“Somebody’s following us, Cap,” he said conversationally. “Wasn’t sure till he climbed on a couple cars down. Behind us all through the casinos too.”
Holden sighed and put his face in his hands.
“Okay, what’s he look like?” he said.
“Belter. Fifties, or maybe forties with a lot mileage. White shirt and dark pants. Goofy hat.”
“Cop?”
“Oh yeah. But no holster I can see,” Amos said.
“All right. Keep an eye on him, but no need to get too worried. Nothing we’re doing here is illegal,” Holden said.
“You mean, other than arriving in our stolen Martian warship, sir?” Naomi asked.
“You mean our perfectly legitimate gas freighter that all the paperwork and registry data says is perfectly legitimate?” Holden replied with a thin smile. “Yeah, well, if they’d seen through that, they would have stopped us at the dock, not followed us around.”
An advertising screen on the wall displayed a stunning view of multicolored clouds rippling with flashes of lightning, and encouraged Holden to take a trip to the amazing dome resorts on Titan. He’d never been to Titan. Suddenly he wanted to go there very much. A few weeks of sleeping late, eating in fine restaurants, and lying on a hammock, watching Titan’s colorful atmosphere storm above him sounded like heaven. Hell, as long as he was fantasizing, he threw in Naomi walking over to his hammock with a couple of fruity-looking drinks in her hands.
She ruined it by talking.
“This is our stop,” she said.
“Amos, watch our friend, see if he gets off the train with us,” Holden said as he got up and headed to the door.
After they got off and walked a dozen steps down the corridor, Amos whispered, “Yep,” at his back. Shit. Well, definitely a tail, but there wasn’t really any reason not to go ahead and check up on Lionel. Fred hadn’t asked them to do anything with whoever was pretending to be the Scopuli’s owner. They couldn’t very well be arrested for knocking on a door. Holden whistled a loud and jaunty tune as he walked, to let his crew and whoever was following them know he wasn’t worried about a thing.
He stopped when he saw the flophouse.
It was dark and dingy and exactly the sort of place where people got mugged or worse. Broken lights created dark corners, and there wasn’t a tourist in sight. He turned to give Alex and Amos meaningful looks, and Amos shifted his hand in his pocket. Alex reached under his coat.
The lobby was mostly empty space, with a pair of couches at one end next to a table covered with magazines. A sleepy-looking older woman sat reading one. Elevators were recessed into the wall at the far end, next to a door marked STAIRS. In the middle was the check-in desk, where, in lieu of a human clerk, a touch screen terminal let guests pay for their rooms.
Holden stopped next to the desk and turned around to look at the woman sitting on the couch. Graying hair, but good features and an athletic build. In a flophouse like this, that probably meant a prostitute reaching the end of her shelf life. She pointedly ignored his stare.
“Is our tail still with us?” Holden asked in a quiet voice.
“Stopped outside somewhere. Probably just watching the door now,” Amos replied.
Holden nodded and hit the inquiry button on the check-in screen. A simple menu would let him send a message to Lionel Polanski’s room, but Holden exited the system. They knew Lionel was still checked in, and Fred had given them the room number. If it was someone playing games, no reason to give him a heads-up before Holden knocked on the door.
“Okay, he’s still here, so let’s—” Holden said, and then stopped when he saw the woman from the couch standing right behind Alex. He hadn’t heard or seen her approach.
“You need to come with me,” she said in a hard voice. “Walk to the stairwell slowly, stay at least three meters ahead of me the entire time. Do it now.”
“Are you a cop?” Holden asked, not moving.
“I’m the person with the gun,” she said, a small weapon appearing like magic in her right hand. She pointed it at Alex’s head. “So do what I say.”
Her weapon was small and plastic and had some kind of battery pack. Amos pulled his heavy slug thrower out and aimed it at her face.
“Mine’s bigger,” he said.
“Amos, don’t—” was all Naomi had time to say before the stairwell door burst open and half a dozen men and women armed with compact automatic weapons came into the room, yelling at them to drop their guns.
Holden started to put his hands up when one of them opened fire, the weapon coughing out rounds so fast it sounded like someone ripping construction paper; it was impossible to hear the separate shots. Amos threw himself to the floor. A line of bullet holes stitched across the chest of the woman with the taser, and she fell backward with a soft, final sound.
Holden grabbed Naomi by one hand and dragged her behind the check-in desk. Someone in the other group was yelling, “Cease fire! Cease fire!” but Amos was already shooting back from his position, prone on the floor. A yelp of pain and a curse told Holden he’d probably hit someone. Amos rolled sideways to the desk, just in time to avoid a hail of slugs that tore up the floor and wall and made the desk shudder.
Holden reached for his gun, but the front sight caught in his waistband. He yanked it out, tearing his underwear, then crawled on his knees to the edge of the desk and looked out. Alex was lying on the floor on the other side of one of the couches, gun drawn and face white. As Holden looked, a burst of gunfire hit the couch, blowing stuffing into the air and making a line of holes in the back of the couch not more than twenty centimeters above Alex’s head. The pilot reached his pistol around the corner of the couch and blindly fired off half a dozen shots, yelling at the same time.
“Fucking ass**les!” Amos yelled, then rolled out and fired a couple more shots and rolled back before the return fire started.
“Where are they?” Holden yelled at him.
“Two are down, the rest in the stairwell!” Amos yelled back over the sound of return fire.
Out of nowhere a burst of rounds bounced off the floor past Holden’s knee. “Shit, someone’s flanking us!” Amos cried out, then moved farther behind the desk and away from the shots.
Holden crawled to the other side of the desk and peeked out. Someone was moving low and fast toward the hotel entrance. Holden leaned out and took a couple shots at him, but three guns opened up from the stairwell doorway and forced him back behind the desk.