“This is what I’ve been doing for years.”
“And you can make a living this way?”
“Sure, if you don’t mind weird-ass aliens and corporate security assholes trying to kill you now and then.”
“Never minded before,” Erich said. “Okay, that’s it. We’re at the end of the run. I got that one hiccup from the water recycler, but everything else is good to go.”
“If we’re in this brick long enough to recycle the water, something will have gone badly wrong.”
“That’s what I was thinking too. You want me to start firing the reactor up? They’ve got scripts and a checklist.”
“Yeah, why don’t you let me take —”
The hand terminal squawked and a man’s voice Amos didn’t recognize came on. “Boss? I think we’ve got company.”
“What’re you seeing?” Erich snapped.
“Three trucks.”
“Okay, fuck it,” Erich said. “I’m starting up the reactor.”
Amos trotted toward the front of the hangar. The lookouts at the windows were all standing and tense. They knew. The servants were still milling in their corner, out of the way. “Yeah, I’d go ahead and run the check first,” he said. “It’d be a shame to do all this just so we could give the folks in Vermont a nice light show.”
The silence was harsh. Amos didn’t understand what the problem was until Erich spoke again. “I don’t take orders from you. Burton.”
Amos rolled his eyes. He shouldn’t have said that on an open channel. So many years and so many catastrophes, and it was still all about not losing face. “I was thinking of it more as expert opinion,” Amos said. And then, “Sir.”
“Noted. While I take my time to do that, how about you go help hold the perimeter,” Erich said, and Amos grinned. Like he wasn’t already on his way to do that. Erich went on. “Walt, start getting the passengers in the ship. Clarissa can assist with the start-up.”
“On my way,” she said, and Amos saw her running across the hangar for the stairs. Stokes was watching her with alarm. Amos waved him over.
“Mr. Burton?” the man said.
“That girl going after her old man? Yeah, she might need to rethink that.”
Stokes went pale and searchlights brighter than the sun flooded through the hangar windows. A voice echoed through bullhorns, barking syllables too muddled by the echo to be words. It didn’t matter. They all got the gist. By the time Amos got to the front doors, there were figures in the lights. Men in riot gear approaching the hangar with assault rifles in their hands that looked a little more heavy-duty than crowd control demanded. The servants were lined up on the stairs to the ship’s airlock, but they weren’t moving fast. One of Erich’s men – maybe twenty years old with a red scarf at his neck – handed Amos a rifle and grinned.
“Aim for the lights?”
“Any plan’s better than no plan,” Amos said, and broke the windowpane out with the butt of the rifle. The gunfire started before he could flip the barrel around to take aim. It roared like a storm, no gap between one report and the next. Somewhere people were screaming, but Erich and Peaches were in the ship and Holden and Alex and Naomi were somewhere off-planet and Lydia was safely dead. There was only so much to worry about. The guy next to him was screaming a wordless war cry. Amos took aim, breathed out, squeezed. The rifle kicked, and one of the glaring lights went out. Then someone else got another one. One of the Pinkwater soldiers pulled back an arm to throw something, and Amos shot them in the hip. A second after they went down, the grenade they dropped flashed and a plume of tear gas rose up through the falling rain.
Someone – Butch, it sounded like – yelled “Push ’em back!” and Amos crouched down, squinting back at the Zhang Guo. The civilians were almost all on, Stokes at the back waving his arms and yelling to hurry them. Something detonated, blowing the glass out of the remaining windows. The shock wave thudded through Amos’ chest like the explosion had kicked him. He stood up, glanced through the window, and shot the nearest figure in the face. The deeper rattle came from outside, and stuttering muzzle flash brighter than the remaining lights. Holes appeared in the wall, beams of light shining through into the vast cathedral space of the hangar.
“We got to get out of here!” Scarf Boy shouted.
“Sounds good,” Amos said, and started walking backward, firing through the window. A half second later, Scarf Boy was with him. The others either noticed them or had already reached the same conclusion. Two were already on the stairs, shooting as they climbed. At this point, no one was trying to hit anything; they were just keeping the others from advancing too fast for everyone to get on board. Amos’ rifle went dry. He dropped it and jogged back to the stairs, holding his hand terminal to his ear as he went.
“How’re we doing?” he shouted.
“You’re very clever,” Peaches yelled back. “We had a power hiccup on start-up. Would have lost maneuvering thrusters.”
“We going to lose them now?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Good.”
He stopped at the base of the stairs. Scarf Boy crouched behind him, reloading his assault rifle. When he had the new magazine in, Amos plucked it out of his hands and pointed at the stairway with his chin. Scarf Boy nodded thanks and scuttled up the steps, his head low. Shadows danced on the windows, and the side door burst in with a three-person team rushing in. Amos mowed them down. Half a dozen of Erich’s people were on the stairs now, some still shooting as they climbed. One of them – Butch – stumbled as she got to the fourth step up. Blood soaked her arm and the side of her neck. Amos held the assault rifle up, spraying the walls, and knelt beside her.