To Holden, it felt like wrapping himself in his own death shroud.
But even with all its layers and weight, it still wasn’t as frightening as the powered armor that recon Marines wore would have been. What the Navy boys called walking coffins. The idea behind the name being that anything powerful enough to break the armor would liquefy the marine inside, so you didn’t bother to open it. You just tossed the whole thing into the grave. This was hyperbole, of course, but the idea of going into that cargo bay wearing something that he wouldn’t even be able to move without the power-enhanced strength would have scared the shit out of him. What if the batteries died?
Of course, a nice suit of strength-augmenting armor might be handy when trying to throw monsters off the ship.
“That’s on backward,” Amos said, pointing at Holden’s thigh.
“Shit,” Holden said. Amos was right. He’d been so far up his own ass that he’d screwed up the buckles on his thigh armor. “Sorry, I’m having a hard time staying focused here.”
“Scared shitless,” Amos said with a nod.
“Well, I wouldn’t say—”
“Wasn’t talking about you,” Amos said. “Me. I’m scared shitless of walking into the cargo bay with that thing in there. And I didn’t watch Eros turn into goo at close range. So I get it. Right there with you, Jim.”
It was the first time in Holden’s memory that Amos had called him by his first name. Holden nodded back at him, then went about straightening out his thigh armor.
“Yeah,” he said. “I just yelled at Alex for not being scared enough.”
Amos had finished with his armor and was pulling his favorite auto-shotgun out of his locker.
“No shit?”
“Yeah. He made a joke and I’m scared out of my skull, so I yelled at him and threatened to relieve him.”
“Can you do that?” Amos asked. “He’s kind of our only pilot.”
“No, Amos. No, I can’t kick Alex off the ship any more than I can kick you or Naomi off the ship. We’re not even a skeleton crew. We’re whatever you have when you don’t have a skeleton.”
“Worried about Naomi leaving?” Amos said. He kept his voice light, but his words hit like hammer blows. Holden felt the air go out of him, and had to focus on breathing again for a minute.
“No,” he said. “I mean, yes, of course I am. But that’s not what has me freaked out right now.”
Holden picked up his assault rifle and looked at it, then put it back in his locker and took out a heavy recoilless pistol instead. The self-contained rockets that were its ammunition wouldn’t impart thrust and send him flying all over the place if he fired it in zero g.
“I watched you die,” he said, not looking at Amos.
“Huh?”
“I watched you die. When that kidnap team, whoever the hell they were, took us. I saw one of them shoot you in the back of the head, and I saw you drop face-first on the floor. There was blood everywhere.”
“Yeah, but I—”
“I know it was a nonlethal round. I know they wanted us alive. I know the blood was your broken nose when your head slammed into the floor. I know all of that now. At the time, what I knew was that you’d just been shot in the head and killed.”
Amos slid a magazine into his shotgun and racked a round but, other than that, didn’t make a sound.
“All of this is really fragile,” Holden said, waving around at Amos and the ship. “This little family we have. One fuckup, and something irreplaceable gets lost.”
Amos was frowning at him now. “This is still about Naomi, right?”
“No! I mean, yes. But no. When I thought you were dead, it knocked all the wind out of me. And right now, I need to focus on getting that thing off the ship, and all I can think about is losing one of the crew.”
Amos nodded, slung the shotgun over his shoulder, and sat down on the bench next to his locker.
“I get it. So what do you want to do?”
“I want,” Holden said, sliding a magazine into his pistol, “to get that fucking monster off my ship. But please promise me you won’t die doing it. That would help a lot.”
“Cap,” Amos said with a grin. “Anything that kills me has already killed everyone else. I was born to be the last man standing. You can count on it.”
The panic and fear didn’t leave Holden. They squatted on his chest now just the way they had before. But at least he didn’t feel so alone with them.
“Then let’s go get rid of this stowaway.”