Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate (48 page)

Jojo blinked, then nodded sharply. “Yes, sir.”

“I want you to find four people who’ll fit in them. Then I want you to go down to engineering and get me control of my ship.”

Jojo saluted, grinning. “Yes, sir.”

“And Jojo?
Anyone
gets in your way, you kill them. Understand?”

“Five by five.”

The guard unstrapped and launched himself toward the hallway. She heard voices in the hall, people preparing for battle.
We have to expect the cycle will go on, getting bigger and more dangerous until one side or the other is destroyed.
Who said that? It seemed like something she’d just heard. Under local control the ventilation system had a slightly different rhythm, the exhalations from recyclers coming a few seconds closer together and lasting half as long. She wondered why that would be. It was the sort of thing Ren would have known. It was the sort of thing she only noticed now.

Ren. She tried to imagine him now. Tried to see herself the way he would see her. She was going to die. She was going to die and make everyone else safe by doing it. It wouldn’t bring him back to life, but it would make his dying mean something. And it would avenge him. In her mind’s eye, she still couldn’t see him smiling about it.

Half an hour later, the four people Jojo had selected came into the room awkwardly. The power of the suits made moving without crashing into things difficult. The cowling shone black and red, catching the light and diffusing it. She thought of massive beetles.

“We’ve got no ammunition, sir,” one of them said. Jojo. His voice was made artificially flat and crisp by the suit’s speakers.

“Then beat them to death,” Ashford said. “Your main objective is the reactor. If all you can get is enough for us to fire the laser, we still win. After that, I want Bull and his allies killed. Anyone who’s there that isn’t actively fighting alongside you, count as an enemy. If they aren’t for us, they’re against us.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sir!” one of the men at the controls said.

“What?”

“I think we have someone in the external elevator shaft, sir.”

“Assault force?”

“No, but they may be trapping it.”

Clarissa turned away.

In the security station, the newsfeed was still spooling. Women’s voices punctuated by occasional gunfire. Ashford’s men hadn’t taken the station yet. She wondered whether he’d let his men gun down Monica Stuart and Anna on a live feed where everyone could see it. Then she wondered how he’d prevent it from happening even if he wanted to. It wasn’t like there would be any consequences. If they won and blew the Ring, they’d all die here one way or another. A few premature deaths along the way should be neither here nor there. When what came next didn’t matter, anybody could do anything. Nothing had consequences.

Except that everyone always dies. You’re distracting yourself from something.
 

Cortez floated in the security booth itself. His face lit from below by the monitor. He looked over as she approached, his smile gentle and calm.

“Ashford’s sending men down to retake engineering,” she said.

“Good. That’s very good.”

“—on the
Corvusier
,” a brown-skinned woman was saying. “You know me. You can trust me. All we’re asking is that you shut down the reactor for a few hours and pull the batteries from the emergency backups. Power down the systems, so we can get out of here.”

“They value their own lives so much,” Cortez said. “They don’t think about the price their survival brings with it. The price for everybody.”

“They don’t,” Clarissa agreed, but something sat poorly with the words. Something itched. “Do you believe in redemption?”

“Of course I do,” Cortez said. “Everything in my life has taught me that there is nothing that fully removes us from the possibility of God’s grace, though sometimes the sacrifices we must make are painfully high.”

“—if we can just come together,” Anna said on the screen, leaning in toward the camera. A lock of red hair had come out of place and fell over her left eye. “Together, we can solve this.”

“What about you?” Cortez asked. He put his hand against her back. “Do you believe in redemption?”

“No,” she said. “Just sacrifice.”

“Mao,” Ashford barked from the other room. “Get out here.”

Clarissa floated to the doorway. The captain looked grayer than he had before. There was swelling around his eyes that would have been dark circles if they’d had any gravity.

“Captain?”

“You understand how all this crap is wired up.”

“A little,” she said.

“I’ve got something I need you to do.”

T
he elevator shaft that ran outside the entire two-kilometer length of the
Behemoth
’s drum section stretched out ahead of him. With Naomi consolidating control over the ship, most of the ancillary systems were down or unsafe to use. The primary elevator was locked at the shaft’s midway point. There was a secondary elevator in storage near the top of the shaft, but it could only be activated if the first elevator was removed from the tracks and locked down. So instead of a comfortable four-minute ride, the trip to the bridge was a two-kilometer-long zero-g float through hard vacuum with a big steel-and-ceramic box blocking the midpoint.

It could be worse. From the security camera streams Naomi had been able to dig into, it didn’t look like Ashford expected anyone to come at the bridge that way. He’d fortified his position at the command-level transition point once word had gone out about the attack on engineering. But so far they hadn’t reinforced the elevator shaft at all. They’d been expecting to hold both ends, and apparently it hadn’t occurred to them yet that they didn’t.

Bull had warned him that Ashford might be losing his mind under the stress of the situation, but he wasn’t a stupid man. He’d had a notably mistake-free career as an OPA captain up to that point, which was why he’d seemed the safe choice to Fred Johnson. Holden couldn’t count on him to make mistakes that would make things easy. But if Naomi won out in engineering it wouldn’t matter. By the time they reached the bridge everyone there would be blissfully asleep.

Holden had the broadcast from Radio Free Slow Zone playing at low volume in his helmet. Anna and Monica were still explaining to the flotilla about the need to shut down all the power in a back-and-forth sort of interview format while occasional volleys of gunfire popped in the background. Somehow it made the crazy things Anna was saying seem sane. Holden gave Monica points for knowing it would work that way. And, so far, the sounds of fighting seemed light. Amos was probably bored.

They’d made a plan, and so far everything was more or less going the way they’d hoped. The thought left Holden increasingly terrified.

Without warning the wall-mounted LEDs in the shaft went out. Holden turned on his suit lights but didn’t slow his climb. He threw a strange double shadow on the bulkhead when Corin’s suit lights came on.

“I’m not sure if that means we’re winning or losing,” he said, just to have something to say.

Corin grunted at him noncommittally. “I see the lift.”

Holden tilted his torso back to shine the suit lights farther up the shaft. The bottom of the elevator was visible a hundred meters ahead as a wall of metal and composite.

“There’s supposed to be a maintenance hatch we can open.”

Corin held up a fist in assent, and while still drifting up the elevator shaft began rummaging around in the duffel she’d brought from engineering. She pulled out a handheld plasma torch.

Holden rotated his body to hit the bottom of the elevator feet first, then kicked on his boot magnets. He walked over to the hatch and tried to open it, but as they suspected it was locked from the inside. Without waiting to be asked Corin started cutting it open with her torch.

“Bull, you there?” Holden asked, switching to the agreed-upon channel.

“Trouble?”

“Just cutting the elevator right now, wanted to check in.”

“Well,” Bull said, drawing the word out. “We’re hitting either home runs or strikes here. We own the essential systems, we’ve got the laser down, and we’re working on killing the reactor.”

“What are we missing?” Holden asked. Corin’s torch sputtered and went out, and she began a quiet profanity-laced conversation with herself as she replaced the power pack with another from her duffel.

“Naomi can’t get into the bridge systems. They’ve got her totally locked out, which means no knockout gas for the entry.”

Which meant, by last count, him and Corin fighting their way past at least fifteen of Ashford’s people, and possibly more. Through a narrow doorway, down a long corridor with no cover. It would make the entry into engineering look like a walk in the park.

“We can’t do that with two people,” Holden said. “There’s no chance.”

Corin, who’d been listening in on her radio, looked up. She hit the elevator hatch with one gauntleted fist and the cut piece fell inside, edges glowing dull red. She made no move to enter, waiting for the outcome of his conversation with Bull. Her expression was blank; it could have meant anything.

“We’re sending some help, so sit tight at the command deck entry hatch and wait for—” He stopped, and Holden could hear someone speaking to him, though the words were too low to make out. It sounded like Naomi.

“What’s up?” Holden asked, but Bull didn’t answer. An increasingly animated conversation happened on Bull’s end for several minutes. Bull’s replies were fragments that without context meant nothing to Holden. He waited impatiently.

“Okay, new problem,” Bull finally said.

“Bigger than the ‘we can’t get into the bridge without dying’ problem?”

“Yeah,” Bull said. Holden felt his stomach drop. “Naomi caught something on a security cam they missed in the corridor outside the bridge. Four people in power armor just left the command deck. It’s the armor we took from the Martians. No way to track them, but I can guess where they’re headed.”

There was only one place Ashford would be sending that much firepower. Engineering.

“Get out,” Holden said, more panic in his voice than he’d hoped to hear. “Get out now.”

Bull chuckled. It was not a reassuring sound. “Oh, my friend, this will be a problem for you before it is for us.”

Holden waited. Corin shrugged with her hands and climbed inside the elevator to open the upper hatch. No need to cut it. The locks were on the inside.

“There are only three ways to get to us,” Bull continued. “They can go down through the drum, but that’s messy. The maintenance corridor on the other side of the drum can’t be accessed when the drum is rotating. That leaves one good way to head south on this beast.”

“Right through us,” Holden said.

“Yup. So guess what? Your mission just changed.”

“Delaying action,” Corin said.

“Give the lady a prize. We still might be able to win this thing if we can buy Naomi a little more time. You get to buy it for her.”

“Bull,” Holden said. “There are two of us with light assault rifles and sidearms here. Those people have force recon armor. I’ve watched someone work in that gear up close. We won’t be a delay. We’ll be a cloud of pink mist they fly through at full speed.”

“Not quite that fast. I’m not an idiot, I pulled all the ammo from the suits, and as an added precaution I went ahead and yanked the firing contacts in the guns.”

“That’s good news, actually, but can’t they just tear us limb from limb?”

“Yeah,” Bull said. “So don’t let them grab you if you can avoid it. Buy us as much time as you can. Bull out.”

Holden looked at Corin, who was looking back at him, the same blank expression on her broad face. His heart was beating triple time. Everything took on a sense of almost painful reality. It was like he’d just woken up.

He was about to die.

“Last stand time,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady.

“This is as good a place as any.” She pointed at the boxy and solid-looking elevator. “Use the upper hatch for cover, they’ll have to come at us without any cover of their own, and without guns they’ll have to close and engage at point blank. We can dump a lot of fire into them as they approach.”

“Corin,” Holden said. “Have you ever seen one of those suits at work?”

“Nope. Does it change what we need to do here?”

He hesitated.

“No,” he said. “I guess it really doesn’t.” He pulled the assault rifle off his back and left it floating next to him. He checked his ammo. Still the same six magazines it had been when he stuffed them in the bandolier.

Nothing to do but wait.

Corin found a spot by the hatch where she could hook one foot under a handhold set into what would be the wall under thrust. She settled in, staring up the elevator shaft through her sights. Holden tried doing the same, but got antsy and had to start moving around.

“Naomi?” he said, switching to their private channel and hoping she was still on the radio.

“I’m here,” she said after a few seconds.

Holden started to reply, then stopped. Everything that came into his head to say seemed trite. He’d been about to say that he’d loved her since the moment he met her, but that was ludicrous. He’d barely even noticed Naomi when they first met. She’d been a tall, skinny engineer. When he got to know her better, she’d become a tall, skinny, and brilliant engineer, but that was it. He felt like they’d eventually became friends, but the truth was he could barely remember the person he’d been back on the
Canterbury
now.

Everyone had lost something in the wake of the protomolecule. The species as a whole had lost its sense of its own importance. Its primacy in the universal plan.

Holden had lost his certainty.

When he thought back to the man he’d been before the death of the
Cant
, he remembered a man filled with righteous certainty. Right was right, wrong was wrong, you drew the lines thus and so. His time with Miller had stripped him of some of that. His time working for Fred Johnson had, if not removed, then filed down what remained. A sort of creeping nihilism had taken its place. A sense that the protomolecule had broken the human race in ways that could never be repaired. Humanity had gotten a two-billion-year reprieve on a death sentence it hadn’t known it had, but time was up. All that was left was the kicking and screaming.

Oddly enough, it was Miller who had given him his sense of purpose back. Or whatever the Miller construct was. He couldn’t really remember that version of himself who’d known exactly where all the lines were drawn. He wasn’t sure of much of anything anymore. But whatever had climbed up off of Venus and built the Ring, it had built Miller too.

And it had wanted to talk. To him.

A small thing, maybe. The new Miller didn’t make much sense. It had an agenda that it wasn’t explaining. The protomolecule didn’t seem particularly sorry for all the chaos and death it had caused.

But it wanted to talk. And it wanted to talk to him. Holden realized he’d found a lifeline there. Maybe there was a way out of all of the chaos. Maybe he could help find it. He recognized that latching on to the idea that the protomolecule, or at least their agent Miller, had picked him as their contact fed all of his worst inclinations to arrogance and self-importance. But it was better than despair.

And now, only starting to see that murky path out of the hole the protomolecule had dug and humanity had hurled itself into with self-destructive gusto, now he was about to be killed because of yet another petty human with more power than sense. It didn’t seem fair. He wanted to live to see how humanity bounced back. He wanted to be part of it. For the first time in a long time he felt like he might be able to turn into the kind of man who could make a difference.

And he wanted to explain this to Naomi. To tell her that he was turning into a better person. The kind of person who would have seen her as more than just a good engineer all those years ago. As if he could, by being a different person now, retroactively fix the shallow, vain man he’d been then. Maybe even make himself worthy of her.

“I like you,” he said instead.

“Jim,” she replied after a moment. Her voice was thick.

“I’ve enjoyed your company ever since we met. Even when you were just an engineer and shipmate, you were a very likable one.”

There was only a faint static hiss on the radio. Holden pictured Naomi retreating into herself, letting her hair fall across her eyes to hide them in that way she did when she was in an uncomfortable emotional situation. Of course, that was silly. With no gravity her hair wouldn’t do that. But the image made him smile.

“Thank you,” he said, letting her off the hook. “Thank you for everything.”

“I love you, Jim,” she finally said. Holden felt his body relax. He saw his coming death, and wasn’t afraid of it anymore. He’d miss all the good stuff to follow, but he’d help make it happen. And a very good person loved him. It was more than most people got in a lifetime.

A low screech started, which cycled up into a howl. For a second, Holden thought Naomi was screaming into her headset. He almost started comforting her before he realized he could feel the vibration in his feet. The sound wasn’t coming across the radio. It was transmitting through his boots on the elevator wall. The entire ship was vibrating.

Holden placed his helmet against the wall to get a better sound, and the scream of the ship was almost deafening. It stopped after an endless minute with an ear-shattering bang. Silence followed.

“What the fuck?” Corin said under her breath.

“Naomi? Bull? Anyone still on the line?” Holden yelled, thinking that whatever had happened had torn the ship apart.

“Yeah,” Bull said. “We’re here.”

“What—” Holden started.

“Mission change,” Bull continued. “That sound was them slamming the brakes on the habitat drum. Catastrophic inertia change 2.0. There are a lot of people in that drum getting thrown around right now.”

“Why would they do that? Just to stop the broadcast?”

“Nope,” Bull said with a tired sigh. He sounded like a man who’d just been informed he was going to have to pull a double shift. “It means they think we fortified the elevator shaft and they’re coming the other way.”

“We’re on our way back,” Holden said, gesturing at Corin to follow him.

“Negative,” Bull said. “If they get the laser back online here while Ashford’s still sitting at that control panel, we lose.”

“So what? We’re supposed to get up there, break into the bridge, and shoot everyone while their guys are down there breaking into engineering and shooting all of you?”

Bull’s sigh sounded tired.