Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Thirty-Five: Amos

Sex was one of those things where the way it was supposed to work and the way it worked for him didn’t always match up real well. He knew all the stuff about love and affection, and that just seemed like making shit up. He understood making shit up. He also understood how people talked about it, and he could talk about it that way, just to fit in.

In practice, he recognized there was power in being with another living body, and he respected it. The pressure built up over the weeks or months on the burn kind of like hunger or thirst, only slower and it wouldn’t kill you if you ignored it. He didn’t fight against it. For one thing, that was stupid. For another it didn’t help. He just noticed it, kept an eye on it. Acknowledged it was there the same way he would anything powerful and dangerous that was sharing his workspace.

When they got into port someplace big enough to have a licensed brothel, he’d go there. Not because it was safe so much as it was an environment where he knew what all the dangers looked like. Could recognize them and not be surprised. Then he’d take care of what needed to be taken care of, and afterward, it wouldn’t bother him for a while.

Maybe that was different from everyone else, but it worked for him.

The thing was, he’d usually be able to sleep afterward. Really sleep. Deep and dreamless and hard to pull up out of until he was done. And right now, he was mostly just looking at the ceiling. The last girl—the one called Maddie—was curled up next to him, the sheets draped around her legs, her arm under one pillow, snoring a little. One of the good things about getting a room for the whole night is they’d give you a quiet one away from the front. Maddie was someone he’d used and been used by before when the Roci’d been on Tycho, and he liked her as much as he liked anyone that wasn’t in his tribe. That she felt safe sleeping next to him warmed something in his stomach that usually stayed cold.

She had a little gap between her front teeth and skin as pale as anyone he’d ever met. She could blush on command, which was a pretty good trick, and she’d been in the life since she was a kid. Before she’d come to Tycho for the legal trade. His own childhood in the illegal trade meant they had context that made the talk before and after more comfortable for him, and she knew he wouldn’t pull any of that “you’re better than this” soul-saving bullshit. He also wouldn’t start calling her a bitch and being abusive out of shame the way some johns did. He liked shooting the shit with her afterward, and usually the way she snored just a little didn’t keep him from drifting off.

Only that wasn’t what was keeping him awake. He knew what was keeping him awake.

He got out of bed quietly so as not to wake her up. He’d paid her and rented the room for the whole night, and the house wasn’t about to give him a refund for leaving early, so she might as well get the rest herself. He gathered up his clothes and slipped out into the hallway to get dressed. A john on his way out passed by as he was pulling on his jumpsuit, made brief and awkward eye contact, nodded curtly. Amos smiled his amiable smile and made room for the guy to go past before he zipped himself in and headed out toward the docks.

The Roci had spent more time in Tycho than any other port, usually getting put back together after the last whatever went wrong. It wasn’t home—nowhere outside the Roci was home—but it was familiar enough that he could feel the differences. It was in the way people talked to each other in the hallways. The kinds of images that played on the newsfeeds. He’d seen what it was like for a place to change in ways that didn’t change back. Earth was like that. Now Tycho. Kind of like a big, slow wave coming out from where the rocks had hit Earth and spreading through everyplace humans were.

There were people on Tycho who recognized him too. Not like they knew Holden. Holden, he couldn’t walk through a room anymore without people staring at him and pointing and making a fuss. Amos had the sense that was going to be a problem eventually, but it wasn’t one he knew how to fix. He wasn’t even sure what it implied at this point.

Back at the ship, he headed down to the machine shop and his workstation. The Roci told him that Holden was in the galley with Babs, Naomi was catching some bunk time, and Peaches was at work replacing the hatch seals they’d been talking about. He made a note on his work schedule to double-check them when she was done, even though he knew they’d be fine. Peaches turned out to be a pretty good worker. Smart, focused, seemed to really enjoy fixing things, and never bitched about the stresses of shipboard life. Perspective, he figured. Shittiest ship there was still had to be better than the best cell in the pit, if only because you got to pick that you were in it.

He shrugged into his couch, pulled up the technical reports, and spooled through the way he had before. Not that he expected to find anything different. Just to see if there was any reaction when he got to the weird bit. He got to it and looked at the data for a while. The torpedoes Bobbie had fired off. Their trajectories. The error logs. And he had the same reaction. It was bugging him.

He shut the workstation down.

“Hey,” Peaches said, coming up from engineering with an ARL polymer tank slung over one shoulder.

“Hey,” he said. “How’s it going?”

She was still too skinny. The smallest standard jumpsuit still left her swimming in it. They’d had to adjust the code to convince the Roci that anyone flying on her could be so slight. Working made her look healthier, though.

She thumbed open a storage locker, slid the tank into place, and dropped into her couch. “I got the seals replaced, but I don’t like the inner airlock door in the cargo bay. It’s not throwing errors, but the power’s dirty.”

“Dirty dirty? Or inside the error bars but it pisses you off dirty?”

“Second one,” Peaches said, and then grinned. But her grin faded fast. “You all right?”

He smiled. “Why do you ask?”

“Because you’re not all right,” she said.

Amos leaned back, shifted to crack his neck. Part of him wanted to talk to her about the torpedoes, but he couldn’t picture Holden doing it. And this was kind of a Holden thing, so he only shrugged. “Need to talk to the captain about something.”

“Then we’re back to the ‘throw ships at them until they run out of ammunition’ plan,” Bobbie said. Her voice was clear and sharp. Someone who didn’t know her might have thought she was pissed, but Amos was pretty sure that was her having a good time. He hesitated in the corridor outside the galley. Truth was, even if they decided to go after Medina like they were stomping snakes to death, they’d be in port for a couple more days. There’d be time to ask the question later that didn’t mean putting his elbow in the planning. But he also wanted to get some decent sleep, so he went forward anyway.

They were sitting across the table from each other, leaning in like two kids dissecting the same frog. The display between them glowed blue and gold. Holden looked tired, but Amos had seen him looking worse one time and another. Holden was the kind of guy who smoked himself down to the filter if he thought it was the right thing to do.

“We should talk to Pa again,” Holden said, looking up at Amos and nodding. “If we go for the station, we risk losing a lot of people.”

Amos ambled to the food dispensers. They were topped up fresh, so he had a lot of choices. There was a part of him that liked it better when it was just a few.

“It’s called war for a reason, sir,” Bobbie said. Even though she didn’t hit it, the sir had a sting. A reminder that it wasn’t just them anymore. “We know the fire rate. We know the retrain rate. We can do the math. If we can get even a small team onto the surface—”

“Of the alien station that we totally don’t understand but strapped a bunch of artillery to anyway,” Holden said. Bobbie wouldn’t be interrupted.

“—we can take control of them. The lack of protection on the station is the best shot I have.”

Amos keyed in noodle soup. The dispenser hummed and chugged for a second while Holden raised his eyebrows.

“Best shot you have?”

“I’ll lead the team,” Bobbie said.

“No. Look, I’m not getting you into this just because you want a fight.”

“Don’t be insulting. Name one other person you know you’d rather combat-drop onto a hostile station and I’ll bow out.”

Holden opened his mouth to reply, then just froze, gaping like a fish. When he finally closed it, his only reply was a shrug of defeat.

Amos chuckled. Both of the others turned to look at him as the bowl popped out, steaming and smelling like salt and reconstituted onion. “Anyone who can shut the cap’n up like that wins the ass-kicking contest every time,” he said, taking a spoon. “I’m not the boss of anything, but seems to me like having Babs here and not putting her in the front line? You use a welding rig to weld things. You use a gun to shoot things. You use a Bobbie Draper to fuck a bunch of bad guys permanently up.”

“Right tool for the job,” Bobbie said, and it sounded like thank you.

“You’re not tools,” Holden said. Then sighed. “But you’re not wrong. Okay. Just let me consult with Pa and Avasarala and the OPA Council, or whatever we’re calling it. In case someone has a better idea.”

Amos took a spoonful of noodle, sucked it up, and smiled while he chewed.

“All right,” Bobbie said. “But guideline? A decent idea now is way better than a brilliant plan when it’s too late.”

“I hear you,” Holden said.

“All right,” Bobbie said. “What about this Duarte asshole? What’s Avasarala’s guess on his reaction?”

“You know,” Amos said around his noodles, swallowed, “I hate to bust in, but you think I could borrow the cap’n for a few minutes?”

“Problem?” Holden asked at the same moment Bobbie said, “Sure.”

“Just need to check something,” Amos said, smiling.

Holden turned to Bobbie. “You should get some rest. I’ll fire off our notes. If we get enough sleep and eat breakfast after, we might even get some replies back.”

“Fair enough,” Bobbie said. “You’re going to sleep too, right?”

“Like the dead,” Holden said. “Just got to finish the stuff first.”

Bobbie rose up and headed out, tapping Amos’ shoulder with her knuckles as she passed. A silent Thanks for having my back. He liked her, but that’s not why he’d agreed with her. When you got a nail to drive, use the fucking hammer. Just made sense.

Amos sat down in her vacated spot, but sideways, with his back against the wall and one leg running along the bench. His hand terminal chimed. Some update that Peaches had been running sending its system clear message to the team. As he watched, the Roci updated him: Alex was back on board. Amos shut the alerts off.

Holden looked like shit. Not just tired, exactly. His skin got waxy and his eyes sort of sank back in the sockets when that happened. Not exhaustion, then. Something else. He looked like a kid who just realized he’d jumped in the deep end of the pool and was trying to figure out whether he should embarrass himself by shouting for help or drown with a little dignity.

“You doing all right?” Holden asked before Amos had quite gathered his thoughts.

“Me? Sure, Cap’n. Last man standing. That’s me. What about you?”

Holden gestured, hands out to the walls and bulkheads, the dock and station beyond it. The universe. “Fine?”

“Yeah, so. Peaches and I were doing the post-fight spit and polish.”

“Yeah?”

“I went over the battle data. You know, usual thing. Make sure the Roci was doing all the stuff we expected her to do. Didn’t need anything pinched or crimped or whatever. And, you know, part of that’s looking at the armament performance.”

Holden’s jaw shifted just a little. It wasn’t much. Probably wouldn’t even have lost him a hand of poker, except Amos had known when to look for it. So that was something to remember. He took another spoonful of his soup.

“Those torpedoes that Bobbie fired off at the end,” he said. “One of ’em scored a direct hit.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Okay.”

“I didn’t check.”

“It hit,” Amos said. “But it didn’t go off. A dud is a serious problem. So I started looking at why it failed.”

“I disarmed them,” Holden said.

Amos put down his bowl, abandoned his spoon in it. The display Holden and Bobbie had been looking over shifted, trying to guess what Holden wanted to be shown.

“But that was the righteous thing to do,” Amos said. He didn’t make it a question, exactly. Just a statement that Holden could agree with or not. He didn’t want it to sound like anything was riding on it. Holden ran his hands through his hair. He looked like he was seeing something that wasn’t in the room. Amos didn’t know what it was.

“He showed me her kid,” Holden said. “Marco? He showed me Naomi’s son. Showed me that he was on the ship right then. Right there. And … I don’t know. He looks like her. Not like her like her, but family resemblance. In the moment, I couldn’t take that away from her. I couldn’t kill him.”

“I get that. She’s one of us. We take care of us,” Amos said. “I’m only asking because those are the bad guys we’re planning to go up against again. If we’re not willing to win the fight, I’m not sure what we’re doing in the cage.”

Holden nodded, swallowed. The display gave up and shut down, leaving the galley just a little bit darker. “That was before we got here.”

“Yeah,” Amos said carefully. “Who your tribe is got kind of weird all of a sudden. If you’re the new Fred Johnson, that’s going to change what it means when you decide not to blow people up.”

“It is,” Holden said. The distress in his expression was like the growl of a power coupler starting to fail. “I don’t know that I’d do it differently if we were back there, in that same moment. I don’t regret what I did. But I know next time can’t be like that.”

“Naomi should probably be good with that too.”

“I was planning to talk to her about it,” Holden said. “I may have been putting it off.”

“So I gotta ask this,” Amos said.

“Shoot.”

“Are you the right guy for this job?”

“No,” Holden said. “But I’m the guy who got it. So I’m going to do it.”

Amos waited for a few moments, seeing how that answer sat with him.

“Okay,” he said, and stood up. The soup had gotten cold enough to have a little film forming on the top. He dropped it and the spoon into the recycler. “Glad we got that cleared up. Anything me and Peaches need to put on the schedule? Feeling like we should maybe give Bobbie’s stuff the once-over.”

“Pretty sure she’s already done that a few hundred times,” Holden said, forcing a smile.

“Probably true,” Amos said. “Well, all right, then.”

He started out the door. Holden’s voice stopped him. “Thank you.”

He looked back. Holden looked like he was hunched, protecting something. Or like someone had kicked him in the chest. Funny how everyone else’s image of the guy got bigger and it made the real one seem small. Like there was only so much food to share between the two of them. “Sure,” he said, not certain what he was being thanked for, but pretty solid this was a good answer. “And hey. If you want, I can change the permissions so that you can’t disarm the torpedoes next time. If taking it out of your hands would help.”

“No,” Holden said. “My hands are fine.”

“Cool, then.” He headed out.

In the machine shop, Peaches was putting away her tools and running the closing sequences for her diagnostics. “Tested the new seals,” she said.

“They good?”

“Within tolerance,” she said, which was as close as she was probably ever going to get to saying they were good. “I’ll check them again tomorrow when the polymerization’s totally done.”

“Okay.”

The system chirped. She checked the readout, okayed it, and closed the display. “You heading out to the station?”

“Nope,” Amos said. Now that he bothered to notice, his body was feeling heavy and slow. Like coming out of a hot bath he’d stayed in a little too long. He wondered if Maddie was awake yet. If he got there quick enough, maybe he could finish up his night there. Except no. She’d be going on shift again about the time he was nodding off, and then it wouldn’t be clear if he’d come back to screw again, and that’d just be awkward. Unless … He considered intellectually whether he wanted to screw again, then shook his head. “Nah, I’m just coming in. Going to grab some sack time now.”

Peaches cocked her head. “You came back early?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “But I can now.”