Expanse 08 - Tiamat's Wrath by James S. A. Corey

Author:James S. A. Corey
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2019-03-26T07:00:00+00:00

The yard that Chava found would have been small back in Sol system. There were thousands like it scattered through the Belt. Improvised shipyards that catered to rock hoppers and independents who couldn’t afford docking fees at Callisto or Ceres or any of the other centers. Apart from the fact that this one didn’t have anything manufactured over fifteen years ago, it could have been anywhere.

The man who ran it was called Zep, and he had a faded split-circle tattoo on his neck. He spoke English, Mandarin, Portuguese, and a dialect of Belter creole that put his background in the Martian trojans. He gave her the tour of the yard. It was a high, pale bubble of ceramic and steel with harsh white work lights overhead and a misting of oil every morning to trap the lunar fines. Everything there was a little sticky to the touch and stank of gunpowder. It was the first place in Auberon system she felt even slightly at home.

Even with the oil, the fines—tiny bits of stone smaller than dust that erosion had never smoothed—were dangerous enough that she wore a mask and eye protection. She went through the rows of decommissioned ships that had been repossessed or damaged by misadventure or malice to the point that it made more sense to sell them as scrap. They were mostly orbital shuttles and semiautomated prospectors. The shuttles were no use to her, but some of the prospectors had probes. They didn’t have the range or speed of real torpedoes, but she could start with them. Over the course of a long, sweat-soaked morning, she’d assembled half a dozen that seemed worth closer examination.

The idea wasn’t that different from the bottles she’d used before. It was only the scale that was different. And the stakes. She could load transmitters and explosives into the probes and then send them out through the different gates. No one would be exposed to danger by coming through the newly haunted slow zone, and the messages would be untraceable. Anyone listening as she had been would hear them just like the ones she’d dropped off before. She needed to work on the exact wording. It would be the first voice from the underground since Medina. Getting it right mattered. Getting it done quickly mattered more.

There had been a moment in the neo-noir films that Alex always watched that happened so often it became a cliché. She had to have seen it a dozen times over the years, and she hadn’t been paying much attention. A firefight would start with operatic choreography and impossibly high-capacity magazines. The hero and the villain would play through the scenario with whatever peculiar flourishes the director had invented to make this one different from all the ones before. Then, at the climactic ending, the two enemies faced each other, and both would run out of ammunition. The resolution of all the heroic violence came down to which of them could reload faster.

That was where the underground and the empire stood.

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