Nemesis Games

Chapter Twenty-four: Amos

“Wouldn’t the density figure in?” Clarissa asked. Whatever crap they’d been feeding into her bloodstream, it had run out. She was starting to look a little better. He could still see the veins under her parchment-thin skin, but she was getting some color back in her cheeks.

“Sure, but that’s all energy you’d put in getting the rocks up to speed in the first place. You drop a slug of tungsten out of a ship or a fucking feather pillow, you’ve still got to get the ship going whatever speed you’re aiming for. All that price got paid at the front, energetically speaking.”

“But a pillow would have burned up before it hit ground.”

“Okay, now that’s a fair point.”

On the screen, the newsfeed showed the strikes again and again, looting footage from as many different sources as they could find—terminals, security cameras, high-orbit mapping satellites. The bolt of ionized air glowed like the trail of a rail gun, and North Africa bloomed a massive rose of fire, again and again. Another beam-like trail in the air, and the Atlantic Ocean went from a vast expanse of slate-blue water to an expanding circle of eerie green and then spewed white and black to the sky. It was like the reporters thought if they all just kept looking at it, it would start making sense.

Millions of people were dead, and millions more would be in the next few hours as the tsunamis and flooding hit. Billions would go in the next few weeks and months. The Earth had become a different planet since he’d gone underground. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could make sense of by staring at it, but he couldn’t look away either. All he could do was talk to Peaches about trivia and wait to see what came next.

The man doing the voice-over had a gentle European accent and a sense of calm that probably meant he’d sucked down a lot of pills. Or it might have been tweaked and enhanced by the sound techs. “The weapons remained undetected by radar until they entered the Terran atmosphere, less than a second before impact.”

The image shifted to an apocalyptic satellite image: five frames in a loop showing the Atlantic impact and the raw shock wave rolling out from it across the ocean. The scale was massive.

“You see,” Amos said, pointing a thumb at the screen, “that’s how you know they were using radar-absorbing coating on the rocks. Burned off and stopped working after they hit atmo, right? Anyway, you figure it went from the ionosphere to sea level in about half a second, so that’s about two hundred klicks per. I’m making this up here, but the kind of bang they’re talking about, you could do it with a block of tungsten carbide maybe three and a half, four meters to a side. That ain’t big.”

“You can figure all that in your head?”

Amos shrugged. “My job has been playing with magnetically contained fusion reactions for a lot of years now. It’s the same kind of math, more or less. You get a feel for it.”

“I can see that,” she said. And then, “You think we’re going to die?”

“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.

Konecheck looked up from behind strands of long iron-gray hair and gave a one-millimeter nod. Amos felt a wave of something a lot like comfort pass through him—a looseness across his shoulders, a warmth in his gut. This was going to get ugly before it was over, but it was a scale of violence he understood.

“New plan,” the escort said. “We’re evacuating these prisoners and the civilian to the surface.”

The guard who’d helped pull the door open—Suliman? Sullivan? Something like that—was a thick-necked bull of a man with a single black eyebrow running across his forehead. Morris, the one with the gun, was thinner, older, with bad teeth and missing the last knuckle on his left pinky finger.

“Sure you don’t want to put the prisoners in a closet before we go?” Morris asked. “I’d feel a lot better getting out of here if we didn’t have these fucking psychos at our back.”

“Peaches comes with me,” Amos said with a loose shrug. “That’s just a thing.”

“Might need some help clearing debris,” Konecheck said. He’d been the one that laughed before. The words, innocuous as they were, held just as much threat but the others didn’t seem to hear it. Amos wondered why that was.

“Elevators are disabled, so we’ll get to the stairs,” the escort said. “That’ll get us out of here. Once we’re up top, we can secure the prisoners.”

“What about fallout?” the thick guard—Amos was almost sure the name was Sullivan—said.

“That’s nukes, asshole,” Konecheck growled.

“Rona? Shouldn’t you query the captain before we do this?” Morris asked. His eyes hadn’t shifted off Konecheck’s back. Competent, Amos thought, and filed the information away for later.

“Captain’s not answering,” the escort, Rona, said. Her voice was tight, too controlled to let the panic out. From the way the other two went quiet, Amos guessed they hadn’t known that. “Let’s head for the stairs. Morris, you take lead, then the prisoners, then me and Sully. You’ll need to follow behind, sir.”

“I’ll walk with them,” Amos said.

“Don’t trust me with your girlfriend?” Konecheck growled.

Amos grinned. “Nope.”

“Let’s get moving,” Rona said. “Before there’s a fucking aftershock.”

Fear was an interesting thing. Amos could see it in all the guards without quite being able to point to what it was. The way Morris kept looking over his shoulder, maybe. Or the way Rona and Sullivan walked exactly in step behind them, like they were trying to agree with each other just by the length of their stride. Peaches seemed focused and empty, but that was kind of just her. Konecheck, on Amos’ left, was jutting out his beard and making a big show of what a badass he was, which would have been funnier if he didn’t have a nervous system redesigned for violence. Guys like that were either scared all the time anyway or so broken they didn’t count. Amos wondered whether he was scared. He didn’t know how he’d tell. He also wondered if there were going to be more rocks falling, but it didn’t seem like the kind of thing he had any say over.

All around them, the prison was in shambles. Cracks ran along the walls like the floor had been shoved out a couple centimeters and pushed back in place. There was a sound of water running through pipes from somewhere. The emergency lights were on, but here and there a few had failed, leaving pools of darkness. Even if the elevators were running, he wouldn’t have wanted to take them. One of the things living on a ship for years had done was give him a sense for how the whole vessel was running based on a few local indicators. And if the Pit had been above orbit, he’d have been sleeping in an environment suit, just so as not to be unpleasantly surprised by waking up airless.

“Stop fucking whistling,” Konecheck said.

“Was I whistling?” Amos asked.

“You were,” Clarissa said, still cradling her swollen hand.

“Huh,” Amos said, and started whistling again, consciously this time.

“I said stop it,” Konecheck growled.

“Yeah,” Amos agreed with a friendly nod. “You did say that.”

“Prisoners will maintain silence,” Rona snapped behind them. “And the civilian will kindly shut the fuck up too.”

Amos considered Konecheck out of the corner of his eyes. Still too early to be sure, but maybe sixty-forty that one of them was going to have to kill the other. Not now, but before it was over. He could hope for the forty.

A shudder passed through the floor like a badly tuned thruster firing. Concrete dust sifted down from the lights like amber snow. Morris said something obscene.

“Aftershock,” Rona said. “Just an aftershock.”

“Might be,” Clarissa said. “Might be the shock wave from Africa. I don’t remember how fast that kind of force travels through the mantle.”

“Not fucking North Africa,” Konecheck said. “No way we’d feel that.”

“When the Galveston plant went up, the shock wave was still measurable on its third time around the planet,” Clarissa said.

“Oh, the bitch is a history professor now?”

“The prisoners will maintain silence!” Rona shouted. She was sounding a lot more agitated. Around a corner, a light glowed green, the icon of a thick-legged stick man walking up steps. He wondered how many other people were on this level, still in lockdown, waiting on rescue. How many were already trudging up the stairs on their way out. The guards were playing it pretty close to the vest, but he’d have bet good money that there were a whole lot of people making their own decisions right now.

Morris stopped at the door to the stairway. The readout set into the wall beside it showed a red image of a closed lock until he swiped his hand terminal across it and keyed something into the display that opened. The lock switched to green, and the door slid open. Of course a prison would put the locks on the emergency power circuit, Amos thought. He wondered what else was locked.

A landslide of mud, water, rocks, concrete, and rebar spilled into the corridor. Morris yelped and jumped back, then fell to the ground, grabbing one shin. His pants were ripped, and Amos caught a glimpse of a dark wetness between the man’s fingers. Blood.

“Morris!” Rona said. “Report!”

“I’m gonna need stitches.”

“I’m moving ahead to look,” Amos said, leaving So don’t shoot me as a given. Beyond the door, the stairway was gone. Rubble and dirt were so thick, he couldn’t even tell if the stairs still existed under them. He couldn’t tell where the water was coming from, but it smelled clean. Which meant it was probably the drinking water. Another tremble shook a few stones and a head-sized ball of concrete loose.

Sullivan was muttering a stream of obscenities under his breath that sounded less like anger and more like the first signs of panic. Amos shook his head.

“No one’s getting out that way,” he said. “Not without a few months and a digging mech. We’re gonna have to find another way up.”

“There isn’t a goddamn other way up,” Rona said. “That’s the evacuation route. That right there.”

“Peaches?”

Clarissa’s voice was calm but still a little slurred. “Hard call, Amos. It’s a prison for high-risk criminals. They don’t put a lot of easy egress routes in it.”

“Fair enough,” Amos said. “But say you had to think of something clever?”

“The guards have overrides. If we can get access to the elevator shaft and the car’s not blocking it, we might be able to climb up.”

“Ten stories at one g on a broken hand?” He didn’t mention the possible concussion that was probably screwing with her sense of balance.

“Didn’t say it’d be fun.”

“The access ladders are all locked down,” the escort said. “They put doors across them so no one can get up without permission.”

Konecheck gave a wide, mirthless laugh, and Sullivan trained another of the strange not-quite-guns on him.

“Peaches?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we could find something else.”

Amos stretched his neck, the vertebrae popping like firecrackers. “This,” he said, “is getting to be a long fucking day.”