Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate (41 page)

“How nice for you,” she said, carefully keeping her tone neutral.

“Doctor Volovodov…
Anna
, I would like your support.” Anna couldn’t stop the snort of disbelief in time, but he pressed on. “You have a way with people. I’m fine in front of a camera, but I’m not as good one-on-one, and that’s where you shine. That’s your gift. And we are about to face terrible personal challenges. Things people will have a hard time understanding. I would like your voice there with me to reassure them.”

“What are you talking about?” Anna said, barely squeezing the words past a growing lump in her throat. She had the sense of a terrible secret about to be revealed. Cortez shone with the invincible certainty of the true believer.

“We are going to close the gate,” he said. “We have a weapon in our possession that we believe will work.”

“No,” Anna said more in disbelief than in denying his claims.

“Yes. Even now engineers work to refit this vessel’s communications laser to make it powerful enough to destroy the Ring.”

“I don’t mean that,” Anna started, but Cortez just continued speaking.

“We are lost, but we can protect those we’ve left behind. We can end the greatest threat the human race has ever known. All it requires is that we sacrifice any hope of return. A small price to pay for—”

“No,” Anna said again, more forcefully. “No, you don’t get to decide that for all of these people.”
For me
, she thought.
You don’t get to take my wife and daughter away like that. Just because you’re afraid
.

“In times of great danger and sacrifice such as this, some will step forward to make the difficult decisions. Ashford has done that, and I support him. Now it is our role to make sure the people understand and cooperate. They need to know that their sacrifice will protect the billions of people we’ve left behind.”

“We don’t know that,” Anna said.

“This station has already claimed hundreds of lives, maybe thousands.”

“Because we keep making decisions without knowing what the consequences are. We chased Holden’s ship through the Ring, we sent soldiers to the station to hunt him, we keep acting without information and then being angry when it hurts us.”

“It didn’t hurt us. It killed us. A lot of us.”

“We’re like children,” Anna said, pushing herself to her feet and lecturing down at him. “Who burn their hands on a hot stove and then think the solution is to blow up all the stoves.”

“Eros,” Cortez started.

“
We
did that! And Ganymede, and Phoebe, all the rest! We did it. We keep acting without thinking and you think the solution is to do it one more time. You have allied yourself with stupid, violent men, and you are trying to convince yourself that being stupid and violent will work. That makes you stupid too. I will never help you. I’ll fight you now.”

Cortez stood up and called to the people waiting outside. A Belter with protective chest armor and a rifle came into the tent.

“Will you shoot me too?” Anna said, putting as much contempt into the words as she could.

Cortez turned his back on her and left with the gunman.

Anna sank down into her chair, her legs suddenly too shaky to support her. She doubled over, rocking back and forth and taking long shuddering breaths to calm herself. Somehow, she didn’t black out.

“Did he hurt you?” Tilly said from behind her. Her friend put a gentle hand on the back of her neck as she rocked.

“No,” Anna said. It wasn’t technically a lie.

“Oh, Annie. They have Claire. They wouldn’t let me talk to her. I don’t know if she’s a hostage or—”

Before she knew she was going to do it, Anna had jumped to her feet and run out of the tent. They’d be going to the elevator that ran up the side of the drum and connected with the passages to the command decks and engineering. They’d be going to the bridge. Men like Cortez and Ashford, men who wanted to be in charge, they’d be on the bridge. She ran toward the elevator as fast as her legs would carry her. She hadn’t actually run in years. Living in a small station tunneled into the ice of Europa, it just hadn’t come up. She was out of breath in moments, but pushed on, ignoring the nausea and the stitch in her ribs.

She reached the elevator just as Cortez and his small band of gun-toting thugs climbed inside. Clarissa was standing at the back of the group, looking small and frail surrounded by soldiers in armor. As the doors slid closed, she smiled at Anna and raised one hand in a wave.

Then she was gone.

“H
ey, Cap?” Amos said from his bed. “That was the third armed patrol that’s gone past this room in about three hours. Some shit is going down.”

“I know,” Holden said quietly. It was obvious that the situation on the
Behemoth
had changed. People with guns were moving through the corridors with hard expressions. Some of them had pulled a doctor aside, had a short but loud argument with her, then taken a patient away in restraints. It felt like a coup in progress, but according to Naomi the security chief Bull had already mutinied and taken the ship from the original Belter captain. And nothing had happened that would explain why he’d suddenly need to put a lot more boots on the ground or begin making arrests.

It felt like a civil war was brewing, or being squashed.

“Should we do something?” Amos asked.

Yes
, Holden thought.
We should do something. We should get back to the
Rocinante
and hide until Miller gets done doing whatever he was doing and releases the ships in the slow zone
. Then they should burn like hell out of this place and never look back. Unfortunately, his crew was still laid up and he didn’t exactly have a ride waiting to take him to his ship.

“No,” he said instead. “Not until we understand what’s happening. I just got
out
of jail. Not in a hurry to go back.”

Alex sat up in bed, and then moaned at the effort. The top of his head was swathed in bloodstained bandages, and the left side of his face had a mushy, pulpy look to it. The speed limit change had thrown him face first into one of the cockpit’s viewscreens. If he hadn’t been at least partially belted into his chair, he’d probably be dead.

“Maybe we should find a quieter place than this to hole up,” he said. “They don’t seem opposed to arresting patients so far.”

Holden nodded with his fist. He was starting to pick up Naomi’s Belter-style gestures, but whenever he caught himself using one he felt awkward, like a kid pretending to be an adult. “My time on this ship has been limited to the docking bay and this room. I don’t have any idea where a quieter place would be.”

“Well,” Naomi said. “That puts you one up on us. None of us were conscious when they brought us here.”

Holden hopped off the edge of her bed and moved to the door, closing it as quietly as possible. He looked around for something to jam it shut with, but quickly decided it was hopeless. The habitation spaces in the
Behemoth
’s drum were built for low weight, not durability. The walls and door of the hospital room were paper-thin layers of epoxy and woven carbon fiber. A good kick would probably bring the entire structure down. Barricading the door would only signal patrols that something was wrong, and then delay them half a second while they broke it.

“Maybe that preacher can help us,” Alex said.

“Yeah.” Amos nodded. “Red seems like good people.”

“No hitting on the preacher,” Holden said, pointing at Amos with an accusing finger.

“I just—”

“But it doesn’t matter, because if she has even half a brain—and I suspect she has a lot more than that—she’ll be busily hiding herself. And she’s not from here. We need an insider.”

“Sam,” Naomi said, just as Holden was thinking the same name. “She’s chief engineer on this boat. No one will know it like she does.”

“Does she owe you any favors?” Holden asked.

Naomi gave him a sour look and pulled his hand terminal off his belt. “No. I owe her about a thousand,” she said as she opened a connection request to Sam. “But she’s a friend. Favors don’t matter.”

She laid the terminal on the bed with the speaker on. The triple beep of an unanswered voice request sounding once a second. Alex and Amos were staring at it intensely, eyes wide. As though it were a bomb that might go off at any moment. In a way, Holden thought, it was. They were about as helpless right now as he could ever remember them being. Holden found himself wishing that Miller would appear and fix everything with alien magic.

“Yo,” a voice said from the terminal. “Knuckles.”

At some point over the last year, Sam had given Naomi the nickname Knuckles. Holden had never been able to figure out why, and Naomi had never offered to explain.

“Sammy,” Naomi replied, the relief in her voice obvious. “We really, really need your help.”

“Funny,” Sam said. “I was just thinking of coming by to ask for
your
help. Coincidence? Or something more?”

“We were calling you to find a hiding spot,” Amos yelled out. “If you were calling us for the same thing, you’re fucked.”

“No, that’s a good idea. I’ve got a spot you can hole up for a while, and I’ll come meet you there. Knuckles, you’ll have the layout in just a second. Just follow the map. I’ll be there as soon as I can. You kids take care of yourselves.”

“You do the same, Sammy,” Naomi said, then killed the connection. She worked the terminal for a few seconds. “Okay, I see it. Looks like unused storage just a couple hundred meters aft and spinward.”

“You get to navigate,” Holden said to her, then added, “Can everyone walk?”

Amos and Alex both nodded, but Naomi said, “Alex’s skull is being held together with glue right now. If he gets dizzy and falls, he’s not getting up again.”

“Now XO,” Alex objected. “I can—”

“Naomi can’t walk,” Amos said. “So you put her on a rolling bed with Alex and push them. I’ll take point. Gimme that map.”

Holden didn’t argue. He picked Naomi up from her bed, trying to jostle her as little as possible, then set her next to Alex on his. “Why am I pushing instead of walking point?”

“He broke his left arm,” Naomi said, scooting as close to Alex as possible and then securing the lap restraint across them both. When Amos began to protest she added, “And all the ribs on his left side.”

“Right,” Holden said, grabbing the push bars at the head of the bed and kicking off the wheel locks. “Lead the way.”

Amos led them through the makeshift hospital corridors, smiling at everyone he passed, moving with an easy stride that made him look like a man with a destination but no hurry to get there. Even the armed patrol they passed barely gave him a glance. When they looked curiously at Holden, pushing two injured people on the same bed, he said, “Two to a bed now. That’s how crowded we’re getting.” They just nodded him past, their expressions both sullen and bored.

Holden hadn’t had much chance to look around the rest of the hospital. After leaving the docks he’d hurried straight to his crew’s room and hadn’t left since. But now, as he moved through the halls and intersections toward the exit, he had a chance to look over the full extent of the damage the catastrophic speed limit change had caused.

Every bed in every room was filled with injured people, and sometimes the benches and chairs in the waiting areas. Most of the injuries were contusions or broken bones, but some were more severe. He saw more than one amputation, and quite a few people hanging in traction with serious spinal injuries. But more than the physical damage, there was the stunned look of shock on every face. The sort of expression Holden associated with the recent victims or witnesses of violent crime. The
Rocinante
had tracked and disabled a pirate slaver ship a few months back, and the beaten and starving prisoners pulled from her hold had looked like this. Not just hurt, but robbed of hope.

Someone with a doctor’s uniform watched Holden push the bed past, his eyes following their progress, but exhaustion robbing him of curiosity. From a small room to his right, Holden heard the electric popping sound of a cauterizing gun, and the smell of cooking meat filled the air.

“This is horrifying,” he whispered to Naomi. She nodded but said nothing.

“None of us shoulda come here,” Alex said.

Doors and corners
, Miller had warned him. The places where you got killed if you weren’t paying attention. Where the ambushes happened.
Could have been a little more explicit
, Holden thought, and then imagined Miller shrugging apologetically and bursting into a cloud of blue gnats.

Amos, half a dozen meters ahead, came to a four-way junction in the corridor and turned right. Before Holden could cross half the distance to the turn, a pair of OPA goons walked into the intersection from the left.

They paused, looking over Naomi and Alex snuggled up in the rolling bed. One of them smirked and half turned to his companion. Holden could almost hear the joke he was about to make about two people to a bed. In preparation, he smiled and readied a laugh. But before the jokester could speak, his companion said, “That’s James Holden.”

Everything after that happened quickly.

The pair of OPA thugs scrambled to get at the shotguns slung over their shoulders. Holden shoved the rolling gurney into their thighs, knocking them back, and gave the corridor a frantic glance looking for a weapon. One of the thugs managed to fumble his shotgun down off his shoulder and rack it, but Naomi scooted forward on the bed and drove her heel into his groin. His partner stepped back, finished getting his hands on his shotgun, and pointed it at her. Holden started to run forward, knowing he was too slow, knowing he’d watch Naomi blown apart long before he could reach the gunman.

Then both gunmen turned toward each other and slammed their faces together. They slumped to the floor, guns falling from nerveless fingers. Amos stood behind them, grimacing and massaging his left shoulder.

“Sorry, Cap,” he said. “Got a little too far ahead there.”

Holden leaned against the corridor wall, legs barely able to support him even in the light gravity. “No apologies. Nice save.” He nodded toward the shoulder that Amos continued to rub with a pained look. “Thought that was broken.”

Amos snorted. “It didn’t fall off. Plenty left in here for a couple of idiots like this.” He bent down and stripped the two fallen men of their weapons and ammunition. A nurse walked up behind Holden, a plastic case in her hands and a question on her face.

“Nothing to see here,” Holden said. “We’ll be gone in a minute.”

She pointed at a nearby door. “Supply closet. No one will notice them in there for a while.” Then she turned and went back the way she came.

“You have a fan,” Naomi said from the bed.

“Not everyone in the OPA hates us,” Holden replied, moving around the gurney to help Amos drag the unconscious men into the closet. “We did good work for them for over a year. People know that.”

Amos handed Holden a compact black pistol and a pair of extra magazines. Holden tucked the gun into the waistband of his pants and pulled his shirt down over it. Amos did the same with a second gun, then put the two shotguns onto the gurney next to Naomi and covered them with the sheet.

“We don’t want to get in a gunfight,” Holden warned Amos as they began moving again.

“Yeah,” Amos said. “But if we’re in one anyway, it’ll be nice to have guns.”

The hospital exit was a short distance down the right-hand hallway, and suddenly they were outside. Or as outside as you could get in the
Behemoth
’s massive habitation drum. From outside, the hospital structure looked cheap and hastily assembled. A football-field-sized shanty made of epoxied carbon and fiberglass. A few hundred meters away, the edge of a city of tents spread out like acne on the drum’s smooth skin.

“That way,” Naomi said, pointing toward a more permanent-looking steel structure. Holden pushed the gurney, and Amos walked a few meters ahead, smiling and nodding at anyone who looked at them. Something in Amos’ face making them scurry away and not look back.

As they approached the squat metal structure, a door opened in the side and Sam’s pixie face appeared, waving a hand at them impatiently. A few minutes and some twisty corridors later, they were in a small, empty metal-walled room. Amos immediately dropped to the floor, laying his left arm and back flat against it.

“Ow,” he said.

“You hurt?” Sam asked, locking the door behind them with a small metal keycard, and then tossing the card to Naomi.

“Everyone’s hurt,” Holden said. “So what the hell is going on?”

Sam blew her lips out and ran one greasy hand through her red hair. The streaks of black already in it told Holden she’d been doing a lot of that. “Ashford retook the ship. He’s got some sort of coalition of bigwigs from the UN Navy, the Martians, and some of the important civilians.”

“Okay,” Holden said, realizing that his lack of context made most of that sentence pretty meaningless, but not wanting to waste time with explanations. “So the people roaming the halls with guns are Ashford’s?”

“Yep. He’s taking out anyone who helped Bull or Pa with the original mutiny, or, y’know, anyone he thinks is a threat.”

“From the way they tried to shoot us, we’re on that list,” Naomi said.

“Definitely.” Sam nodded. “I haven’t been able to track down Pa, but Bull called me, so I know he’s okay.”

“Sam,” Holden said, patting the air in a calming gesture. “Keep in mind I have no idea who these people are or why they are important, and we don’t have time for a who’s who. Just tell us the important bits.”

Sam started to object, then shrugged and briefly explained the plan to use the comm laser. “If I do what he’s asking me to do, we’ll be able to get a pulse out of it that’ll be hotter than a star for about three-quarters of a second. It will melt that entire side of the ship in the process.”

“Does he know that?” Naomi asked, incredulity in her voice.

“He doesn’t care. Whether it works on the Ring or not, we have to stop him. There are thousands of people on this ship right now, and they’ll all die if he gets his way.”

Holden sank down onto the edge of the gurney with a long exhale. “Oh, we’re the least of the problem,” he said. “This is suddenly much, much bigger than that.”

Sam cocked her head at him, frowning a question.

“I’ve seen what this station does to threats,” Holden said. “Miller showed me, when I was there. All this slow zone stuff is non-lethal deterrent as far as it’s concerned. If that big blue ball out there decides us monkeys are an actual threat, it will autoclave our solar system.”