Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate (29 page)

If it had been a battle, it would have been a humbling defeat. It hadn’t even been an attack.

“Then what would you call it?” Pa asked from the screen of his hand terminal. She and Ashford had both survived. Ashford was riding roughshod over the recovery efforts, trying—Bull thought—to micromanage the crisis out of existence. That left Pa at the helm to coordinate with all the other ships. She was better suited for it anyway. There was a chance, at least, that she would listen.

“If I were doing it, I’d call it progressive restraint,” Bull said. “That asshole who shot the Ring came through doing something fierce and he got locked down. There’s rules about how fast you can go. Then Holden and those marines go to the station, something happens. Whatever’s running the station gets its jock in a twist, and things lock down harder. I don’t know the mechanism of how they do it, but the logic’s basic training stuff. It’s allowing us as much freedom as it can, but the more we screw it up, the tighter the choke.”

“Okay,” Pa said, running a hand through her hair. She looked tired. “I can see that. So as long as it doesn’t feel threatened, maybe things don’t get worse.”

“But if someone gets pissed,” Bull said. “I don’t know. Some Martian pendejo just lost all his friends or something? He decides to arm a nuke, walk it to the station, and set it off, maybe things get a lot worse.”

“All right.”

“We’ve got to get everyone acting together,” Bull said. “Earth, Mars, us. Everyone. Because if this was me, I’d escalate from a restraint, to a coercive restraint, to shooting someone. We don’t want to get this thing to follow the same—”

“I said
all right
, Mister Baca!” Pa shouted. “That means I understood your point. You can stop making it. Because the one thing I
don’t
need right now is another self-righteous male telling me how high the stakes are and that I’d better not fuck things up. I
got
it.
Thank
you.”

Bull blinked, opened his mouth, and closed it again. On his screen, Pa pinched the bridge of her nose. He heard echoes of Ashford in her frustration.

“Sorry, XO,” he said. “You’re right. I was out of line.”

“Don’t worry about it, Mister Baca,” she said, each syllable pulling a weight behind it. “If you have any concrete, specific recommendations, my door is always open.”

“I appreciate that,” Bull said. “So the captain… ?”

“Captain Ashford’s doing his best to keep the ship in condition and responsive. He feels that letting the crew see him will improve morale.”

And how’s that going
, Bull didn’t ask. Didn’t have to. Pa could see him restraining himself.

“Believe it or not, we are all on the same team,” she said.

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

Her expression clouded and she leaned in toward her screen, a gesture of intimacy totally artificial in the floating world of zero g and video connections and still impossible to entirely escape.

“I heard about your condition. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he said.

“If I ordered you to accept the medical coma?”

He laughed. Even that felt wrong. Truncated.

“I’ll go when I’m ready,” he said, only realizing after the fact that the phrase could mean two different things. “We get out of the woods, the docs can take over.”

“All right, then,” she said and her terminal chimed. She cursed quietly. “I have to go. I’ll touch base with you later.”

“You got it,” Bull said and let the connection drop.

The wise thing would have been to sleep. He’d been awake for fourteen hours, checking in with the security staff who were still alive, remaking a duty roster, doing all the things he could do from the medical bay that would make the ship work. Fourteen hours wasn’t all that long a shift in the middle of a crisis, except that he’d been crippled.

Crippled.

With a sick feeling, he walked his fingertips down his throat, to his chest, and to the invisible line where the skin stopped feeling like his own and turned into something else. Meat. His mind skittered off the thought. He’d been hurt before and gotten back from it. He’d damn near died four or five different times. Something always happened that got him back on his feet. He always got lucky. This time would be the same. Somehow, somehow he’d get back. Have another story to tell and no one to tell it to.

He knew he was lying to himself, but what else could he do? Apart from stand aside. And maybe he should. Let Pa take care of it. Give Ashford his shot. No one would give him any shit if he took the medical coma. Not even Fred. Hell, Fred would probably have told him to do it. Ordered him.

Bull closed his eyes. He’d sleep or he wouldn’t. Or he’d drift into some half-lucid place that wasn’t either. One of the doctors was weeping in the corridor, a slow, autonomic sound, more like being sick than expressing sorrow. Someone coughed wetly. Pneumonia was the worst danger now. Null g messed with the sensors that triggered the kinds of coughing that actually cleared lungs until it was too late. After that, strokes and embolisms as the blood that gravity should have helped to drain pooled and clotted instead. On all the other ships, it was the same. Survivable injuries made deadly just by floating. If they could just get under thrust. Get some gravity…

We’re all on the same team
, Pa said in his half drowse, and Bull was suddenly completely awake. He scooped up his hand terminal, but Ashford and Pa were both refusing connections. It was the middle of their night. He considered putting through an emergency override, but didn’t. Not yet. First, he tried Sam.

“Bull?” she said. Her skin looked grayish, and there were lines at the corners of her mouth that hadn’t been there before. Her one blood-red eye seemed like an omen.

“Hey, Sam. Look, we need to get all the other crews from all the other ships onto the
Behemoth
. Bring everyone together so no one does anything stupid.”

“You want a pony too?”

“Sure,” Bull said. “Thing is, we got to give them a reason to come here. Something they need and they can’t get anyplace else.”

“Sounds great,” Sam said, shaking her head. “Maybe I’m not at my cognitive best here, sweetie, but are you asking me for something?”

“They’ve all got casualties. They all need gravity. I’m asking you how long it would take you to spin up the drum.”

T
he darkness was beautiful and surreal. The ships of the flotilla, drawn together by the uncanny power of the station, hugged closer to each other than they ever would have under human control. The only lights came from the occasional exterior maintenance array and the eerie glow of the station. It was like walking through a graveyard in the moonlight. The ring of ships and debris glittered in a rising arc before her and behind, as if any direction she chose would lead up from where she was now.

The EVA suit had limited propellant, and she wanted to conserve it for her retreat. She scuttled through the vacuum, magnetic boots clicking against the hull of the
Prince
until she reached its edge and launched herself into the gap between vessels, aiming toward a Martian supply ship. The half mech and emergency airlock folded on her back massed almost fifty kilos, but with their courses matched, they were as weightless as she was. It was an illusion, she knew, but in the timeless reach between the
Thomas Prince
and hated
Rocinante
, all her burdens seemed light.

The EVA suit had a simple heads-up display that outlined the
Rocinante
with a thin green line. It wasn’t the nearest ship. The trip out to it would take hours, but she didn’t mind. It was as trapped as all the others. It couldn’t go anyplace.

She hummed to herself as she imagined her arrival. Rehearsed it. She let herself daydream that he would be there: Jim Holden returned from the station. She imagined him raging at her as she destroyed his ship. She imagined him weeping and begging her forgiveness, and seeing the despair in his eyes when she refused. They were beautiful dreams, and folded safely inside them, she could forget the blood and horror behind her. Not just the catastrophe on the
Prince
, but all of it—Ren, her father, Julie, everything. The dim blue light of the not-moon felt like home, and the impending violence like a promise about to be kept.

If there was another part of her, a sliver of Clarissa that hadn’t quite been crushed yet that felt differently, it was small enough to ignore.

Of course it was just as likely they’d all be dead when she got there. The catastrophe would have hit them as hard as the
Thomas Prince
or any of the other ships. Holden’s crew might be nothing but cooling meat already, only waiting for her to come and light their funeral pyre. There was, she thought, a beauty in that too. She ran across the skins of the ships, leaped from one to the next like a nerve impulse crossing a synapse. Like a bad idea being thought by a massive, moonlit brain.

The air in the suit smelled like old plastic and her own sweat. The impact of the magnetic boots pulling her to the ships and then releasing her again translated up her leg, tug and release, tug and release. And before her, as slowly as the hour hand of an analog clock, the ghost-green
Rocinante
grew larger and nearer.

She knew the ship’s specs by heart. She’d studied them for weeks. Martian corvette, originally assigned to the doomed
Donnager
. The entry points were the crew airlock just aft of the ops deck, the aft cargo bay doors, and a maintenance port that ran along beneath the reactor. If the reactor was live, the maintenance access wouldn’t work. The fore airlock had almost certainly had its security profile changed once the ship fell into Holden’s control. Only a stupid man wouldn’t change it, and Melba refused to believe a stupid man could bring down her father. The service records she’d gleaned suggested that the cargo bay had been breached once already. Repairs were always weaker than the original structure. The choice was easy.

The attitude of the ship put the cargo bay on the far side of the ship, the body of the
Rocinante
hiding its flaw from the light. Melba stepped into shadow, shivering as if it could actually be colder in the darkness. She fastened the mech to the ship’s skin and assembled it for use under the glare of the EVA suit’s work lamps. The mech was the yellow of fresh lemons and police tape. The cautions printed in three alphabets were like little Rosetta stones. She felt an inexplicable fondness for the machine as she strapped it across her back, fitting her hands into the waldoes. The mech hadn’t been designed for violence, but it was suited for it. That made her and it the same.

She lit the cutting torch and the EVA suit’s mask went dark. Melba clung to the ship and began her slow invasion. Sparks and tiny asteroids of melted steel flew off into the darkness around her. The repair work where the bay doors had been bent out and refitted was almost invisible. If she hadn’t known to look, she wouldn’t have seen the weaknesses. She wondered if they knew she was coming. She imagined them hunched over their security displays, eyes wide with fear at what was digging its way under the
Rocinante
’s skin. She found herself singing softly, snatches of popular songs and old holiday tunes, whatever came to mind. Bits of lyrics and melody matched to the hum of the torch’s vibration.

She breached the
Rocinante
, a patch of glowing steel no wider than her finger popping out. No air vented through the gap into the vacuum. They didn’t keep the cargo bay pressurized. That meant the atmosphere wasn’t dropping inside, and the ship alarms weren’t blaring. One problem solved even without her help. It felt like fate. She killed the torch and unfolded the emergency airlock, sealing it against the hatch. She unzipped the outer layer, closed it, unzipped the inner one, and stepped into the small additional room she’d created. She didn’t know how much damage she’d have to do to get into the inner areas of the ship. She didn’t want an accidental loss of atmosphere to rob her of her vengeance. Holden needed to know who’d done this to him, not gasp out his last breaths thinking his ship had merely broken.

Gently, she slipped the mech’s hand into the hole, braced, and peeled back the cargo door, long strips of steel blooming like an iris blossom. When it was wide enough, she took the sides of the hole in her mechanical hands and pulled herself into the cargo bay. Supply crates lined the walls and floors, held in place by electromagnets. One had shattered, a victim of the catastrophe. A cloud of textured protein packets floated in the air. The LED on the panel beside the interior airlock door was green; the bay hadn’t been locked down. Why would it? She punched the button to enter the airlock and begin the cycle. Once the green pressure light came on, she slipped her hands out of the mech and lifted off the helmet. No Klaxons were ringing. No voices shouted or threatened. She’d made it on without alarming anyone. Her grin ached.

Back in the mech, she opened the airlock into the interior of the ship and paused. Still no alarms. Melba pulled herself gently, silently into enemy territory.

The
Rocinante
was built floor by floor from the reactor up to the engineering deck, to the machine shop, then the galley and crew cabins and medical bays, storage deck containing the crew airlock, then on up to the command deck and pilot’s station farthest forward. Under thrust, it would be like a narrow building. Without thrust, the ship was directionless.

She had choices to make now. The cargo bay was close enough to give her access to engineering and the reactor. She could sneak in there and start the reactor on its overload. Or she could go up, try taking the crew by surprise, and set the ship to self-destruct from the command deck.

She took a deep breath. The
Rocinante
had four regular crew including Holden, and she didn’t know whether the documentary crew were still on board. At least two of the regular crew had military training and experience. She might be able to take them in a fight if she got the drop on them or came across them one at a time.

The risk was too high. The reactor was nearest, it was easiest, and she could get out through the cargo bay. She pulled herself along the corridors she knew only from simulations, toward the reactor and the death of the ship.

When she opened the hatch to engineering, a woman floated above an opened control panel, a soldering iron in one hand and a spool of wire in the other. She had the elongated frame and slightly oversized head of someone who’d grown up under low g. Brown skin and dark hair pulled back in a utilitarian knot. Naomi Nagata. Holden’s lover.

Melba felt a sudden urge to tear off the mech suit, swirl her tongue across the roof of her mouth, feel the chemical rush. To grab the narrow Belter’s neck in her bare hands and feel the bones snap. It would be a yearlong dream of revenge made tactile and perfect. But two other crew members were on the ship, and she didn’t know where they were. The terror she’d felt in that sleazy Baltimore casino came rushing back. Crawling helplessly on the floor in the post-drug collapse while people banged at the door to get in. She couldn’t risk a crash until she knew where everyone was.

Naomi looked up at the sound of the door, pleasure in the woman’s dark eyes as if the interruption were a happy surprise, and then shock, and then a cold fury.

For a moment, neither one moved.

With a yell, the woman launched herself at Melba, spinning the spool of wire in front of her. Melba tried to dodge, but the bulk of the mech and its slow response made it impossible. The wire hit her left cheek with a sound like a brick falling to earth, and for a moment her head rang. She brought up the mech’s arm in a rough block, taking the Belter solidly in the ribs and sending them both spinning. Melba grabbed at a handhold, missed it, and then tried for another. The mech’s hand latched on, crushing the metal flat and almost pulling it from the wall, but the Belter was ahead of her, skimming through the air at Melba, teeth bared like a shark. Melba tried to get the mech’s free arm up to bat her away, but the Belter was already too close. She grabbed the front of Melba’s jumpsuit, balling it in a fist, and used the leverage to swing a hard knee into her ribs, punctuating each blow with a word.

“You. Don’t. Get. To hurt. My.
Ship.
”

Melba felt a rib give way. She reached her tongue for the roof of her mouth, but again she didn’t make the small private circles that would flush her blood with fire. She had to be awake and functional when the fight was over. She gritted her teeth and curled the mech’s free arm in, bending it against itself, and then snapped her hand closed. The Belter screamed. The mech’s claw had her by the shoulder. Melba squeezed again and heard the muffled, wet sound of bone breaking.

She threw the Belter across the room as hard as the motors let her. Where the woman bounced off the far wall, a smear of blood marked it. Melba waited, watching the Belter rotate in the air, directionless and loose as a rag doll sinking to the bottom of a swimming pool. A growing sphere of blood adhered to the woman’s shoulder and neck.

“I do what I want,” Melba said, and the voice sounded like someone else’s.

Carefully, she pulled herself to the control panel. The panel was off, fixed to the deck with a length of adhesive tape. The guts within were a mess of wires and plates. The
Rocinante
had taken some damage in the catastrophe, but not so much that Melba couldn’t do what was needed. She shrugged out of the mech, cracked her knuckles, traced the major control nodes, and plugged them back into the panel. The local memory check took only a few seconds, and she overrode the full system check. It was nothing she could have done before she left Earth, but Melba Koh had spent months learning about the guts of military ships. This was just the sort of thing Soledad, Stanni, and Bob would have checked on if they’d been working maintenance. It was something Ren would have taught her.

Her fingers curled, stumbling over the keyboard for a moment, but she got it back.

The control specs of the reactor came up. Releasing the magnetic bottle that kept the core from melting through the ship was deliberately designed to be difficult. Changing the limits on the reaction itself until it would eventually outstrip the bottle’s ability to contain it was also hard, but less so. And it would give her a little time to tell Holden what she’d done, then get out of the ship and back toward the
Thomas Prince
. In the chaos of the day, no one might even know that someone had survived the death of the
Rocinante
.

A flicker in her peripheral vision was the only warning she had, but it was enough. Melba twisted out of the way, the Belter’s massive wrench hissing through the air where her temple had been. Melba pushed back with her legs, struggling frantically to worm back into the mech. She tensed against the coming attack, but no blows came. She shrugged into the metal and jammed her hands into the waldoes, grabbing the wall and spinning back to the fight just as the Belter looked up from the control panel. Blood was crawling up the woman’s neck, held to her by surface tension, and her smile was triumphant. The control panel flashed red and a screen of code crawled over it too fast to read. The lights in the room went off, and the emergency LEDs flickered on. Melba felt her throat go tight.

The Belter had dumped core. The reaction Melba had come to overload was dissipating in a cloud of gas behind the ship. The Belter’s smile was feral and triumphant.

“Doesn’t change anything,” Melba said. It hurt to talk. “You have torpedoes. I’ll overload one of those.”

“Not in my lifetime,” the Belter said, and attacked again.

Her swing was lopsided, though. Clumsy. The wrench clanged against the mech’s joint, but it didn’t do any damage. The Belter launched herself out of reach just as Melba swung an arm at her. The Belter wasn’t using her injured arm at all, and she left spinning droplets of blood whenever she changed direction.

Melba wondered why the woman didn’t call for help. On little ships like this, opening a communications channel was often as simple as saying it out loud. Either the computer was down, the rest of the crew dead or incapacitated, or it simply hadn’t occurred to her. It didn’t matter. It didn’t change what Melba had to do. She shifted to her right, sliding through the air, moving handhold to handhold, never giving the other woman the chance to catch her unmoored and spin her into the open air at the center of the room. The Belter perched on the wall, her dark eyes darting one way, then other, searching for advantage. There was no fear in them, no sentimentality. Melba had no doubt that if the opportunity came, Naomi would kill her.