“Yup.”
“Of this?”
“Maybe.”
On the screen, the newsfeed replayed a five-second clip from a sailing boat. The flash of perfectly straight lightning, the weird deforming lens of the pressure wave bending the air and light, and the image shattered. Whoever had been in the ship, they’d died before they knew what they were looking at. Probably the most common last words that day were going to be Huh, that’s weird. That or Oh shit. Amos was aware in a distant way that his gut hurt, like he’d eaten a little too much food. Probably fear or shock or something. Clarissa made a small sound in the back of her throat. Amos looked over at her.
“I wish I’d seen my father again.”
“Yeah?”
She was silent for a moment. Then, “If he’d done it? If he’d figured out how to control the protomolecule? Everything would have been different. This wouldn’t be happening.”
“Something else would be,” Amos said. “And if you’d ever seen that thing up close, you wouldn’t think it was better.”
“Do you think Captain Holden would ever—”
The floor rose up and punched Amos in the legs. By instinct, he tried to roll, but the attack was too wide. There was no way to get around it. The screen shattered; the lights failed. Something loud happened. For a few seconds, he was rattled around the room like dice in a box, not knowing what was hitting him. Everything went black.
An endless moment later, the amber emergency light flickered on. Clarissa’s bed was on its side, the girl poured out of it to the floor. A pool of clear liquid widened around the medical expert system, filling the air with a pungent smell like coolant and alcohol. The thick wire-and-bulletproof-glass window had shattered in its frame and was now opaque as snow. A network of cracks laced the wall. From the corner, Clarissa’s half-panicked laughter bubbled up, and Amos felt his own feral smile rise up to meet it. An alarm was sounding, the wail rising and stuttering and rising again. He didn’t know if it was supposed to sound like that or if the shock wave had broken it.
“You all in one piece there, Peaches?”
“Not sure. My hand really hurts. May have broken something.”
He got to his feet. He hurt everywhere. But long familiarity with pain told him nothing was seriously damaged, so he shoved the hurt to one side and ignored it. Either the ground was still shaking a little or he was. “Well, if you did, that’ll suck.” The door to the hall was closed, but it looked wrong. Like the frame had warped. He wondered if it would ever open again.
“We’re ten stories underground,” Clarissa said.
“Yeah.”
“If it was like this for us, how bad is it up top?”
“Don’t know,” Amos said. “Let’s go see.”
She sat up. Her left hand was already swollen to about twice the size of the right one, so something in it was busted. In her prison gown, she looked like a ghost. Something already dead that hadn’t stopped moving yet. Which, he figured, might be accurate.
“We’re on lockdown,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
“Thing is, for us to be in lockdown, this has to be a prison. For this to be a prison, there has to be, you know, a civilization out there. I think this just turned into a big hole in the ground with a bunch of dangerous people in it. We should leave.”
He kicked the door. It was like punching a bulkhead with a bare fist. He moved over and tried the shattered window. It was only a little bit better. He tried three more times before a voice shouting from outside interrupted him. “Stop that immediately! We’re in lockdown!”
“Someone doesn’t know this isn’t a prison anymore,” Clarissa said. She sounded a little drunk. Might be a concussion to go with her broken hand.
“In here!” Amos shouted. “Hey! We’re stuck in here!”
“We are in lockdown, sir. You have to stay where you are until—”
“The wall’s cracked,” Amos shouted back. “It’s gonna collapse.” It might even have been true.
There was a long moment of quiet, and then a click from the doorway. The door scraped open a couple centimeters and jammed. The escort looked in. Dim emergency lighting from down the hall turned her into a grayscale outline. Even so, he could see the fear in her expression. There were other people behind her, but he couldn’t make them out.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, “but this facility is—”
Amos put his shoulder against the door, not pushing out, but not letting her close it again either.
“In lockdown. I got that,” he said. “Here’s the thing, though. We need to evacuate.”
“You can’t, sir, this is—”
“Not just us,” Amos said. “You too. You need to get out of here too. Unless you’re really looking to die at work, which I would find disappointing.”
The escort licked her lips. Her gaze cut to the right. He tried to think what would convince her the rest of the way, but the best he came up with was punching her in the jaw and hoping he could push his way out before anyone shot him. He was cocking back his arm when Clarissa put a hand on his shoulder.
“You’ve got people on the top, don’t you?” she said. “Friends? Family?”
The escort’s gaze lost focus, seeing something else. Someone else. Probably someone dead but not cool yet. “I can’t… I can’t think about that right now.”
“Penal regulations say that you have the responsibility to maintain the safety and health of prisoners in your custody,” Clarissa said. “You won’t get in trouble for leading an evacuation. You’ll be a hero.”
The escort was breathing heavily, like she was doing some kind of hard physical labor. Amos had seen people do that kind of thing when they were upset about something, but he didn’t really understand it. Clarissa moved him gently aside and leaned in toward the escort.
“You can’t be part of a relief effort up there if you’re buried alive down here,” the girl said, softly. Like she was apologizing for something. “There might be aftershocks. The walls might collapse. There’s no dishonor in evacuating.”
The escort swallowed.
Clarissa leaned in, almost whispering. “There’s a civilian in here.”
The escort said something under her breath that Amos didn’t quite catch, then turned to talk over her shoulder. “Help me get this goddamned door open, Sullivan. The structure’s compromised, and we’ve got a fucking civilian in here that we need to get to safety. Morris, if that bastard tries anything, take him down hard. You understand, asshole? One wrong move, and we’ll end you.”
Someone in the corridor laughed, and it sounded like a threat. Amos and Clarissa backed up. Two new hands took hold of the door and started hauling it back open.
“Keep the civilian safe? That’s what got to her?” Amos asked.
Clarissa shrugged. “It was the excuse she needed. Though you are a precious flower.”
“Well, sure. Just not used to anybody appreciating it.”
The door opened with a shriek, swinging into the corridor only halfway before it stuck fast. Probably permanently. In the hallway, the damage was clearer. A crack ran down the center, three or four centimeters lower on one side than the other. The air was thicker than it had been coming in; Amos felt the reflexive urge to check the air recyclers. Maybe that wasn’t even wrong. Being thirty-odd meters underground was a lot like being in vacuum. If things were busted enough, atmosphere was going to be a problem.
The other prisoner—Konecheck—knelt on the ground, a second guard—Morris—standing three paces behind him with a weapon pointed at the man’s back. If it was a gun, it wasn’t a design Amos recognized. The prisoner’s face was swollen all down the left side like he’d lost a boxing match with a very slow ref. The escort, two other guards, Peaches, and this fella.