Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate (32 page)

“Is that why we came out here?” Bull said. It wasn’t a denial, and that seemed to be close enough to a confession for Ashford. Besides which, it wasn’t like Bull had been hiding it.

“And enemy military personnel? You’re bringing them aboard my ship as well?”

Pa had agreed to everything Ashford was listing off. But she stood behind the captain, not speaking up, expression unreadable. Bull wasn’t sure what was going on between the captain and his XO, but if they were working out some internal power struggle, Bull knew which side he’d want to end up on. So he bit the bullet and didn’t mention Pa’s involvement. “Yes, I’m bringing in everyone I can get. Humanitarian outreach and consolidation of control. It’s textbook. A second-year would know to do it.” Pa winced at that.

“Mister Baca, you have exceeded your authority. You have ignored the chain of command. All orders given by you, all permissions granted by you, are hereby revoked. I am relieving you of duty and instructing that you be placed in a medical coma until such time as you can be evacuated.”

“Like fuck you are,” Bull said. He hadn’t intended to, but the words came out like a reflex. They seemed to float in the air between them, and Bull discovered that he’d meant them.

“This isn’t open for debate,” Ashford said coldly.

“Damn right it’s not,” Bull said. “The reason you’re in charge of this mission and not me is that Fred Johnson didn’t think the crew would be comfortable with an Earther running a Belter ship. You got the job because you kissed all the right political asses. You know what? Good for you. Hope your career takes off like a fucking rocket. Pa’s here for the same reason. She’s got the right-sized head, though at least hers doesn’t seem to be empty.”

“That’s a racist insult,” Ashford said, trying to interrupt, “and I won’t have—”

“I’m here because they needed someone who could get the job done and they knew we were screwed. And you know what? We’re still screwed. But I’m going to get us out of here, and I’m going to keep Fred from being embarrassed by what we did here, and you are going to stay out of my way while I do it, you pinche motherfucker.”

“That’s enough, Mister Baca. I will—”

“You know it’s true,” Bull said, shifting to face Pa. Her expression was closed, empty. “If he’s in charge of this, he’s going to get it wrong. You’ve seen it. You know—”

“You will stop addressing the XO, Mister Baca.”

“—what kind of decisions he makes. He’ll send them back to their ships, even if it means people die because—”

“You are
relieved
. You will be—”

“—he wasn’t the one that invited them. It’s going to—”

“—quiet. I do not give you permission—”

“—make all of this more dangerous, and if someone—”

“—to speak to my staff. You will be—”

“—else pisses that thing off, we could all—”

“—
quiet!
” Ashford shouted, and he pushed forward, his mouth in a square gape of rage. He hit the medical bed too hard, pressing into Bull, grabbing him by the shoulder and shaking him hard enough to snap his teeth shut. “I told you to
shut up
!”

The restraints opened under Ashford’s attack, the Velcro ripping. Pain lanced through Bull’s neck like someone was pushing a screwdriver into his back. He tried to push the captain away, but there was nothing to grab hold of. His knuckles cracked against something hard: the table, the wall, something else. He couldn’t say what. People around him were shouting. His balance felt profoundly wrong, the dead weight of his body flowing limp and useless in the empty air, but tugged at by the tubes and the catheters.

When the world made sense again, he was at a forty-degree angle above the table, his head pointing down. Pa and Macondo were gripping Ashford’s arms, the captain’s hands bent into claws. Serge was bunched against the wall, ready to launch but not sure what direction he should go.

Doctor Sterling appeared at his side, gathering his legs and drawing him quickly and professionally back toward the bed.

“Could we please not assault the patient with the crushed spinal cord,” she said as she did, “because this makes me very uncomfortable.”

Another vicious flare of pain, hot and sharp and evil, ran through Bull’s neck and upper back as she strapped him down. One of the tubes was floating free, blood and a bit of flesh adhering to its end. He didn’t know what part of his body it had come out of. Pa was looking at him, and he kept his voice calm.

“We’ve already screwed up twice. We came through the Ring, and we let soldiers go on the station. We won’t get a third. We can get everyone together, and we can get them out of here.”

“That’s dangerous talk, mister,” Ashford spat.

“I can’t be captain,” Bull said. “Even if I wasn’t stuck in this bed, I’m an Earther. There has to be a Belter in charge. Fred was right about that.”

Ashford pulled his arms free of Pa and Macondo, plucked his sleeves back into trim, and steadied himself against the wall.

“Doctor, place Mister Baca in a medical coma. That is a direct order.”

“Serge,” Bull said. “I need you to take Captain Ashford into custody, and I need you to do it now.”

No one moved. Serge scratched his neck, the sounds of fingernails against stubble louder than anything in the room. Pa’s gaze locked in the middle distance, her face sour and angry. Ashford’s eyes narrowed, cutting over toward her. When she spoke, her voice was dead and joyless.

“Serge. You heard what the chief said.”

Ashford gathered himself to launch for Pa, but Serge already had a restraining hand on the captain’s shoulder.

“This is mutiny,” Ashford said. “There’ll be a reckoning for this.”

“You need to come with us now,” Serge said. Macondo took Ashford’s other arm and put it in an escort hold, and the three of them left together. Pa stayed against the wall, held steady by a strap, while the doctor, tutting and muttering under her breath, replaced the catheters and checked the monitors and tubes attached to his skin. For the most part, he didn’t feel it.

When she was done, the doctor left the room. The door slid closed behind her. For almost a minute, neither of them spoke.

“Guess your opinion on mutiny changed,” Bull said.

“Apparently,” Pa said, and sighed. “He’s not thinking straight. And he’s drinking too much.”

“He made the decision that brought us all here. He can sign his name to all the corpses on all those ships.”

“I don’t think he sees it that way,” Pa said. And then, “But I think he’s putting a
lot
of effort into not seeing it that way. And he’s slipping. I don’t think… I don’t think he’s well.”

“It’d be easier if he had an accident,” Bull said.

Pa managed a smile. “I haven’t changed
that
much, Mister Baca.”

“Didn’t figure. But I had to say it,” he said.

“Let’s focus on getting everyone safe, and then getting everyone home,” she said. “It was a nice career while it lasted. I’m sorry it’s ending this way.”

“Maybe it is,” Bull said. “But did you come out here to win medals or to do the right thing?”

Pa’s smile was thin.

“I’d hoped for both,” she said.

“Nothing wrong with a little optimism, long as it doesn’t set policy,” he said. “I’m going to keep on getting everyone on the
Behemoth
.”

“No weapons but ours,” she said. “We keep taking all comers, but not if it means having an armed force on the ship.”

“Already done,” Bull said.

Pa closed her eyes. It was easy to forget how much younger than him she was. This wasn’t her first tour, but it could have been her second. Bull tried to imagine what he’d have felt like, still half a kid, throwing his commanding officer into the brig. Scared as hell, probably.

“You did the right thing,” he said.

“You’d have to say that. I backed your play.”

Bull nodded. “I did the right thing. Thank you for supporting me, Captain. Please know that I’ll be returning that favor as long as you sit in the big chair.”

“We aren’t friends,” she said

“Don’t have to be, so long as we get the job done.”

T
he marines weren’t gentle, but they were professional. Holden had seen Martian powered armor used by a recon marine before. As they moved back through the caverns and tunnels of the station, Holden in thick foam restraints slung across one soldier’s back like a piece of equipment, he was aware of how much danger he was in. The men and women in the suits had just watched one of their own be killed and eaten by an alien, they were deep within territory as threatening and unfamiliar as anything he could imagine, and the odds were better than even that they were all blaming him for it. That he wasn’t dead already spoke to discipline, training, and a professionalism he would have respected even if his life hadn’t depended on it.

Whatever frequencies they were speaking on he didn’t have access to, so the furtive journey from the display chamber or whatever it had been back to the surface all happened in eerie silence as far as he was concerned. He kept hoping to catch a glimpse of Miller. Instead, they passed by the insectile machines, now as still as statues, and over the complex turf. He thought he could see something like a pattern in the waves and ripples that passed along the walls and floor, complicated and beautiful as raindrops falling on the surface of a lake, or music. It didn’t comfort him.

He tried to get through to the
Rocinante
, to Naomi, but the marine he was strapped to had either disabled his suit radio when they were restraining him or something had jammed the signal. One way or another, he couldn’t get anything. Not from the
Roci
, not from the marines, not from anywhere. There was only the gentle loping and an almost unbearable dread.

His suit gave him a low air warning.

He didn’t have any sense of where they were or how far they’d gone. The surface of the station might be through the next tunnel or they might not have reached the halfway point. Or, for that matter, the station could be changing around them, and the way they’d come in might not exist. The suit said he had another twenty minutes.

“Hey!” he shouted. He tried to swing his legs against the armor of the person carrying him. “Hey! I’m going to need air!”

The marine didn’t respond. No matter how hard Holden tried to thrash, his strength and leverage were a rounding error compared to the abilities of the powered armor. All he could do was hope that he wasn’t about to die from an oversight. Worrying about that was actually better than wondering about Naomi and Alex and Amos.

The air gauge was down to three minutes and Holden had shouted himself hoarse when the marine carrying him crouched slightly, hopped up, and the station fell away beneath them. The luminescent surface irised closed behind them, automatic and unthinking. The skiff hung in the vacuum not more than five hundred meters away, its exterior lights making it the brightest thing in the eerie starless sky. They found their way into the mass airlock quickly. Holden’s suit was blaring its emergency, the carbon dioxide levels crept up toward the critical level, and he had to fight to catch his breath.

The marine flipped him into a wall-mounted holding bar and strapped him in.

“I’m out of air!” Holden screamed. “Please!”

The marine reached out and cracked the seal on Holden’s suit. The rush of air smelled like old plastic and poorly recycled urine. Holden sucked it in like it was roses. The marine popped off his own helmet. His real head looked perversely small in the bulk of the combat armor.

“Sergeant Verbinski!” a woman’s voice snapped.

“Yes, sir,” the marine who’d been carrying him said.

“There something wrong with the prisoner?”

“He ran out of air a few minutes back.”

The woman grunted. Nothing more was said about it.

The acceleration burn, when it came, was almost subliminal. A tiny sensation of weight settling Holden into his suit, gone as soon as it came. The marines murmured among themselves and ignored him. It was all the confirmation he needed. What Miller had said was true. The slow zone’s top speed had changed again. And from the expressions on their faces, he guessed that the casualties had been terrible.

“I need to check in with my ship,” he said. “Can someone contact the
Rocinante
, please?” No one answered him. He pressed his luck. “My crew may be hurt. If we could just—”

“Someone shut the prisoner up,” the woman who’d spoken before said. He still couldn’t see her. The nearest marine, a thick-jawed man with skin so black it seemed blue turned toward him. Holden braced himself for a threat or violence.

“There’s nothing you could do,” the man said. “Please be quiet now.”

His cell in the brig of the
Hammurabi
was a little over a meter and a half wide and three meters deep. The crash couch was a dirty blue and the walls and floor a uniform white that gleamed in the harsh light of the overhead LED. The jumpsuit he’d been issued felt like thick paper and crackled when he moved. When the guards came for him, they didn’t bother putting the restraints back on his arms and legs.

The captain floated near a desk, her close-cropped silver hair making her look like an ancient Roman emperor. Holden was strapped into a crash couch that was canted slightly forward, so that he had to look up at her, even without the convenience of an up.

“I am Captain Jakande,” she said. “You are a military prisoner. Do you understand what that means?”

“I was in the navy,” Holden said. “I understand.”

“Good. That’ll cut about half an hour of legal bullshit.”

“I’ll happily tell you everything I know,” Holden said. “No need for the rough stuff.”

The captain smiled like winter.

“If you were anyone else, I’d think that was a figure of speech,” she said. “What is your relationship to the structure at the center of the slow zone? What were you doing there?”

He had spent so many months trying not to talk about Miller, trying not to tell anyone anything. Except Naomi, and even then he’d felt guilty putting the burden of the mystery on her. On one hand, the chance to unburden himself pulled at him like gravity. On the other…

He took a deep breath.

“This is going to sound a little strange,” he said.

“All right.”

“Shortly after the protomolecule construct lifted off from Venus and headed out to start assembling the Ring? I was… contacted by Detective Josephus Miller. The one who rode Eros down onto Venus. Or at least something that looked and talked like him. He’s shown up every few weeks since then, and I came to the conclusion that the protomolecule was using him. Well, him and Julie Mao, who was the first one to be infected, to drive me out through the Ring. I thought that they… it wanted me to come here.”

The captain’s expression didn’t change. Holden felt a strange lump in his throat. He didn’t want to be having this conversation here. He wanted to be talking with Naomi in their bedroom on the
Rocinante
. Or at a bar on Ceres. It didn’t matter where. Only who.

Was she dead? Had the station killed her?

“Go on,” the captain said.

“Apparently I was mistaken,” Holden said.

He began with the journey out, with the protomolecule’s vision of Miller waiting for him at the station. The attack by her marine, and the consequences as Miller explained them. The visions of the vast empire and the darkness that flowed over it, the death of suns. He relaxed as he went along, the words coming easier, faster. He sounded insane even to himself. Visions no one else could see. Vast secrets revealed only to him.

Except it had all been a mistake.

He’d thought he was important. That he was special and chosen, and that what had happened to him and his crew had been dictated by a vast and mysterious power. He’d misunderstood everything.
Doors and corners
, Miller had said, and because he hadn’t puzzled out what the dead man meant by it, they’d all come through the Ring. And to the station. His relief and his growing self-disgust mingled with every phrase. He’d been a fool dancing at the edge of the cliff, because he’d been sure that he couldn’t fall. Not him.

“And then I was here, talking to you,” he said dryly. “I don’t know what happens next.”

“All right,” she said. Her expression gave away nothing.

“You’ll want a full medical workup to see if there’s anything organically wrong with my brain,” Holden said.

“Probably,” the captain said. “My medical staff has its hands full at the moment. You will be kept in administrative detention for the time being.”

“I understand,” Holden said. “But I need to get in contact with my crew. You can monitor the connection. I don’t care. I just need to know they’re okay.”

The angle of the captain’s mouth asked why he thought they were.

“I’ll try to get a report to you,” she said. “Everyone’s scrambling right now, and the situation could get worse quickly.”

“Is it bad, then?”

“It is.”

 

 

Time in his cell passed slowly. A guard brought tubes of rations: protein, oil, water, and vegetable paste. Sometimes it had a nearly homeopathic dose of curry. It was food meant to keep you alive. Everything after that was your own problem. Holden ate it because he had to stay alive. He had to find his crew, his ship. He had to get out of there.

He had seen a massive alien empire fall. He’d seen suns blown apart. He’d watched a man overwhelmed and slaughtered by nightmare mechanisms on a space station that human hands hadn’t built. All he could think about was Naomi and Amos and Alex. How they were going to keep their ship. How they were going to get home. And home meant anyplace but here. Not for the first time, he wished they were all transporting sketchy boxes of unknown cargo to Titania. He floated in the coffin-sized cell and tried not to go crazy from the toxic combination of inaction and mind-bending fear.

Even if the whole crew was well, he was in custody of Mars now. He hadn’t harmed the
Seung Un
, and everyone would know that. He hadn’t made the false broadcast. All the things they were accusing him of could fall away, and there would still be the fact that Mars would take away his ship. He tried to focus on that despair, because as bad as it would be, if he kept the ship and lost his crew, that would feel worse.

“You’ve got lousy taste in friends,” Miller said.

“Where the hell have you been?” Holden snapped.

The dead man shrugged. In the cramped quarters, Holden could smell the man’s breath. A firefly flicker of blue sped around Miller’s head like a low-slung halo and vanished.

“Time’s hard,” he said, as if the comment carried its own context. “Anyway, we were talking about something.”

“The station. The lockdown.”

“Right,” Miller said, nodding. He plucked off his ridiculous hat and scratched his temple. “That. So the thing is, as long as there’s a shitload of high energy floating around, the station’s not going to get comfortable. You guys have, what? Twenty big ships?”

“About that, I guess.”

“They’ve all got fusion reactions. They’ve all got massive internal power grids. Not a big deal by themselves, but the station’s been spooked a couple times. It’s jumpy. You’re going to have to give it a little massage. Show that you’re not a threat. Do that, and I’m pretty sure I can get you moving again. That or it’ll break you all down to your component atoms.”

“It’ll what?”

Miller’s smile was apologetic.

“Sorry,” he said. “Joke. Just get the reactors off-line and the internal grids off. It’ll get you below threshold, and I can take it from there. I mean, if that’s what you decide you want to do.”

“What do you mean,
if
?”

Holden shifted. The ceiling brushed against his shoulders. He couldn’t stretch in here. There wasn’t room for two people.

There wasn’t room for two people.

For a fraction of a second, his brain tried to fit two images—Miller floating beside him and the too-small cell—together and failed. The flesh on his back felt like there were insects crawling all over it. The two things couldn’t both be true, and his brain shuddered and recoiled from the fact that they were. Miller coughed.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “This is hard enough the way it is. What I mean by
if
is that lockdown’s lockdown. I don’t get to pick what part of the trap gets unsprung. If I take off the dampening and you all start burning for home or shooting at each other or whatever, that means I also open the gates. All of them.”

“Including the ones with the burned-up stars?”

“No,” Miller said. “Those gates are gone. Only real star systems on the other side of the ones that are left.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Depends on what comes through,” Miller said. “That’s a lot of doors to kick down all at once.” The only sound was the hiss of the air recyclers. Miller nodded as if Holden had said something. “The other option is figure out a way to sneak back home with your tails between your legs and try and pretend this all never happened.”

“You think we should do that?”