Fred Johnson was alive, and Tycho Station wasn’t in Marco’s hands. Holden was in danger. She would be the one that hurt him.

So that meant that the Roci, like the Augustín Gamarra before her, had been rigged to have her magnetic bottle fail. Probably in dock. Fred Johnson, James Holden, and incidentally Chief Engineer Sakai and everyone on the station – all of them would die in a fireball whenever the software she’d written a lifetime ago decided that they should.

It was all happening again, and she had no way to stop it.

Chapter Thirty: Amos

They moved on foot. The clouds weren’t really clouds, and the rain that spat down at them was as much grit and soot as water. The stink of turned earth and rot was all around them, but the cold pushed it back to where it mostly just smelled cold. From the way the trees were all knocked down in the same direction – leaves roughly northeast, roots pointing southwest – he hoped they’d be heading toward less devastated territory. At least until they got near the coast and the flooding.

In Baltimore, he figured the folks in the least trouble would be in the failed arcology in the middle of the city. It had been designed to hold a whole ecosystem inside its massive steel-and-ceramic walls. That it hadn’t worked for shit didn’t matter as much as the fact that it had been built tall and designed to last. Even if the bottom few floors went underwater, there’d be plenty of people near the top who rode out the worst of it. When Baltimore was a sea, the arcology would still be an island.

Plus, the arcology was a shit neighborhood. Erich and his thugs owned at least some of it. And so long as the rest wasn’t controlled by one of the major players – Loca Griega or Golden Bough – they could probably take it in a determined push. And even if Erich hadn’t made it, there’d be someone there to negotiate with. He just hoped it wasn’t Golden Bough. Those guys, in his experience, were fucking assholes.