Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate (23 page)

On the way back to his station, he looked over the datafile the
Rocinante
had sent out. The saboteur seemed legitimate enough. Bull had seen enough faked confessions to recognize the signs, and this didn’t have them. After that, though, the whole damn thing turned into a fairy tale. A mysterious woman who manipulated governments and civilians, who was willing to kill dozens of people and risk thousands in order to… do what? Put James Holden through the Ring, where he was going now?

The image the prisoner had built looked like it had been carved from ice. No one had added color. Bull put on an even olive flesh tone and brown hair, and the face didn’t look familiar. Juliette Mao, they said. She hadn’t been the first person infected with the protomolecule, but everyone before her had gotten thrown in an autoclave one way or the other. She’d been the seed crystal that Eros had used to make itself, to make the Ring. So who was to say she couldn’t be wandering around hiring traitors and placing bombs?

The problem with living with miracles was that they made everything seem plausible. An alien weapon had been lurking in orbit around Saturn for billions of years. It had eaten thousands of people, hijacking the mechanisms of their bodies for its own ends. It had built a wormhole gate into a kind of haunted sphere. So why not the rest? If all that was possible, everything was.

Bull didn’t buy it.

Back at the security desk, he checked the status. The skiff of Earth marines had gone too fast, trying to race ahead of the Martian force. The slow zone had caught them, and the skiff was drifting off toward the ring of debris. Chances were that all the men in it were dead. The Martian skiff was still on track, but Holden would reach the structure before they got to him. It was too bad, in a way. The Martians had been the trigger-happy ones all along. Chances of someone getting to question Holden were looking pretty long.

Bull sucked his teeth, half-formed ideas shifting in the back of his mind. Holden wasn’t getting interrogated, but that didn’t mean no one would. He checked his security codes. Ashford hadn’t blocked him from using the comm laser. Protocol would have been to discuss this with Ashford or at least Pa, but they had their hands full right now anyway. And if it worked, it would be hard for them to object. They’d have a bargaining chip.

The
Rocinante
’s XO appeared on the screen.

“What can I do for you,
Behemoth
?”

“Carlos Baca here. I’m security chief. Wanted to talk about maybe taking a problem off your hands.”

She hoisted her eyebrows, her head shaking like she was trying to stay awake. She had a smart face.

“I’ve got a lot of problems right now,” she said. “Which one were you thinking about?”

“You got a bunch of civvies on your ship. One of ’em under arrest. Mars is still saying you’re flying their ship. Earth is wondering whether you blew the shit out of one of theirs. I can take custody of your prisoner and give the rest of them a safer place than you can.”

“Last I checked, the OPA was the only one that’s actually shot at us so far,” she said. She had a good smile. Too young for him, but ten years ago he’d have been asking her if he could make her dinner around now. “Doesn’t put you at the top of my list.”

“That was me,” Bull said. “I won’t do it this time.” It got him a chuckle, but it was the bleak kind. The one that came from someone wading through hell. “Look, you got a lot going on, and you’ve got a bunch of people on there who aren’t your crew. You got to keep them safe, and it’s a distraction. You send ’em over here, and everyone’ll see you aren’t trying to control access to them. Makes this whole thing about how it wasn’t you that blew the shit out of the
Seung Un
that much easier for people to believe.”

“I think we’re past goodwill gestures,” she said.

“I think goodwill gestures are the only chance you have to avoid a field promotion,” Bull said. “They’re sending killers after your captain. Good ones. No one’s thinking straight here. You and me, we can start cooling things down. Acting like grown-ups. And if we do, maybe they do too. No one else needs to get killed.”

“Thin hope,” she said.

“It’s all the hope I got. You got nothing to hide, then show them that. Show everyone.”

It took her twenty seconds.

“All right,” she said. “You can have them.”

“W
ow,” Holden said to himself, “I really don’t want to do this.”

The sound echoed in his helmet, competing only with the faint hiss of his radio.

“I tried to talk you out of it,” Naomi replied, her voice somehow managing to be intimate even flattened and distorted by his suit’s small speakers.

“Sorry, I didn’t think you were listening.”

“Ah,” she said. “Irony.”

Holden tore his eyes way from the slowly growing sphere that was his destination and spun around to look for the
Rocinante
behind him. She wasn’t visible until Alex fired a maneuvering thruster and a gossamer cone of steam reflected some of the sphere’s blue glow. His suit told him that the
Roci
was over thirty thousand kilometers away—more than twice as far as any two people on Earth could ever be from each other—and receding. And here he was, in a suit of vacuum armor, wearing a disposable EVA pack that had about five minutes of thrust in it. He’d burned one minute accelerating toward the sphere. He’d burn another slowing down when he got there. That left enough to fly back to the
Roci
when he was done.

Optimism expressed as conservation of delta V.

Ships from the three fleets had begun coming through the gate even before he’d started his trip. The
Roci
was now protected from them only by the absolute speed limit of the slow zone. She was drifting off at just under that limit to put as much space between her and the fleets as possible. They had a sphere a million kilometers in diameter to play with, even without going beyond the area marked by the gates. The gates had close to fifty thousand kilometers of empty space between them, but the idea of flying out of the slow zone and into that starless void beyond made Holden’s skin crawl. He and Naomi had agreed it would be a maneuver of last resort.

As long as no one could fire a ballistic weapon, the
Roci
should be plenty safe with five hundred quadrillion square kilometers to move around in.

Holden spun back around, using two quarter-second blasts from his EVA pack, and took a range reading to the sphere. He was still hours away. The minute-long burst he’d fired from the pack to start his journey had accelerated him to a slow crawl, astronomically speaking, and the
Roci
had come to a relative stop before releasing him. He’d never have had enough juice in the EVA pack to stop himself if the ship had flung him out at the slow zone’s maximum speed.

Ahead in the middle of all that starless black, the blue sphere waited.

It had waited for two billion years for someone to come through his particular gate, if the researchers were right about how long ago Phoebe had been captured by Saturn. But lately the strangeness surrounding the protomolecule and the Ring left Holden with the disquieting feeling that maybe all of the assumptions they’d made about its origins and purpose were wrong.

Protogen had named the protomolecule and decided it was a tool that could redefine what it meant to be human. Jules-Pierre Mao had treated it like a weapon. It killed humans, therefore it was a weapon. But radiation killed humans, and a medical X-ray machine wasn’t intended as a weapon. Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.

So here the monkeys were, poking the shiny box and making guesses about what it did. Holden could tell himself that in his case the box was asking to be poked, but even that was making a lot of assumptions. Miller looked human, had
been
human once, so it was easy to think of him as having human motivations. Miller wanted to communicate. He wanted Holden to know or do something. But it was just as likely—more likely, maybe—that Holden was anthropomorphizing something far stranger.

He imagined himself landing on the station, and Miller saying,
James Holden, you and only you in the universe have the correct chemical composition to make a perfect wormhole fuel!
then stuffing him into a machine to be processed.

“Everything okay?” Naomi asked in response to his chuckle.

“Still just thinking about how incredibly stupid this is. Why didn’t I let you talk me out of it?”

“It looks like you did, but it took a couple of hours for it to process. Want us to come get you?”

“No. If I bail out now, I’ll never have the balls to try it again,” Holden said. “How’s it look out there?”

“The fleets came through with about two dozen ships, mostly heavies. Alex has figured out the math on doing short torpedo burns to get one up to the speed limit but not over. Which means everyone on those other ships are doing the same thing. So far no one has fired at us.”

“Maybe your protestations of my innocence worked?”

“Maybe,” she said. “There were a couple of small ships detaching from the fleet on an intercept course with you. The
Roci
is calling them landing skiffs.”

“Shit, they’re sending the Marines after me?”

“They’ve burned up to the speed limit, but the
Roci
says you make stationfall before they catch you. But
just
before.”

“Damn,” Holden said. “I really hope there’s a door.”

“They lost the UN ship. The other is Martian. So maybe they brought Bobbie. She can make sure the others are nice to you.”

“No,” Holden said with a sigh. “No, these will be the ones that are still mad at me.”

Knowing the marines were following made the back of his neck itch. Being in a space suit just added that to his already lengthy list of insoluble problems.

“On the good news level, Monica’s team is getting evacuated to the
Behemoth
.”

“You never did like her.”

“Not much, no.”

“Why not?”

“Her job is digging up old things,” Naomi said, the lightness of her tone almost covering her anxieties. “And digging up old things leads to messes like this one.”

 

 

When Holden was nine, Rufus the family Labrador died. He’d already been an adult dog when Holden was born, so Holden had only ever known Rufus as a big black slobbering bundle of love. He’d taken some of his first steps clutching the dog’s fur in one stubby fist. He’d run around their Montana farm not much bigger than a toddler with Rufus as his only babysitter. Holden had loved the dog with the simple intensity only children and dogs share.

But when he was nine, Rufus was fifteen, and old for such a big dog. He slowed down. He stopped running with Holden, barely managing a trot to catch up, then gradually only a slow walk. He stopped eating. And one night he flopped onto his side next to a heater vent and started panting. Mother Elise had told him that Rufus probably wouldn’t last the night, and even if he did they’d have to call the vet in the morning. Holden had tearfully sworn to stay by the dog’s side. For the first couple of hours, he held Rufus’ head on his lap and cried, as Rufus struggled to breathe and occasionally gave one halfhearted thump of his tail.

By the third, against his will and every good thought he’d had about himself, Holden was bored.

It was a lesson he’d never forgotten. That humans only have so much emotional energy. No matter how intense the situation, or how powerful the feelings, it was impossible to maintain a heightened emotional state forever. Eventually you’d just get tired and want it to end.

For the first hours drifting toward the glowing blue station, Holden had felt awe at the immensity of empty starless space around him. He’d felt fear of what the protomolecule might want from him, fear of the marines following him, fear that he’d made the wrong choice and that he’d arrive at the station to find nothing at all. Most of all fear that he’d never see Naomi or his crew again.

But after four hours of being alone in his space suit, even the fear burned out. He just wanted it all to be over with.

With the infinite and unbroken black all around him, and the only visible spot of light coming from the blue sphere directly ahead, it was easy to feel like he was in some vast tunnel, slowly moving toward the exit. The human mind didn’t do well with infinite spaces. It wanted walls, horizons, limits. It would create them if it had to.

His suit beeped at him to let him know it was time to replenish his O2 supply. He pulled a spare bottle out of the webbing clipped to his EVA pack and attached it to the suit’s nipple. The gauge on his HUD climbed back up to four hours and stopped. The next time he had to refill, he’d be on the station or in Marine custody.

One way or the other, he wouldn’t be alone anymore, and that was a relief. He wondered what his mothers would have thought about all this, whether they would have approved of the choices he’d made, how he could arrange to have a dog for their children since Naomi wouldn’t be able to live at the bottom of the gravity well. His attention wandered, and then his mind.

 

 

He awoke to a harsh buzzing sound, and for a few seconds slapped his hand at empty space trying to turn his alarm off. When he finally opened sleep-gummed eyes, he saw his HUD flashing a proximity warning. He’d somehow managed to fall asleep until the station was only a few kilometers away.

At that distance, it loomed like a gently curving wall of metallic blue, glowing with its own inner light. No radiation alarms were flashing, so whatever made it glow wasn’t anything his suit thought was dangerous to him. The flight program Alex had written for him was spooling out on the HUD, counting down to the moment when he’d need to do his minute-long deceleration burn. Waving his hand around when he first woke up had put him into a gentle rotation, and the flight program was prompting him to allow it to make course corrections. Since he trusted Alex completely on matters of navigation, Holden authorized the suit to handle the descent automatically.

A few quick bursts of compressed gas later, he was facing out into the black, the sphere at his back. Then came a minute-long burn from the pack to slow him to a gentle half meter per second for landing. He kicked on his boot magnets, not knowing if they’d actually help or not—the sphere looked like metal, but that didn’t mean much—and turned around.

The wall of glowing blue was less than five meters away. Holden bent his knees, bracing for the impact of hitting the surface, and hoping to absorb enough energy that he didn’t just bounce off. The half meters ticked away, each second taking too long and passing too quickly. With only a meter before impact, he realized he’d been holding his breath and let out a long exhale.

“Here we go,” he said to no one.

“Hey, boss?” Alex said in a burst of radio static.

Before Holden could reply, the surface of the sphere irised open and swallowed him up.