Konecheck looked up from behind strands of long iron-gray hair and gave a one-millimeter nod. Amos felt a wave of something a lot like comfort pass through him – a looseness across his shoulders, a warmth in his gut. This was going to get ugly before it was over, but it was a scale of violence he understood.
“New plan,” the escort said. “We’re evacuating these prisoners and the civilian to the surface.”
The guard who’d helped pull the door open – Suliman? Sullivan? Something like that – was a thick-necked bull of a man with a single black eyebrow running across his forehead. Morris, the one with the gun, was thinner, older, with bad teeth and missing the last knuckle on his left pinky finger.
“Sure you don’t want to put the prisoners in a closet before we go?” Morris asked. “I’d feel a lot better getting out of here if we didn’t have these fucking psychos at our back.”
“Peaches comes with me,” Amos said with a loose shrug. “That’s just a thing.”
“Might need some help clearing debris,” Konecheck said. He’d been the one that laughed before. The words, innocuous as they were, held just as much threat but the others didn’t seem to hear it. Amos wondered why that was.
“Elevators are disabled, so we’ll get to the stairs,” the escort said. “That’ll get us out of here. Once we’re up top, we can secure the prisoners.”
“What about fallout?” the thick guard – Amos was almost sure the name was Sullivan – said.
“That’s nukes, asshole,” Konecheck growled.
“Rona? Shouldn’t you query the captain before we do this?” Morris asked. His eyes hadn’t shifted off Konecheck’s back. Competent, Amos thought, and filed the information away for later.
“Captain’s not answering,” the escort, Rona, said. Her voice was tight, too controlled to let the panic out. From the way the other two went quiet, Amos guessed they hadn’t known that. “Let’s head for the stairs. Morris, you take lead, then the prisoners, then me and Sully. You’ll need to follow behind, sir.”
“I’ll walk with them,” Amos said.
“Don’t trust me with your girlfriend?” Konecheck growled.
Amos grinned. “Nope.”
“Let’s get moving,” Rona said. “Before there’s a fucking aftershock.”
Fear was an interesting thing. Amos could see it in all the guards without quite being able to point to what it was. The way Morris kept looking over his shoulder, maybe. Or the way Rona and Sullivan walked exactly in step behind them, like they were trying to agree with each other just by the length of their stride. Peaches seemed focused and empty, but that was kind of just her. Konecheck, on Amos’ left, was jutting out his beard and making a big show of what a badass he was, which would have been funnier if he didn’t have a nervous system redesigned for violence. Guys like that were either scared all the time anyway or so broken they didn’t count. Amos wondered whether he was scared. He didn’t know how he’d tell. He also wondered if there were going to be more rocks falling, but it didn’t seem like the kind of thing he had any say over.
All around them, the prison was in shambles. Cracks ran along the walls like the floor had been shoved out a couple centimeters and pushed back in place. There was a sound of water running through pipes from somewhere. The emergency lights were on, but here and there a few had failed, leaving pools of darkness. Even if the elevators were running, he wouldn’t have wanted to take them. One of the things living on a ship for years had done was give him a sense for how the whole vessel was running based on a few local indicators. And if the Pit had been above orbit, he’d have been sleeping in an environment suit, just so as not to be unpleasantly surprised by waking up airless.
“Stop fucking whistling,” Konecheck said.
“Was I whistling?” Amos asked.
“You were,” Clarissa said, still cradling her swollen hand.
“Huh,” Amos said, and started whistling again, consciously this time.
“I said stop it,” Konecheck growled.
“Yeah,” Amos agreed with a friendly nod. “You did say that.”
“Prisoners will maintain silence,” Rona snapped behind them. “And the civilian will kindly shut the fuck up too.”
Amos considered Konecheck out of the corner of his eyes. Still too early to be sure, but maybe sixty-forty that one of them was going to have to kill the other. Not now, but before it was over. He could hope for the forty.
A shudder passed through the floor like a badly tuned thruster firing. Concrete dust sifted down from the lights like amber snow. Morris said something obscene.
“Aftershock,” Rona said. “Just an aftershock.”
“Might be,” Clarissa said. “Might be the shock wave from Africa. I don’t remember how fast that kind of force travels through the mantle.”