Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate (44 page)

From what?
she wondered.

“Thank you,” Cortez said. His smile looked more familiar now. More like the man she saw on screens. “I knew that there would be some resistance to doing the right thing here. But I wasn’t ready for it. Spiritually, I wasn’t ready for it. Surprised me.”

“It’ll do that,” Clarissa said.

Cortez nodded. He was about her father’s age. She tried to imagine Jules-Pierre Mao floating in the little space, weeping over a dead engineer. She couldn’t. She couldn’t imagine him here at all, couldn’t picture what he looked like exactly. All of her impressions were of his power, his wit, his overwhelming importance. The physical details were beside the point. Cortez looked at himself in the mirror, set his own expression.

He’s about to die
, she thought.
He’s about to condemn himself and everyone on this ship to dying beyond help, here in the darkness, because he thinks it is the right and noble thing to do
. Was that what Ashford was doing too? She wished now that she’d talked to him more when they’d been prisoners together. Gotten to understand him and who he was. Why he was willing to die for this. And more than that, why he was willing to kill. Maybe it was altruism and nobility. Maybe it was fear. Or grief. As long as he did what needed doing, it didn’t matter why, but she found she was curious. She knew why she was here, at least. To redeem herself. To die for a reason, and make amends.

You’re trying to distract yourself.
 

“—don’t you think?” Cortez said. His smile was gentle and rueful, and she didn’t have any idea what he’d been saying.

“I guess,” she said and pushed back from the doorframe to give him room. Cortez pulled himself by handholds, trying to keep his body oriented with head toward the ceiling and feet toward the floor, even though crawling along the walls was probably safer and more efficient. It was something people who lived with weight did by instinct. Clarissa only noticed it because she wasn’t doing it. The room was just the room, no up or down, anything a floor or a wall or a ceiling. She expected a wave of vertigo that didn’t come.

“You know it doesn’t matter,” she said.

Cortez smiled at her, tilting his head in a question.

“If we’re all sacrifices, it doesn’t matter when we go,” Clarissa said. “She went a little before us. We’ll go a little later. It doesn’t even matter if we all go willingly to the altar, right? All that matters is that we break the Ring so everyone on the other side is safe.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Cortez said. “Thank you for reminding me.”

An alert sounded in the next room, and Clarissa turned toward it. Ashford had undone his straps and was floating above his control panel, his face stony with rage.

“What’s going on, Jojo?”

“I think we’ve got a problem, sir…”

E
verything about the former colonial administrative offices made Holden sad. The drab, institutional green walls, the cluster of cubicles in the central workspace, the lack of windows or architectural flourishes. The Mormons had been planning to run the human race’s first extrasolar colony from a place that would have been equally at home as an accounting office. It felt anticlimactic.
Hello, welcome to your centuries-long voyage to build a human settlement around another star! Here’s your cubicle.

The space had been repurposed in a way that at least gave it a lived-in feel. A cobbled-together radio occupied one entire closet, just off the main broadcasting set. The size saying more about the slapdash construction than about the broadcasting power. The current fleet was in a small enough space to pick up a decent handheld set. A touch screen on one wall acted as a whiteboard for the office, lists of potential interviews and news stories listed along with contact names and potential public interest. Holden was oddly flattered to see his name next to the note
Hot, find a way to get this
.

Now the room buzzed with activity. Bull’s people were trickling in a few at a time. Most of them brought duffel bags full of weapons or ammunition. A few brought tools in formed plastic cases with wheels on the bottom. They were preparing to armor the former office space into a mini-fortress. Holden leaned against an unused desk and tried to stay out of everyone’s way.

“Hey,” Monica said, appearing at his side out of nowhere. She nodded her head at the board. “When I heard you were back from the station, I was hoping I could get an interview from you. Guess I missed my chance, though.”

“Why?”

“Next to this end-of-the-world shit, you’ve slipped a couple notches in the broadcast schedule.”

Holden nodded, then shrugged. “I’ve been famous before. It’s not so great.”

Monica sat on the desk next to him and handed him a drinking bulb. When Holden tasted it, it turned out to be excellent coffee. He closed his eyes for a moment, sighing with pleasure. “Okay, now I’m just a little in love with you.”

“Don’t tease a girl,” she replied. “Will this work? This plan of Bull’s?”

“Am I on the record?”

Someone started welding a sheet of metal to the wall, forcing them both to throw up their hands to block the light. The air smelled like sulfur and hot steel.

“Always,” Monica said. “Will it?”

“Maybe. There’s a reason military ships are scuttled the second someone takes engineering. If you don’t own that ground, you don’t own the ship.”

Monica smiled as if that all made sense to her. Holden wondered how much actually did. She wasn’t a wartime reporter. She was a documentary producer who’d wound up in the wrong place at the right time. He finished off the last of his coffee with a pang of regret and waited to see if she had anything else to ask. If he was nice, maybe she’d find him a refill.

“And this Sam person can do that?” she said.

“Sam’s been keeping the
Roci
in the air for almost three years now. She was one of Tycho’s best and brightest. Yeah, if she’s got your engine room and she doesn’t like you, you’re screwed.”

“Want more coffee?”

“Good God, yes,” Holden said, holding out his bulb like a street beggar.

Before Monica could take it, Bull came clumping over to them in his mechanical walker. He started to speak and then began a wet, phlegmy cough that lasted several seconds. Holden thought he looked like a man who was dying by centimeters.

“Sorry,” Bull said, spitting into a wadded-up rag. “That’s disgusting.”

“If you die,” Monica said, “I won’t get my exclusive.”

Bull nodded and began another coughing fit.

“If you die,” Holden said, “can I have all your stuff?”

Bull gave a grand, sweeping gesture at the office around them. “Someday, my boy, this will all be yours.”

“What’s the word?” Holden asked, raising the bulb to his lips and being disappointed at its emptiness all over again.

“Corin found the preacher, huddled up with half her congregation in their church tent.”

“Great,” Holden said. “Things are starting to come together.”

“Better than you think. Half the people in that room were UN and Martian military. They’re coming with her. She says they’ll back her story when she asks the other ships to shut down. It also won’t hurt to have a few dozen more able bodies to man the defenses when Ashford comes after us.”

As Bull spoke, Holden saw Amos enter the offices pushing the bed Alex and Naomi were on. A knot he hadn’t even realized he had relaxed in his shoulders. Bull was still talking about utilizing the new troops for their defensive plans, but Holden wasn’t listening. He watched Amos move the gurney to a safe corner at the back of the room and then wander over to stand next to them.

“Nothing new outside,” Amos said when Bull stopped talking. “Same small patrols of Ashford goons walking the drum, but they don’t act like they know anything’s up.”

“They’ll know as soon as we do our first broadcast,” Monica said.

“How’s that shoulder?” Holden asked.

“Sore.”

“I’ve been thinking I want you to take command of the defense here once the shit hits the intake.”

“Yeah, okay,” Amos said. He knew Holden was asking him to protect Naomi and Alex. “I guess that means you’re going down to—”

He was interrupted by a loud buzzing coming from Bull’s pocket. Bull pulled a beat-up hand terminal out and stared at it like it might explode.

“Is that an alarm?” Holden asked.

“Emergency alert on my private security channel,” Bull said, still not answering it. “Only the senior staff can use that channel.”

“Ashford, trying to track you down?” Holden asked, but Bull ignored him and answered the call.

“Bull here. Ruiz, I—” Bull started, then stopped and just listened. He grunted a few times, though Holden couldn’t tell if they were assents or negations. When he finished the call, he dropped the hand terminal on the desk behind him without looking at it. His brown skin, recently gray with sickness, had turned almost white. He reached up with both hands to wipe away what Holden realized with shock were tears. Holden would not have guessed the man was capable of weeping.

“Ashford,” Bull started, then began a long coughing fit that looked suspiciously like sobbing. When he’d finally stopped, his eyes and mouth were covered with mucus. He pulled a rag out of his pocket and wiped most of it off, then said, “Ashford killed Sam.”

“What?” Holden asked. His brain refused to believe this could be true. He’d heard the words clearly, but those words could not be, so he must have heard them wrong. “What?”

Bull took a long breath, gave his face one last wipe with the rag, then said, “He brought her up to the bridge to ask about the laser mods, and then he shot her. He made Anamarie Ruiz the chief engineer.”

“How do you know?” Monica asked.

“Because that was Ruiz on the line just now. She wants us to get her the hell out of there,” Bull said. Almost all traces of his grief were gone from his face. He took another long, shuddering breath. “She knows Ashford has completely gone around the bend, but what can she do?”

Holden shook his head, still refusing to believe it. Brilliant little Sam, who fixed his ship, who was Naomi’s best friend, whom Alex and Amos shared a good-natured crush on.
That
Sam couldn’t be dead.

Amos was staring at him. The big man’s hands were curled into fists, his knuckles a bloodless white.

“We have to hold this ground,” Holden said, hoping to head off Amos’ next words. “I need you to hold it or this whole thing falls apart.”

“Then you kill him,” Amos said, his words terrifyingly flat and emotionless. “None of this trial bullshit. No righteous man among the savages bullshit. You fucking kill him, or so help me God…”

Holden felt a sudden nausea almost drive him to his knees. He took a few deep breaths to push it back. This was what they had to offer to Sam’s memory. After all she’d done for them. All she’d meant to them. They had violence, arguments about the best way to get revenge. Sam, who as far as he knew had never hurt another person in her life. Would she want this? He could picture her there, telling Amos and Bull to put their testosterone away and act like adults. The thought almost made him vomit.

Monica put a hand on his back. “Are you okay?”

“I have to tell Naomi,” was all he could say, then he pushed her hand away and walked across a floor that moved under his feet like the rolling deck of an oceangoing ship.

Naomi reacted only with sorrow, not with anger. She cried, but didn’t demand revenge. She repeated Sam’s name through her tears, but didn’t say Ashford’s once. It seemed like the right reaction. It seemed like love.

He was holding Naomi while she gently wept when Bull clumped up behind him. He felt a flash of anger, but swallowed it.

“What?”

“Look,” Bull said, rubbing his buzz cut with both hands. “I know this is a shitty time, but we have to talk about where we go from here.”

Holden shrugged.

“Sam’s gone, and she was pretty central to our plans…”

“I understand,” Naomi said. “I’ll go.”

“What?” Holden said, feeling like they were having a conversation in some kind of code he didn’t understand. “Go where?”

“With Sam gone, Naomi is the best engineer we’ve got,” Bull said.

“What about this Ruiz person? I thought she was the chief engineer now.”

“She was in charge of infrastructure,” Bull said. “And I’ve seen Nagata’s background. She’s got the training and the experience. And we trust her. If someone’s going to take Sam’s place—”

“No,” Holden said without thinking about it. Naomi was hurt. She couldn’t fight her way into the engine room now. And Sam had been killed.

“I’ll go,” Naomi repeated. “My arm is for shit, but I can walk. If someone can help me once we get there, I can take out the bridge and shut down the reactor.”

“No,” Holden said again.

“Yeah, me too,” Alex added. He was sitting on the edge of the gurney facing away from them. He’d been shaking like he was crying, but hadn’t made a sound. His voice sounded dry, like fallen leaves rustling in the wind. Brittle and empty. “I guess I have to go too.”

“Alex, you don’t—” Naomi started, but he kept talking over the top of her.

“Nobody pulled the
Roci
’s batteries off-line when we left, so if we’re shutting everything down, she’ll need someone to do it.”

Bull nodded. Holden wanted to smack him for agreeing with any of this.

“And that’ll be me,” Alex said. “I can tag along as far as engineering, grab an EVA pack there, and use the aft airlock to get out.”

Amos moved over behind Bull, his face still flat, emotionless, but his hands in fists. “Alex is going?”

“New plan,” Bull said loud enough for everyone to hear. People stopped whatever they were doing and moved over to listen. More must have arrived, because there were almost fifty in the office now. At the back of the room stood a small knot of people in military uniforms. Anna the redheaded preacher was with them. She was holding hands with an aggressively thin woman who alternated smoking and tapping her front teeth with her pinky fingernail. Bull spotted them at the same time Holden did, and waved them forward.

“Anna, come on up here,” he said. “Most everyone is here now, so this is how it’s going to go down.”

The room got quiet. Anna made her way up to Bull and waited. Her skinny friend came with her, staring at the crowd around the preacher with the suspicious eyes of a bodyguard.

“In”—Bull stopped to look at a nearby wall panel with a clock on it—“thirty minutes, I will take a team made up of security personnel and the crew of the
Rocinante
to the southern drum access point. We will retake that access point and gain entrance into the engineering level. Once we control engineering, Monica and her team will begin a broadcast explaining to the rest of the fleet about the need to kill the power. Preacher, that’s where you and your people come in.”

Anna turned and smiled at her group, a motley collection of people in the uniforms of a variety of services and planetary allegiances. Most of them injured in one way or another. Some quite badly.

“The target for the shutdown is 1900 hours local, about two and a half hours from now. We need them to keep it down for two hours. That’s our window. We need the
Behemoth
down during that two hours.”

“We’ll make it happen,” Naomi said.

“But when our broadcast starts, Ashford will probably try to take this location. Amos and the remainder of my team, along with any volunteers from among the rest of you, will hold this position as long as possible. The more bad guys you can tie up here, the fewer we’ll have trying to take engineering back from us. But I need you to hold. If we can’t keep Anna and her people on the air long enough to get everyone on board with our shutdown plan, this thing ends before it starts.”

“We’ll hold,” Amos said. No one disagreed.

“Once we control engineering, we’ll send a team forward to put restraints on the hopefully unconscious people on the bridge and we’ll own the ship. The lights go out, the aliens let us go, and we get the fuck out of this miserable stretch of space once and for all. How’s that sound?”

Bull raised his voice with the final question, looking for a cheer from the group, and the group obliged. People began to drift back toward their various tasks. Holden squeezed Naomi’s uninjured shoulder and moved over to Anna. She looked lost. Along the way he grabbed Amos by the arm.

“Anna,” Holden said. “Do you remember Amos?”

She smiled and nodded. “Hello, Amos.”

“How you doing, Red?”

“Amos will be here to protect you and the others,” Holden continued. “If you need anything, you let him know. I feel safe in saying nothing will get in here to stop you from doing your job as long as he’s alive.”

“That’s the truth,” Amos said. “Ma’am.”

“Hey, guys,” someone called out from the doorway. “Look what followed me home. Can I keep them?”