The construction gantry sloped out ahead of them, the flexible walls shining like snake scales. There was a constant low-level whine, the vibrations of the construction equipment carried along the flesh of the station. The spin gravity here was a little less than the standard one-third g on Tycho Station proper, and Ashford was making a little show of speeding up and then slowing down for the Earthers. Bull slowed his own steps down just a little to make the man wait longer.
“Time element? What’s that look like, Colonel?” Ashford asked.
“Not as bad as it could be,” Fred said. “The Ring hasn’t made any apparent changes since the big one during the incident. No one else has gone through, and nothing’s come out. People have backed down from filling their pants to just high alert. Mars is approaching this as a strictly military and scientific issue. They’ve got half a dozen science vessels on high burn already.”
“How much escort?” Bull asked.
“One destroyer, three frigates,” Fred said. “Earth is moving slower, but larger. They’ve got elections coming up next year, and the secretary-general’s been catching hell about turning a blind eye to rogue corporate entities.”
“Wonder why,” Bull said dryly. Even Ashford smiled. Between Protogen and Mao-Kwikowski, the order and stability of the solar system had pretty much been dropped in a blender. Eros Station was gone, taken over by an alien technology and crashed into Venus. Ganymede was producing less than a quarter of its previous food output, leaving every population center in the outer planets relying on backup agricultural sources. The Earth-Mars alliance was the kind of quaint memory someone’s grandpa might talk about after too much beer. The good old days, before it all went to hell.
“He’s putting on a show,” Fred went on. “Media. Religious leaders. Poets. Artists. They’re hauling them all out to the Ring so that every feed he can reach is pointed away from him.”
“Typical,” Ashford said, then didn’t elaborate. Typical for a politician. Typical for an Earther. “What are we looking at out there?”
The gantry sang for a moment, an accident of harmonics setting it ringing and shaking until industrial dampers kicked in and killed the vibration before it reached the point of doing damage.
“All we’ve confirmed is that some idiot flew through the Ring at high ballistic speeds and didn’t come out the other side,” Fred said, moving his hands in the physical shrug of a Belter. “Now there’s some kind of physical anomaly in the Ring. Could be that the idiot kid’s ship got eaten by the Ring and converted into something. The ring sprayed a lot of gamma and X-rays, but not enough to account for the mass of the ship. Could be that he broke it. Could be that it opened a gate, and there’s a bunch of little green men in saucers about to roll through and make the solar system into a truck stop.”
“What—” Bull began, but Ashford talked over him.
“Any response from Venus?”
“Nothing,” Fred said.
Venus was dead. For years after a corrupted Eros Station fell through its clouds, all human eyes had turned to that planet, watching as the alien protomolecule struggled in the violence and heat. Crystal towers kilometers high rose and fell away. Networks of carbon fibers laced the planet and degraded to nothing. The weapon had been meant to hijack simple life on Earth, billions of years before. Instead, it had the complex ecosystem of human bodies and the structures to sustain them in the toxic oven of Venus. Maybe it had taken longer to carry out its plan. Maybe having complex life to work with had made things easier. Everything pointed to it being finished with Venus. And all that really mattered was it had launched a self-assembling ring in the emptiness outside the orbit of Uranus that sat there dead as a stone.
Until now.
“What are we supposed to do about it?” Bull asked. “No offense, but we don’t got the best science vessels. And Earth and Mars blew the crap out of each other over Ganymede.”
“Be there,” Fred said. “If Earth and Mars send their ships, we send ours. If they put out a statement, we put out one of our own. If they lay a claim on the Ring, we counterclaim. What we’ve done to make the outer planets into a viable political force has reaped real benefits, but if we start letting them lead, it could all evaporate.”
“We planning to shoot anybody?” Bull asked.
“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” Fred said.
The gantry’s gentle upward slope brought them to a platform arch. In the star-strewn blackness, a great plain of steel and ceramic curved away above them, lit by a thousand lights. Looking out at it was like seeing a landscape—this was too big to be something humans had made. It was like a canyon or a mountain. The meadow-filled caldera of some dead volcano. The scale alone made it impossible to see her as a ship. But she was. The construction mechs crawling along her side were bigger than the house Bull had lived in as a boy, but they looked like football players on a distant field. The long, thin line of the keel elevator stretched along the body of the drum to shuttle personnel from engineering at one end to ops at the other. The secondary car, stored on the exterior, could hold a dozen people. It looked like a grain of salt. The soft curve was studded with turreted rail guns and the rough, angry extrusions of torpedo tubes.
Once, she’d been the Nauvoo. A generation ship headed to the stars carrying a load of devout Mormons with only an engineered ecosystem and an unshakable faith in God’s grace to see them through. Now she was the Behemoth. The biggest, baddest weapons platform in the solar system. Four Donnager-class battleships would fit in her belly and not touch the walls. She could accelerate magnetic rounds to a measurable fraction of c. She could hold more nuclear torpedoes than the Outer Planets Alliance actually had. Her communications laser was powerful enough to burn through steel if they gave it enough time. Apart from painting teeth on her and welding on an apartment building–sized sharkfin, nothing could have been more clearly or effectively built to intimidate.
Which was good, because she was a retrofitted piece of crap, and if they ever got in a real fight, they were boned. Bull slid a glance at Ashford. The captain’s chin was tilted high and his eyes were bright with pride. Bull sucked his teeth.
The last threads of weight let go as the platform and gantry matched to the stillness of the Behemoth. One of the distant construction mechs burst into a sun-white flare as the welding started.
“How long before we take her out?” Ashford asked.
“Three days,” Fred said.
“Engineering report said the ship’ll be ready in about ten,” Bull said. “We planning to work on her while we’re flying?”
“That was the intention,” Fred said.
“Because we could wait another few days here, do the work in dock, and burn a little harder going out, get the same arrival.”
The silence was uncomfortable. Bull had known it would be, but it had to be said.
“The crew’s comfort and morale need as much support as the ship,” Fred said, diplomacy changing the shapes of the words. Bull had known him long enough to hear it. The Belters don’t want a hard burn. “Besides which, it’s easier to get the in-transit work done in lower g. It’s all been min-maxed, Bull. You ship out in three.”
“Is that a problem?” Ashford said.
Bull pulled the goofy grin he used when he wanted to tell the truth and not get in trouble for it.
“We’re heading out to throw gang signs at Earth and Mars while the Ring does a bunch of scary alien mystery stuff. We’ve got a crew that’s never worked together, a ship that’s half salvage, and not enough time to shake it all down. Sure it’s a problem, but it’s not one we can fix, so we’ll do it anyway. Worst can happen is we’ll all die.”
“Cheerful thought,” Ashford said. The disapproval dripped off him. Bull’s grin widened and he shrugged.
“Going to happen sooner or later.”
Bull’s quarters on Tycho Station were luxurious. Four rooms, high ceilings, a private head with an actual water supply. Even as a kid back on Earth, he hadn’t
lived this well. He’d spent his childhood in a housing complex in the New Mexican Shared Interest Zone, living with his parents, grandmother, two uncles, three aunts, and about a thousand cousins, seemed like. When he turned sixteen and declined to go on basic, he’d headed south to Alamogordo and worked his two-year service stripping down ancient solar electricity stations from the bad old days before fusion. He’d shared a dorm with ten other guys. He could still picture them, the way they’d been back then, all skinny and muscled with their shirts off or tied around their heads. He could still feel the New Mexican sun pressing against his chest like a hand as he basked in the radiation and heat of an uncontrolled fusion reaction, protected only by distance and the wide blue sky.
When his two-year stint was up, he tried tech school, but he’d gotten distracted by hormones and alcohol. Once he’d dropped out, his choices were pretty much just the military or basic. He’d chosen the one that felt less like death. In the Marines, he’d never had a bunk larger than the front room of his Tycho Station quarters. He hadn’t even had a place that was really his own until he mustered out. Ceres Station hadn’t been a good place for him. The hole he’d taken had been up near the center of spin, low g and high Coriolis. It hadn’t been much more than a place to go sleep off last night’s drunk, but it had been his. The bare, polished-stone walls, the ship surplus bed with restraining straps for low g. Some previous owner had chiseled the words besso o nadie into the wall. It was Belter cant for better or nothing. He hadn’t known it was a political slogan at the time. The things he’d gotten since coming to Tycho Station—the frame cycling through a dozen good family pictures from Earth, the tin Santos candleholder that his ex-girlfriend hadn’t taken when she left, the civilian clothes—would have filled his old place on Ceres and not left room for him to sleep. He had too much stuff. He needed to pare it down.
But not for this assignment. The XO’s suite on the Behemoth was bigger.
The system chimed, letting him know someone was at the door. From long habit, Bull checked the video feed before he opened the door. Fred was shifting from one foot to the other. He was in civilian clothes. A white button-down and grandpa pants that tried to forgive the sag of his belly. It was a losing fight. Fred wasn’t out of shape any more than Bull was. They were just getting old.
“Hey,” Bull said. “Grab a chair anywhere. I’m just getting it all together.”
“Heading over now?”
“Want to spend some time on the ship before we take her out,” Bull said. “Check for stray Mormons.”
Fred looked pained.
“I’m pretty sure we got them all out the first time,” he said, playing along. “But it’s a big place. You can look around if you want.”
Bull opened his dresser, his fingers counting through T-shirts. He had ten. There was a sign of decadence. Who needed ten T-shirts? He pulled out five and dropped them on the chair by his footlocker.
“It’s going to be all kinds of hell if they get rights to the Nauvoo back,” he said. “All the changes we’re making to her.”
“They won’t,” Fred said. “Commandeering the ship was perfectly legal. It was an emergency. I could list you ten hours of precedent.”
“Yeah, but then we salvaged it ourselves and called it ours,” Bull said. “That’s like saying I’ve got to borrow your truck, but since I ran it into a ditch and hauled it back out, it’s mine now.”
“Law is a many-splendored thing, Bull,” Fred said. He sounded tired. Something else was bothering him. Bull opened another drawer, threw half his socks into the recycler, and put the others on his T-shirts.
“Just if the judge doesn’t see it that way, could be awkward,” Bull said.
“The judges on Earth don’t have jurisdiction,” Fred said. “And the ones in our court system are loyal to the OPA. They know the big picture. They’re not going to take our biggest ship off the board and hand it back over. Worst case, they’ll order compensation.”
“Can we afford that?”
“Not right now, no,” Fred said.
Bull snorted out a little laugh. “Ever wonder what we did wrong that got us here? You’re driving one of the biggest desks in the OPA, and I’m XO to Ashford. That ain’t a sign we’ve been living our lives right, man.”
“About that,” Fred said. “We’ve had a little change of plan.”
Bull opened his closet, his lips pressing thin. Fred hadn’t just come to chew the fat. There was a problem. Bull took two suits out of the closet, both still wrapped in sticky preservative film. He hadn’t worn either one in years. They probably didn’t fit.
“Ashford thought it would be better to have Michio Pa as the XO. We talked about it. I’m reassigning you as chief security officer.”
“Third-in-command now,” Bull said. “What? Ashford think I was going to frag him and take his chair?”
Fred leaned forward, his fingers laced. The gravity of his expression said he knew it was a crap situation but was making the best of it.
“It’s all about how it looks,” Fred said. “This is the OPA’s navy. The Behemoth is the Belt’s answer to Mars’ and Earth’s heaviest hitters. Having an Earther on the bridge doesn’t send the right message.”
“All right,” Bull said.
“I’m in the same position. You know that. Even after all this time, I have to work twice as hard to command loyalty and respect because of where I’m from. Even the ones who like having me around because they think I make Earth look weak don’t want to take orders from me. I’ve had to earn and re-earn every scrap of respect.”
“Okay,” Bull said. Security officer was going to mean less time in uniform. With a sigh, he put both suits on the chair.
“I’m not saying that you haven’t,” Fred said. “No one knows better than I do that you’re the best of the best. There are just some constraints we have to live with. To get the job done.”
Bull leaned against the wall, his arms crossed. Fred looked up at him from under frost-colored brows.
“Sir, I been flying with you for a long time,” Bull said. “If you need to ask me something, you can just do it.”
“I need you to make this work,” Fred said. “What’s going on out there is the most important thing in the system, and we don’t know what it is. If we embarrass ourselves or give the inner planets some critical advantage, we stand to lose a lot of ground. Ashford and Pa are good people, but they’re Belters. They don’t have the same experience working with Earth forces that you and I do.”
“You think they’re going to start something?”
“No. Ashford will try his hardest to do the right thing, but he’ll react like a Belter and be surprised when other people don’t.”
“Ashford has only ever done a right thing because he’s afraid of being embarrassed. He’s a pretty uniform surrounding vacuum. And you can’t rely on that.”
“I’m not,” Fred agreed. “I’m sending you out there because I trust you to make it work.”
“But you’re not giving me command.”
“But I’m not giving you command.”
“How about a raise?”
“Not that either,” Fred said.
“Well, heck,” Bull said. “All the responsibility and none of the power? How can I turn down an offer like that?”
“No joking. We’re screwing you over, and the reasons are all optics and political bullshit. But I need you to take it.”
“So I’ll take it,” Bull said.
For a moment, the only sound was the quiet ticking of the air recycler. Bull turned back to the task of putting his life in a footlocker again. Somewhere far above him, hidden by tons of steel and ceramic, raw stone and vacuum, Behemoth waited.
Chapter Three: Melba
When she walked into the gambling house, Melba felt eyes on her. The room was lit by the displays on the game decks, pink and blue and gold. Most of them were themed around sex or violence, or both. Press a button, spend your money, and watch the girls put foreign and offensiv
e objects inside themselves while you waited to see whether you’d won. Slot machines, poker, real-time lotteries. The men who played them exuded an atmosphere of stupidity, desperation, and an almost tangible hatred of women.
“Darling,” an immensely fat man said from behind the counter. “Don’t know where you think you come to, but you come in the wrong place. Maybe best you walk back out.”
“I have an appointment,” she said. “Travin.”
The fat man’s eyes widened under their thick lids. Someone in the gloom called out a vulgarity meant to unease her. It did, but she didn’t let it show.
“Travin in the back, you want him, darling,” the fat man said, nodding. At the far end of the room, through the gauntlet of leers and threat, a red metal door.
All of her instincts came from before, when she was Clarissa, and so they were all wrong now. From the time she’d been old enough to walk, she’d been trained in self-defense, but it had all been anti-kidnapping. How to attract the attention of the authorities, how to deescalate situations with her captors. There had been other work, of course. Physical training had been part of it, but the goal had always been to break away. To run. To find help.
Now that there was no one to help her, nothing quite applied. But it was what she had, so it was what she used. Melba—not Clarissa, Melba—nodded to the fat man and walked through the close-packed, dim room. The full gravity of Earth pulled on her like an illness. On one of the gambling decks, a cartoon woman was being sexually assaulted by three small gray aliens while a flying saucer floated above them. Someone had won a minor jackpot. Melba looked away. Behind her, an unseen man laughed, and she felt the skin at the back of her neck tighten.
Of all her siblings, she had most enjoyed the physical training. When it ended, she began studying tai chi with the self-defense instructor. Then, when she was fourteen, her father had made a joke about it at a family gathering. How learning to fight might make sense—he could respect that—but dancing while pretending to fight looked stupid and wasted time. She’d never trained again. That was ten years ago.
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