Abaddon's Gate e-3

by James S. A. Corey

  Anna gathered herself, smiled, and put out her hand.

  “We’ve met before,” she said, “but we haven’t really been introduced. My name’s Anna.”

  A lifetime’s etiquette accepted the offered hand on Clarissa’s behalf. The woman’s fingers were very warm.

  “My priest?” Clarissa said.

  “Sorry about that,” Anna said. “I didn’t mean to presume. I was getting angry, and I tried to pull rank.”

  “I know people who do worse. When they’re angry.”

  Clarissa released the woman’s hand.

  “I’m a friend of Tilly’s. She helped me after the ship crashed. I was hurt and not thinking very straight, and she helped me,” she said.

  “She’s good that way.”

  “She knew your sister too. Your father. The whole family,” Anna said, then pressed her lips together impatiently. “I wish they’d given us chairs. I feel like we’re standing around at a bus terminal.”

  Anna took a deep breath, sighing out her nose, then sat there in the middle of the room with her legs crossed. She patted the metal decking at her side. Clarissa hesitated, then lowered herself to sit. She had the overwhelming memory of being five years old, sitting on a rug in kindergarten.

  “That’s better,” Anna said. “So, Tilly’s told me a lot about you. She’s worried.”

  Clarissa tilted her head. From just the form, it seemed like the place where she would reply. She felt the urge to speak, and she couldn’t imagine what she would say. After a moment, Anna went on, trying again without seeming to.

  “I’m worried about you too.”

  “Why?”

  Anna’s eyes clouded. For a moment, she seemed to be having some internal conversation. But only for a moment. She leaned forward, her hands clasped.

  “I didn’t help you before. I saw you just before the Seung Un blew up,” she said. “Just before you set off the bomb.”

  “It was too late by then,” Clarissa said. Ren had already been dead. “You couldn’t have stopped it.”

  “You’re right,” Anna said. “That’s not the only reason I’m here. I also… I lost someone. When all the ships stopped, I lost someone.”

  “Someone you cared about,” Clarissa said. “Someone you loved.”

  “Someone I hardly knew, but it was a real loss. And also I was scared of you. I am scared of you. But Tilly told me a lot about you, and it’s helped me to get past some of my fear.”

  “Not all of it?”

  “No. Not all of it.”

  Something deep in the structure of the ship thumped, the whole structure around them ringing for a moment like a gigantic bell tolling far, far away.

  “I could kill you,” Clarissa said. “Before they got the door open.”

  “I know. I saw.”

  Clarissa put her hand out, her palm against the notched runner. The finish was smooth and the metal cool.

  “You want a confession, then?” she said.

  “If you want to offer one.”

  “I did it,” Clarissa said. “I sabotaged the Rocinante and the Seung Un. I killed Ren. I killed some people back on Earth. I lied about who I was. All of it. I’m guilty.”

  “All right.”

  “Are we done, then?”

  Anna scratched her nose and sighed. “I came out to the Ring even though it upset my wife. Even though it meant not seeing my baby for months. I told myself that I wanted to come see it. To help people make sense of it and, whatever it was, to not be afraid. You came out here to… save your father. To redeem him.”

  “Is that what Tilly says?”

  “She’s not as polite about it.”

  Clarissa coughed out a laugh. Everything she could say felt trite. Worse, it felt naive and stupid. Jim Holden destroyed my family and I wanted my father to be proud of me and I was wrong.

  “I did what I did,” Clarissa said. “You can tell them that. The security people. You can tell them I confessed to it all.”

  “If you’d like. I’ll tell them.”

  “I would. I want that.”

  “Why did you try to kill Naomi?”

  “I wanted to kill all of them,” Clarissa said, and each word was hard to speak, as though they were too large to fit through her throat. “They were part of him, and I wanted him not to be. Just not to exist at all anymore. I wanted everyone to know he is a bad man.”

  “Do you still want that?”

  “I don’t care,” Clarissa said. “You can tell them.”

  “And Naomi? I’m going to see her. Is there anything you’d want me to tell her in particular?”

  Clarissa remembered the woman’s face, bruised and bleeding. She flexed her hand, feeling the mech’s glove against her fingers. It would have taken nothing to snap the woman’s neck, a feather’s weight of pressure. She wondered why she hadn’t. The difference between savoring the moment and hesitating warred at the back of her mind, and her memory supported both. Or neither.

  “Tell her I hope she gets well soon.”

  “Do you hope that?”

  “Or am I just being polite, you mean?” Clarissa said. “Tell her whatever you want. I don’t care.”

  “All right,” Anna said. “Can I ask a question?”

  “Can I stop you?”

  “Yes.”

  The silence was no more than three long breaths together.

  “You can ask me a question.”

  “Do you want to be redeemed?”

  “I don’t believe in God.”

  “Do you want to be redeemed by something other than God, then? If there was forgiveness for you, could you accept it?”

  The sense of outrage began in Clarissa’s stomach and bloomed out through her chest. It curled her lips and furrowed her brow. For the first time since she’d lost consciousness trying to beat her way through the locker on the Rocinante, she remembered what anger felt like. How large it was.

  “Why should I be forgiven for anything? I did it. That’s all.”

  “But if—”

  “What kind of justice would that be? ‘Oh, you killed Ren, but you’re sorry now so it’s okay’? Fuck that. And if that’s how your God works, then fuck Him too.”

  The freezer door clanked. Clarissa looked up at it, resenting the accident of timing and then realizing they’d heard her yelling. They were coming to save the preacher. She balled her hands into fists and looked down at them. They were going to take her back to her cell. She felt in her gut and her throat how little she wanted that.

  “It’s all right,” Anna said as the guard stepped into the freezer, his sidearm trained on Clarissa. “We’re okay.”

  “Yeah, no,” the guard said. His gaze was sharp and focused. Frightened. “Time’s passed. Meeting’s over.”

  Anna looked at Clarissa with something like frustration in her expression. Not with her, but with the situation. With not getting everything to be just the way she wanted it. Clarissa had some sympathy for that.

  “I’d like to talk with you again,” Anna said. “If it’s all right.”

  “You know where I live,” Clarissa said with a shrug. “I don’t go out much.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Anna

  Bull wasn’t in his office when she arrived. A muscular young woman with a large gun on her hip shrugged when Anna asked if she could wait for him, then ignored her and continued working. A wall screen was set to the Radio Free Slow Zone feed, where a young Earther man was leaning in toward Monica Stuart and speaking earnestly. His skin was a bright pink that didn’t seem to be his natural color. Anna thought he looked peeled.

  “I haven’t changed my commitment to autonomy for the Brazilian shared interest zones,” he said. “If anything I feel like I’ve broadened it.”

  “Broadened it how?” Monica asked. She seemed genuinely interested. It was a gift. The peeled man tapped at the air with his fingertips. Anna felt sure she’d seen him on the Thomas Prince, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember his name. She had the vague sense
he was a painter. Some kind of artist, certainly.

  “We’ve all changed,” he said. “By coming here. By going through the trials that we’re all going through, we’ve all been changed. When we go back, none of us will be the people we were before. The tragedy and the loss and the sense of wonder changes what it means to be human. Do you know what I mean?”

  Oddly, Anna thought she did.

  Being a minister meant being in the middle of people’s lives. Anna had counseled dating congregation members, presided over their weddings, baptized their babies, and in one heartbreaking case presided over the infant’s funeral a year later. Members of the congregation included her in most of the important events of their lives. She was used to it, and mostly enjoyed the deep connection to people it brought. Charting the course of a life was making a map of the ways each event changed the person, leaving someone different on the other side. Passing through the Ring and the tragedies it had brought wouldn’t leave any of them the same.

  The exodus from the rest of the fleet to the Behemoth was in full swing. The tent cities spread across the curved inner surface of the habitation drum like wildflowers on a field of flat, ceramic steel–colored earth. Anna saw tall gangly Belters helping offload wounded Earthers from emergency carts, plugging in IVs and other medical equipment, fluffing pillows and mopping brows. Inners and outers offloaded crates in mixed groups without comment. Anna couldn’t help but be warmed by that, even in the face of their recent disaster. Maybe it took real tragedy to get them all working together, but it did. They did. There was hope in that.

  Now if they could just figure out how to do it without the blood and screaming.

  “Your work has been criticized,” Monica Stuart said, “as advocating violence.”

  The peeled man nodded.

  “I used to reject that,” he said. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it may be valid, though. I think when we come home, there will be some readjustment.”

  “Because of the Ring?”

  “And the slow zone. And what’s happened here.”

  “Do you think you would encourage other political artists to come out here?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Chris, her young officer, had asked about organizing mixed-group church services on the Behemoth. She’d assumed he meant mixed religions at first, but it turned out he meant a church group with Earthers and Martians and Belters. Mixed, as if God categorized people based on the gravity they’d grown up in. It had occurred to Anna then that there really wasn’t any such thing as a “mixed” church group. No matter what they looked like, or what they chose to call Him, when a group of people called out to God together, they were one. Even if there was no God, or one God, or many gods, it didn’t matter. Faith, hope, and love, Paul had written, but the greatest of these is love. Faith and hope were very important to Anna. But she could see Paul’s point in a way she hadn’t before. Love didn’t need anything else. It didn’t need a common belief, or a common identity. Anna thought of her child and felt a rush of longing and loneliness. She could almost feel Nami in her arms, almost smell the intoxicating new-baby scent on her head. Nono the Ugandan and Anna the Russian had blended themselves together and made Nami. Not a mix, nothing so crude as that. More than just the sum of her parts and origins. A new thing, individual and unique.

  No mixed group, then. Just a group. A new thing, perfect and unique. She couldn’t imagine God would see it any other way. Anna was pretty sure she had her first sermon too. She was about halfway through typing up an outline for her “no mixed groups in God’s eyes” sermon on her handset when Bull came through the door, his mechanical legs whining and thumping with each step. Anna thought it gave Bull even more gravitas than he’d had before. He moved with a deliberateness caused by mechanical necessity, but easily mistaken for formality and stateliness. The electric whine of the machine and the heavy thump of his tread were a sort of herald calling out his arrival.

  Anna imagined the annoyance Bull would feel if she told him this, and giggled a little to herself.

  Bull was in the middle of speaking to a subordinate and didn’t even notice her. “I don’t care how they feel about it, Serge. The agreement was no armed military personnel on the ship. Even if there weren’t a shitload of guns built in, those suits would still be weapons. Confiscate their gear or throw them off the damn ship.”

  “Si, jefe,” the other man with him replied. “Take it how, sa sa? Can opener?”

  “Charm the bastards. If we can’t make them do anything now, while we’re all friends, what do we do when they decide we aren’t friends? Four marines in recon armor decide they own this ship, they fucking own it. So we take the armor away before they do. I don’t even want that stuff in the drum. Lock it in the bridge armory.”

  Serge looked deeply unhappy at this task. “Some help, maybe?”

  “Take as many as you want, but if you don’t need them it’s only gonna piss the marines off, and if you do, they won’t actually help.”

  Serge paused, mouth open, then closed it with a snap and left. Bull noticed Anna for the first time and said, “What can I do for you, Preacher?”

  “Anna, please. I came to talk about Clarissa Mao,” she said.

  “If you’re not her lawyer or her union representative—”

  “I’m her priest. What happens to her now?”

  Bull sighed again. “She confessed to blowing up a ship. Nothing much good comes after that.”

  “People say you spaced a man for selling drugs. They say you’re hard. Cold.”

  “Do they?” Bull said. Anna couldn’t tell if the surprise in his voice was genuine or mocking.

  “Please don’t kill her,” she said, leaning closer and looking him in the eye. “Don’t you let anyone else kill her either.”

  “Why not?” The way he said it wasn’t a challenge or a threat. It was as if he just didn’t know that answer, and sort of wondered. Anna swallowed her dread.

  “I can’t help her if she’s dead.”

  “No offense, but that’s not really my concern.”

  “I thought you were the law and order here.”

  “I’m aiming for order, mostly.”

  “She deserves a trial, and if everyone knows what you know about her, she won’t get one. They’ll riot. They’ll kill her. At least help me get her a trial.”

  The large man sighed. “So are you looking for a trial, or just a way to stall for time?”

  “Stall for time,” Anna said.

  Bull nodded, weighing something in his mind, then gestured for her to precede him into his office. After she sat down next to his battered desk, he clumped around the small space making a pot of coffee. It seemed an extravagance considering the newly implemented water rationing, but then Anna remembered Bull was now the second most powerful person in the slow zone. The privileges of rank.

  She didn’t want coffee, but accepted the offered cup to allow Bull a moment of generosity. Generosity now might lead to more later, when she was asking for something she really wanted.

  “When Holden starts telling people who actually sabotaged the Seung Un—and he’s Jim Holden, so he will—the UN people are going to ask for Clarissa. And if they give me enough that I can get everyone here, together, and safe until we can get out of this trap, I’m going to give her to them. Not off the ship, but in here.”

  “What will they do?” Anna took a companionable sip of her coffee. It burned her tongue and tasted like acid.

  “Probably, they’ll put together a tribunal of flag officers, have a short trial, and throw her in a recycler. I’d say space her, normally, but that seems wasteful considering our predicament. Supplies sent from home will take as long to fly through the slow zone to us as they’ll take to get to the Ring.”

  His voice was flat, emotionless. He was discussing logistics, not a young woman’s life. Anna suppressed a shudder and said, “Mister Baca, do you believe in God?”

  To his credit, he tried not to roll his eyes. He almost s
ucceeded.

  “I believe in whatever gets you through the night.”

  “Don’t be flip,” Anna said, and was gratified when Bull straightened a little in his walker. In her experience, most strong-willed men had equally strong-willed mothers, and she knew how to hit some of the same buttons.

  “Look,” Bull said, trying to reclaim the initiative. Anna spoke over the top of him.

  “Forget God for a moment,” she said. “Do you believe in the concept of forgiveness? In the possibility of redemption? In the value of every human life, no matter how tainted or corrupted?”

  “Fuck no,” Bull said. “I think it is entirely possible to go so far into the red you can’t ever balance the books.”

  “Sounds like the voice of experience. How far have you been?”

  “Far enough to know there’s a too damn far.”

  “And you’re comfortable being the judge of where that line is?”

  Bull pulled on the frame of his walker, shifting his weight in the straps that held him. He looked wistfully at the office chair he could no longer use. Anna felt bad for him, broken at the worst possible time. Trying to keep his tiny world in order, and burning through the last reserves of his strength with reckless abandon. The bruised eyes and yellow skin suddenly seemed like a flashing battery indicator, warning that the power was almost gone. Anna felt a pang of guilt for adding to his burden.

  “I don’t want to kill that girl,” he said, taking another sip of the terrible coffee. “In fact, I don’t give a shit about her one way or the other, as long as she’s locked up and isn’t a danger to my ship. The one you should talk to is Holden. He’s the one who’s gonna get the torches-and-pitchforks crowd wound up.”

  “But the Martians…”

  “Surrendered twenty hours ago.”

  Anna blinked.

  “They’ve been wanting to for days,” Bull said. “We just had to find a way to let ’em save face.”