Memorys legion, p.18
Memory's Legion, page 18
Unable to use it with Timmy on his neck, Oestra dropped the shotgun and twisted, trying to get his arms and legs under himself, trying to get the leverage to push Timmy back. Timmy reached down and hooked his finger into the gunman’s left eye, bracing the head with his knee and turning his wrist until he felt the eyeball pop. Oestra’s screams were wilder now, panic and pain taking over. Timmy let the pressure up, scooted to the left, and picked up the abandoned shotgun. He fired once into Oestra’s head and the man stopped screaming.
Timmy trotted across the room, shotgun in one hand. Burton boiled out of the bedroom, pistols in either fist and teeth bared like a dog’s. The front window shattered. Timmy ducked through the brick archway into the kitchen, shifted his grip on the shotgun, and swung it hard and low, leading with the elbow like a cricket player at the bat as Burton roared in after him. The sound of the connection was like a piece of raw steak being dropped on concrete. Burton’s feet flew out from under him, but the momentum of his rush carried him stumbling into the space beyond. Timmy lowered the shotgun toward the man’s head, but Burton whirled, dropping his own guns and grabbing the shotgun’s barrel. The smell of burning skin was instantaneous. Timmy tried to pull back, but Burton kicked out. His right foot hit Timmy’s knee like he’d kicked a fire hydrant, but Timmy still stumbled. The shotgun roared again, and the refrigerator sprouted pocks of twisted metal and plastic. Burton twisted, pulling himself in close. Too close for the shotgun’s long barrel. He hammered his elbow into Timmy’s ribs twice and felt something give the third time. Timmy dropped the shotgun, and then they were both down on the floor.
They grappled, caught in each other’s arms, each man shifting for the position that would destroy the other in a parody of intimate love. The fingers of Burton’s left hand worked their way under Timmy’s chin, digging at his neck, pushing into the hard cartilage of his throat. Timmy choked, gagged, pulled back the centimeter that was all Burton needed. He pulled his right arm up into the gap, braced himself, twisted, and now Timmy’s arm and head were locked. Burton gasped out a chuckle.
“You just fucked the wrong asshole,” he hissed as Timmy bucked and struggled. “Your little cripple boyfriend? I’m gonna burn him down for days. I’m gonna find everyone you ever loved and kill them all slow.”
Timmy grunted and pushed back, but the effort only made Burton’s lock on him tighter.
“You thought you could take me, you dumbfuck piece of shit?” Burton spat into Timmy’s ear. “You thought you were tougher than me? I owned your momma, boy. You’re just second-generation property.”
All along their paired bodies, Burton felt Timmy tense and then, with a vast exhalation, relax, melting into the hold. Burton pulled tighter, squeezing. There was a report like a pistol shot when Timmy’s shoulder dislocated and the resistance stuttered. Burton’s grip broke. Timmy rolled, cocked back his fist and brought it down on the bridge of Burton’s nose. The pain was bright. The volume of the world faded. The fist came down again, jostling the kitchen. The light seemed strange, reducing the red of the bricks and the yellow of the stove to shades of gray. Burton tried to bring his arms up to cover his face, to shield him from the violence, but they were a very long way away, and he kept losing track of them. He had them up, but they were numb and boneless. The attacks easily brushed them aside. The fist hit his nose again, and he didn’t know if it was for the third time or the fourth.
Shit, he thought. This is just going to keep going on until that fucker decides to stop.
The impact came again, and Burton tried to say something, to scream. The impact came again, and afterward followed a few seconds of darkness and silence and calm. Burton felt very sleepy. The impact came again. Calm. The impact came again and again and again. Each time, the violence felt more distant and the emptiness between more profound until a kind of forgetfulness came over him.
Once Timmy was sure that he was alone in the apartment, he rolled onto his back. His left arm hung from the socket, limp, useless, and disconnected. He levered himself up to his knees, breathing hard between clenched teeth. Then stood. He took the automatic shotgun in his one good hand and stepped out to the main room. On the screen, the Indian woman was still speaking, wagging a finger at the camera to make a point. The timestamp beside her read 21:44. Two minutes. Maybe a little less. Timmy walked to the front window. The guards from the street weren’t at their posts. He nodded to himself and went to stand by the front door. When the knob turned, he waited. The door flew open, and he fired three times, once straight ahead, and then angling to the left and right. Someone started screaming and the door banged closed again.
Timmy went back to the kitchen. He flipped on the burners, pulled down the roll of cheap paper towels from the wall. He found a bottle of peanut oil in the cabinet and doused the towels with half of it before he put them directly on the heating element. A flurry of footsteps came from the front and he fired the shotgun again, not aiming at anything. They retreated. The oil-soaked paper caught fire, and Timmy picked up the burning roll, trotted to the bedroom, and threw the flaming mass into the bunched covers. By the time he was back in the kitchen, the flame shadows were already dancing in the archway behind him. Timmy put the half-full bottle of oil directly onto the heating element and walked to the back of the safe house. The stairway leading to the alley was narrow and white. He didn’t see anyone, but he fired the shotgun twice anyway then tossed the gun back into the fire. If there had been a guard there, they’d fled. Timmy walked out into the night.
He moved slowly, but with purpose. When his path crossed with other people’s he smiled and nodded. Once, when he had almost reached his destination, an old man in a black coat had stopped and stared at his bruised and bloody hand. Timmy smiled ruefully, shrugged, and didn’t break stride. The old man didn’t raise an alarm. Around here, a muscle-bound thug with blood on his cuffs and skinned knuckles didn’t warrant anything more than a disapproving look.
The security forces had put a fresh lock on Lydia’s door, but Timmy knew the back way in. He slid through the window into the bathroom he’d known so well over the last few years. It still smelled like her. They’d gone through everything. Her towels and the shower curtain were on the floor. Bottles of medications littered the sink. He dug through until he found some painkillers and dry swallowed three. In the kitchen, he wrapped his shoulder in ice, then waited motionless until the swelling was down as far as it was going to go. Putting his shoulder back in its socket was a question of lying on the bed, his grip on the mattress bottom hard and unforgiving, and then pulling back slowly, relaxing into the pain, until it slid back into place with a wet, angry pop. He stripped, washed himself with wet hand towels, and changed into a fresh set of his clothes. Ones that didn’t have anybody’s blood on them.
The churn, the crackdown, the catastrophe. The cycle of boom and bust. The turn of the seasons. Whatever name was applied to it, the inevitable cascade of events in the city rolled on just the same. When the fire trucks came and put out the blaze, they identified the two bodies as Feivel Oestra and an unregistered man. The unregistered was a small, compact, dark-skinned man in an expensive shirt and tailored slacks. He had no tattoos, and a wide birthmark on his right shoulder blade in the shape of a rough triangle. Both men had died by violence. If the fire had been meant to conceal that, it failed. If it was only meant to foul any trace DNA or fingerprint evidence, it did well enough. Add to that the fact that Oestra was on the Star Helix lists as someone to bring in for questioning, and the broad strokes of the story came clear.
The same night, fifteen men loyal to the Loca Griega were surrounded in a nightclub. The hostage situation that rose out of it left two people dead and ten in custody, and the attendant lawsuits against Star Helix and the owners of the nightclub were the top of the local and regional newsfeeds. Oestra’s death was little more than a footnote, something mentioned and then moved on from. Other things—smaller things—fell even below that level of obscurity. A woman selling illicit painkillers out of her apartment beside the arcology had a screaming fight with one of her clients, called security, and was taken away for questioning. A sweep of the ruins on the bay islands found a small squatters’ camp with an LED lamp, an emergency prep sleeping bag, and an exhausted chemical stove, but anyone who had been living there was gone. An art dealer contacted with a request for assistance with an investigation killed himself rather than come in. None of those events raised any notice at all.
Soon, the paroxysm of violence, legal and otherwise, would thin back down to the normal background radiation of human vice. Very serious people would argue about whether the program had worked. Some would argue that crime had gone down, others that it had actually risen. Star Helix would take its payment from the government and settle out of court most of the complaints made against it. One of the remaining lieutenants would rise to the top, or the whole criminal apparatus would turn over to a new organization, a new generation. Within a year, there would be a new working normal that would run more or less gracefully until the next time. People of little importance would survive and make names for themselves. The mighty would fall, the meek would rise up in their places and become mighty. But all that would come later.
In the pearly light that came before the dawn, one other thing happened that went unnoticed, meaningless to anyone but those involved.
It was on a street down near the water’s edge. The eastern sky was brightening with the coming dawn, the western sky still boasted a scattering of stars. Traffic on the street was thick, but not yet the immobile crush that would come with the light. Sea and rot perfumed the air, but the cool made the scent seem almost pleasant. A tea-and-coffee stand was opening, sporting the blue-and-pink logo of a popular chain and a tray of baked goods just the same as a million other trays on five continents and two worlds. Old men and women on basic huffed down the sidewalk, getting in the day’s exercise before the sun came up. Young men and women staggered home from long nights at the street clubs and rairai joints, exhausted from hours of dancing, drinking, sex, and frustrated hope. Soon, the streets and tube stations would thicken with the traffic of those who had jobs to go to, and then be released to the masses for whom basic was a way of life.
A boy on the verge of manhood stood on a corner near the tea-and-coffee stand. He was taller than average, and muscular. His close-cropped reddish-brown hair was receding, though he was young. His expression was blank, and he held himself in a tight, guarded way that could have been grief or the protecting of some physical injury. His right hand was swollen, the knuckles skinned. If it hadn’t been for that last detail, the security team might have passed him by. Three women and two men, all in the ballistic armor and helmets of Star Helix.
“Morning,” the team lead said, and half a beat later the tall man smiled and nodded. He turned to walk away, but the other personnel shifted to block his path.
The man tensed, then made the visible decision to relax. His smile was rueful. “Sorry. I was just heading out.”
“I respect that, sir. We appreciate you taking a moment,” the team lead said, placing a hand on the butt of his pistol. “Really did a number on your hand.”
“Yeah. I box.”
“Can be a good workout. I’m going to need to see your ID.”
“Don’t got it on me. Sorry.”
“We’ll need to check you against the database, then. That isn’t a problem, is it?”
“Think I got the right to refuse that, don’t I?”
“You do,” the team lead said, letting a hint of hardness slip into his voice beneath the casual words. “But then we’d need to take you to the substation and do the full biometric scan to exclude you from the persons of interest list, and there are a whole lot of very unpleasant people who are in that queue. You don’t want to hang out with them. Not if you have someplace you need to be.”
The big man seemed to consider this. He glanced back over his shoulder.
“Looking for someone?” the team lead asked.
“Was more thinking there might be some folks looking for me.”
“So. How do you want to play this?”
The man shrugged and held out his hand. The team’s data analyst stepped forward and tapped the collector against the thick wrist. The readout stuttered red, then went to solid green. The seconds ticked away.
“If there’s something you want to tell me,” the team lead said, “this would be the time.”
“Nah,” the big man said. “I think I’m good.”
“Yeah?”
“You know,” he said, “good enough.”
The team lead’s hand terminal chimed. He pulled it out with his left hand, his right still on the butt of his gun. The readout had the red border of a flagged profile. The big man’s body went very still while they read. It was a long moment before the team lead spoke.
“Amos Burton.”
“Yeah?” the big man said. It could have meant, Yes, I killed him, or What about him? All the team lead heard was the affirmation.
“I’ve got a travel flag on you here. You’re cutting it pretty close.”
Amos Burton’s eyebrows rose and the corners of his mouth turned down. “I am?”
“You’re shipping out to Luna on the noon launch from Bogotá station, Mr. Burton. These apprenticeship programs are tough to get into, and last I heard, they take it mighty poorly if you miss your berth. Might wind up waiting another decade to get back on the list.”
“Huh,” the big man said.
“Look, there’s a high-speed line about nine blocks north of here. We can take you there if you want.”
“Erich, you sonofabitch,” the big man said. Instead of looking north, he turned to the east, toward the sea and rising sun. “I’m not Mr. Burton.”
“Sorry?”
“I’m not Mr. Burton,” the man said again. “You can call me Amos.”
“Whatever you want. But I think you’d better haul ass out of town if you don’t want to get in some serious shit, Amos.”
“You ain’t the only one that thinks that. But I’m good. I know where the high-speed lines are. I won’t miss my ride.”
“All right then,” the team lead said with a crisp nod. “Have a better one.”
The security team moved on, flowing around the big man like river water around a stone. Amos watched them go, then went to the tea-and-coffee stand, bought a cup of black coffee and a corn muffin. He stood on the corner for a long minute, eating and drinking and breathing the air of the only city he’d ever known. When he was done, he dropped the cup and the muffin wrapper into the recycling bin and turned north toward the high-speed line and Bogotá station and Luna. And, who knew, maybe the vastness beyond the moon. The sweep of planets and moons and asteroids that humanity had spread to, and where the chances of running into anybody from Baltimore were vanishingly small. A needle in a haystack all of humanity wide.
Amos Burton was a tall, stocky, pale-skinned man with an amiable smile, an unpleasant past, and a talent for cheerful violence. He left Baltimore to its dynamic balance of crime and law, exotics and mundanity, love and emptiness. The number of people who knew him and loved him could be counted on one hand and leave most of the fingers spare, and when he was gone, the city went on without him as if he had never been.
The Churn
Author’s Note
From a technical standpoint, this was probably the hardest thing we ever wrote. The critical bit—that Timmy was going to grow up to be the Amos we know and love—was the big reveal, but we couldn’t be sure when the penny was going to drop for any individual reader, so the story had to work with and without the surprise coming at the end.
Partly because of that, “The Churn” is the only part of The Expanse written in an omniscient voice. Almost everything else we do is close third. In the novels, we use a wide variety of close thirds, usually (but not always) mapping to the chapters. “The Churn” dips into a lot of different people’s minds—though never Timmy’s—and even shows things that no one could have seen. The “crane shot” image when the police are converging on Liev through the crowd, for instance, isn’t one anybody in the story could have seen, but the narrator can, and so the reader can. It changes the voice of the story in ways that were tricky and interesting.
The stories don’t just let us explore parts of the universe that the novels didn’t, they also let us play with the writing process a little.
It’s also probably the darkest story we wrote. The sexual relationship between Lydia and Timmy is deeply messed up—for both of them—and the story doesn’t condemn or celebrate it. When the show was cast, Wes Chatham (who plays Amos Burton/Timmy) took this story to a psychotherapist and talked about what kinds of things an upbringing like this would do to someone.
A lot of Amos’ character requires forgoing the customary moral judgments. For better or worse.
The Vital Abyss
They kept us in an enormous room. Ninety meters by sixty with a ceiling eight meters above us, a bit less than a football pitch, with observation windows along the top two meters all the way around from which our guards could look down on us if they chose to. Old crash couches salvaged from God knew where lay scattered around the floor. Eventually I came to recognize a certain subtle smell like alcohol and plastic when the air scrubbers were replaced, and the humidity and temperature would sometimes vary, leaving runnels of condensate coming down the walls. Those were the nearest things we had to weather. The gravity, somewhere in the neighborhood of one-quarter g, suggested we were on a spin station. Our guards never said as much, but I could think of no planetary bodies that matched that.
For most of us there was a sense that this shabby, empty room was the final destination for us, the former science team from Thoth Station. Some wept at the thought. The research group did not.
