Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate (9 page)

It was the last piece. Everything in place. A sense of almost religious well-being washed over her. The thin room with its scratched walls and too-bright LEDs had never seemed so benign. She levered herself up out of the couch. She wanted to celebrate, though of course there was no one she could tell. Talk to might be enough.

The halls of the
Cerisier
were so narrow that it was impossible to walk abreast or to pass someone coming the opposite way without turning sideways. The mess would fit twenty people sitting with their hips touching. The nearest thing to an open area was the fitness center off the medical bay. The treadmills and exercise machines required enough room that no one would be caught in the joints and belts. Safety regulations made it the widest, freest air in the ship, and so a good place to be around people.

Of her team, only Ren was present. In the usual microgravity, he would probably have been neck deep in a tank of resistance gel. With the full-g burn, he was on a regular treadmill. His pale skin was bright with sweat, his carrot-orange hair pulled back in a frizzed ponytail. It was strange watching him. His large head was made larger by his hair, and the thinness of his body made him seem more like something from a children’s program than an actual man.

He nodded to her as she came in.

“Ren,” she said, walking to the front of his machine. She felt the gazes of other crewmen on her, but on the
Cerisier
she didn’t feel as exposed. Or maybe it was the good news that carried her. “Do you have a minute?”

“Chief,” he said instead of yes, but he thumbed down the treadmill to a cool-down walk. “Que sa?”

“I heard some of the things Stanni was saying about me,” she said. Ren’s expression closed down. “I just wanted…”

She frowned, looked down, and then gave in to the impulse welling up in her.

“He’s right,” she said. “I’m in over my head with this job. I got it because of some political favors. I’m not qualified to do what I’m doing.”

He blinked rapidly. He shot a glance around her, checking to see if anyone had overheard them. She didn’t particularly care, but she thought it was sweet that he did.

“Not so bad, you,” he said. “I mean, little off here, little off there. But I’ve been under worse.”

“I need help,” she said. “To do all the work the way it should be done, I need help. I need someone I can trust. Someone I can count on.”

Ren nodded, but his forehead roughened. He blew out his breath and stepped off the treadmill.

“I want to get the work done right,” she said. “Not miss anything. And I want the team to respect me.”

“Okay, sure.”

“I know you should have had this job.”

Ren blew out another breath, his cheeks ballooning. It was more expressive than she’d ever seen him before. He leaned against the wall. When he met her gaze, it was like he was seeing her for the first time.

“Appreciate you saying it, chief, but we’re both of us outsiders here,” he said. “Stick together, bien?”

“Good,” she said, leaning against the wall next to him. “So. The brownout buffers? What did I get wrong?”

Ren sighed.

“The buffers are smart, but the design’s stupid,” he said. “They talk to each other, so they’re also a separate network, yah? Thing is, you put one in the wrong way? Works okay. But next time it resets, the signal down the line looks wrong. Triggers a diagnostic run in the next one down, and then the next one down. Whole network starts blinking like Christmas. Too many errors on the network and it fails closed, takes down the whole grid. And then you got us going through checking each one by hand. With flashlights and the supervisor chewing our nuts.”

“That’s… that can’t be right,” she said. “Seriously? It could have shut down the
grid
?”

“I know, right?” Ren said, smiling. “And all it would take is change the design so it don’t fit in if you got it wrong. But they never do. A lot of what we do is like that, boss. We try to catch the little ones before they get big. Some things, you get them wrong, it’s nothing. Some things, and it’s a big mess.”

The words felt like a church bell being struck. They resonated. She was that fault, that error. She didn’t know what she was doing, not really, and she’d get away with it. She’d pass. Until she didn’t, and then everything would fall apart. Her throat felt tighter. She almost wished she hadn’t said anything.

She was a brownout buffer pointed the wrong way. A flaw that was easy to overlook, with the potential to wreck everything.

“For the others… don’t take them harsh. Blowing off steam, mostly. Not you so much as it’s anything. Fear-biting.”

“Fear?”

“Sure,” he said. “Everyone on this boat’s scared dry. Try not to show it, do the work, but we all getting nightmares. Natural, right?”

“What are they afraid of?” she asked.

Behind her the door cycled open and shut. A man said something in a language she didn’t know. Ren tilted his head, and she had the sick, sinking feeling that she’d done something wrong. She hadn’t acted normal, and she didn’t know what her misstep was.

“Ring,” he said at last. “It’s what killed Eros. Could have killed Mars. All that weird stuff it did on Venus, no one knows what it was. Deaded that slingshot kid who went through. Half everyone thinks we should be pitching nukes at it, other half thinks we’d only piss it off. We’re going out as deep as anyone ever has just so we can look in the devil’s eye, and Stanni and Solé and Bob? They’re all scared as shit of what we see in it. Me too.”

“Ah,” she said. “All right. I understand that.”

Ren tried on a smile.

“You? It don’t scare you?”

“It’s not something I think about.”

N
ami and Nono left for Earth a week before Anna’s shuttle. Those last days living alone in those rooms, knowing that she would never be back—that they would never be back—was like a gentle presentiment of death: profoundly melancholy and, shamefully, a little exhilarating.

The shuttle from Europa was one of the last to join the flotilla, and it meant eighteen hours of hard burn. By the time she set foot on the deck of the UNN
Thomas Prince
, all she wanted was a bunk and twelve hours’ sleep. The young yeoman who’d been sent to greet and escort her had other plans, though, and the effort it would have taken to be rude about it was more than she could muster.

“The
Prince
is a
Xerxes
-class battleship, or what we sometimes refer to as a third-generation dreadnought,” he said, gesturing to the white ceramic-over-gel of the hangar’s interior walls. The shuttle she’d arrived on nestled in its bay looking small under the cathedral-huge arch. “We call it a third-generation battleship because it is the third redesign since the buildup during the first Earth-Mars conflict.”

Not that it had been much of a conflict, Anna thought. The Martians had made noises about independence, the UN had built a lot of ships, Mars had built a few. And then Solomon Epstein had gone from being a Martian yachting hobbyist to the inventor of the first fusion drive that solved the heat buildup and rapid fuel consumption problems of constant thrust. Suddenly Mars had a few ships that went really, really fast. They’d said,
Hey, we’re about to go colonize the rest of the solar system. Want to stay mad at us, or want to come with?
The UN had made the sensible choice, and most people would agree: Giving up Mars in exchange for half of the solar system had probably been a pretty good deal.

It didn’t mean that both sides hadn’t kept on designing new ways to kill each other. Just in case.

“. . . just over half a kilometer long, and two hundred meters wide at its broadest point,” the yeoman was saying.

“Impressive,” Anna replied, trying to bring her wandering attention back.

The yeoman pulled her luggage on a small rolling cart to a bank of elevator lifts.

“These elevators run the length of the ship,” he said as he punched a button on the control panel. “We call them the keel elevators—”

“Because they run along the belly of the ship?” Anna said.

“Yes! That’s what the bottom of seagoing vessels was called, and space-based navies have kept the nomenclature.”

Anna nodded. His enthusiasm was exhausting and charming at the same time. He wanted to impress her, so she resolved to be impressed. It was a small enough thing to give someone.

“Of course, the belly of the ship is largely an arbitrary distinction,” he continued as the elevator climbed. “Because we use thrust gravity, the deck is always in the direction thrust is coming from, the aft of the ship. Up is always away from the engines. There’s not really much to distinguish the other four directions from each other. Some smaller ships can land on planetary surfaces, and in those ships the belly of the ship contains landing gear and thrusters for liftoff.”

“I imagine the
Prince
is too large for that,” Anna said.

“By quite a lot, actually! But our shuttles and corvettes are capable of surface landings, though it doesn’t happen very often.”

The elevator doors opened with another ding, and the yeoman pushed her luggage out into the hall. “After we drop off your baggage at your stateroom, we can continue the tour.”

“Yeoman?” Anna said. “Is that the right way to address you?”

“Certainly. Or Mister Ichigawa. Or even Jin, since you’re a civilian.”

“Jin,” Anna continued. “Would it be all right if I just stayed in my room for a while? I’m very tired.”

He stopped pulling her baggage and blinked twice. “But the captain said all of the VIP guests should get a complete tour. Including the bridge, which is usually off-limits to non-duty personnel.”

Anna put a hand on the boy’s arm. “I understand that’s quite a privilege, but I’d rather see it when I can keep my eyes open. You understand, don’t you?” She gave his arm a squeeze and smiled her best smile at him.

“Certainly,” he said, smiling back. “Come this way, ma’am.”

Looking around her, Anna wasn’t sure if she actually wanted to see the rest of the ship. Every corridor looked the same: Slick gray material with something spongy underneath covered most walls. Anna supposed it was some sort of protective surface, to keep sailors from injury if they banged into it during maneuvers. And anything that wasn’t gray fabric was gray metal. The things that would be impressive to most people about the ship would be its various mechanisms for killing other ships. Those were the parts of the ship she was least interested in.

“Is that okay?” Ichigawa said after a moment. Anna had no idea what he was talking about. “Calling you ma’am, I mean. Some of the VIPs have titles. Pastor, or Reverend, or Minister. I don’t want to offend.”

“Well, if I didn’t like you I’d ask you to call me Reverend Doctor, but I do like you very much, so please don’t,” she said.

“Thank you,” Jin said, and the back of his neck blushed.

“And if you were a member of my congregation, I’d have you call me Pastor Anna. Buddhist?”

“Only when I’m at my grandmother’s house,” Jin said with a wink. “The rest of the time I’m a navy man.”

“Is that a religion now?” Anna asked with a laugh.

“The navy thinks so.”

“Okay.” She laughed again. “So why don’t you just call me Anna?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jin said. He stopped at a gray door marked OQ 297-11 and handed her a small metal card. “This is your room. Just having the card on you unlocks the door. It will stay locked when you’re inside unless you press the yellow button on the wall panel.”

“Sounds very safe,” Anna said, taking the key from Jin and shaking his hand.

“This is the battleship
Thomas Prince
, ma’am. It’s the safest place in the solar system.”

 

 

Her stateroom was three meters wide by four meters long. Luxurious by navy standards, normal for a poor Europan, coffinlike to an Earther. Anna felt a brief moment of vertigo as the two different Annas she’d been reacted to the space in three different ways. She’d felt the same sense of disconnection when she’d first boarded the
Prince
and felt the full gravity pressing her down. The Earther she’d been most of her life felt euphoric as, for the first time in years, her weight felt
right
. The Europan in her just felt tired, drained by the excessive pull on her bones.

She wondered how long it would take Nono to get her Earth legs back. How long it would take before Nami could walk there. They were both spending the entire trip back pumped full of muscle and bone growth stimulators, but drugs can only take a person so far. There would still be the agonizing weeks or months as their bodies adapted to the new gravity. Anna could almost see little Nami struggling to get up onto her hands and knees like she did on Europa. Could almost hear her cries of frustration while she built up the strength to move on her own again. She was such a determined little thing. It would infuriate her to lose the hard-won physical skills she’d developed over the last two years.

Thinking about it made Anna’s chest ache, just behind her breastbone.

She tapped the shiny black surface of the console in her room, and the room’s terminal came on. She spent a moment learning the user interface. It was limited to browsing the ship’s library and to sending and receiving text or audio/video messages.

She tapped the button to record a message and said, “Hi Nono, hi Nami!” She waved at the camera. “I’m on the ship, and we’re on our way. I—” She stopped and looked around the room, at the sterile gray walls and spartan bed. She grabbed a pillow off of it and turned back to the camera. “I miss you both already.” She hugged the pillow to her chest, tight. “This is you. This is both of you.”

She turned the recording off before she got teary. She was washing her face when the console buzzed a new-message alert. Even though it didn’t seem possible Nami could have gotten the message and replied already, her heart gave a little leap. She rushed over and opened the message. It was a simple text message reminding her of the VIP “meet and greet” in the officers’ mess at 1900 hours. The clock said it was currently 1300.

Anna tapped the button to RSVP to the event and then climbed under the covers of her bed with her clothes on and cried herself to sleep.

 

 

“Reverend Doctor Volovodov,” a booming male voice said as soon as she walked into the officers’ mess.

The room was laid out for a party, with tables covered in food ringing the room, and a hundred or more people talking in loose clumps in the center. In one corner, an ad hoc bar with four bartenders was doing brisk business. A tall, dark-skinned man with perfectly coiffed white hair and an immaculate gray suit walked out of the crowd like Venus rising from the waves. Anna wondered how he managed the effect. He reached out and took her hand with his. “I’m so happy to have you with us. I’ve heard so much about the powerful work you’re doing on Europa, and I don’t see how the Methodist World Council could have chosen anyone else for this important trip.”

Anna shook his hand, then carefully extricated herself from his grasp. Doctor Hector Cortez, Father Hank on his live streamcasts that went out to over a hundred million people each week, and close personal friend and spiritual advisor to the secretary-general himself. She couldn’t imagine how he knew anything about her. Her tiny congregation of less than a hundred people on Europa wouldn’t even be a rounding error to his solar system–wide audience. She found herself caught between feeling flattered, uncomfortable, and vaguely suspicious.

“Doctor Cortez,” Anna said. “So nice to meet you. I’ve seen your show before, of course.”

“Of course,” he said, smiling vaguely and already looking around the room for someone else to talk to. She had the sense that he’d come to greet her less out of the pleasure of her arrival than as a chance to extricate himself from whatever conversation he’d been having before, and she didn’t know whether to be relieved or insulted. She settled on amused.

Like a smaller object dragged into some larger gravity well, an elderly man in formal Roman Catholic garb pulled away from the central crowd and drifted in Doctor Cortez’s direction.

She started to introduce herself when Doctor Cortez cut in with that booming voice and said, “Father Michel. Say hello to my friend Reverend Doctor Annushka Volovodov, a worker for God’s glory with the Europa congregation of Methodists.”

“Reverend Volovodov,” the Catholic man said. “I’m Father Michel, with the Archdiocese of Rome.”

“Oh, very nice to meet—” Anna started.

“Don’t let him fool you with that humble old country priest act,” Cortez boomed over the top of her. “He’s a bishop on the short list for cardinal.”

“Congratulations,” Anna said.

“Oh, it’s nothing. All exaggeration and smoke.” The old man beamed. “Nothing will happen until it fits with God’s plan.”

“You wouldn’t be here if that were true,” Cortez said.

The bishop chuckled.

A woman in an expensive blue dress followed one of the uniformed waiters with his tray of champagne. She and Father Michel reached for a glass at the same moment. Anna smiled a no at the offered champagne, and the waiter vanished into the crowd at the center of the room.

“Please,” the woman said to Anna. “Don’t leave me to drink alone with a Catholic. My liver can’t take it.”

“Thank you, but—”

“What about you, Hank? I’ve heard you can put down a few drinks.” She punctuated this with a swig from her glass. Cortez’s smile could have meant anything.

“I’m Anna,” Anna said, reaching out to shake the woman’s hand. “I love your dress.”

“Thank you. I am Mrs. Robert Fagan,” the woman replied with mock formality. “Tilly if you aren’t asking for money.”