Abaddon's Gate e-3

by James S. A. Corey

  And—the thought had the copper taste of fear—they’d find Ren. They’d know she killed him. Her father would know. Word would reach him in his cell that she had beaten Ren to death, and that would be worse than anything. Not that she’d done it, Melba thought. That she’d been caught doing it.

  The sound came from her door, three hard thumps, and she screamed despite herself. Her heart was racing, the blood tapping at the inside of her throat, banging at her ribs.

  “Miss Koh?” Soledad’s voice came. “You in there? Can I… I need to talk if you’ve…”

  Hearing fear in someone else’s voice felt like vertigo. Melba got to her feet. Either the pilot was repositioning the ship or she was just unsteady. She couldn’t tell which. She looked in her mirror, and the woman looking out could almost have been a normal person woken from a deep sleep.

  “Just a minute,” she said, running her fingers through her hair, pressing the dark locks against her scalp. Her face felt clammy. Nothing to be done. She opened the door.

  Soledad stood in the thin, cramped corridor. The muscles in her jaw worked like she was chewing something. Her wide eyes skittered over Melba, away and back, away and back.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Koh, but I can’t… I can’t do it. I can’t go there. They can fire me, but I can’t go.” Melba reached out and put her hand on the woman’s arm. The touch seemed to startle them both.

  “All right,” she said. “It’ll be all right. Where can’t you go?”

  The ship shifted. That one wasn’t her imagination, because Solé moved too.

  “The Prince,” she said. “I don’t want… I don’t want to volunteer.”

  “Volunteer for what?” Melba asked. She felt like she was coaxing the girl back from some sort of mental break. There was enough self-awareness left in her to appreciate the irony.

  “Didn’t you get the message? It’s from the contracts supervisor.”

  Melba looked back over her shoulder. Her hand terminal was on the crash couch, a green-and-red band on the screen showing that there was a priority message waiting. She raised a finger, keeping Soledad out of the room and away from the locker, and grabbed the terminal. The message had come through ten hours before, marked urgent and must reply. Melba wondered how long she’d been lying in her couch, lost in her panic fugue. She thumbed the message accept. A stream of tight legal script poured onto the screen, brash as a shout.

  Danis General Contracting, owners and operators of half the civilian support craft in the fleet, including the Cerisier, was invoking the exceptional actions clause of the standard contract. Each functional team would choose a designated volunteer for temporary duty on the UNN Thomas Prince. The remuneration would remain at the standard level until completion of the contract, when any hazard bonuses or exemptions would be assessed.

  Melba had to read the words three times to understand them.

  “I can’t go in there,” Soledad was saying, somewhere away to her left. The voice had taken on an irritating whine. “My father. I told you about him. You understand. Your sister was there too. You have to tell Bob or Stanni to do it. I can’t.”

  They were going after Holden. They were going through the Ring after Holden. Her panic didn’t fall away so much as click into focus.

  “None of you are going,” Melba said. “This one’s mine.”

  The official transfer was the easiest thing she’d done since she came aboard. She sent a message to the contracts officer with her ID number and a short message saying that she’d accept transfer to the Prince. Two minutes later, she had her orders. Three hours to finish her affairs on the Cerisier, then into the transport and gone. It was intended, she knew, as a time to meet with her team, make the transition easy. She had other fish to fry.

  Filling a locker with industrial sealant was one thing. The foam was made to apply quickly and remain malleable for a few seconds before the yellow mush dimmed to gold and set. The excess could be cut away with a sharp knife for the next hour. After that, nothing would move it except the right kind of solvent, and even that was an ugly, arduous process.

  But leaving the body where it could be found wasn’t an option. Someone would be assigned to her bunk, and they’d want to use the locker. Besides which, leaving Ren behind seemed somehow wrong. And so with two and a half hours before she left the ship, Melba took a pair of shoulder-length latex gloves, three cans of solvent, a roll of absorbent towels, and a vacuum-rated large personal tool case into her room and locked the door behind her.

  The locker door didn’t want to open at first, fixed in place by a drop of sealant she hadn’t noticed, but a few sprays of solvent degraded it until she could pull it open with her fingers. The sealant was a single rough-textured face of gold, like a cliff made small. She opened the tool case, took a deep breath, and faced the grave.

  “I’m sorry about this,” she said. “I’m really, really sorry.”

  At first the solvent spray didn’t seem to do anything beyond a sharp smell, but then the sealant began ticking, like a thousand insects walking over stone. Gouges and crevasses formed in the sealant wall, then a small runnel of slime. She rolled up a few of the towels, setting them on the floor to catch the flow.

  Ren’s knee was the first part to appear, the round cap of the bone and death-blackened skin emerging from the melting foam like a fossil. The fabric of his uniform was soaked with fluid rot. The smell hit her, but it wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. She’d imagined herself retching and weeping, but it was gentler than that. When she took his legs to draw him out, they fell away from his pelvis, so she cut the trousers, wrapped the legs in towels, and put them in the toolbox. Her mind was quiet and still, like an archaeologist pulling the dead of centuries before out into the light. Here was his spine. This was the vile slush where the hydrochloric acid in his gut, no longer held in check by the mechanisms of life, had digested his stomach, his liver, his intestines. She drew out his head last, the bright red hair darkened and flecked with matter like an overused kitchen mop.

  She lifted the bones into the toolbox, packed them with the gore- and corruption-soaked towels, then closed his new coffin, triggered the seal, and set the lock combination. She had forty minutes left.

  She spent another ten minutes cleaning out the locker where Ren had spent his death, then stripped off the gloves and threw them in the recycler. She bathed, trying to scrub off the stink, and noticed distantly that she was sobbing. She ignored the fact, and by the time she’d changed into her new uniform, the crying seemed to have stopped. She picked up the last of her things, threw them in a pack, put her still-wet hair in a ponytail, and hauled Ren to the loading bay where the other supplies would be taken across to the Prince. It didn’t allow her time to say her goodbyes to Soledad or Stanni or Bob. She was sorry for that, but it was a burden she could bear.

  There were about thirty of them, all told. Men and women she’d seen around the ship, heard their names once or twice, nodded to in the galley or on the exercise machines. Once they reached the Prince, they were all brought into a small white conference room with benches that bolted to the floor like pews. They were already under thrust, already moving for the Ring and whatever was on the other side. While the overly enthusiastic yeoman prattled on about the Thomas Prince, she glanced at the faces around her. An old man with a scruffy white beard and ice-blue eyes. A stocky blond woman who was probably younger than she was with poorly applied eyeliner and a grim look about the jowls. They’d all come here of their own free will. Or free will as bounded by the terms of their work contracts. They were all going through the Ring, into the mouth of whatever was on the other side. She wondered what would motivate them to do it, what kinds of secrets they’d hidden in their tool chests.

  “You will need to keep your identification cards with you at all times,” the yeoman was saying, holding up a white plastic card on a lanyard. “Not only are these the keys to get into your quarters, they’ll also get you food in the civilian commissary. And they’ll let you
know if you’re where you’re supposed to be.”

  The blond woman turned toward Melba and glared. Melba looked away, blushing. She hadn’t intended to stare. Never be rude unintentionally, her father had always said.

  The yeoman’s white card turned a deep, bloody red.

  “If you see this,” he said, “it means you’re in a restricted area and need to leave immediately. Don’t worry too much. She’s a big ship, and we all get a little turned around sometimes. I got buzzed four times the first week I was here. No one’s going to get bent out of shape over an honest mistake, but security will be following up on them, so be prepared.”

  Melba looked at her own white card. It had her name, a picture of her unsmiling face. The yeoman was talking about how much they were appreciated, and how their service was an honor to the ship and to themselves. All in this together, one big team. The first stirring of hatred for the man shifted in her gut, and she tried to distract herself.

  She didn’t know what she’d do once they were all on the other side, but she had to find Holden. She had to destroy him. The soundman too. Anything that led back to her had to be destroyed or discredited. She wondered if there was a way to get a fake card, or one that belonged to someone with a lot more clearance than Melba Koh would have. Maybe one that could check out a shuttle. She’d need to look into it. She was improvising now, and getting the best tools she could manage would be critical.

  Around her, people began standing up. From the bored looks and the quiet, she figured they were beginning the walking tour. She’d been through the Thomas Prince before. She was already familiar with the high ceilings and wide corridors where three people could walk abreast. She might not know where everything was, but she could fake it. She fell in line with the others.

  “In case of emergency, all you’ll have to do is get back to your quarters and strap in,” the yeoman said, walking backward so that he could keep lecturing them while they all moved, bumping against each other like cattle. Someone behind her made a soft mooing sound, and someone else chuckled. The joke had gone out to the darkness of space even where cows hadn’t.

  “Now, through here is the civilian commissary,” the yeoman said as they passed through a pair of sliding steel doors. “Those of you who were working here before might be used to getting your food and coffee from the officers’ mess, but now that we’re on a military operation, this is going to be the place to go.”

  The civilian commissary was a low gray box of a room with tables and chairs bolted to the floor, and a dozen people of all ages and dress sat scattered around. A thin man with improbably pale hair leaned against a crash-padded wall, drinking something from a bulb. Two older men in black robes and clerical collars sat huddled together like the unpopular kids at a cafeteria. Melba was already beginning to turn inward again, ignoring them all, when something caught her. A familiar voice.

  Twenty feet away, Tilly Fagan leaned in toward an older man who looked like he was struggling between annoyance and flirtation. Her hair was up and her laughter caustic in a way that recalled long, uncomfortable dinner parties with both of their families. Melba felt a sudden atavistic shame at being so underdressed. For a sickening moment, her false self slipped away and she was Clarissa again.

  Forcing herself to move slowly, calmly, she drifted to the back of the crowd, making herself as small and difficult to notice as she could. Tilly glanced over at the nattering yeoman and his herd of technicians with undisguised annoyance, but didn’t notice Melba. Not this time. The yeoman led them all back out of the commissary, down the long hallway to their new quarters. Melba took her ponytail down and brushed her hair in close around her face. She’d known, of course, that the Prince had the delegation from Earth, but she’d discounted them. Now she wondered how many other people here knew Clarissa Mao. She had the horrible image of turning a corner and seeing Micha Krauss or Steven Comer. She could see their eyes going wide with surprise, and she wondered whether she could bring herself to kill them too. If she couldn’t, the brig and the newsfeeds and a prison cell like her father’s would follow.

  The yeoman was talking about their quarters, assigning them out one by one to all the volunteer technicians. They were tiny, but the need for each person to have a crash couch in case of emergency meant they wouldn’t be hot-bunking. She could stay in there, bribe one of the others to bring her food. Except, holed up like a rat, tracking and killing Holden became exponentially more difficult. There had to be a way…

  The yeoman called her name, and she realized it wasn’t the first time.

  “Here,” she said. “Sorry.”

  She scuttled into her room, the door recognizing her white card and unlocking for her, then closing once she was inside. She stood for a long moment, scratching her arm. The room was bright and clean and as unlike the Cerisier as Nepal was from Colombia.

  “You came to improvise,” she said, and her voice sounded like it came from someone else. “Well, here you are. Start improvising.”

  Chapter Twenty: Holden

  Instead of putting him at ease, the weeks and months of interviews had given Holden a new persona. A version of himself that stood in front of a camera and answered questions. That explained things and told stories in ways entertaining enough to keep the focus on himself. It wasn’t the sort of thing that he’d have expected to have any practical application.

  One more surprise among many.

  “This,” Holden said, gesturing to the large video monitor behind him on the operations deck, “is what we are calling the slow zone.”

  “That’s a terrible name,” Naomi said. She was at the ship operations panel, just out of view of the documentary crew’s cameras. “Slow zone? Really?”

  “You have a better name?” Monica asked. She whispered something to Clip and he shifted a few degrees to his left, camera moving with him in a slow pan. The burst blood vessel in his eye was starting to fade. The high-g burn through the Ring had been hard on all of them.

  “I still like Alex’s name,” Naomi replied.

  “Dandelion sky?” Monica said with a snort. “First of all, only people from Earth and Mars have even the slightest idea what a dandelion is. And second of all, no, it sounds stupid.”

  Holden knew he was still on camera, so he just smiled and let the two of them hash it out. The truth was, he’d been partial to Alex’s name. Where they sat, looking out, it did sort of look like being at the center of a dandelion, the sky filled with fragile-looking structures in an enormous sphere around them.

  “Can we finish this?” Monica asked, shooting the comment at Naomi without looking at her.

  “Sorry I interrupted,” Naomi replied, not looking sorry at all. She winked at Holden and he grinned back.

  “And, three… two…” Monica pointed at him.

  “The slow zone, based on the sensor data we’re able to get, is approximately one million kilometers across.” Holden pointed at the 3D representation on the screen behind him. “There are no visible stars, so the location of the zone is impossible to determine. The boundary is made up of one thousand three hundred and seventy-three individual rings evenly spaced into a sphere. So far, the only one we’ve been able to find that’s ‘open’ is the one we came through. The fleets we traveled out with are still visible on the other side, though the Ring seems to distort visual and sensor data, making readings through it unreliable.”

  Holden tapped on the monitor, and the center of the image enlarged rapidly.

  “We’re calling this Ring Station, for lack of a better term. It appears to be a solid sphere of a metallic substance, measuring about five kilometers in diameter. Around it is a slow-moving ring of other objects, including all of the probes we’ve fired into the slow zone, and the Belter ship Y Que. The torpedo that chased us through the Ring is headed toward the station in a trajectory that seems to indicate it will become part of the garbage ring too.”

  Another tap and the central sphere took up the entire screen. “We’re calling it a stat
ion pretty much only because it sits at the center of the slow zone, and we’re making the entirely unfounded assumption that some sort of control station for the gates would be located there. The station has no visible breaks in its surface. Nothing that looks like an airlock, or an antenna, or a sensor array, or anything. Just that big silvery blue glowing ball.”

  Holden turned off the monitor and both of the camera operators swiveled to put him at the center of their shots.

  “But the most intriguing factor of the slow zone, and the one that gives it its name, is the absolute speed limit of six hundred meters per second. Any object above the quantum level traveling faster than that is locked down by what seems to be an inertial dampening field, and then dragged off to join the garbage circling the central station. At a guess, this is some sort of defensive system that protects the Ring Station and the gates themselves. Light and radar still work normally, but radiation made up of larger particles like alpha and beta radiation does not exist inside the slow zone. At least outside the ship, that is. Whatever controls the speeds here only seems concerned by the exterior of the objects, not the interior. We’ve done radiation and object speed tests inside the ship, and so far everything works as normal. But the last probe we fired was immediately grabbed by the field and is now making its way down to the garbage ring. The lack of alpha and beta radiation leads me to believe that there’s a thin cloud of loose electrons and helium nuclei orbiting that station as part of the garbage ring.”

  “Can you tell us what your plan is now?” Monica said from off camera. Cohen pointed his mic at her, then back at Holden.

  “Our plan now is to remain motionless, avoid attracting the Ring Station’s attention, and keep studying the slow zone using what instruments we have. We can’t leave until we repair the comm array and let everyone outside know that we aren’t psychotic murderers bent on claiming the Ring for ourselves.”