“Know what?” Amos said.
It was Clarissa that answered. “If that was the last one. Or if the hits are going to keep on coming.”
In the silence that came afterward, they weren’t guard, prisoner, and civilian. They were just three people in a room.
The moment passed.
“I’ll be back with an update as soon as I have one, sir.”
Amos’ brain ran through all the scenarios that came easy and didn’t see many options. “Hey, wait. I know it ain’t for pleasure viewing or nothing, but that screen over there catch newsfeeds?”
“Prisoners only get access in the common area.”
“Sure,” Amos said. “But I’m not a prisoner, right?”
The woman looked down, then shrugged. She took out her hand terminal, tapped in a few lines of text, and the empty gray screen flickered to life. A pale man with broad, soft lips was in the middle of his report.
“— undetected by the radar arrays, we are getting reports that there was a temperature anomaly that may have been related to the attack.”
The guard nodded to him and closed the door. He couldn’t hear it lock, but he was pretty sure it had. He sat back in his chair and propped his heels on the side of the hospital bed. Clarissa sat forward, her bone-thin hands knotted together. The feed switched over to a white-haired man talking earnestly about the importance of not jumping to conclusions.
“Do you know where the first one hit?” Clarissa asked. “Do you remember anything from the news?”
“I wasn’t paying attention. I think they said Krakatoa? Is that a place?”
Clarissa closed her eyes. If anything, she went a little paler. “Not exactly. It’s a volcano that blew itself up a long, long time ago. Sent ash eighty kilometers up. Shock waves went around the world seven times.”
“But it’s not North Africa?”
“No,” she said. “I can’t believe they really did it. They’re dropping rocks. I mean, who would even do that? You can’t… you can’t replace Earth.”
“Maybe you kind of can now,” Amos said. “Lot of planets out there now weren’t around before.”
“I can’t believe someone would do this.”
“Yeah, but they did.”
Clarissa swallowed. There had to be stairs around here. They’d be locked up so that prisoners couldn’t get to them, but Amos figured there’d have to be stairs. He went to the window to the hall and pressed his head against it. He couldn’t see anything down the hall either way. Kicking the glass out seemed unlikely too. Not that he was looking to try. Just thinking.
On the screen, a mushroom cloud rose over a vast and empty sea. Then, as a woman’s voice calmly talked about megatonnage and destructive capacity, a map was displayed with one bright red dot on North Africa, another in the ocean.
Clarissa hissed.
“Yeah?” Amos said.
“If the spacing’s even,” Clarissa said, “if there’s another one, it’s going to be close.”
“Okay,” Amos said. “Can’t do anything about that, though.”
The hinges were on the other side of the door too, because of course they were. It was a fucking prison. He clicked his tongue against his teeth. Maybe they’d take it off lockdown and send him on his way. Might happen. If it didn’t, though… Well, this was going to be a stupid way to die.
“What’re you thinking?” she asked.
“Well, Peaches. I’m thinking that I stayed on this mudball a day too long.”
Chapter Twenty-three: Holden
Holden sat back, light-headed, his eyes still on the screen. The immensity of the news made Fred’s office seem fresh and unfamiliar: the desk with the fine black lines of wear at the corner; the captain’s safe set into the wall like a little privacy window; the industrial carpeting. It was like he was seeing Fred, leaning forward on his elbows, grief in his eyes, for the first time. Less than an hour earlier, reports had come through with red frames around the feed windows to show how serious everything was. The previous headlines – a meteor or possibly a small comet had struck North Africa – were forgotten. The ships carrying the prime minister of the Martian Republic were being approached by an unknown and apparently hostile force, his escort moving to intercept. It was the news of the year.