”
“Wait, what?”
“If Holden was—”
“Forget Holden. You called me his hired killer. Is that how you guys think of me? The killer on Holden’s payroll?”
Avasarala frowned. “You’re not?”
“Well, mostly I’m a mechanic. But the idea that the UN has a file on me somewhere that lists me as the Rocinante’s killer? That’s kind of awesome.”
“You say that kind of thing, it doesn’t make me think we’re wrong, you know.”
“So,” Amos said, shrugging with his shoulders like an Earther, his hands still behind his back, “we done here?”
“Mostly,” Avasarala said. “How was everyone when you left? Good?”
“Roci got beat to shit during the Ilus thing. But crew’s good. Alex is trying to reconnect with an ex. Captain and Naomi are still rubbing uglies pretty regular. Same same, mostly.”
“Alex is on Mars?”
“Well, his ex is. I assume he’d head over there, but he was still on Tycho last I saw him.”
“That’s interesting,” Avasarala said. “Not the part where he’s reconnecting with his ex-wife, though. No one ever tries that without seeming like an asshole.”
“Right?”
“Well,” Avasarala said, then looked up at someone offscreen. She smiled and accepted a steaming cup from a disembodied hand, then took a long sip and sighed with pleasure. “Thank you for meeting with me, Mr. Burton.”
“Oh, it was my pleasure.”
“Please keep in mind that my name is pretty closely connected with the Rocinante, Captain Holden, and his crew at this point.”
“So?” Amos said with another shrug.
“So,” Avasarala said, then put her steaming cup down and leaned forward again. “If you’re about to do something I’ll need to cover up later, I’d appreciate a call first.”
“You got it, Chrissie.”
“Honestly. Fucking stop that,” she said with a smile.
The screen went black, and the woman who’d stopped him at the port came in. Amos pointed to the screen with his chin.
“I think she likes me.”
The street level view of New York wasn’t all that different from the Baltimore streets he’d grown up on. Lots of tall buildings, lots of automated street traffic, lots of people stratified into two distinct groups: those who had someplace to be, and those who didn’t. The employed scuttled from public transit to office buildings and back again at shift change. They bought things from street vendors, the simple fact of having currency a mark of status. Those on basic drifted and bartered, living on the excess created by the productive, and adding to it where they could with under-the-table industry too small for the government to notice.
Drifting among them like ghosts, invisible to anyone not from their world, was a third group. The ones who lived in the cracks. Thieves looking for an easy score. Pushers and con artists and prostitutes of every age group, every point on the spectrum of gender and sexual orientation. The kind of people Amos had once been. A corner pusher saw him looking and frowned back, seeing Amos for what he was without recognizing him. It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be in town long enough for it to get to anyone who’d come demanding to know where he fit in their ecosystem.