Abaddon's Gate e-3

by James S. A. Corey

  “That’s very flattering,” Anna whispered, then paused to shake hands with a Belter woman who tearfully thanked her for organizing the meeting. Tilly gave the woman her most insincere smile but managed not to roll her eyes.

  “I need a drink,” Tilly said once the woman had left. “Come with. I’ll buy you a lemonade.”

  “They closed the bar. Rationing.”

  Tilly laughed. “I have a supplier. The guy running the rationing sold me a bottle of their best Ganymede hooch for the low price of a thousand dollars. He tossed in the lemonade for free.”

  “A thousand—”

  “One of two things will happen,” Tilly said, taking out a cigarette and putting it in her mouth but leaving it unlit. “We’ll get out of here, back into the solar system where I’m rich and a thousand bucks doesn’t matter, or we won’t get out and nothing will matter.”

  Anna nodded because she didn’t know what else to say. As much as she’d come to enjoy and rely on Tilly’s friendship, she was occasionally reminded how utterly different their worlds were. If she and Nono had an extra thousand UN dollars lying around, it would have immediately gone into Nami’s college fund. Tilly had never in her life had to sacrifice a luxury to get a necessity. If there was any actual mixing in the congregation, it was that. The one thing the Belters and inner planet naval people had in common was that none of them would be drinking thousand-dollar alcohol that night, but Tilly would.

  God might not care about financial standing, but He was the only one.

  “I admit, lemonade sounds nice,” Anna said, fanning her face with her hand terminal. The Behemoth’s big habitat drum was built to house a lot more people than it currently held, but they’d stripped a lot of the environmental systems out of it when they converted it to a warship. It was starting to seem like they were reaching the atmosphere processing limits. Or maybe just the air conditioning. The temperature was generally higher now than a girl raised in Russia and most recently living on one of Jupiter’s icy moons enjoyed.

  After one more tour of the tent to say goodbye to the last lingering remnants of her congregation, Anna followed Tilly out. It wasn’t much cooler outside the tent, but the spin of the drum and the air recycling system did combine to create a gentle breeze. Tilly looked over her flushed red face and sweat-plastered hair with a critical eye and said, “Don’t worry, everyone who’s coming over is here. I heard Cortez talking to some OPA bigwig a couple days ago. This is as hot as it’s going to be. And as soon as they find a way to cool us down that doesn’t involve venting our atmosphere into space, they’ll do it.”

  Anna couldn’t help but laugh. When Tilly raised an eyebrow, Anna explained, “We flew across the entire solar system, almost to the orbit of Neptune, a world so cold and distant from the sun we didn’t even know it was there until Bouvard noticed that something was bumping Uranus around.”

  Tilly’s eyebrow crept higher. “Okay.”

  “And when we get here, who knows how far from the sun and with billions of kilometers of empty space in every direction? We somehow manage to be hot and crowded.”

  “Thank God the Belters thought to bring this rattletrap with them,” Tilly said, ducking to enter her tent. She flopped down into a folding chair and started rummaging in a plastic cooler next to it. “Can you imagine trying to stuff everyone onto the Prince? We’d be twelve to a bunk there. Lovely culture, these Belters.”

  Anna pulled her cassock off and laid it over the edge of Tilly’s cot. Underneath she was wearing a white blouse and a knee-length skirt that was much less stifling. Tilly pulled a plastic bulb of lemonade out of the cooler and handed it to her, then poured herself a glass of something as clear as water that smelled like hospital cleanser. When Anna took the bulb she was surprised to find it cold. Small drops of condensation were already forming on its surface. She put the cool bottle against the back of her neck and felt a delightful chill run down her spine.

  “How did you manage ice?”

  “Dry ice,” Tilly said around a lit cigarette, then paused to down her first shot. “Apparently it’s easy for the people in atmosphere processing to make. Lots of carbon dioxide just lying around.”

  If Tilly was spending a thousand dollars a bottle for the antiseptic she was drinking, Anna didn’t want to know what a steady supply of ice was costing her. They drank in companionable silence for a while, the cool lemonade doing wonders for Anna’s heat exhaustion. Tilly brought up the idea of finding something to eat, and they wandered out of her tent in search of a supply kiosk.

  There were people walking through the crowded tent city carrying guns.

  “This looks bad,” Tilly said. It did. These weren’t bored security officers with holstered sidearms. These were grim-faced Belter men and women with assault rifles and shotguns carried in white-knuckled grips. The group moving between the tents was at least a dozen strong, and they were looking for something. Or someone.

  Anna tugged at Tilly’s sleeve. “Maybe we should try to get people to go back to the church tent to wait this out.”

  “Annie, if the bullets start flying in here, even God can’t make that tent a safe place to hide. I want to know what’s going on.”

  Anna reluctantly followed her in a path that paralleled the armed group, which moved with purpose, occasionally stopping to look in tents or quietly question people. Anna began to feel very frightened without being sure why.

  “Oh,” Tilly said. “Here we go.”

  Bull’s second-in-command—Serge was his name, Anna thought—rounded one of the larger tents trailing half a dozen security people behind him. They were all armed as well, though only with handguns. Even to Anna’s untrained eye, the difference between six people with pistols and twelve people with rifles was dramatic. Serge had a faint smile on his face as though he hadn’t noticed. Anna saw the muscular young woman from the security office standing behind him, though her face was a worried scowl. Oddly enough, seeing someone else look worried made Anna feel better.

  “No guns in the drum, sa sa?” Serge said to the armed Belter group, though the volume of his voice made it clear he was speaking to the onlookers as well. “Drop ’em.”

  “You have guns,” a Belter woman said with a sneer. She held a rifle at the ready.

  “We’re the cops,” Serge said, placing one hand on the butt of his gun and grinning back at her.

  “Not anymore,” she replied and in one quick movement shifted her rifle and shot him in the head. A tiny hole appeared in his forehead, and a cloud of pink mist sprayed into the air behind him. He sank slowly to the floor, an expression of vague puzzlement on his face.

  Anna felt her gorge rise, and had to double over and pant to keep from vomiting. “Jesus Christ,” Tilly said in a strangled whisper. The speed with which the situation had gone from unsettling to terrifying took Anna’s breath away. I’ve just seen a man have his brains blown out. Even after the horrors of the slow zone catastrophe, it was the worst thing she’d ever seen. The security man hadn’t thought the woman would shoot him, hadn’t suspected the true nature of the threat, and the price he’d paid for it was everything.

  At that thought, Anna threw up all over her shoes and then sank to her knees, gagging. Tilly dropped down next to her, not even noticing that the knees of her pants were in a pool of vomit. Tilly hugged her for a second then whispered, “We need to go.” Anna nodded back because she couldn’t open her mouth without fear of losing control again. A few dozen meters away, the Belters were disarming the security team and tying their arms behind their backs with plastic strips.

  At least they weren’t shooting anyone else.

  Tilly pulled her to her feet, and they hurried back to her tent, all thought of food forgotten. “Something very bad is happening on this ship,” Tilly said. Anna had to suppress a manic giggle. Given their current circumstances, things would have to be very bad indeed for Tilly to think the situation had gotten worse. Sure, they were all trapped in orbit around an alien space station that periodic
ally changed the rules of physics and had killed a bunch of them, but now they’d decided to start shooting each other too.

  Yes, very bad.

  Hector Cortez came to Tilly’s tent about an hour after the shooting. Anna and Tilly had spent the time staying as close to the floor of the tent as possible, arranging Tilly’s few bits of furniture into barricades around them. It had the feeling of performing ritual magic. Nothing in the room would actually stop a bullet, but they arranged it anyway. A blanket fort to keep the monsters at bay.

  Mercifully, there hadn’t been any further sounds of gunfire.

  The few times they peeked out of the tent, they saw smaller groups of no more than two or three armed Belters patrolling the civilian spaces. Anna avoided meeting their eyes, and they ignored her.

  When Cortez arrived, he cleared his throat loudly outside the tent, then asked if he could enter. They were both afraid to answer, but he came in anyway. Several people waited for him outside, though Anna couldn’t see who.

  He glanced once around the inside of the gloomy space, looking over their flimsy barricade, then pulled a chair away from it and sat down without commenting on it.

  “The shooting is over. It’s safe to sit,” he said, gesturing at the other chairs. He looked better than he had in a while. His suit had been cleaned and somehow he’d found a way to wash his thick white hair. But that wasn’t all of it. Some of his self-assurance had returned. He seemed confident and in charge again. Anna climbed up off the floor and took a chair. After a moment, Tilly did the same.

  “I’m sorry you were frightened,” Cortez said with a smile that didn’t seem sorry at all.

  “What’s going on, Hank?” Tilly asked, her eyes narrowing. She took out a cigarette and began playing with it without lighting it. “What are you up to?”

  “I’m not up to anything, Matilda,” Cortez said. “What’s happening is that the rightful authority on this ship has been restored, and Captain Ashford is once more in command.”

  “Okay, Hector,” Tilly replied, “but how are you involved? Seems like internal OPA politics to me. What’s your play?”

  Cortez ignored her and said to Anna, “Doctor Volovodov, may we speak privately?”

  “Tilly can hear anything—” Anna started, but Tilly waved her off.

  “I think I’ll go outside for a smoke.”

  When she’d left the tent, Cortez pulled his chair close enough that his knees were almost touching Anna’s. He leaned forward, taking her hands in his own. Anna had never had the sense that Hector was interested in her sexually, and still didn’t, but somehow the closeness felt uncomfortably intimate. Invasive.

  “Anna,” he said, giving her hands a squeeze. “Things are about to change dramatically on this ship, and in our calling here. I’ve been fortunate in that Captain Ashford trusts me and has sought my counsel, so I’ve had some input on the direction these changes take.”

  The forced intimacy, combined with the bitter taste still in her mouth from having seen a man murdered, brought up an anger she hadn’t expected. She pulled her hands away from him with more violence than she intended, then couldn’t help but feel a twinge of satisfaction at the hurt and surprise on his face.

  “How nice for you,” she said, carefully keeping her tone neutral.

  “Doctor Volovodov… Anna, I would like your support.” Anna couldn’t stop the snort of disbelief in time, but he pressed on. “You have a way with people. I’m fine in front of a camera, but I’m not as good one-on-one, and that’s where you shine. That’s your gift. And we are about to face terrible personal challenges. Things people will have a hard time understanding. I would like your voice there with me to reassure them.”

  “What are you talking about?” Anna said, barely squeezing the words past a growing lump in her throat. She had the sense of a terrible secret about to be revealed. Cortez shone with the invincible certainty of the true believer.

  “We are going to close the gate,” he said. “We have a weapon in our possession that we believe will work.”

  “No,” Anna said more in disbelief than in denying his claims.

  “Yes. Even now engineers work to refit this vessel’s communications laser to make it powerful enough to destroy the Ring.”

  “I don’t mean that,” Anna started, but Cortez just continued speaking.

  “We are lost, but we can protect those we’ve left behind. We can end the greatest threat the human race has ever known. All it requires is that we sacrifice any hope of return. A small price to pay for—”

  “No,” Anna said again, more forcefully. “No, you don’t get to decide that for all of these people.” For me, she thought. You don’t get to take my wife and daughter away like that. Just because you’re afraid.

  “In times of great danger and sacrifice such as this, some will step forward to make the difficult decisions. Ashford has done that, and I support him. Now it is our role to make sure the people understand and cooperate. They need to know that their sacrifice will protect the billions of people we’ve left behind.”

  “We don’t know that,” Anna said.

  “This station has already claimed hundreds of lives, maybe thousands.”

  “Because we keep making decisions without knowing what the consequences are. We chased Holden’s ship through the Ring, we sent soldiers to the station to hunt him, we keep acting without information and then being angry when it hurts us.”

  “It didn’t hurt us. It killed us. A lot of us.”

  “We’re like children,” Anna said, pushing herself to her feet and lecturing down at him. “Who burn their hands on a hot stove and then think the solution is to blow up all the stoves.”

  “Eros,” Cortez started.

  “We did that! And Ganymede, and Phoebe, all the rest! We did it. We keep acting without thinking and you think the solution is to do it one more time. You have allied yourself with stupid, violent men, and you are trying to convince yourself that being stupid and violent will work. That makes you stupid too. I will never help you. I’ll fight you now.”

  Cortez stood up and called to the people waiting outside. A Belter with protective chest armor and a rifle came into the tent.

  “Will you shoot me too?” Anna said, putting as much contempt into the words as she could.

  Cortez turned his back on her and left with the gunman.

  Anna sank down into her chair, her legs suddenly too shaky to support her. She doubled over, rocking back and forth and taking long shuddering breaths to calm herself. Somehow, she didn’t black out.

  “Did he hurt you?” Tilly said from behind her. Her friend put a gentle hand on the back of her neck as she rocked.

  “No,” Anna said. It wasn’t technically a lie.

  “Oh, Annie. They have Claire. They wouldn’t let me talk to her. I don’t know if she’s a hostage or—”

  Before she knew she was going to do it, Anna had jumped to her feet and run out of the tent. They’d be going to the elevator that ran up the side of the drum and connected with the passages to the command decks and engineering. They’d be going to the bridge. Men like Cortez and Ashford, men who wanted to be in charge, they’d be on the bridge. She ran toward the elevator as fast as her legs would carry her. She hadn’t actually run in years. Living in a small station tunneled into the ice of Europa, it just hadn’t come up. She was out of breath in moments, but pushed on, ignoring the nausea and the stitch in her ribs.

  She reached the elevator just as Cortez and his small band of gun-toting thugs climbed inside. Clarissa was standing at the back of the group, looking small and frail surrounded by soldiers in armor. As the doors slid closed, she smiled at Anna and raised one hand in a wave.

  Then she was gone.

  Chapter Forty: Holden

  “Hey, Cap?” Amos said from his bed. “That was the third armed patrol that’s gone past this room in about three hours. Some shit is going down.”

  “I know,” Holden said quietly. It was obvious that the situation
on the Behemoth had changed. People with guns were moving through the corridors with hard expressions. Some of them had pulled a doctor aside, had a short but loud argument with her, then taken a patient away in restraints. It felt like a coup in progress, but according to Naomi the security chief Bull had already mutinied and taken the ship from the original Belter captain. And nothing had happened that would explain why he’d suddenly need to put a lot more boots on the ground or begin making arrests.

  It felt like a civil war was brewing, or being squashed.

  “Should we do something?” Amos asked.

  Yes, Holden thought. We should do something. We should get back to the Rocinante and hide until Miller gets done doing whatever he was doing and releases the ships in the slow zone. Then they should burn like hell out of this place and never look back. Unfortunately, his crew was still laid up and he didn’t exactly have a ride waiting to take him to his ship.

  “No,” he said instead. “Not until we understand what’s happening. I just got out of jail. Not in a hurry to go back.”

  Alex sat up in bed, and then moaned at the effort. The top of his head was swathed in bloodstained bandages, and the left side of his face had a mushy, pulpy look to it. The speed limit change had thrown him face first into one of the cockpit’s viewscreens. If he hadn’t been at least partially belted into his chair, he’d probably be dead.

  “Maybe we should find a quieter place than this to hole up,” he said. “They don’t seem opposed to arresting patients so far.”

  Holden nodded with his fist. He was starting to pick up Naomi’s Belter-style gestures, but whenever he caught himself using one he felt awkward, like a kid pretending to be an adult. “My time on this ship has been limited to the docking bay and this room. I don’t have any idea where a quieter place would be.”

  “Well,” Naomi said. “That puts you one up on us. None of us were conscious when they brought us here.”