“And why would she think that?” he asked.
“Same enemies,” Holden said. “We have to stop Ashford. If he does what he’s planning, we’re all trapped in here until we die. And I’m pretty sure the Ring kills everybody on the other side. Earth, Mars. The Belt. Everyone.”
Bull felt something deep in his chest settle. He didn’t know if it was only the weight of his worst fears coming true or if something unpleasant was happening in his lungs. He put the pistol in his holster, took the joysticks, and angled himself toward the two men. The mech’s movements seemed louder now that there were other people to hear them.
“Okay,” Bull said. “How about you start at the beginning and tell me what the hell you’re going on about.”
Bull had been around charisma before. The sense that some people had of moving through their lives in a cloud of likability or power. Fred Johnson had that, and there were glimmers of it in Holden too. In fact, there was something about Holden’s open-faced honesty that reminded Bull of the young Fred Johnson’s candor. He said things in a simple, matter-of-fact way—the station wouldn’t come off lockdown until they turned off all the reactors and enough of the electronics on the ships; the makers of the protomolecule had been devoured by some mysterious force even badder-ass than they were; the station would destroy the solar system if it decided humans and their weapons constituted a real threat—that made them all seem plausible. Maybe it was the depth of his own belief. Maybe it was just a talent some people were born with. Bull felt a growing respect for Jim Holden, the same way he’d respect a rattlesnake. The man was dangerous just by being what he was.
When Holden ran out of steam, repeating himself that they had to stop Ashford, that Sam was buying them time, that the skeleton crews on the other ships had to shut down their reactors and power down their backup systems, Bull scratched his chin.
“What if Ashford’s right?” he said.
“I don’t understand,” Holden said.
“All this stuff you got from the alien? What if it’s bullshitting you?”
Holden’s jaw went hard, but a moment later he nodded.
“He might be,” he said. “I don’t have any way of making sure. But Sam says Ashford’s going to sacrifice the Behemoth when he shoots at the Ring, and if Miller wasn’t lying, he’s sacrificing everything else along with it. Is that a chance you’re willing to take?”
“Taking it either way,” Bull said. “Maybe we stop him, and we save the system. Maybe we leave the Ring open for an invasion by things that are going eat our brains on toast. Flip a coin, ese. And we got no time to test it out. No way to make sure. Either way, it’s a risk.”
“It is,” Holden said. “So. What are you going to do?”
Bull’s sigh started him coughing again. The mucus that came up into his mouth tasted like steroid spray. He spat. That was what it came down to. It wasn’t really a question.
“Figure we got to retake engineering,” Bull said. “Probably going to be a bitch of a fight, but we got to do it. With the drum spinning, the only path between engineering and command is the external lift or in through the command transition point, and then all the way through the drum to the engineering transition point with a shitload of people and spin gravity to slow them down. Any reinforcements he’s got up top won’t make it before the fight’s done one way or the other.”
“Sammy’s already in engineering,” Amos said. “Might be she could soften up the terrain for us before we go in.”
“That’d be good,” Bull said.
“And once we take it?” Holden said.
“Pump an assload of nitrogen into command, and pull ’em all out after they’ve gone to sleep, I figure,” Bull said. “If Captain Pa’s still alive, they’re her problem.”
“What if she ain’t?” Amos said.
“Then they’re mine,” Bull said. Amos’ smile meant the man had unpacked Bull’s words just the way he’d meant them.
“And the reactor?” Holden said. “Are you going to shut it down?”
“That’s the backup plan,” Bull said with a grin. “We shut it down. We get everyone else to shut down.”
“Can I ask why?”
“Might be that we can get this thing off of lockdown and it won’t kill off the sun, even if Ashford does get a shot off,” Bull said.
“Fair enough,” Holden said. “I’ve got my crew. We’re a little banged up.”
“Pure of heart, though,” Amos said.
“I don’t know how many people I still got,” Bull said. “If I can get through to a couple of them, I can find out.”
“So where do we set up shop?”
Bull paused. If they were going to try an assault on engineering, a distraction would help. Something that would pull Ashford’s attention away from what actually mattered to something else. If there was a way to slap him down. Hurt his pride. Ashford hadn’t been the kind of man who thought things through well before the catastrophe, but he had been cautious. If there was a way to make him angry, to overcome that caution. But doing that and getting the word to the other ships that they needed to shut down would be more time than he had, unless…
“Yeah,” he said sourly. “I know where we’re going. May be a little dangerous getting there. Ashford’s people are all through the drum.”
“Not as many as there were when we started,” Amos said. Bull didn’t ask what he meant.
“Lead on,” Holden said. “We’ll follow you.”
Bull tapped his fingers on the joysticks. Embarrassment and shame clawed their way up his guts. A shadow of confusion crossed Holden’s face. Bull felt a stab of disgust with himself. He was about to put a bunch of civilians in danger in order to draw Ashford’s attention, he was going to do it of his own free will, and he was ashamed of the things that he didn’t actually have any control over. He didn’t know what that said about him, but he figured it couldn’t be good.
Radio Free Slow Zone was in what had once been the colonial administrative offices. The narrow office spaces had been designed into the walls and bulkheads of the original ship, back when it had been the Nauvoo, and the amount of work it would have taken to strip the cubicles back until the space could be used for something else had never been worth the effort. Bull had given it to Monica Stuart and her crew because it was a cheap favor. Something he didn’t need—the old offices—for something he did: a familiar face and reassuring voice to help make the Behemoth into the gathering place for the full and fractured fleet.
The broadcast studio was a sheet of formed green plastic that someone had pried off the floor and set on edge. The lights were jerry-rigged and stuck to whatever surfaces came to hand. Bull recognized most of the faces, though he didn’t know many of them. Monica Stuart, of course. Her production team was down to an Earther woman named Okju and a dark-skinned Martian called Clip. Holden had called his crew there, but they hadn’t arrived yet.
Bull considered the space from a tactical point of view. It wouldn’t be hard to block off accessways. The little half walls provided a lot of cover, and they were solid enough to stop most slug throwers. An hour or two with some structural steel and a couple welders and the place could be almost defensible. He hoped it wouldn’t need to be. Except that he hoped it would.
“We went black as soon as the fighting started,” Monica said. “Thought it would be better not to go off half-cocked.”
“Good plan,” Bull said, and his hand terminal chimed. He held up a finger and fumbled to accept the connection. Corin’s face flickered to life. She looked pale. Shell-shocked. He knew the expression.
“How bad?”
“I’ve got about thirty people, sir,” Corin said. “Armed and armored. We control the commissary and most of the civilians. Once Ashford got control of the transition points, he mostly fell back.”
“Pa?”
“Alive,” Corin said. “Pretty beat up, but alive.”
“We’ll call that a win.”
“We lost Serge,” Corin
said, her voice flat and calm. That was it, then. Bull felt I’m sorry coming by reflex and pushed it back. Later. He could offer sympathy later. Right now, he only had room for strong.
“All right,” he said. “Bring whoever you can spare to the colonial administrative offices. And weapons. All the weapons we’ve got, bring them here.”
“New headquarters?”
“Security station in exile,” Bull said, and Corin almost smiled. There was no joy in it, but maybe a little amusement. Good enough for now. She saluted, and he returned the gesture as best he could before dropping the connection.
“So this is a coup,” Monica said.
“Counter-countercoup, technically,” Bull said. “Here’s what I need you to do. I want you reporting on what’s going on here. Broadcast. The Behemoth, the other ships in the fleet. Hell, tell the station if you think it’ll listen. Captain Ashford was relieved for mental health reasons. The trauma was too much for him. He and a few people who are still personally loyal to him have holed up in command, and the security team of the Behemoth is going to extract him.”
“And is any of that true?”
“Maybe half,” Bull said.
Behind Monica’s back, the wide-set Earther woman named Okju looked up and then away.
“I’m not a propagandist,” Monica said.
“Ashford’s going to get us all killed,” Bull said. “Maybe everyone back home too, if he does what he’s thinking. The catastrophe? Everything we’ve been through here? These were the kid gloves. He’s trying to start a real fight.”
It was strange how saying the words himself made them seem real in a way that hearing from Holden hadn’t. He still wasn’t sure whether he believed it was true, even. But right now, it needed to be, and so it was. Monica’s eyes went a little rounder and bright red splotches appeared on her cheeks.
“When this is over,” she said, “I want the full story. Exclusive. Everything that’s really going on. Why it came down the way it did. In-depth interviews with all the players.”
“Can’t speak for anyone but myself right now,” Bull said. “But that’s a fair deal by me. Also, I need you to talk the other ships in the fleet into shutting down their reactors and power grids, pulling the batteries out of every device they can find that’s got them.”
“Because?”
“We’re trying to get the lockdown on the ships taken off,” he said. “Let us go home. And if we can’t stop Ashford, getting off lockdown is the only chance we’ve got to keep the station from retaliating against the folks on the other side of the Ring.”
And because if the insults and provocations, the false threats and misdirections all failed, that would be enough. If Ashford could see the other plan coming together, if he could see his heroic gesture, his grand sacrifice being taken away, he would come. He’d do whatever he could to shut down the studio, and every gun that came here was one less that would be at engineering or command.
Monica looked nonplussed.
“And how am I going to convince them to do that, exactly?”
“I have an idea about that,” Bull said. “I know this priest lady who’s got people from damn near every ship out here coming to her services. I’m thinking we recruit her.”
Even, he didn’t say, if it puts her in the firing line.
Chapter Forty-Two: Clarissa
The end came. All the running around stopped, and a kind of calm descended on Ashford. On Cortez. All of them. The order went out to secure the transition points. No one was passing into or out of the drum. Not now. Not ever again.
It felt almost like relief.
“I’ve been thinking about your father,” Cortez said as the lift rose toward the transition point, spin gravity ebbing away and the growing Coriolis making everything feel a little bit off. Like a dream or the beginning of an unexpected illness. “He was a very clever man. Brilliant, some would say, and very private in his way.”
He tried to turn the protomolecule into a weapon and sell it to the highest bidder, Clarissa thought. The thought should have stung, but it didn’t. It was just a fact. Iron atoms formed in stars; a Daimo-Koch power relay had one fewer input than the standard models; her father had tried to militarize the protomolecule. He hadn’t known what it was. No one had. That didn’t keep them from playing with it. Seeing what they could do. She had the sudden visual memory of a video she’d seen of a drunken soldier handing his assault rifle to a chimp. What had happened next was either hilarious or tragic, depending on her mood. Her father hadn’t been that different from the chimp. Just on a bigger scale.
“I’m sorry I didn’t have the chance to know him better,” Cortez said.
Ashford and seven of his men were on the lift with them. The captain stood at the front, hands clasped behind his back. Most of his men were Belters too. Long frames, large heads. Ren had had that look too. Like they were all part of the same family. Ashford’s soldiers had sidearms and bulletproof vests. She didn’t. And yet she kept catching them glancing over at her. They still thought of her as Melba. She was the terrorist and murderer with the combat modifications. That she looked like a normal young woman only added to the sense that she was eerie. This was why Ashford had wanted her so badly. She was an adornment. A trophy to show how strong he was and paper over his failure to hold his own ship before.
She wished that one of them would smile at her. The more they acted like she was Melba, the more she felt that version of herself coming back, seeping up into her cognition like ink soaking through paper.
“There was one time your brother Petyr came to the United Nations buildings when I was visiting there.”
“That would have been Michael,” she said. “Petyr hates the UN.”
“Does he?” Cortez said with a gentle laugh. “My mistake.”
The lift reached the axis of the drum, slowing gently so that they could all steady themselves with the handrails and not be launched up into the ceiling. Behind them, a series of vast conduits and transformers powered the long, linear sun of the drum. Before she’d come out to the Ring, she’d never seriously thought about balancing power loads and environmental control systems. That kind of thing had been for other people. Lesser people. Now, with all she’d learned, the scale of the Behemoth’s design was awing. She wished the others could have seen it. Soledad and Bob and Stanni. And Ren.
The doors slid open, and the Belters launched themselves into the transition with the grace of men and women who’d spent their childhoods in low or null g. She and Cortez didn’t embarrass themselves, but they would never have the autonomic grace of a Belter on the float.
The command decks were beautiful. The soft indirect lighting took everyone’s shadows away. Melba launched herself after Ashford and the Belters, swimming through the air like a dolphin in the sea.
The command center itself was beautifully designed. A long, lozenge-shaped room with control boards set into ceramic desks. On one end of the lozenge, a door opened into the captain’s office, on the other, to the security station. The gimbaled crash couches looked less like functional necessities than the natural, beautiful outgrowth of the ship. Like an orchid. The walls were painted with angels and pastoral scenes. The effect was only slightly spoiled by the half dozen access panels that stood open, repairs from the sudden stop still uncompleted. Even the guts of the command center were beautiful in their way. Clarissa found herself wanting to go over and just look in to see if she could make sense of the design.
Three men floated at the control boards, all of them Belters. “Welcome back, Captain,” one of them said.
Ashford sailed through the empty air to the captain’s station. Three of the soldiers drifted out to take positions in the corridor, the others arraying themselves around the room, all with sightlines on the doors leading in. Anyone who tried to take the command center would have to walk through a hailstorm of bullets. Clarissa pulled herself over to the door of the security station, as much to get out of the way as anything, and Cortez followed her,
his expression focused, serious, and a little agitated.
Ashford keyed in a series of commands, and his control panel shifted, growing brighter. His eyes tracked over the readouts and screens. Lit from below, he looked less like the man set to save all of humanity at the sacrifice of himself and his crew and more like a lower university science teacher trying to get his simulations to work they way they were meant to.
“Jojo?” he said, and the voice of the prison guard came from the control deck like the man was standing beside them.
“Here, Captain. We’ve got the engineering transition point locked down. Anyone wants to get in here, we’ll give ’em eight kinds of hell.”
“Good man,” Ashford said. “Do we have Chief Engineer Rosenberg?”
“Yes, sir. She’s making the modifications to the comm array now.”
“Still?”
“Still, sir.”
“Thank you,” he said, then tapped the display, his fingertips popping against the screen. “Sam. How long before the modifications are done?”
“Two hours,” she said.
“Why so long?”
“I’m going to have to override every safety device in the control path,” she said. “This thing we’re doing? There’s a lot of built-in design that was meant to keep it from happening.”
Ashford scowled.
“Two hours,” he said, and stabbed the connection closed.
The waiting began. Two hours later, the same woman explained that the targeting system had been shaken out of round by the catastrophe. It just meant a delay getting lock for most purposes, but since this was a one-shot application, she was realigning it. Three more hours. Then she was getting a short loop error that he had to track down. Two more hours.
Clarissa saw Ashford’s mood darken with every excuse, every hour that stretched past. She found the toilets tucked at the back of the security station and started wondering about getting a few tubes of food. If the only working commissary was in the drum, that might actually be a problem. Cortez had strapped himself into a crash couch and slept. The guards slowly became more and more restless. Clarissa spent an hour going from access panel to access panel, looking at the control boards and power relays that fed the bridge. It was surprising how many of them were the same as the ones she’d worked with on the Earth ships coming out. Cut an Earther or a Belter, they both bled the same blood. Crack an access panel on the Behemoth and the Prince, and both ships had the same crappy brownout buffers.
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