“Nice. Thanks for not saying it.”
“Thanks for still being my friend.”
It felt like goodbye, so Amos gave Erich one last smile, and left the room. Tatu was waiting in the corridor with a box full of tequila bottles. The guards must have been monitoring the whole thing.
“Need help on your way out?” the guard asked.
“Naw,” Amos replied and hoisted the box over one shoulder. “I’m good at leaving.”
Amos let his hand terminal take him to the nearest flophouse and got a room. He dumped his booze and bag on the bed and then hit the streets. A short walk took him to a food cart where he bought what the sign optimistically called a Belgian sausage. Unless the Belgians were famous for their flavored bean curd products, the optimism seemed misplaced. Not that it mattered. Amos realized that while he knew the orbital period of every Jovian moon by heart, he had no idea where B
elgium was. He didn’t think it was a North American territory, but that was about the best he could do. He was hardly in a position to criticize assertions about their cuisine.
He walked toward the old rotting docks he played on as a child, not for any reason more profound than needing a destination and knowing which direction the water was. He finished the last of his sausage and then, not seeing a convenient recycling bin, he chewed up and swallowed the wrapper too. It was made of spun corn starch and tasted like stale breakfast cereal.
A small knot of teens passed him, then paused and turned to follow. They were in that awkward age between being a victim on legs and capable of real adult crimes. The right age for petty theft and running for the dealers mixed with the occasional mugging when opportunity presented itself without too much risk. Amos ignored them and climbed down onto the rusting steel of an old bayfront jetty.
The teens hung back, arguing in quiet but tense voices. Probably deciding if the reward of a solitary mark with an outsider’s credit balance – it being an article of faith that anyone from outside the docks of Baltimore had more money than anyone in them – was worth the risk of taking on a man of his size. He knew the calculus of that equation well. He’d been in on that very argument himself, once upon a time. He continued to ignore them and listened instead to the gentle lap of the water against the pilings of his jetty.
In the distance, the sky lit up with a line of fire like a lightning bolt drawn with a ruler. A sonic boom rolled across the bay a few moments later, and Amos had a sudden and intense memory of sitting on those very docks with Erich, watching the rail-gun supply lifts fired into orbit, and discussing the possibility of leaving the planet.
To everyone outside the gravity well, Amos was from Earth. But that wasn’t true. Not in any way that mattered. Amos was from Baltimore. What he knew about the planet outside of a few dozen blocks of the poor district would fit on a napkin. The first steps he’d ever taken outside the city were when he’d climbed off a high-speed rail line in Bogotá and onto the shuttle that had flown him to Luna.
He heard quiet footsteps on the jetty behind him. The discussion was over. The yeas outweighing the nays. Amos turned around and faced the approaching teens. A few of them held improvised clubs. One had a knife. “Not worth it,” he said. He didn’t flex or raise his fists. He just shook his head. “Wait for the next one.” There was a tense moment as they stared at him and he stared back. Then, moving as though they’d reached some sort of telepathic consensus, they drifted away in a group.
Erich was wrong about him being the same. The man he’d once been wasn’t a collection of personality traits. He was the things he knew, the desires of his heart, the skills he had. The person he’d been before he left knew where the good basement booze was brewed. Which dealers had a consistent supply of quality black market marijuana and tobacco. The brothels that serviced the locals, and the ones that were there only to rob thrill-seeking poverty tourists. That person knew where to rent a gun for cheap, and that the price tripled if you used it. Knew it was cheaper to rent time in a machine shop and make your own. Like the shotgun he’d used the first time he killed a man.
But the person he was now knew how to keep a fusion reactor running. How to tune the magnetic coils to impart maximum energy to ionized exhaust particles, and how to fix a hull breach. That guy didn’t care about these streets or the pleasures and risks they offered. Baltimore could look exactly the same, and be as foreign to him as the mythical land of Belgium.
And in that moment, he knew it was his last time on Earth. He was never coming back.
He woke up in his rented flop the next morning with half a bottle of tequila on his nightstand and the first hangover he’d had in years. For a moment he thought he’d been so drunk he wet the bed, but realized that in the stifling heat of the room he’d sweated out about a liter. His throat felt dry and his tongue swollen.
He rinsed off the night’s sweat and drank steaming-hot water out of the shower, tilting his head back to let it fill his mouth. After decades of filtered and sterilized ship and space station water, he marveled at all the flavors in it. He hoped not too many of them were microbes or heavy metals.
He pulled the remaining tequila bottles out of their box and stuffed them into his duffel bag, wrapping his clothes around them to protect them. Then he picked up his hand terminal and started looking for a hop back to Luna, then a connecting long flight to Tycho. He’d said goodbye to Lydia, or the pieces of her that she’d left behind anyway. He’d said a goodbye of sorts to Erich. There was no one left on the entire planet he gave half a shit about.
Well, no. That wasn’t true. Maybe half.
He called the number Avasarala had used, and a sculpted young man with a perfect haircut, pale skin, and gigantic teeth appeared. He looked like an expensive store mannequin. “Secretary Avasarala’s office.”
“Gimme Chrissie, kid, and make it snappy.”
The mannequin was stunned into silence for two long breaths. “I’m sorry, but the secretary can’t —”
“Kid,” Amos said with a smirk, “I just called on her private line, right? My name is Amos Burton.” A lie, but one he’d told often enough it had become a sort of truth. “I work for James Holden. I bet if you don’t tell her I’m on the line right now that you’re applying for basic by the end of the day.”
“One moment please,” the mannequin said and then the screen displayed the blue-and-white logo of the UN.
“Burton,” Chrisjen Avasarala said, appearing on the screen less than thirty seconds later. “Why the fuck are you still on my planet?”
“Getting ready to leave, chief, but figured I got one more person to check in on before I go.”
“Was it me? Because I don’t like you enough to consider that charming. I have a flight to Luna waiting on the pad for me so I can go do fucking party arrangements before the Martian prime minister arrives.”
“They make you do that?”
“I do everything, and every second I talk to you costs ten thousand dollars.”