“I won’t.”

“We won’t,” Amos said. “You mean we won’t. Not you and not your tribe.”

“We won’t.”

“Perfect. No problems, then. And give Butch your stuff, all right? Drop gun too.”

“Yes, sir.”

Amos walked back toward the hangar. Sure enough, Peaches was standing in the doorway, her arms crossed. He wiped his hand. His knuckles were bleeding.

“See, that’s what civilization is,” he said. “Bunch of stories. That’s all.”

“So what if it is?” Peaches said. “We’re really good at telling stories. Everything just turned to shit, and we’re already finding ways to put it back together. Stokes and the other servants were ready to fight us or get killed, but then I knew his name and he remembered me, and now there’s a story where he wants to help us. You go out there and you send a message about how those guys should leave us alone. All of us. More than just six or seven. And, side note here, you know the Pinkwater guys are going to come back and try to kill you for that, right?”

“Just need ’em to take a long time gearing up,” Amos said. “Figure we’ll be off the ground by then.”

Stokes leaned in from behind Peaches, his expression apologetic. “About that? There is a small problem.”

The hangar was as tall as a cathedral, and the Zhang Guo stood in the middle of it like a piece of gargantuan art. The surface of the ship was worked to look like gold-and-silver filigree over a body of lapis. The drive cones had golden ideograms written on them in something that looked like gold but apparently didn’t melt at high temperature. He could tell from looking it didn’t have an Epstein drive. Twice as big as the Rocinante and maybe – maybe – a quarter as functional, it was as much an orbital shuttle as it was a confession of decadence.

And, more to the point, it didn’t run.

“The house power supplies are exhausted,” Stokes explained. “Without power, there’s no water recyclers. No heat. No network connections.”

“So,” Amos said. “You figured the smart move was to get a bunch of people who’ve never seen a working fusion drive to just fire one up so you could top off the batteries? That’s the kind of suicidal optimism you just don’t see every day.”

Stokes shrugged. “The ship was here only because it needed repair. We were never able to make it run.”

Amos clapped the man on the shoulder. “You just go get me all the tools you were using. This is something I know how to do.”

Stokes trotted away, shouting to the others from his group. Erich’s people seemed to be equally divided between setting up a defensive perimeter and looking for the most expensive things that would fit in their pockets. Erich and Peaches came to stand beside him.