“People call me Amos now.”
Erich laughed. “Guess I knew that, right?”
“Guess you did,” Amos said. Erich looked good. Healthy in a way he’d never looked as a kid. He even had a middle-aged man’s spare tire around the gut. He still had the small, shriveled left arm. And from the way he was standing, he looked like he’d still walk with a limp. But now, surrounded by his success and his well-fed chubbiness, they looked like trophies of a past life instead of disabilities in the current one.
“So,” Erich said, “kind of wondering what you’re doing in town.”
“He beat up Troy,” one of the guards said. “And Laci says he manhandled her some too.”
“Did he kill anyone?” Erich asked. When neither guard answered, he said, “Then he’s still being polite.”
“That’s right,” Amos agreed with an amiable nod. “Not here to mess up your shit, just here to chat.”
“So,” Erich said, sitting back down on his rubber ball chair, “let’s chat.”
Chapter Eleven: Alex
Three days after he’d seen Talissa—for what he had to think now was the last time—and gone afterward to eat with Bobbie Draper, Alex knew it was time to go home. He’d had dinners with family and a couple old friends; he’d seen the ways his old hometown had changed and the ways it hadn’t. And he’d determined once again that sometimes a broken thing couldn’t be fixed. That was the closest he was going to get to having it be okay.
But before he left, there was one more person he was going to disappoint.
The express tube to Londres Nova hummed to itself, the advertisements above the seats promising to make the lives of the riders better in a hundred different ways: technical certifications, improved undergarments, tooth whitening. The facial-recognition software didn’t seem to know what to make of him. None of the ads spoke to him. The closest was a thin lawyer in an olive-green suit offering to help people find passages to the new systems beyond the Ring. Start a new life in the off-world colonies! We can help!
Across from him, a boy of about seventeen was staring quietly into space, his eyes half-open at the edge of boredom and sleep. When Alex had been about the boy’s age, he’d been deciding whether to go into the Navy or apply for upper university. He’d been dating Kerry Trautwine even though Mr. Trautwine was a religious zealot who hated him for not belonging to the right sect. He’d spent his nights playing battle simulations with Amal Shah and Korol Nadkarni.
This boy across from him was traveling the same corridors that Alex had, eating at some of the same restaurants, thinking about sex in likely more or less the same terms, but he also lived in a different universe. Alex tried to imagine what it would have been like to include travel to an alien planet in among his options at seventeen. Would he have still enlisted? Would he have met Talissa?
A gentle, mechanical voice announced their arrival at the Aterpol terminal. The boy’s eyes opened, roused back to full consciousness, and he shot a distrustful look at Alex. The deceleration pushed Alex’s back, feeling almost like a long attitude burn. Almost but not quite.
Aterpol was the downtown of Londres Nova, the only station with connections to all of the neighborhoods that made up the city. The vaulted ceilings curved over the common areas, the access doors along the walls double-sealed to keep air from leaking into the evacuated tubes. The terminal itself opened into a wide public park with real trees rising from the soil into the artificial twilight. Benches made to look like wood and iron stood scattered along the winding paths, and a pond filled the air with the smells of algae and moisture. The reassuring breeze-murmur of the air recyclers passed under everything like a constant and eternal prayer. Windows rose up along the walls, light streaming out of them or not. The rooms that looked out over Alex as he walked were businesses and apartments, restaurants and maintenance halls.
Alex crossed the park to the farther gates, where the local tubes ran to the other neighborhoods. Innis Shallow, where Bobbie lived, didn’t have the best reputation. The worst that Mars had to offer wasn’t as bad as an iffy sector on Ceres Station, though, and regardless anyone who took on Bobbie was either suicidal or had an army behind them.
At the Innis Shallow station, Alex shrugged into his jacket and went on foot. There were carts for rent and a girl of no more than fourteen with a scavenged rickshaw calling on the corner. It was a short walk, though, and Alex was dreading the conversation at the end of it.
He’d walked the same path three days before, still smarting from his abortive meeting with Tali, following his hand terminal’s directions to Bobbie’s rooms. He hadn’t seen the former marine since Luna the night that the Ring had lifted itself off the ruins of Venus and flown out toward the far edge of the system, and he’d been looking forward to anything that would distract him from the day he’d been having until then.
Bobbie was living in a very pleasant side corridor with its own greenway in the center and lights that had been fashioned to look like wrought-iron lamps from someone’s imagined 1800s London. He’d only had to stand at her door for a few seconds before it opened.
Bobbie Draper was a big woman, and while years of civilian life had lost her a little of her muscle definition, she radiated competence and strength the way a fire did heat. Every time he saw her, he remembered a story from ancient history about the native Samoans armed with rocks and spears driving the gun-toting Spanish conquistadors into the sea. Bobbie was a woman who made that shit seem plausible.
“Alex! Come in. I’m sorry the place is a mess.”
“Ain’t worse than my cabin at the end of a long run.”
The main room was wider than the ops deck back on the Roci, and done in shades of terra-cotta and gray that shouldn’t have worked together, but did. The dining table didn’t seat more than four, and there were only two chairs beside it. Through an archway across from the front door, a wall monitor was set to a slowly shifting spray of colors, like Monet’s water lilies animated. Where most places would have had a couch, a resistance-training machine dominated the space, a rack of chrome free weights beside it. A spiral staircase led up and down in the den’s corner, bamboo laminate steps glowing warmly in the light.
“Fancy digs,” Alex had said.
Bobbie’s glance at her own rooms seemed almost apologetic. “It’s more than I need. A lot more than I need. But I thought I’d like the space. Room to stretch out.”
“You thought you would?”
She shrugged. “It’s more than I need.”
She put on a brown leather jacket that looked professional and minimized the breadth of her shoulders, then led him to a fish shack with shredded trout in black sauce that had been some of the best he’d ever had. The beer was a local brew, served cold. Over the course of two hours, the sting of Talissa’s voice and his feeling of self-loathing lost their edges, if they didn’t quite vanish. Bobbie told stories about working veterans’ outreach. A woman who’d come in to get psychiatric help for her son who wouldn’t stop playing console games since he’d finished his deployment. Bobbie had made contact with the boy’s first drill sergeant, and now the kid had a job at the shipyards. Or the time a man came in claiming that the sex toy lodged in his colon was service related. When Bobbie laughed, Alex laughed with her.
Slowly, he’d started taking his turn too. What it had been like on the far side of the Ring. Watching Ilus or New Terra or whatever the hell they wound up calling it as it went through its paroxysms. What it had been like shipping back with a prisoner, which led into the first time they’d shipped a prisoner—Clarissa Mao, daughter of Jules-Pierre and sister to the protomolecule’s patient zero, that one had been—and how Holden and Amos and Naomi were all doing these days.