Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate (45 page)

Holden patted Anna on the arm and gave Amos a meaningful look.
Protect this one with your life.
Amos nodded back. He looked vaguely offended.

He left them together and caught up with Bull heading for the door. The security officer Corin, Bull’s new second-in-command, was leaning next to the door with a shit-eating grin.

“Come on in, boys,” she said, and four Martians with military haircuts came into the room. They stood on the balls of their feet, slowly looking over every inch of the room. Holden had known someone who always entered a room that way. Bobbie. He found himself wishing she were here. The man in the lead was powerfully familiar.

“Sergeant Verbinski,” Bull said to one of them. “This is a surprise.”

Holden hadn’t recognized the man without his armor. He looked big.

“Sir,” Verbinski said. “I heard you’re about to start a fight to get us all out of here.”

“Yeah,” Bull said. “I am.”

“Sounds like a noble cause,” Verbinski replied. “Need four grunts with nothing else to do?”

“Yeah,” Bull said with a growing smile. “I really do.”

T
hey’d failed.

Anna watched the busy men and women in the radio offices as they strapped on body armor, loaded weapons, hung grenades from their belts, and she felt only sadness and despair.

A history professor at university had once told her,
Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas
.
It’s attractive because it’s simple, it’s direct, it’s almost always available as an option. When you can’t think of a good rebuttal for your opponent’s argument, you can always punch them in the face.

They’d run out of ideas. And now they were reaching for the simple, direct, always available option of shooting everyone they disagreed with. She hated it.

Monica caught her eye from across the room and held up a small thermos of coffee in invitation. Anna waved her off with a smile.

“Are you insane?” Tilly asked. She was sitting on the floor next to her in a back corner of the offices, trying to stay out of everyone’s way. “That woman has the only decent coffee on this entire ship.” She waved at Monica, pointing at herself.

“I should have spent more time talking to Cortez,” Anna said. “The OPA captain might be intractable, but I could have reached Cortez with enough time.”

“Life is finite, dear, and Cortez is an asshole. We’ll all be better off if someone puts a bullet in him before this is over.” Tilly accepted a pour of Monica’s coffee with a grateful smile. Monica set the thermos down and sat on the floor next to them.

“Hey, we—” she started, but Anna didn’t notice.

“You don’t mean that,” Anna said to Tilly, annoyance creeping into her voice. “Cortez isn’t a bad person. He’s frightened and unsure, and has made some bad choices, but at worst he’s misguided, not evil.”

“He doesn’t deserve your sympathy,” Tilly said, then tossed back the last of her coffee like she was angry with it.

“Who are we—” Monica started again.

“He does. He does deserve it,” Anna said. Watching the young men and women prepare for war, preparing to kill and be killed right in front of her, made her more angry with Tilly than she probably would have been otherwise. But she found herself very angry now. “That’s exactly the point. They
all
deserve our sympathy. If Bull’s right about Ashford, and he’s gone crazy with fear and humiliation and the trauma of seeing his crew killed, then he deserves our sympathy. That’s a terrible place to be. Cortez deserves our understanding, because he’s doing exactly the same thing we are. Trying to find the right thing to do in an impossible situation.”

“Oh,” Monica said. “Cortez. He’s the—”

“That’s a load of crap, Annie. That’s exactly how you know who the good guys and the bad guys are: by what they do when the chips are down.”

“This isn’t about good guys and bad guys,” Anna said. “Yes, we’ve picked sides now, because some of the actions they are about to take will have serious consequences for us, and we’re going to try to stop them. But what you’re doing is demonizing them, making them the enemy. The problem with that is that once we’ve stopped them and they can’t hurt us anymore, they’re still demons. Still the enemy.”

“Believe me,” Tilly said, “when I get out of here, it will be my mission in life to burn Cortez to the ground for this.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?”

“He won’t be on a ship trying to destroy the Ring anymore. He won’t be supporting Ashford anymore. All of the circumstances that made him your enemy will be gone. What’s the value in clinging to the hate?”

Tilly turned away and fumbled around in her pocket for her cigarettes. She smoked one aggressively, pointedly not looking at Anna.

“What’s the answer, then?” Monica asked after a few tense moments of silence.

“I don’t know,” Anna said, pulling her legs close and resting her chin on her knees. She tucked her back as far into the corner of the room as it would go, her body looking for a safe place with a small child’s insistence. But the hard green walls offered no comfort.

“So it’s all just academic, then,” Monica said. Tilly snorted in agreement, still not looking at Anna.

Anna pointed at the people getting ready in the room around them. “How many will be dead by the end of today?”

“There’s no way to know,” Monica said.

“We owe it to them to look for other answers. We’ve failed this time. We’ve run out of ideas, and now we’re reaching for the gun. But maybe next time, if we’ve thought about what led us here, maybe next time we find a different answer. Certainty doesn’t have a place in violence.”

For a while, they were silent. Tilly angrily chain-smoked. Monica typed furiously on her terminal. Anna watched the others get ready for war, and tried to match faces with names. Even if they won out today, there was a very good chance she’d be presiding over more than one funeral tomorrow.

Bull clunked over to them, his walking machine whining to a stop. He had deteriorated during the few hours they’d spent in the office. He was coughing less, but he’d begun using his inhaler a lot more often. Even the machine seemed ill now, its sounds harsher, its movements jerkier. As though the walker and Bull had merged into one being, and it was dying along with him.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Fine,” Anna said. She considered telling him he needed rest, then abandoned the idea. She didn’t need to lose another argument just then.

“So we’re getting pretty close to zero hour here,” Bull said, then stifled a wet-sounding cough. “You have everything you need?”

No
, Anna thought.
I need an answer that doesn’t include what you’re about to do.

“Yes,” she said instead. “Monica has been making notes for the broadcast. I’ve compiled a list of all the ships we have representatives from. We’re missing a few, but I’m hoping planetary allegiance will be enough to get their cooperation. Chris Williams, a junior officer from the
Prince
, has been a big help on that.”

“You?” Bull asked, jabbing a thick hand toward Monica.

“My team is ready to go,” she said. “I’m a bit worried about getting the full broadcast out before Ashford’s people stop us.”

Bull laughed. It was a wet, unpleasant sound. “Hold on.” He called out to Jim Holden, who was busy reassembling a stripped-down rifle of some sort and chatting with one of the Martian marines. Holden put the partly assembled rifle on a table and walked over.

“What’s up?”

“These people need reassurance that they’ll be protected long enough to finish their broadcast,” Bull said.

Holden blinked twice, once at Bull, once at the three women sitting cross-legged on the floor. Anna had to suppress a giggle. Holden was so comically earnest, she just wanted to give him a hug and pat him on the head.

“Amos will make sure you’re not interrupted,” he finally said.

“Right,” Bull said. “Tell them why that’s reassuring.”

“Oh. Well, when Amos is angry he’s the meanest, scariest person I’ve ever met, and he’d walk across a sea of corpses he personally created to help a friend. And one of his good friends just got murdered by the people who are going to be trying to take this office.”

“I heard about that,” Anna said. “I’m sorry.”

“Yes,” Holden said. “And the last people in the galaxy I’d want to be are the ones that are going to try and break in here to stop you. Amos doesn’t process grief well. It usually turns into anger or violence for him. I have a feeling he’s about to process the shit out of it on some Ashford loyalists.”

“Killing people won’t make him feel better,” Anna said, regretting the words the second they left her mouth. These people were going to be risking their lives to protect her. They didn’t need her moralizing at them.

“Actually,” Holden said with a half smile, “I think it might for him, but Amos is a special case. You’d be right about most anyone else.”

Anna looked across the room at Amos. He was sitting quietly by the front door to the broadcast office, some sort of very large rifle laid across his knees. He was a large man, tall and thick across the shoulders and chest. But with his round shaved head and broad face, he didn’t look like a killer to Anna. He looked like a friendly repairman. The kind who showed up to fix broken plumbing or swap out the air recycling filters. According to Holden, he would kill without remorse to protect her.

She imagined trying to explain their current situation to Nono.
I’ve fallen in with killers, you see, but it’s okay because they are the right killers. The good guy killers. They don’t shoot innocent chief engineers. They shoot the people who do.

Monica was asking Holden something. When he started to answer, Anna got up and left with an apology to everyone and no one. She dodged through the crowded office, smiling and patting people on the arm as she passed, distributing gentle reassurance to everyone around her. It was all she had to offer them.

She pulled an unused chair over next to Amos and sat down. “Red,” he said, giving her a tiny nod.

“I’m sorry.” She put her hand on his arm. He stared down at it as though he couldn’t figure out what it was.

“Okay,” he said, not asking the obvious question. Not pretending not to understand. Anna found herself liking him immediately.

“Thank you for doing this.”

Amos shifted in his chair to face her. “You don’t need to—”

“In a few hours, we might all be dead,” she said. “I want you to know that I know what you’re doing, and I know why, and I don’t care about any of that. Thank you for helping us.”

“God damn, Red,” Amos said, putting his hand on hers. “You must be hell on wheels as a preacher. You’re making me feel the best and worst I’ve felt in a while at the same time.”

“That’s all I wanted to say,” Anna said, then patted his hand once and stood up.

Before she could leave, Amos grabbed her hand in an almost painfully tight grip. “No one’s gonna hurt you today.”

There was no boast in it. It was a simple statement of fact. She gave him a smile and pulled her hand away. Good-hearted unrepentant killers were not something she’d had to fit into her worldview before this, and she wasn’t sure how it would work. But now she’d have to try.

“All right, people, listen up,” Bull yelled out over the noise. The room fell silent. “It’s zero hour. Let’s get the action teams divided up and ready to go.”

A shadow fell across Anna. Amos was standing behind her, clutching his large gun. “Defense,” he called out. “To me.”

A group of maybe two dozen extricated themselves from the general crowd and moved over to Amos. Anna found herself surrounded by heavily armed and armored Belters with a few inner planet types mixed in. She was not a tall woman, and it felt like being at the bottom of a well. “Excuse me,” she said, but no one heard her. A strong hand gripped her arm, pulled her through the knot of people, and deposited her outside of it. Amos gave her a smile and said, “Might want to find a quiet corner, Red.”

Anna thought about trying to cross the room back to Tilly and Monica, but there were too many people in the way. Amos had a sort of personal field that kept anyone from standing too close to him, so Anna just stayed inside it to keep from getting trampled on. Amos didn’t appear to mind.

“Assault team,” Holden called out, “to me.”

Soon he had a group of two dozen around him, including Naomi and Alex from the
Rocinante
, the four Martian marines, a bunch of Bull’s security people, and Bull himself. The only people in the group without obvious physical injuries were the four marines. Alex and Naomi looked especially bad. Naomi’s shoulder was bound tight in a harness that immobilized it and her arm, and she winced every time she took a step. Alex’s face was swollen so badly that his left eye was almost completely closed. Blood spotted the bandages around his head.

These are the people who helped stop Protogen, who fought the monsters around Ganymede
, she told herself.
They’re tough, they’ll make it.
It sounded thin even in her own head.

“Well,” Bull said. The crowd seemed to be waiting for last words from him. “I guess this is it. Good hunting, everyone.”

A few people clapped or called out to him. Most didn’t. Across the room Monica was talking to her camera people. Anna knew she should join them, but found herself not wanting to. All these people would be risking their lives to buy her time.
Her.
So it was all on her whether the whole plan succeeded or failed. If she couldn’t convince an entire flotilla of ships from three separate governments that turning off their power for a couple hours was the right thing to do, then it would all be for nothing. She found herself wanting to delay that moment as long as possible. To keep it from being her responsibility as long as she could.

“Better go, Red,” Amos whispered to her.

“What if they’re all too scared to shut down their ships?” she replied. “We’re in the haunted house, and I’m about to tell everyone that the way to escape is to turn out all the lights. I would find that unconvincing in their shoes.”

Amos nodded thoughtfully. Anna waited for the words of encouragement.

“Yeah,” he finally said. “That’ll be a bitch. My job’s a lot easier. Good luck.”

Somehow, the honesty in not even trying to sugarcoat it cracked the last of Anna’s fear, and she found herself laughing. Before she could reconsider, she grabbed Amos around the middle and gave him a squeeze.

“Again,” she said, letting him go after a few seconds, “thank you. I was being a big scaredy-cat. You’re a good person, Amos.”

“Nah, I’m not. I just hang with good company. Get going, Red. I gotta get my game face on.”

The assault team was heading for the door, and Anna moved to the wall to let them by. Holden stopped next to Amos and said, “Be here when I get back, big man.”

Amos shook his hand and slapped him on the back once. Holden’s face was filled with worry. Anna had a sudden vision of her future, sending Nami off to school one day, being terrified that she wouldn’t be there to look after her and having to let her go anyway.