Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate (14 page)

The only other people in the mess hall were a few military people with officers’ uniforms, and a small knot of the civilian contractors drinking coffee and slumping in their seats like workers in the middle of an all-nighter. A dozen metal tables were bolted to the floor with magnetic chairs at their sides. Wall displays scrolled information for the ship’s officers, all of it gibberish to her. A row of cutouts opened into the galley, letting through plates of food and the sounds of industrial dishwashers and the smell of floor cleaner. It was like sitting too near the kitchen in a very, very clean restaurant.

Anna drank her milk slowly, savoring the rich texture and ridiculous luxury of it. A bell chimed on someone’s hand terminal, and two of the civilian workers got up and left. One stayed, a beautiful but sad-faced woman who looked down at a terminal on the table with a vacant, thousand-yard stare.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” said a voice behind her, almost making Anna jump out of her chair. A young man in a naval officer’s uniform moved into her field of view and gestured awkwardly at the chair next to her. “Mind if I sit?”

Anna recovered enough to smile at him, and he took it as assent, stiffly folding himself into the seat. He was very tall for an Earther, with short blond hair and the thick shoulders and narrow waist all of the young officers seemed to have regardless of gender.

Anna reached across the table to shake his hand and said, “Anna Volovodov.”

“Chris Williams,” the young officer replied, giving her hand a short but firm shake. “And yes, ma’am, I know who you are.”

“You do?”

“Yes, ma’am. My people in Minnesota are Methodists, going back as far as we can trace them. When I saw you listed on the civilian roster, I made sure to remember the name.”

Anna nodded and sipped her milk. If the boy had singled her out because she was a minister of his faith, then he wanted to talk to her as a member of the congregation. She mentally shifted gears to become Pastor Anna and said, “What can I do for you, Chris?”

“Love your accent, ma’am,” Chris replied. He needed time to build up to whatever it was that he’d approached her about, so Anna gave it to him.

“I grew up in Moscow,” she replied. “Though after two years on Europa I can almost do Belter now, sa sa?”

Chris laughed, some of the tension draining out of his face. “That’s not bad, ma’am. But you get those guys going at full speed, I can’t understand a word the skinnies say.”

Anna chose to ignore the slur. “Please, no more ‘ma’am.’ Makes me feel a hundred years old. Anna, please, or Pastor Anna if you have to.”

“All right,” Chris said. “Pastor Anna.”

They sat together in companionable silence for a few moments while Anna watched Chris work up to whatever he needed to say.

“You heard the alarm, right?” he finally said. “Bet it woke you up.”

“It’s why I’m here,” Anna replied.

“Yeah. Action stations. It’s because of the dusters— I mean, Martians, you know.”

“Martians?” Anna found herself wanting another glass of the delicious milk, but thought it might distract Chris, so she didn’t wave at the waiter.

“We’re in weapons range of their fleet now,” he said. “So we go on alert. We can’t share sky with the dusters anymore without going on alert. Not since, you know, Ganymede.”

Anna nodded and waited for him to continue.

“And that Ring, you know, it’s already killed somebody. I mean, just a dumb as sand skinny slingshotter, but still. Somebody.”

Anna took his hand. He flinched a bit, but relaxed when she smiled at him. “That scares you?”

“Sure. Of course. But that ain’t it.”

Anna waited, keeping her face carefully neutral. The pretty civilian girl across the room got up suddenly, as though leaving. Her lips moved, talking to herself, then she sat back down, put her arms on the table, and leaned her head on them. Someone else scared, waiting out the long watches of the night, all alone in a room full of people.

“I mean,” Chris said, breaking into her reverie, “that ain’t all of it anyway.”

“What else?” Anna said.

“The Ring didn’t put us on alert,” he said. “It’s the Martians. Even with that thing out there, we’re still thinking about shooting each other. That’s pretty fucked up. Sorry. Messed up.”

“It seems like we should be able to see past our human differences when we’re confronted with something like this, doesn’t it?”

Chris nodded and squeezed her hand tighter, but said nothing.

“Chris, would you like to pray with me?”

He nodded and lowered his head, closing his eyes. When she’d finished, he said, “I know I’m not the only Methodist on the ship. Do you, you know, hold services?”

I do now.
 

“Sunday, at 10 a.m., in conference room 41,” she said, making a mental note to ask someone if she could use conference room 41 on Sunday mornings.

“I’ll see if I can get the time off,” Chris said with a smile. “Thank you, ma’am. Pastor Anna.”

“It was nice talking to you, Chris.”
You just gave me a reason to be here.

When Chris left, Anna found herself very tired, ready to return to her bed, but the pretty girl across the room hadn’t moved. Her head was still buried in her arms. Anna walked over to her and gently touched her on the shoulder. The girl’s head jerked up, her eyes wild, almost panicked.

“Hi,” Anna said. “I’m Anna. What’s your name?”

The girl stared up, as if the question were a difficult one. Anna sat down across from her.

“I saw you sitting here,” Anna said. “It looked like you could use some company. It’s okay to be afraid. I understand.”

The girl jerked to her feet like a malfunctioning machine. Her eyes were flat, and her head tilted a degree. Anna felt suddenly afraid. It was like she’d gone to pet a dog and found herself with her hand on a lion. Something in the back of her head told her,
This is a bad one
.
This one will hurt you.

“I’m sorry,” Anna said, standing up with her hands half raised. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“You don’t know me,” the girl replied. “You don’t know anything.” Her hands were clenched into fists at her sides, the tendons in her neck quivering like plucked guitar strings.

“You’re right,” Anna said, still backing up and patting the air with her hands. “I apologize.”

Other people in the room were staring at them now, and Anna felt a surge of relief that she wasn’t alone with the girl. The girl stared at her, trembling, for a few more seconds, then darted out of the room.

“What the fuck was that all about?” someone behind Anna said in a quiet voice.

Maybe the girl had woken up from a nightmare too, Anna thought. Or maybe she hadn’t.

A
rriving at the Ring was a political fiction, but that didn’t keep it from being real. There was no physical boundary to say that this was within the realm of the object. There was no port to dock at. The
Behemoth
’s sensory arrays had been sucking in data from the Ring since before they’d left Tycho. The Martian science ships and Earth military forces that had been there before the doomed Belter kid had become its first casualty were still there, where they had been, but resupplied now. The new Martian ships had joined them, matched orbit, and were hanging quietly in the sky. The Earth flotilla, like the
Behemoth
, was in the last part of the burn, pulling up to whatever range they’d chosen to stop at. To say,
We have come across the vast abyss to float at this distance and now we are here
.
We’ve arrived.

As far as anyone could tell, the Ring didn’t give a damn.

The structure itself was eerie. The surface was a series of twisting ridges that spiraled around its body. At first they appeared uneven, almost messy. The mathematicians, architects, and physicists assured them all that there was a deep regularity there: the height of the ridges in a complex harmony with the width and the spacing between the peaks and valleys. The reports were breathless, finding one layer of complexity after another, the intimations of intention and design all laid bare without any hint of what it all might mean.

“The official Martian reports have been very conservative,” the science officer said. His name was Chan Bao-Zhi, and on Earth, he’d have been Chinese. Here, he was a Belter from Pallas Station. “They’ve given a lot of summary and maybe a tenth of the data they’ve collected. Fortunately, we’ve been able to observe most of their experiments and make our own analysis.”

“Which Earth will have been doing too,” Ashford said.

“Without doubt, sir,” Chan said.

Like any ritual, the staff meeting carried more significance than information. The heads of all the major branches of the
Behemoth
’s structural tree were present: Sam for engineering, Bull for security, Chan for the research teams, Bennie Cortland-Mapu for health services, Anamarie Ruiz for infrastructure, and so on, filling the two dozen seats around the great conference table. Ashford sat in the place of honor, another beneficent Christ painted on the wall behind him. Pa sat at his right hand, and Bull—by tradition—at his left.

“What have we got?” Ashford said. “Short form.”

“It’s fucking weird, sir,” Chan said, and everyone chuckled. “Our best analysis is that the Ring is an artificially sustained Einstein-Rosen bridge. You go through the Ring, you don’t come out the other side here.”

“So it’s a gate,” Ashford said.

“Yes, sir. It appears that the protomolecule or Phoebe bug or whatever you want to call it was launched at the solar system several billion years ago, aiming for Earth with the intention of hijacking primitive life to build a gateway. We’re positing that whoever created the protomolecule did it as a first step toward making travel to the solar system more convenient and practical later.”

Bull took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was what everyone had been thinking, but hearing it spoken in this official setting made it seem more real. The Ring was a way for something to get here. Not just a gateway. A beachhead.

“When the
Y Que
went through it, the mass and velocity of the ship triggered some mechanism in the Ring,” Chan said. “The Martians have a good dataset from the moment it happened, and there was a massive outpouring of energy within the Ring structure and a whole cascade of microlevel conformation changes. The entire object went up to about five thousand degrees Kelvin, and it has been cooling regularly ever since. So it took a lot of effort to get that thing running, but it looks like not much to maintain.”

“What do we know about what’s on the other side?” Pa asked. Her expression was neutral, her voice pleasant and unemotional. She could have been asking him to justify a line item in his budget.

“It’s hard to know much,” Chan said. “We’re peeking through a keyhole, and the Ring itself seems to be generating interference and radiation that makes getting consistent readings difficult. We know the
Y Que
wasn’t destroyed. We’re still getting the video feed that the kid was spewing when he went through, it’s just not showing us much.”

“Stars?” Ashford said. “Something we can start to navigate from?”

“No, sir,” Chan said. “The far side of the Ring doesn’t have any stars, and the background microwave radiation is significantly different from what we’d expect.”

“Meaning what?” Ashford said.

“Meaning, ‘Huh, that’s weird,’” Chan said. “Sir.”

Ashford’s smile was cool as he motioned the science officer to continue. Chan coughed before he went on.

“We have a couple of other anomalies that we aren’t quite sure what to make of. It looks like there’s a maximum speed on the other side.”

“Can you unpack that, please?” Pa said.

“The
Y Que
went through the Ring going very fast,” Chan said. “About seven-tenths of a second after it reached the other side, it started a massive deceleration. Bled off almost all its speed in about five seconds. It looks like the nearly instant deceleration was what killed the pilot. Since then, it seems as if the ship is being moved out away from the Ring and deeper into whatever’s on the other side.”

“We know that when the protomolecule’s active, it’s been able to… alter what we’d expect from inertia,” Sam said. “Is that how it stopped the ship?”

“That’s entirely possible,” Chan said. “Mars has been pitching probes through the Ring, and it looks like we start seeing the effect right around six hundred meters per second. Under that, mass behaves just the way we expect it to. Over that, it stops dead and then moves off in approximately the same direction that the
Y Que
is going.”

Sam whistled under her breath.

“That’s
really
slow,” she said. “The main drives would be almost useless.”

“It’s slower than a rifle shot,” Chan said. “The good news is it only affects mass above the quantum level. The electromagnetic spectrum seems to behave normally, including visible light.”

“Thank God for small favors,” Sam said.

“What else are the probes telling us?”

“There’s something out there,” Chan said, and for the first time a sense of dread leaked into his voice. “The probes are seeing objects. Large ones. But there’s not much light except what we’re shining through the Ring or mounting on the probes. And, as I said, the Ring has always given inconsistent returns. If whatever’s in there is made of the same stuff, who knows?”

“Ships?” Ashford said.

“Maybe.”

“How many?”

“Over a hundred, under a hundred thousand. Probably.”

Bull leaned forward, his elbows on the table. Ashford and Pa were looking around the table at the graying faces. They’d known before, because they weren’t going to wait for a staff meeting to get their information. Now they were judging the reactions. So he’d give them a reaction. Control the fall.

“Be weirder if there wasn’t anything there. If it was an attack fleet, they’d have attacked by now.”

“Yeah,” Ruiz said, latching on to the words.

Ashford opened the floor for questions. How many probes had Mars fired through? How long would it take something going at six hundred meters per second to reach one of the structures? Had they tried sending small probes in? Had there been any contact from the protomolecule itself, the stolen voices of humans, the way there had been with Eros? Chan did his best to be reassuring without actually having anything more that he could say. Bull assumed there was a deeper report that Ashford and Pa were getting, and he wondered what was in it. Being kept out chafed.

“All right. This is all interesting, but it’s not our focus,” Ashford said, bringing the Q-and-A session to a halt. “We’re not here to send probes through the Ring. We’re not here to start a fight. We’re just making sure that whatever the inner planets do, we’re at the table. If something comes out of the Ring, we’ll worry about it then.”

“Yes, sir,” Bull said, throwing his own weight behind Ashford’s. It wasn’t like there was another strategy. Better that the crew see them all unified. People were watching how this all came down, and not just the crew.

“Mister Pa?” Ashford said. The XO nodded and glanced at Bull. Instinct dropped a weight in his gut.

“There have been some irregularities in the ship’s accounting structure,” Pa said. “Chief Engineer Rosenberg?”

Sam nodded, surprise on her face. “XO?” she said.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to restrict you to quarters and revoke your access privileges until this is all clarified. Chief Watanabe will relieve you. Mister Baca, you’ll see to it.”

The room was just as silent, but the meaning behind it was different now. Sam’s eyes were wide with disbelief and rising fury.

“Excuse me?” she said. Pa met her gaze coolly, and Bull understood all of it in an instant.

“Records show you’ve been drawing resources from work and materials budgets that weren’t appropriate,” Pa said, “and until the matter is resolved—”

“If this is about the tech support thing, that’s on me,” Bull said. “I authorized that. It’s got nothing to do with Sam.”

“I’m conducting a full audit, Mister Baca. If I find you’ve been drawing resources inappropriately, I’ll take the actions I deem appropriate. As your executive officer, I am informing you that Samara Rosenberg is to be confined to quarters and her access to ship’s systems blocked. Do you have any questions about that?”

She’d waited until they’d made the trip, until they’d gotten where they were going, and now it was time to establish that she was in control. To get back at him for the drug dealer he’d spaced and punish Sam for being his ally. Would have been stupid to do until their shakedown run was over. But now it was.

Bull laced his fingers together. The refusal was on the back of his tongue, waiting. It would have been insubordination, and it would have been easy as breathing out. There were years—decades even—when he’d have done it, and taken the consequences as a badge of honor. It had been his call, and standing by while Sam was punished for it was more than dishonorable, it was disloyal. Pa knew that. Anyone who’d read his service records would know it. If it had just been his mission, his career on the line, he’d have done it, but Fred Johnson had asked him to make this work. So there was only one play to make.

“No questions,” he said, rising from his chair. “Sam. You should come with me now.”

The others were silent as he led her out of the conference room. They all looked stunned and confused, except Ashford and Pa. Pa wore a poker face, and Ashford had a little shadow of smugness in the corners of his mouth. Sam’s breath shook. Outrage and adrenaline left her skin pale. He helped her into the side seat of his security cart, then got behind the controls. They lurched into motion, four small engines whirring and whining. They were almost at the elevators when Sam laughed. A short, mirthless sound as much like a cry of pain as anything.

“Holy shit,” Sam said.

Bull couldn’t think of anything to say that would pull the punch, so he only nodded and took the cart into the wide elevator car. Sam wept, but there was nothing that looked like sorrow in her expression. He guessed that she’d never suffered that kind of disciplinary humiliation before. Or if she had, it hadn’t been often enough to build up a callus. The dishonor of letting her take the hit was like he’d swallowed something before he’d chewed it enough, and now it wouldn’t go down.

Back at the security office, Serge was at the main desk. The man’s eyebrows rose as Bull came in the room.

“Hoy, bossman,” the duty officer said. A hardcore OPA bruiser named Jojo. “Que pasa?”

“Nothing good. What did I miss?”

“Complaint from a carnicería down by engineering about a missing goat. Got a note from one of the Earth ships lost one of their crew, wondering if we’d come up with an extra. A couple coyos got shit-faced and we locked ’em in quarters, told ’em we’d sic the Bull on ’em.”

“How’d they take that?”

“We had them mop up after.”

Bull chuckled before he sighed.

“So. I’ve got Samara Rosenberg in the cart outside,” he said. “XO wants her confined to quarters for unauthorized use of resources.”

“I want a pony in a wetsuit.” Jojo grinned.

“XO gave an order,” Bull said. “I want you to take her to her quarters. I’ll get her access pulled. We’ll need to set a guard while we’re at it. She’s pissed.”

Jojo scratched at his neck. “We’re doing it?”

“Yeah.”

Jojo’s face closed. Bull nodded toward the door. Jojo left, and Bull took his place at the desk, identifying himself to the system and starting the process of locking Sam out of her own ship. While the security system ran its check against each of the
Behemoth
’s subsystems, he leaned on his elbows and watched.

The first time Fred Johnson saved Bull’s life, he’d done it with a rifle and a mobile medical unit. The second time, he’d done it with a credit chip. Bull had mustered out at thirty and took his pension to Ceres. For three years, he’d just lived. Ate cheap, drank too much, slept in his own bed not knowing if he was sick from the alcohol or the spin. Not caring much. He got into a few fights, had a few disagreements with the local law. He didn’t see that he had a problem until it was unmistakable, and by then it was a hell of a problem.

Depression ran in his family. Self-medicating did too. His grandfather had died of the pair. His mother had been in therapy a couple times. His brother had graduated to heroin and lived five years in a treatment center in Roswell. None of it had seemed to have anything to do with Bull. He was a marine. He’d turned away from a life on basic to live in the stars, or if not the stars, at least the rocks that floated free in the night sky. He’d killed men. Bottle couldn’t beat him. But it almost had.