Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate

by James S. A. Corey

  It made her laugh. Despite everything, Clarissa laughed, and then she put her head down again and cried. Her chest hurt so badly she was sure something really was breaking. Aortic aneurysm, pulmonary embolism, something. Sorrow couldn’t really feel like a heart breaking, could it? That was just a phrase.

  It went on forever. And then past that, and then it slowed. Her body was as limp as a rag. Tilly’s blouse was soaked with tears and snot and saliva, but she was still sitting just as she’d been. Her hand still ran through Clarissa’s hair. Her fingernails traced the curve of her ear.

  “You put the bomb on the Seung Un,” Tilly said, “and framed Jim Holden for it.”

  It wasn’t a question or an accusation. She didn’t want Clarissa to confess, just to confirm. Clarissa nodded against Tilly’s lap. When she spoke, her voice clicked and her throat felt thick and raw.

  “He hurt Daddy. Had to do something.”

  Tilly sighed.

  “Your father is a first-class shit,” she said, and because it was her saying it, it didn’t hurt to hear.

  “I’ve got to tell the chief,” the guard said, apology in her voice. “I mean about what happened. He wants me to report in.”

  “I’m not stopping you,” Tilly said.

  “You need to come with me,” the guard said. “I can’t leave you there with her. It’s not safe.”

  A flash of panic lit her mind. She couldn’t be alone. Not now. They couldn’t leave her locked up and alone.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Tilly said. “You go do whatever it is you need to do. I’ll be here with Claire.”

  “Ah. That girl killed a lot of people, ma’am.”

  The silence was just a beat, and without shifting her head, Clarissa knew what look was on Tilly’s face. The guard cleared her throat.

  “I’ll have to lock the door, ma’am.”

  “Do what you need to, Officer,” Tilly said.

  The bars shifted and crashed. The lock clacked home. The footsteps retreated. Clarissa wept for Ren. Maybe the others would come later. The dead soldiers on the Seung Un. Holden’s lover whom she’d beaten and brutalized. All the men and women who’d died because they’d followed Holden through the Ring. She might have tears for them, but now it was only Ren, and she didn’t think she would stop in her lifetime.

  “I deserve to die,” she said. “I’ve become a very bad person.”

  Tilly didn’t disagree, but she didn’t stop cradling her either.

  “There’s someone I’d like you to talk to,” she said.

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Anna

  The security force had come first, three soldiers in a shuttle with guns and restraints for Melba. Or Clarissa. Whoever she was. Then, much later, a medical evacuation had come, taking the Rocinante’s crew.

  Anna’s own ride arrived almost a day later, not an afterthought, but not a priority. The way things had all come about, she thought not being a priority was probably a sign things were going well for her.

  When she arrived on the Behemoth, she had expected to see someone from that ship’s security team. Or, if they were well enough, maybe Naomi and the other two crewmen from the Rocinante.

  Hector Cortez stood in the shuttle bay. He smiled when he saw her and raised his hand in a little wave of greeting. The motion reminded her of her grandfather in his failing days: careful and a little awkward. She thought Cortez had aged a decade in a few days, then realized he must have been injured in the catastrophe.

  “Anna,” he said. “I am so glad to see you.”

  The Behemoth’s massive drum section was spinning now, creating a vertigo-inducing false gravity. Anna’s feet told her that she was standing on solid ground. Her inner ear argued that she was falling over sideways, and kept trying to get her to tilt her body the other direction. It wasn’t enough to make her steps unsteady, but it did make everything feel a little surreal. Having Hector Cortez, celebrity and minister to the powerful, kiss her cheek didn’t make things any less dreamlike.

  “It’s good to see you too,” she said. “I didn’t know you were on the Behemoth.”

  “We’ve all come,” he said. “They’ve left the smallest of crews on the Thomas Prince, and we’ve all come here. All of us that are left. We’ve lost so many. I attended services yesterday for the fallen. Father Michel. Rabbi Black. Paolo Sedon.”

  Anna felt a little twinge of dread.

  “Alonzo Guzman?”

  Cortez shook his head.

  “Neither alive nor dead,” he said. “They have him in a medical coma, but he’s not expected to survive.”

  Anna remembered the man’s pleading eyes. If she’d only found help for him sooner…

  “I’m sorry to have missed that service,” she said.

  “I know,” Cortez said. “It’s why I wanted to meet you. May I walk with you?”

  “Of course,” Anna said. “But I don’t know where I’m going.”

  “Then I will give you the basic orientation,” the old man said, turning a degree and sweeping his hand toward the shuttle bay. “Come with me, and I will bring you to the glory of the lift system.”

  Anna chuckled and let him lead the way. He walked carefully too. Not mincing, but not striding. He seemed like a different person than the one who’d called the three factions of humanity together to pass through the Ring and into the unknown. It was more than just how he held his body too.

  “I thought it was important that those of us who were part of the petition speak at the service,” he said. “I wanted our regret to have a voice.”

  “Our regret?”

  He nodded.

  “Yours. Mine. All of us who advised that we come to this darkness. It was hubris, and the innocent have suffered because of it. Died for listening to our bad advice. God has humbled me.”

  His voice still had the richness of a lifetime’s practice, but there was a new note in it. A high, childlike whine underneath the grandeur. Sympathy for his distress and an uncharitable annoyance sprang up in her.

  “I don’t know that I see it that way,” she said. “We didn’t come here to glorify ourselves. We did it to keep people from fighting. To remind ourselves and each other that we’re all together in this. I can’t think that’s an evil impulse. And I can’t see what happened to us as punishment. Time and chance—”

  “Befall all men,” Hector said. “Yes.”

  Behind them, a shuttle’s attitude rocket roared for a moment, then cut off. A pair of Belters in gray jumpsuits sauntered toward it, toolboxes in their hands. Cortez was scowling.

  “But even given what grew from that seed? You still don’t think we were punished? The decision was not made out of arrogance?”

  “History is made up of people recovering from the last disaster,” Anna said. “What happened was terrible. Is terrible. But I still can’t see God’s punishment in it.”

  “I do,” Cortez said. “I believe we have fallen into a realm of evil. And more, Doctor Volovodov, I fear we have been tainted by it.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “The devil is here,” Cortez said. He shook his head at Anna’s protesting frown. “Not some cartoon demon. I’m not a fool. But the devil has always lived in men when they reach too far, when they fail to ask if they should do something just because they can do it. We have— I have fallen into his trap. And worse, we have blazed the trail to him. History will not remember us kindly for what we have done.”

  Anna knew quite a few members of the Latter-day Saints church. They agreed with the Methodists on a few minor things like not drinking alcohol, which gave them a sense of solidarity at interfaith conventions. They disagreed on some important things, like the nature of God and His plan for the universe, which didn’t seem to matter as much as Anna would have thought. They tended to be happy, family-oriented, and unassuming.

  Standing in the belly of the Behemoth, Anna would never have guessed they would build something like the massive generation ship. It was so big, so extravagant. It was like a rebell
ious shout at the emptiness of space. The universe is too big for our ship to move through it in a reasonable time? Fine, we’ll stuff all the bits of the universe we need inside of our ship and then go at our own pace. The inner walls of the rotating drum curved up in the distance, Coriolis effect masquerading as mass, metal ribbing and plates pretending to be substrate, just waiting for soil and plants and farm animals. Through the center of the drum, half a kilometer over Anna’s head, a narrow thread of bright yellow light shone down on them all. The sun, stretched into a line in the sky. The entire idea of it was arrogant and defiant and grandiose.

  Anna loved it.

  As she walked across a wide empty plain of steel that should have been covered in topsoil and crops, she thought that this audaciousness was exactly what humanity had lost somewhere in the last couple of centuries. When ancient maritime explorers had climbed into their creaking wooden ships and tried to find ways to cross the great oceans of Earth, had their voyage been any less dangerous than the one the Mormons had been planning to attempt? The end point any less mysterious? But in both cases, they’d been driven to find out what was on the other side of the long trip. Driven by a need to see shores no one else had ever seen before. Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she’ll be haunted by what might be behind it.

  A few people liked to paint this drive as a weakness. A failing of the species. Humanity as the virus. The creature that never stops filling up its available living space. Hector seemed to be moving over to that view, based on their last conversation. But Anna rejected that idea. If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they’d all still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another’s fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She’d looked up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She’d tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity, that had put her there.

  Looking at the tiny world spinning around her, she knew one day it would give them the stars as well.

  The refugee camp was a network of tents and prefabricated temporary structures set on the inner face of the drum, the long thin line of sun-bright light pressing down onto them all like a spring afternoon on Earth. It took her almost half an hour to find Chris Williams’ tent. The liaison from the Thomas Prince let her know that the young naval officer had survived the catastrophe, but had suffered terrible injuries in the process. Anna wanted to find him, and maybe through him the rest of the little congregation she’d formed during the trip out.

  A few questions of helpful refugees later, and she found his tent. There was no way to knock or buzz, so she just scratched at the tent flap and said, “Chris? You in there?”

  “That you, Pastor? Come on in.”

  The liaison hadn’t been specific in her descriptions of Chris’ injuries, so Anna braced herself for the worst when she entered. The young lieutenant was lying in a military-style cot, propped up by a number of pillows. He had a small terminal on his lap that he set aside as she came in. His left arm and left leg both ended at the middle joint.

  “Oh, Chris, I’m—”

  “If your next word is ‘sorry,’” he said, “I’m going to hop over there and kick your ass.”

  Anna started laughing even as the tears filled her eyes. “I am sorry, but now I’m sorry for being sorry.” She sat by the edge of his cot and took his right hand. “How are you, Chris?”

  “With a few obvious exceptions”—he waved his shortened left arm around—“I came through the disaster better than most. I didn’t even have a bad bruise.”

  “I don’t know how the navy health plan works,” Anna started, but Chris waved her off.

  “Full regrowth therapy. We ever get out of here and back to civilization, and a few painful and itchy months later I’ll have bright pink replacements.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Anna said. She’d been about to offer to pay for his treatment, not knowing how she’d actually do that. She felt a moment of relief and shame. “Have you heard from anyone else who was in our group? I haven’t had time to find them yet.”

  “Yeah,” Chris said with a chuckle, “I heard. You’ve been doing commando raids while I’ve been laid up. If I’d known they trained you guys to take down souped-up terrorists, I’d have paid more attention in church as a kid.”

  “I ran away from her until she had a seizure, and then I taped her to a chair. Not very heroic.”

  “I’m getting a medal for falling into a pressure hatch, sacrificing an arm and a leg to keep seven sailors from being trapped in a compromised part of the ship. I was unconscious at the time, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Heroism is a label most people get for doing shit they’d never do if they were really thinking about it.”

  Anna laughed at that. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that exact thing recently.” Chris relaxed back into his pile of pillows and nodded for her to continue.

  “Labels, I mean. People are calling the aliens evil, because they hurt us. And without context, how do we know?”

  “Yeah,” Chris said. “I lose a couple limbs getting drunk and falling into a harvesting combine, I’m an idiot. I lose the same limbs because I happened to be standing next to the right door when the ship was damaged, I’m a hero.”

  “Maybe it’s as simple as that. I don’t know. I feel like something really important is about to happen, and we’re all making up our minds ahead of time what it will be.”

  Chris absentmindedly scratched at the stump of his left leg, then grimaced. “Like?”

  “We came through the Ring to stop James Holden from talking to the aliens first. But this is the same man that helped send Eros to Venus instead of letting it destroy the Earth. Why did we assume he’d do a bad job of being the first human the aliens met? And now something has slapped us down, taken all our guns away, but not killed us. That should mean something. Certainly anything this powerful could kill us as easily as it declawed us. But it didn’t. Instead of trying to figure out what it means, we’re hurting so we call it evil. I feel like we’re children who’ve been punished and we think it’s because our parents are mean.”

  “They stopped our ships to… what? Pacify us?” Chris asked.

  “Who knows?” Anna said, shrugging. “But I know we’re not asking those questions. Humans do bad things when they’re afraid, and we’re all very afraid right now.”

  “Tara died,” Chris said.

  Anna racked her brain trying to remember who Tara was. Chris saw her confusion and added, “Short blond hair? She was a marine?”

  “Oh no,” Anna replied, feeling the tears well up again. Her angry marine had died. A whole future in which she’d worked with Tara to find out the source of her anger vanished. Conversations she’d already had in her head, lines of questioning, the anticipation of satisfaction she’d get from having the marine open up to her. Gone, as if someone had flicked a switch. It was hard not to sympathize with Cortez’s view a little. After all, the aliens had killed one of her congregation now.

  But maybe not on purpose, and intent mattered. The universe made no sense to her otherwise.

  She managed to finish off her visit without, she hoped, seeming too distracted. Afterward, she went to find her own assigned tent and try to rest. She had no reason to think that sleep would come. After she found her place, Tilly Fagan appeared. Anna lifted her arm in greeting, but before she could get a word out, Tilly threw both arms around her and was squeezing until she could hear her ribs pop. Tilly was surprisingly strong for such a thin woman.

  “I was furious with myself for letting you leave,” Tilly said, squeezing even tighter and leaning her weight against Anna. She was heavy. They both were in the spinning drum. It took some getting used to.

  When Tilly finally let up the pressure a bit, Anna said, “I think I was… altered.”

  “That was my fault, too,” Tilly said, followed b
y more squeezing. Anna realized the only thing to do was ride it out, and patted Tilly on the lower back until her friend got it out of her system.

  After a few moments, Tilly released Anna and stepped back, her eyes shiny but a smile on her face. “I’m glad you didn’t die. Everyone else from the Prince is a pod.” Anna decided not to ask what a pod was. “The Behemoth has become the place to be,” Tilly continued. “If we never figure out how to escape this trap, it’s the place it will take us the longest to die. That makes it the high-rent district of the slow zone.”

  “Well, that’s… important.”

  Tilly laughed. She pulled a cigarette out and lit it as they walked. At Anna’s shocked look she said, “They let you do it here. Lots of the Belters do. They obsess over air filters and then suck poisonous particulates into their lungs recreationally. It’s a fabulous culture.”

  Anna smiled and waved the smoke away from her face.

  “So,” Tilly said, pretending not to notice. “I demanded they let me go on the first shuttle over. Did you manage to retrieve Holden?”

  “I didn’t find him,” Anna said. “Just his crew. But I think I might have saved their lives.”

  At first, she thought Tilly’s expression had cooled, but that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t coldness. It was pain. Anna put her hand on Tilly’s arm.

  “I have someone I need you to talk to,” Tilly said. “And you probably aren’t going to like it, but you’re going to do it for me. I’ll never ask you for anything again, and you’re buying a lifetime of expensive markers to trade in with this.”

  “Whatever I can do.”

  “You’re going to help Claire.”

  Anna felt like the air had gone out of the room. For a moment, she heard the throat-scarring screams again and felt the blows transferred through the buckling locker door. She heard Chris tell her that Tara had died. She saw Cortez, and heard the buzzsaw despair in his voice. She took a breath.

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course I am.”