Holden hopped off the edge of her bed and moved to the door, closing it as quietly as possible. He looked around for something to jam it shut with, but quickly decided it was hopeless. The habitation spaces in the Behemoth’s drum were built for low weight, not durability. The walls and door of the hospital room were paper-thin layers of epoxy and woven carbon fiber. A good kick would probably bring the entire structure down. Barricading the door would only signal patrols that something was wrong, and then delay them half a second while they broke it.
“Maybe that preacher can help us,” Alex said.
“Yeah.” Amos nodded. “Red seems like good people.”
“No hitting on the preacher,” Holden said, pointing at Amos with an accusing finger.
“I just—”
“But it doesn’t matter, because if she has even half a brain—and I suspect she has a lot more than that—she’ll be busily hiding herself. And she’s not from here. We need an insider.”
“Sam,” Naomi said, just as Holden was thinking the same name. “She’s chief engineer on this boat. No one will know it like she does.”
“Does she owe you any favors?” Holden asked.
Naomi gave him a sour look and pulled his hand terminal off his belt. “No. I owe her about a thousand,” she said as she opened a connection request to Sam. “But she’s a friend. Favors don’t matter.”
She laid the terminal on the bed with the speaker on. The triple beep of an unanswered voice request sounding once a second. Alex and Amos were staring at it intensely, eyes wide. As though it were a bomb that might go off at any moment. In a way, Holden thought, it was. They were about as helpless right now as he could ever remember them being. Holden found himself wishing that Miller would appear and fix everything with alien magic.
“Yo,” a voice said from the terminal. “Knuckles.”
At some point over the last year, Sam had given Naomi the nickname Knuckles. Holden had never been able to figure out why, and Naomi had never offered to explain.
“Sammy,” Naomi replied, the relief in her voice obvious. “We really, really need your help.”
“Funny,” Sam said. “I was just thinking of coming by to ask for your help. Coincidence? Or something more?”
“We were calling you to find a hiding spot,” Amos yelled out. “If you were calling us for the same thing, you’re fucked.”
“No, that’s a good idea. I’ve got a spot you can hole up for a while, and I’ll come meet you there. Knuckles, you’ll have the layout in just a second. Just follow the map. I’ll be there as soon as I can. You kids take care of yourselves.”
“You do the same, Sammy,” Naomi said, then killed the connection. She worked the terminal for a few seconds. “Okay, I see it. Looks like unused storage just a couple hundred meters aft and spinward.”
“You get to navigate,” Holden said to her, then added, “Can everyone walk?”
Amos and Alex both nodded, but Naomi said, “Alex’s skull is being held together with glue right now. If he gets dizzy and falls, he’s not getting up again.”
“Now XO,” Alex objected. “I can—”
“Naomi can’t walk,” Amos said. “So you put her on a rolling bed with Alex and push them. I’ll take point. Gimme that map.”
Holden didn’t argue. He picked Naomi up from her bed, trying to jostle her as little as possible, then set her next to Alex on his. “Why am I pushing instead of walking point?”
“He broke his left arm,” Naomi said, scooting as close to Alex as possible and then securing the lap restraint across them both. When Amos began to protest she added, “And all the ribs on his left side.”
“Right,” Holden said, grabbing the push bars at the head of the bed and kicking off the wheel locks. “Lead the way.”
Amos led them through the makeshift hospital corridors, smiling at everyone he passed, moving with an easy stride that made him look like a man with a destination but no hurry to get there. Even the armed patrol they passed barely gave him a glance. When they looked curiously at Holden, pushing two injured people on the same bed, he said, “Two to a bed now. That’s how crowded we’re getting.” They just nodded him past, their expressions both sullen and bored.
Holden hadn’t had much chance to look around the rest of the hospital. After leaving the docks he’d hurried straight to his crew’s room and hadn’t left since. But now, as he moved through the halls and intersections toward the exit, he had a chance to look over the full extent of the damage the catastrophic speed limit change had caused.
Every bed in every room was filled with injured people, and sometimes the benches and chairs in the waiting areas. Most of the injuries were contusions or broken bones, but some were more severe. He saw more than one amputation, and quite a few people hanging in traction with serious spinal injuries. But more than the physical damage, there was the stunned look of shock on every face. The sort of expression Holden associated with the recent victims or witnesses of violent crime. The Rocinante had tracked and disabled a pirate slaver ship a few months back, and the beaten and starving prisoners pulled from her hold had looked like this. Not just hurt, but robbed of hope.
Someone with a doctor’s uniform watched Holden push the bed past, his eyes following their progress, but exhaustion robbing him of curiosity. From a small room to his right, Holden heard the electric popping sound of a cauterizing gun, and the smell of cooking meat filled the air.
“This is horrifying,” he whispered to Naomi. She nodded but said nothing.
“None of us shoulda come here,” Alex said.
Doors and corners, Miller had warned him. The places where you got killed if you weren’t paying attention. Where the ambushes happened. Could have been a little more explicit, Holden thought, and then imagined Miller shrugging apologetically and bursting into a cloud of blue gnats.
Amos, half a dozen meters ahead, came to a four-way junction in the corridor and turned right. Before Holden could cross half the distance to the turn, a pair of OPA goons walked into the intersection from the left.
They paused, looking over Naomi and Alex snuggled up in the rolling bed. One of them smirked and half turned to his companion. Holden could almost hear the joke he was about to make about two people to a bed. In preparation, he smiled and readied a laugh. But before the jokester could speak, his companion said, “That’s James Holden.”
Everything after that happened quickly.
The pair of OPA thugs scrambled to get at the shotguns slung over their shoulders. Holden shoved the rolling gurney into their thighs, knocking them back, and gave the corridor a frantic glance looking for a weapon. One of the thugs managed to fumble his shotgun down off his shoulder and rack it, but Naomi scooted forward on the bed and drove her heel into his groin. His partner stepped back, finished getting his hands on his shotgun, and pointed it at her. Holden started to run forward, knowing he was too slow, knowing he’d watch Naomi blown apart long before he could reach the gunman.
Then both gunmen turned toward each other and slammed their faces together. They slumped to the floor, guns falling from nerveless fingers. Amos stood behind them, grimacing and massaging his left shoulder.
“Sorry, Cap,” he said. “Got a little too far ahead there.”
Holden leaned against the corridor wall, legs barely able to support him even in the light gravity. “No apologies. Nice save.” He nodded toward the shoulder that Amos continued to rub with a pained look. “Thought that was broken.”
Amos snorted. “It didn’t fall off. Plenty left in here for a couple of idiots like this.” He bent down and stripped the two fallen men of their weapons and ammunition. A nurse walked up behind Holden, a plastic case in her hands and a question on her face.
“Nothing to see here,” Holden said. “We’ll be gone in a minute.”
She pointed at a nearby door. “Supply closet. No one will notice them in there for a while.” Then she turned and went back the way she came.
“You have a fan,” Naomi said from the bed.<
br />
“Not everyone in the OPA hates us,” Holden replied, moving around the gurney to help Amos drag the unconscious men into the closet. “We did good work for them for over a year. People know that.”
Amos handed Holden a compact black pistol and a pair of extra magazines. Holden tucked the gun into the waistband of his pants and pulled his shirt down over it. Amos did the same with a second gun, then put the two shotguns onto the gurney next to Naomi and covered them with the sheet.
“We don’t want to get in a gunfight,” Holden warned Amos as they began moving again.
“Yeah,” Amos said. “But if we’re in one anyway, it’ll be nice to have guns.”
The hospital exit was a short distance down the right-hand hallway, and suddenly they were outside. Or as outside as you could get in the Behemoth’s massive habitation drum. From outside, the hospital structure looked cheap and hastily assembled. A football-field-sized shanty made of epoxied carbon and fiberglass. A few hundred meters away, the edge of a city of tents spread out like acne on the drum’s smooth skin.
“That way,” Naomi said, pointing toward a more permanent-looking steel structure. Holden pushed the gurney, and Amos walked a few meters ahead, smiling and nodding at anyone who looked at them. Something in Amos’ face making them scurry away and not look back.
As they approached the squat metal structure, a door opened in the side and Sam’s pixie face appeared, waving a hand at them impatiently. A few minutes and some twisty corridors later, they were in a small, empty metal-walled room. Amos immediately dropped to the floor, laying his left arm and back flat against it.
“Ow,” he said.
“You hurt?” Sam asked, locking the door behind them with a small metal keycard, and then tossing the card to Naomi.
“Everyone’s hurt,” Holden said. “So what the hell is going on?”
Sam blew her lips out and ran one greasy hand through her red hair. The streaks of black already in it told Holden she’d been doing a lot of that. “Ashford retook the ship. He’s got some sort of coalition of bigwigs from the UN Navy, the Martians, and some of the important civilians.”
“Okay,” Holden said, realizing that his lack of context made most of that sentence pretty meaningless, but not wanting to waste time with explanations. “So the people roaming the halls with guns are Ashford’s?”
“Yep. He’s taking out anyone who helped Bull or Pa with the original mutiny, or, y’know, anyone he thinks is a threat.”
“From the way they tried to shoot us, we’re on that list,” Naomi said.
“Definitely.” Sam nodded. “I haven’t been able to track down Pa, but Bull called me, so I know he’s okay.”
“Sam,” Holden said, patting the air in a calming gesture. “Keep in mind I have no idea who these people are or why they are important, and we don’t have time for a who’s who. Just tell us the important bits.”
Sam started to object, then shrugged and briefly explained the plan to use the comm laser. “If I do what he’s asking me to do, we’ll be able to get a pulse out of it that’ll be hotter than a star for about three-quarters of a second. It will melt that entire side of the ship in the process.”
“Does he know that?” Naomi asked, incredulity in her voice.
“He doesn’t care. Whether it works on the Ring or not, we have to stop him. There are thousands of people on this ship right now, and they’ll all die if he gets his way.”
Holden sank down onto the edge of the gurney with a long exhale. “Oh, we’re the least of the problem,” he said. “This is suddenly much, much bigger than that.”
Sam cocked her head at him, frowning a question.
“I’ve seen what this station does to threats,” Holden said. “Miller showed me, when I was there. All this slow zone stuff is non-lethal deterrent as far as it’s concerned. If that big blue ball out there decides us monkeys are an actual threat, it will autoclave our solar system.”
“Who’s Miller?” Sam asked.
“Dead guy,” Amos said.
“And he was on the station?”
“Apparently,” Amos said with a lopsided shrug.
“Jim?” Naomi said, putting her hand on his arm. This was the first she’d heard him speak of his experiences on the station, and he felt a pang of guilt for not telling her before.
“Something was attacking them, the protomolecule masters or whatever they were. Their defense was causing the star in any… infected solar system to go supernova. That station has the power to blow up stars, Naomi.
“If Ashford does this, it will kill every human there is. Everyone.”
There was a long silence. Amos had stopped rubbing his arm and grunting. Naomi stared up at him from the bed, eyes wide, the fear on her face mirroring his own.
“Well,” Sam finally said. “Good thing I’m not gonna let him, then, isn’t it?”
“Say again?” Amos said from the floor.
“I didn’t know about this other thing with ghosts and aliens,” Sam said in a tone of voice that made it clear she wasn’t totally buying Holden’s story. “But I’ve been sabotaging the laser upgrades. Delaying the process while I build in short points. Weaknesses that will blow every time he tries to fire it. It should be easy enough to explain away because of course the system was never designed for this, and the ship is a flying hunk of cobbled-together junk at this point anyway.”
“How long can you get us?”
“Day. Maybe a day and a half.”
“I think I love you,” Alex said, the words coming out in a pain- and medication-induced mumble.
“We all do, Sam,” Holden said to cover for him. “That’s brilliant, but there aren’t very many of us, and it’s a big, complicated ship. The question is how we get control of it.”
“Bull,” she replied. “That’s why I called you. Bull’s kind of messed up right now and he needs help and I don’t know anyone else on this ship I trust.” This last part she directed at Naomi.
“We’ll do whatever we can,” Naomi replied, holding up her hand. Sam crossed the room and took it. “Anything you need, Sammy. Tell us where Bull is, and I’ll send my boys to go collect him.”
Amos pushed himself up off the floor with a grunt and moved to the gurney. “Yeah, whatever you need, Sam. We owe you about a million at this point, and this Ashford guy sounds like an asshole.”
Sam gave a relieved smile and squeezed Naomi’s fingers. “I really appreciate it. But be careful. Ashford loyalists are everywhere, and they’ve already killed some people. If you run into any more of them, there’ll be trouble.”
Amos pulled one of the shotguns out from under the sheet and laid it casually across his shoulder.
“Man can hope.”
Chapter Forty-One: Bull
The storage cells were too large to be a prison. They were warehouses for the supplies to start again after a hundred ecological collapses. Seed vaults and soil and enough compressed hydrogen and oxygen to recreate the shallow ocean of a generation ship. Bull drove his mech across the vast open space, as wide and tall and airy as a cathedral, but without a single image of God. It was a temple dedicated to utility and engineering, the beauty of function and the grandeur of the experiment that would have launched humanity at the distant stars.
Everything was falling to shit around him. All the information he could put together, hunched close to his hand terminal like he was trying to crawl into it, showed that Ashford had taken over engineering and the reactor at the far south of the drum and command at the north. His squads were moving through the drum with impunity. Pa was missing and might be dead. She still had a lot of people loyal to her, including Bull, to his surprise, but if they found her body in a recycler someplace that would fade quickly. He’d done everything he could. He hadn’t had the power, so he’d tried for finesse, and when that didn’t work, he’d grabbed the power. He’d taken the massacre of thousands by the protomolecule’s station and gone at least halfway to building a city out of it. A little civilizat
ion in the mouth of the void. If he’d been a little more ruthless, maybe he could have made it work. Clanking softly through the massive space, that was the thing that haunted him. Not his sins, not even the people he’d killed, but the thought that if he’d killed just one or two more it might have been enough.
And even with that darkness in his heart, he couldn’t keep from feeling moved by the scale of the steel and ceramic. The industrial beauty of design. He wished they’d gone to the stars instead of flying it into the mouth of hell. He wished he’d been able to make it all work out.
He tried to connect with Serge, but got nothing. He tried Corin. He wanted to reach out to Sam again, but he couldn’t risk Ashford finding out they were in contact. He checked the broadcast feed or Radio Free Slow Zone, but Monica Stuart and her crew hadn’t made any announcements. He let himself hope that Ashford’s plan would collapse in on itself the way that all of his own plans had. Not much chance of that, though. Ashford just wanted to blow shit up. That was always easier than making something.
He thought about recording a last message to Fred Johnson, but he didn’t know if he wanted to apologize, commiserate, or make the man feel guilty for putting a petulant little boy like Ashford in charge, so instead he waited and hoped for something unexpected. And maybe good for a change.
He heard the footsteps coming from the aftmost access corridor. More than one person. Two. Maybe three. If it was Ashford’s men coming for him, he wasn’t going to have to worry much about what to say to Fred. He took the pistol out of his holster and checked the magazine. The soft metallic sounds echoed. The footsteps faltered.
“Bull?” a familiar voice called out. “Are you in there?”
“Who’s asking?” Bull said, then coughed. He spat on the deck.
“Jim Holden,” the voice said. “You aren’t planning to shoot me, are you? Because Sam sort of gave us the impression that we were on the same side.”
Holden stepped into the storage area. This was who she’d meant when she said she knew who she could trust. And she had a point. Holden was outside every command. His reputation was built on being a man without subtexts. The man behind him with the shotgun was Amos Burton. For a moment, Bull was surprised to see the wounded Earther on his feet, then remembered his own condition and smiled. He lowered his gun, but he didn’t put it away.
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