Naomi came to rest against the opposite wall, a knot of panting and blood.
“Who are you?” the Belter croaked.
I am vengeance, Melba thought. I am your death made flesh. But the voice that answered came from behind her.
“Anna. My name’s Anna. Are you all right?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Anna
The woman—Naomi Nagata—replied by coughing up a red glob of blood.
“I’m an idiot, of course you’re not all right,” Anna said, then floated over to her, pausing to push the still-twitching Melba to the other side of the compartment. Girl and mech drifted across the room, bounced off a bulkhead, and came to a stop several meters away.
“Emergency locker,” Naomi croaked, and pointed at a red panel on one wall. Anna opened it to find flashlights, tools, and a red-and-white bag not too different from the one Tilly had been carrying on the Prince. She grabbed it. While Anna extracted a package of gauze and a can of coagulant spray for the nasty wound on Naomi’s shoulder, the Belter pulled out several hypo ampules and began injecting herself with them one at a time, her movements efficient and businesslike. Anna felt like something was tearing in her shoulders every time she wrapped the gauze around Naomi’s upper torso, and she almost asked for another shot for herself.
Years before, Anna had taken a seminar on ministering to people with drug addictions. The instructor, a mental health nurse named Andrew Smoot, had made the point over and over that the drugs didn’t only give pleasure and pain. They changed cognition, stripped away the inhibitions, and more often than not, someone’s worst habits or tendencies—what he called their “pathological move”—got exaggerated. An introvert would often withdraw, an aggressive person would grow violent. Someone impulsive would become even more so.
Anna had understood the idea intellectually. Almost three hours into her spacewalk, the amphetamines Tilly had given her began to fade and a clarity she hadn’t known she lacked began to return to her. She felt she had a deeper, more personal insight into what her own pathological move might be.
Anna had spent only a few years living among Belters and outer planets inhabitants. But that was long enough to know that their philosophy boiled down to “what you don’t know kills you.” No one growing up on Earth ever really understood that, no matter how much time they later spent in space. No Belter would have thrown on a space suit and EVA pack and rushed out the airlock without first knowing exactly what the environment on the other side was like. It wouldn’t even occur to them to do so.
Worse, she’d run out that airlock without stopping to send a message to Nono. You don’t ask for permission, you ask for forgiveness echoed in her head. If she died doing this, Nono would have it carved as her epitaph. She’d never get that last chance to say she was sorry.
The brightly colored display, which always seemed to float at the edge of her vision no matter which way her face was pointed, had said that she had 83 percent of her air supply remaining. Not knowing how long a full tank would last robbed that information of some much-needed context.
As she’d tried to slow her breathing back down and keep from panicking, the gauge ticked to 82 percent. How long had it been at 83 percent before it did? She couldn’t remember. A vague feeling of nausea made her think about how bad throwing up in her space suit would be, which only made the feeling worse.
The girl, Melba, or Claire now, was far ahead and gaining, moving with the easy grace of long practice. Someone for whom walking in a space suit with magnetic boots was normal. Anna tried to hurry and only managed to kick her boot with her other foot and turn the magnet up high enough to lock it to the hull of the ship. The momentum of her step tugged against the powerful magnetic clamp. After several lost seconds figuring out how to fix that problem, she’d found the controls and slid the grip back down to a normal human range. After that, she gave up on haste and aimed for a safe, consistent pace. Slow and steady, but she wasn’t winning the race. She lost sight of the girl, but she’d told herself it didn’t matter. She guessed well enough where Clarissa Mao was going. Or Melba Koh. Whoever this woman was.
She had seen images of the Rocinante on newsfeeds before. It was probably as famous as a ship could be. James Holden’s central role in the Eros and Ganymede incidents along with a peppering of dogfights and antipiracy actions had kept his little corvette mentioned in the media on and off for years. As long as there weren’t two Martian corvettes parked next to each other, Anna felt confident she’d be able to spot it.
Fifteen long minutes later, she did.
The Rocinante was shaped like a stubby black wedge of metal; a fat chisel laid on its side. The flat surface of the hull was occasionally broken up by a domed projection. Anna didn’t know enough about ships to know what they were. It was a warship, so sensors or guns, maybe, but definitely not doors. The tail of the ship had been facing her, and the only obvious opening in it was at the center of the massive drive cone. She walked to the edge of the ship she was on and then from side to side trying to get a better look at the rest of the Rocinante before jumping over to it. The irony of looking before she leapt at this late stage of the game made her laugh, and she felt some of the tension and nausea fading.
Just to the right of the drive cone was a bubble of plastic attached to the ship, pale as a blister. A moment later she was through the wound in the ship’s cargo doors and inside. It had occurred to her, as she looked at the maze of crates locked against the hull with magnets much like the ones on her own feet, that she hadn’t thought her plan through past this. Did this room connect to the rest of the ship? The doors behind her didn’t have an airlock, which probably meant that this space was usually kept in vacuum. She had no idea where anyone would be in relation to that room, and more worrisome, she had no idea if the girl she was chasing was still in there, hiding behind one of the boxes.
Anna carefully pulled herself from crate to crate to the other end of the long, narrow compartment. Bits of plastic and freeze-dried food drifted around her like a cloud of oddly shaped insects. The broken crates might have been relics of a fight or debris created by the speed change; she had no way to know. She reached into the small bag tethered to her EVA pack and pulled out the taser. She’d never fired one in microgravity or in vacuum. She hoped neither thing affected it. Another gamble no Belter would ever take.
To her great relief, she found an airlock at the other end of the room, and it opened at a touch of the panel. Cycling it took several minutes, while Anna pulled the heavy EVA pack off her back and played with the taser to make sure she knew how to turn the safety off. The military design was intuitive, but less clearly labeled than the civilian models she was accustomed to. The panel flashed green and the inner doors opened.
No one was in sight. Just a deck that looked like a machine shop with tool lockers and workbenches and a ladder set into one wall. Bookending the ladder were two hatches, one going toward the front of the ship, the other toward the back. Anna was thinking that she was most likely to run into crewmembers by going toward the front of the ship when there was a loud bang from the back and the lights went out.
Yellow LEDs set into the walls came on a moment later, and a genderless voice said, “Core dump, emergency power only,” and repeated it several times. Her helmet muffled the sound, but there was clearly still air in the ship. She pulled the helmet off and hung it from her harness.
Anna was fairly certain you only ejected the core in emergencies related to the engine room, so she moved to that hatch instead. With the constant rumble of the ship gone and her helmet removed she could hear faint noises coming through the hatch. It took her several long moments to figure out how to access it, and when she finally did the hatch snapped open so suddenly it made her almost yelp with surprise.
Inside, Melba was murdering someone.
A Belter woman with long dark hair and a greasy coverall was having her throat crushed by the mechanical arms Melba wore. The woman—Anna could see now that it was James Holden�
�s second-in-command, Naomi Nagata—looked like Melba had beaten her badly. Her arm and shoulder were covered in blood, and her face was a mass of scrapes and contusions.
Anna drifted down into the vaulted chamber. The reactor room’s walls curving inward like a church, the cathedrals of the fusion age. She felt an almost overwhelming need to hurry, but she knew she’d only get one shot with the taser, and she didn’t trust herself to fire on the move.
Naomi’s face was turning a dark, bruised purple. Her breath the occasional wet rasp. Somehow, the Belter managed to raise one hand and flip Melba off. Anna’s feet hit the decking, and her boots stuck. She was less than three meters behind Melba when her finger pressed the firing stud, aiming for the area of her back not covered by the skeletal frame of the mech, hoping the taser would work through a vacuum suit.
She missed, but the results were impressive anyway.
Instead of hitting the fabric of Melba’s suit, the taser’s two microdarts hit the mech dead center. The trailing wires immediately turned bright red and began to fall apart like burning string. The taser got so hot Anna could feel it through her glove, so she let go just before it melted into a glob of gooey gray plastic. The mech arced and popped and the arms snapped straight out. The room smelled like burning electrical cables. All of Melba’s hair was standing straight up, and even after the taser had died her fingers and legs continued to twitch and jerk. A small screen on the mech’s arm had a flashing red error code.
“Who are you?” Naomi Nagata asked, drifting in a way that told Anna she’d be slumping to the floor at the first hint of gravity.
“Anna. My name’s Anna,” she had said. “Are you all right?”
After the third injection, Naomi took a long, shuddering breath and said, “Who’s Anna?”
“Anna is me,” she said, then chuckled at herself. “You mean who am I? I’m a passenger on the Thomas Prince.”
“UN? You don’t look like navy.”
“No, a passenger. I’m a member of the advisory group the secretary-general sent.”
“The dog and pony show,” Naomi said, then hissed with pain as Anna tightened the bandage and activated the charge that would keep it from unwinding.
“Everyone keeps calling it that,” Anna said as she felt the bandage. She wished she’d paid more attention in the church first aid class. Clear the airway, stop the bleeding, immobilize the injury was about the limit of what she knew.
“That’s because it is,” Naomi said, then reached up with her good hand to grab a rung of the nearby ladder. “It’s all political bullsh—”
She was cut off by a mechanical-sounding voice saying, “Reboot complete.”
Anna turned around. Melba was staring at them both, her hair still standing straight out from her head, but her hands no longer twitching uncontrollably. She moved her arms experimentally, and the half mech whined, hesitated, and then moved with her.
“Fuck me,” Naomi said. She sounded annoyed but unsurprised.
Anna reached for her taser before she remembered it had melted. Melba bared her teeth.
“This way,” Naomi said as the hatch slid open above them. Anna darted through it, with Naomi close behind using her one good arm to pull herself along. Melba surged after them, reaching out with one foot to push off the reactor housing.
Naomi pulled her leg through just in time to avoid being grabbed by the mech’s claw, then tapped the locking mechanism with her toe and the hatch slammed shut on the mech’s wrist. The hatch whined as it tried to close, crushing the claw in a spray of sparks and broken parts. Anna waited for the scream of pain that didn’t come, then realized that the gloves Melba used to control the machine were in the mech’s forearms, several centimeters behind the point of damage. They hadn’t hurt her, and she’d sacrificed the use of one of the mech’s claws in order to keep the hatch open. The other claw appeared in the gap, gripping at the metal, bending it.
“Go,” Naomi said, her voice tight with pain, her good hand pointing at the next hatch up the ladder. After they were both through, Anna took a moment to look around at the new deck they were on. It looked like crew areas. Small compartments with flimsy-looking doors. Not a good place to hole up. Naomi flew through the empty air and the dim shadows cast by the emergency lights, and Anna followed as best she could, the feeling of nightmare crawling up her throat.
After they’d passed through the hatch into the next level, Naomi stopped to tap on the small control screen for several seconds. The emergency lights shifted to red, and the panel on the hatch read security lockdown.
“She’s not trapped down there,” Anna said. “She can get out through the cargo bay. There’s a hole in the doors.”
“That’s twice now someone has done that,” Naomi replied, pulling herself up the ladder. “Anyway, she’s wearing a salvage mech rig, and she’s in the machine shop. Half the stuff in there is made to cut through ships. She’s not trapped. We are.”
This took Anna by surprise. They’d gotten away. They’d locked a door behind them. That was supposed to end it. The monster isn’t allowed to open doors. It was fuzzy, juvenile thinking, and Anna became less sure that all the drugs had actually passed through her system. “So what do we do?”
“Medical bay,” Naomi said, pointing down a short corridor. “That way.”
That made sense. The frail-looking Belter woman was getting a gray tone to her dark skin that made Anna think of massive blood loss, and the bandage on her shoulder had already soaked through and was throwing off tiny crimson spheres. She took Naomi by the hand and pulled her down the corridor to the medical bay door. It was closed, and the panel next to it flashed the security lockdown message like the deck hatches had. Naomi started pressing it, and Anna waited for the door to slide open. Instead, another, heavier-looking door slid into place over the first, and the panel Naomi was working on went dark.
“Pressure doors,” Naomi said. “Harder to get through.”
“But we’re on this side of them.”
“Yeah.”
“Is there another way in?” Anna asked.
“No. Let’s go.”
“Wait,” Anna said. “We need to get you in there. You’re very badly hurt.”
Naomi turned to look at her, frowned as if she’d only really seen Anna for the first time. It was a speculative frown. Anna felt she was being sized up.
“I have two injured men in there. My crew. They’re helpless,” Naomi finally said. “Now they’re as safe as I can make them. So you and I are going to go up to the next deck, get a gun, and make sure she follows us. When she shows up, we’re going to kill her.”
“I don’t—” Anna started.
“Kill. Her. Can you do that?”
“Kill? No. I can’t,” Anna said. It was the truth.
Naomi stared at her for a second longer, then just shrugged with her good hand. “Okay, then, come with me.”
They moved through the next hatch to the deck above. Most of the space was taken up by an airlock and storage lockers. Some of the lockers were large enough to hold vacuum suits and EVA packs. Others were smaller. Naomi opened one of the smaller lockers and pulled out a thick black handgun.
“I’ve never shot anyone either,” she said, pulling the slide back and loading a round. To Anna’s eye the bullet looked like a tiny rocket. “But those two in the med bay are my family, and this is my home.”
“I understand,” Anna said.
“Good, because I can’t have you—” Naomi started, then her eyes rolled up in her head and her body went limp. The gun drifted away from her relaxed hand.
“No no no,” Anna repeated in a sudden wash of panic. She floated over to Naomi and held her wrist. There was still a pulse, but it was faint. She dug through the first aid pack, looking for something to help. One ampule said it was for keeping people from going into shock, so Anna jabbed Naomi with it. She didn’t wake up.
The air in the room began to smell different. Hot, and with the melted plastic odor her damaged
taser had given off when it died. A spot of red appeared on the deck hatch, then shifted to yellow, then to white. The girl in the mech, coming for them.
The hatch above them, the one that led forward on the ship, was closed and flashing the lockdown message. Naomi hadn’t told her what the override code was. The airlock was on their level, but it was locked down too.
The deck hatch began to open in lurching increments. Anna could hear Melba panting and cursing as she forced it. And Naomi’s lockdown code hadn’t kept the insane woman out, it had only locked them in.
Anna pulled Naomi’s limp body over to one of the large vacuum suit storage lockers and put her inside, climbing in after her. There was no lock on the door. Between the unconscious woman and the suit, there was hardly enough room for her to close it. She set both of her feet at the corner where the door of the locker met the deck and set the magnets up to full. She felt the suit lock onto the metal, clamping her legs into place and pulling her up close against the locker door.
On the far side, metal shrieked. Something wet brushed against the back of Anna’s neck. Naomi’s hand, limp and bloody. Anna tried not to move, tried not to breathe loudly. The prayer she offered up was hardly more than a confusion of fear and hope.
A locker door slammed open off to her left. Then another one, closer. And then another. Anna wondered where Naomi’s gun had gotten to. It was in the locker somewhere, but there was no light, and she’d have to unlock the magnets on her boots to look for it. She hoped they hadn’t left it outside with the crazy woman. Another locker opened.
The door centimeters from Anna’s face shifted, but didn’t open. The vents and the cracks in the locker door flared the white of a cutting torch, then went dark. A mechanical voice said, “Backup power depleted.” The curse from the other side was pure frustration. It was followed by a series of grunts and thumps: Melba taking the mech rig off. Anna felt a surge of hope.
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