Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate (8 page)

There had been any number of times in his travels on the
Roci
that he’d imagined—even expected—it all to come to a tragic end. But those scenarios had involved firefights or alien monstrosities or desperate dives into some planetary atmosphere. He’d imagined with a sick thrill of dread what it would be like if Alex died, or Amos. Or Naomi. He’d wondered whether the three of them would go on without him. He hadn’t considered that the end might find all of them perfectly fine. That the
Rocinante
might be the one to go.

Hope, when it came, was a documentary streamcast team from UN Public Broadcasting. Monica Stuart, the team lead, was an auburn-haired freckled woman with a professionally sculpted beauty that made her seem vaguely familiar when he saw her on the screen of the pilot’s deck. She hadn’t come in person.

“How many people are we talking about?” Holden asked.

“Four,” she said. “Two camera jockeys, my sound guy, and me.”

Holden ran a hand across eight days’ worth of patchy beard. The sense of inevitability sat in his gut like a stone.

“To the Ring,” he said.

“To the Ring,” she agreed. “We need to make it a hard burn to get there before the Martians, the Earth flotilla, and the
Behemoth
. And we’d like some measure of safety once we’re out there, which the
Rocinante
would be able to give us.”

Naomi cleared her throat, and the documentarian shifted her attention to her.

“You’re sure you can get the hold taken off the
Roci
?” Naomi asked.

“I am protected by the Freedom of Journalism Act. I have the right to the reasonable use of hired materials and personnel in the pursuit of a story. Otherwise, anyone could stop any story they didn’t like by malicious use of injunctions like the one on the
Roci
. I have a backdated contract that says I hired you a month ago, before I arrived at Ceres. I have a team of lawyers ten benches deep who can drown anyone that objects in enough paperwork to last a lifetime.”

“So we’ve been working for you all along,” Holden said.

“Only if you want to get that docking lock rescinded. But it’s more than just a ride I’m looking for. That’s what makes it reasonable that I can’t just hire a different ship.”

“I knew there was a but,” Holden said.

“I want to interview the crew too. While there are a half dozen ships I could get for the trip out, yours is the one that comes with the survivors of Eros.”

Naomi looked across at him. Her eyes were carefully neutral. Was it better to be here, trapped on Ceres while the
Roci
was pulled away from him by centimeters, or flying straight into the abyss with his crew? And the Ring.

“I have to think about it,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

“I respect that,” Monica said. “But please don’t take long. If we’re not going with you, we’ve still got to go with someone.”

He dropped the connection. In the silence, the deck seemed larger than it was.

“This isn’t coincidence,” Holden said. “We just
happen
to get locked down by Mars, and the only thing that can get us out of the docking clamps just
happens
to be heading for the Ring? No way. We’re being manipulated. Someone’s planning this. It’s him.”

“Jim—”

“It’s him. It’s Miller.”

“It’s not Miller. He can barely string together a coherent sentence,” Naomi said. “How is he going to engineer something like this?”

Holden leaned forward and the seat under him shifted. His head felt like it was stuffed with wool.

“If we leave, they can still take her away from us,” he said. “Once this story is done, we won’t be in any better position than we are right now.”

“Except that we wouldn’t be locked on Ceres,” Naomi said. “And it’s a long way out there. A long way back. A lot could change.”

“That wasn’t as comforting as you meant it to be.”

Naomi’s smile was thin but not bitter.

“Fair point,” she said.

The
Rocinante
hummed around them, the systems running through their automatic maintenance checks, the air cycling gently through the ducts. The ship breathing and dreaming. Their home, at rest. Holden reached out a hand, lacing his fingers with Naomi’s.

“We still have some money. We can take out a loan,” she said. “We could buy a different ship. Not a good one, but… It wouldn’t have to be the end of it all.”

“It would be, though.”

“Probably.”

“No choice, then,” Holden said. “Let’s go to Nineveh.”

 

 

Monica and her team arrived in the early hours of the morning, loading a few small crates of equipment that they carried themselves. In person, Monica was thinner than she seemed on screen. Her camera crew were a sturdy Earth woman named Okju and a brown-skinned Martian man who went by Clip. The cameras they carried looked like shoulder-mounted weapons, alloy casings that could telescope out to almost two meters or retract to fit around the tightest corner in the ship.

The soundman was blind. He had a dusting of short white hair and opaque black glasses. His teeth were yellowed like old ivory, and his smile was gentle and humane. According to the paperwork, his name was Elio Casti, but for some reason the documentary team all called him Cohen.

They assembled in the galley, Holden’s four people and Monica’s. He could see each group quietly considering the other. They’d be living in one another’s laps for months. Strangers trapped in a metal-and-ceramic box in the vast ocean of the vacuum. Holden cleared his throat.

“Welcome aboard,” he said.

I
f the Earth-Mars alliance hadn’t collapsed, if there hadn’t been a war—or two wars depending on how the line between battles was marked—civilian ships like the
Cerisier
would have had no place in the great convoy. The ships lost at Ganymede and in the Belt, the skirmishes to control those asteroids best placed to push down a gravity well. Hundreds of ships had been lost, from massive engines of war like the
Donnager
, the
Agatha King
, and the
Hyperion
to countless small three- and four-person support ships.

Nor, Melba knew, were those the only scars. Phobos with its listening station had become a thin, nearly invisible ring around Mars. Eros was gone. Phoebe had been subjected to a sustained nuclear hell and pushed into Saturn. The farms at Ganymede had collapsed. Venus had been used and abandoned by the alien protomolecule. Protogen and the Mao-Kwikowski empire, once one of the great shipping and transport companies in the system, had been gutted, stolen, and sold.

The
Cerisier
began her life as an exploration vessel. Now she was a flying toolshed. The bays of scientific equipment were machine shops now. What had once been sealed labs were stacked from deck to deck with the mundane necessities of environmental control networks—scrubbers, ducting, sealants, and alarm arrays. She lumbered through the uncaring vacuum on the fusion plume of her Epstein drive. The crew of a hundred and six souls was made of a small elite of ship command—no more than a dozen, all told—and a vast body of technicians, machinists, and industrial chemists.

Once, Melba thought, this ship had been on the bleeding edge of human exploration. Once it had burned through the skies of Jovian moons, seeing things humanity had never seen before. Now it was the handservant of the government, discovering nothing more exotic than what had been flushed into the water reclamation tanks. The degradation gave Melba a sense of kinship with the ship’s narrow halls and gray plastic ladders. Once, Clarissa Melpomene Mao had been the light of her school. Popular and beautiful, and suffused with the power and influence of her father’s name. Now her father was a numbered prisoner in a nameless prison, allowed only a few minutes of external connection every day, and those to his lawyer, not his wife or children.

And she was Melba Koh, sleeping on a gel couch that smelled of someone else’s body in a cabin smaller than a closet. She commanded a team of four electrochemical technicians: Stanni, Ren, Bob, and Soledad. Stanni and Bob were decades older than her. Soledad, three years younger, had been on two sixteen-month tours. Ren, her official second, was a Belter and, like all Belters, passionate about environmental control systems the way normal people were with sex or religion. She didn’t ask how he’d ended up on an Earth ship, and he didn’t volunteer the information.

She had known the months going out to the Ring would be hard, but she’d misunderstood what the worst parts would be.

“She’s a fucking bitch, right?” Stanni said. It was a private channel between him and Ren. If she’d been who she pretended to be, she wouldn’t have been able to hear it. “She doesn’t know dick.”

Ren grunted, neither defending her nor joining the attack.

“If you hadn’t caught that brownout buffer wrong way on the
Macedon
last week, it would have been another cascade failure, si no? Would have had to throw off the whole schedule to go back and fix it.”

“Might’ve,” Ren said.

She was a level above them. The destroyer
Seung Un
muttered around her. The crew was on a maintenance run. Scheduled, routine, predictable. They’d left the
Cerisier
ten hours earlier in one of the dozen transports that clung to the maintenance ship’s skin. They would be here for another fifteen hours, changing out the high-yield scrubbers and checking the air supply continuity. The greatest danger, she’d learned, was condensation degrading the seals.

It was the kind of detail she should have known.

She pulled herself through the access shaft. Her tool kit hung heavy on her front in the full-g thrust gravity. She imagined it was what being pregnant would feel like. Unless something strange had happened, Soledad and Bob were sleeping in the boat. Ren and Stanni were a level down, and going lower with every hour. They were expecting her to make the final inspection of their work. And, it seemed, they were expecting her to do it poorly.

It was true, of course. She didn’t know why a real electrochemical technician seeing her inexperience should embarrass her as deeply as it did. She’d read a few manuals, run through a few tutorials. All that mattered was that they think she was an authentic semicompetent overseer. It didn’t matter whether they respected her. They weren’t her friends.

She should have switched to the private frequencies for Soledad and Bob to be certain neither had woken unexpectedly and might come looking for her. This part of the plan was important. She couldn’t let any of them find her. But somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to shift away from Ren and Stanni.

“She don’t do anything is all. Keeps to her cabin, don’t help on the project. She just come out the end, look up, look down, sign off, and go back to her cabin.”

“True.”

The junction was hard to miss. The bulkhead was reinforced and clearly marked with bright orange safety warnings in five languages. She paused before it, her hands on her hips, and waited to feel some sense of accomplishment. And she did, only it wasn’t as pure as she’d hoped. She looked up and down the passageway, though the chances of being interrupted here were minimal.

The explosive was strapped against her belly, the heat of her skin keeping it malleable and bright green. As it cooled to ambient, the putty would harden and fade to gray. It surprised her again with its density. Pressing it along the seams of the junction, she felt like she was forming lead with her bare hands. The effort left her knuckles aching before she was halfway done. She’d budgeted half an hour, but it took her almost twice that. The detonator was a black dot four millimeters across with ten black ceramic contacts that pressed into the already stiffening putty. It looked like a tick.

When she was done, she wiped her hands down with cleaning towelettes twice, making sure none of the explosive was caught under her fingernails or on her clothes. She’d expected to skip her inspection of just the one level, but Ren and Stanni had made good time, and she took the lift down two levels instead. They were still talking, but not about her now. Stanni was considering getting a crush on Soledad. In laconic Belt-inflected half phrases, Ren was advising against it. Smart man, her second.

The lift paused and three soldiers got on it, all men. Melba pressed herself back to make room for them, and the nearest nodded his polite gratitude. His uniform identified him as Marcos. She nodded back, then stared hard at her feet, willing them not to look at her. Her uniform felt like a costume. Even though she knew better, it felt like they would see through her disguise if they looked too close. Like her past was written on her skin.

My name is Melba Koh
, she thought.
I’ve never been anyone else
.

The lift stopped at her level and the three soldiers made way for her. She wondered, when the time came, whether Marcos would die.

 

 

She had never been to her father’s prison, and even if he’d been allowed visitors, the visit would have been in a prescribed room, monitored, transcribed. Any real human emotion would have been pressed out of it by the weight of official attention. She would never have been permitted to see the hallways he walked down or the cell where he slept, but after his incarceration by the United Nations, she’d researched prison design. Her room was three centimeters narrower, a centimeter and a half longer. The crash couch she slept in was gimbaled to allow for changes in acceleration, while his would be welded to the floor. She could squeeze out whenever she wanted and go to the gang showers or the mess. Her door locked from the inside, and there were no cameras or microphones in her room.

In every way that mattered, she had more freedom than her father. That she likely spent as much time in isolation was a matter of choice for her, and that made all the difference. Tomorrow would be a fresh rotation out. Another ship, another round of maintenance that she could pretend to oversee. Tonight she could lie in her couch dressed in the simple cotton underclothes that she’d bought as the kind of thing Melba would wear. Her hand terminal had fifteen tutorials in local memory and dozens more on the ship’s shared storage. They covered everything from microorganic nutrient reclamation to coolant system specifications to management policies. She should have been reading them through. Or if not that, at least she shouldn’t have been reviewing her own secret files.

On the screen, Jim Holden looked like a zealot. The composite was built from dozens of hours of broadcast footage of the man taken over the previous years, with weight given to the most recent images and stills. The software she’d used to make a perfect visual simulacrum of the man cost more than her Melba persona had. The fake Holden had to be good enough to fool both people and computers, at least for a little while. On the screen, his brown eyes squinted with an idiot’s earnestness. His jaw had the first presentiment of jowls, only half hidden by the microgravity. The smarmy half smile told her everything she needed to know about the man who had destroyed her family.

“This is Captain James Holden,” he said. “What you’ve just seen is a demonstration of the danger you are in. My associates have placed similar devices on every ship presently in proximity to the Ring. You will all stand down as I am assuming sole and absolute control over the Ring in the name of the Outer Planets Alliance. Any ship that approaches the Ring without my
personal
permission will be destroyed without—”

She paused it, freezing her small, artificial Holden in mid-gesture. Her fingertip traced the outline of his shoulder, across his cheek, and then stabbed at his eyes. She wished now that she’d picked a more inflammatory script. On Earth, making her preparations, it had seemed enough to have him take unilateral control of the Ring. Now each time she watched it, it seemed tamer.

Killing Holden would have been easier. Assassinations were cheap by comparison, but she knew enough about image control and social dynamics to see where it would have led. Martyrdom, canonization, love. A host of conspiracy theories that implicated anyone from the OPA to her father. That was precisely not the point. Holden had to be humiliated in a way that passed backward in time. Someone coming to his legacy had to be able to look back at all the things Holden had done, all the pronouncements he’d given, all the high-handed, self-righteous decisions made on behalf of others while never leaving his control and see that of course it had all led to this. His name put in with the great traitors, con men, and self-aggrandizing egomaniacs of history. When she was done, everything Holden had touched would be tainted by association, including the destruction of her family. Her father.

Somewhere deep in the structure of the
Cerisier
, one of the navigators started a minor correction burn and gravity shifted a half a degree. The couch moved under her, and she tried not to notice it. She preferred the times when she could pretend that she was in a gravity well to the little reminders that she was the puppet of acceleration and inertia.

Her hand terminal chimed once, announcing the arrival of a message. To anyone who didn’t look carefully, it would seem like just another advertisement. An investment opportunity she would be a fool to ignore with a video presentation attached that would seem like corrupted data to anyone who didn’t have the decryption key. She sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the couch, and leaned close to the hand terminal.

The man who appeared on her screen wore black glasses dark enough to be opaque. His hair was cropped close to his skull, but she could see from the way it moved that he was under heavy burn. The soundman cleared his throat.

“The package is delivered and ready for testing. I’d appreciate the balance transfer as soon as you’ve confirmed. I’ve got some bills coming due, and I’m a little under the wire.” Something in the background hissed, and a distant voice started laughing. A woman. The file ended.

She replayed it four more times. Her heart was racing and her fingers felt like little electric currents were running through them. She’d need to confirm, of course. But this was the last, most dangerous step. The
Rocinante
had been cutting-edge military hardware when it had fallen into Holden’s hands. There could also have been any number of changes made to the security systems in the years since. She set up a simple remote connection looped through a disposable commercial account on Ceres Station. It might take days for the
Rocinante
’s acknowledgment to come back to her saying that the back door was installed and functioning, that the ship was hers. But if it did…