Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate

by James S. A. Corey

  The large man sighed. “So are you looking for a trial, or just a way to stall for time?”

  “Stall for time,” Anna said.

  Bull nodded, weighing something in his mind, then gestured for her to precede him into his office. After she sat down next to his battered desk, he clumped around the small space making a pot of coffee. It seemed an extravagance considering the newly implemented water rationing, but then Anna remembered Bull was now the second most powerful person in the slow zone. The privileges of rank.

  She didn’t want coffee, but accepted the offered cup to allow Bull a moment of generosity. Generosity now might lead to more later, when she was asking for something she really wanted.

  “When Holden starts telling people who actually sabotaged the Seung Un—and he’s Jim Holden, so he will—the UN people are going to ask for Clarissa. And if they give me enough that I can get everyone here, together, and safe until we can get out of this trap, I’m going to give her to them. Not off the ship, but in here.”

  “What will they do?” Anna took a companionable sip of her coffee. It burned her tongue and tasted like acid.

  “Probably, they’ll put together a tribunal of flag officers, have a short trial, and throw her in a recycler. I’d say space her, normally, but that seems wasteful considering our predicament. Supplies sent from home will take as long to fly through the slow zone to us as they’ll take to get to the Ring.”

  His voice was flat, emotionless. He was discussing logistics, not a young woman’s life. Anna suppressed a shudder and said, “Mister Baca, do you believe in God?”

  To his credit, he tried not to roll his eyes. He almost succeeded.

  “I believe in whatever gets you through the night.”

  “Don’t be flip,” Anna said, and was gratified when Bull straightened a little in his walker. In her experience, most strong-willed men had equally strong-willed mothers, and she knew how to hit some of the same buttons.

  “Look,” Bull said, trying to reclaim the initiative. Anna spoke over the top of him.

  “Forget God for a moment,” she said. “Do you believe in the concept of forgiveness? In the possibility of redemption? In the value of every human life, no matter how tainted or corrupted?”

  “Fuck no,” Bull said. “I think it is entirely possible to go so far into the red you can’t ever balance the books.”

  “Sounds like the voice of experience. How far have you been?”

  “Far enough to know there’s a too damn far.”

  “And you’re comfortable being the judge of where that line is?”

  Bull pulled on the frame of his walker, shifting his weight in the straps that held him. He looked wistfully at the office chair he could no longer use. Anna felt bad for him, broken at the worst possible time. Trying to keep his tiny world in order, and burning through the last reserves of his strength with reckless abandon. The bruised eyes and yellow skin suddenly seemed like a flashing battery indicator, warning that the power was almost gone. Anna felt a pang of guilt for adding to his burden.

  “I don’t want to kill that girl,” he said, taking another sip of the terrible coffee. “In fact, I don’t give a shit about her one way or the other, as long as she’s locked up and isn’t a danger to my ship. The one you should talk to is Holden. He’s the one who’s gonna get the torches-and-pitchforks crowd wound up.”

  “But the Martians…”

  “Surrendered twenty hours ago.”

  Anna blinked.

  “They’ve been wanting to for days,” Bull said. “We just had to find a way to let ’em save face.”

  “Save face?”

  “They got a story they can tell where they don’t look weak. That’s all they needed. But if we didn’t find something, they’d have stuck to their posts until they all died. Nothing ever killed more people than being afraid to look like a sissy.”

  “Holden’s coming here, then?”

  “Already be on a shuttle escorted by four recon marines, which is another fucking headache for me. But how about this? I won’t talk about the girl until I have reason to. What Holden does, though, he just does.”

  “Fine, then I’ll talk to him when he arrives,” Anna said.

  “Good luck with that,” Bull said.

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Holden

  When the Martians came for him—two men and two women, all in uniform and all armed—Holden’s isolation-drunk mind had spun out in a dozen directions at once. The captain had found room for him in the medical clinic and she wanted to grill him again about what happened on the station and they were going to throw him out an airlock and they’d had news that Naomi was dead and they’d had news that she wasn’t. It felt like every neuron he had from his brain down to his toes was on the edge of firing. It was all he could do not to launch himself off the cell’s wall and into the narrow corridor.

  “The prisoner will please identify himself,” one of the men said.

  “James Holden. I mean, it’s not like you have very many prisoners here, right? Because I’ve been trying to find someone to talk with for it feels like about a decade since I got here, and I’m pretty sure there isn’t so much as a dust mite in this place besides me.”

  He bit his lips to stop talking. He’d been alone and scared for too long. He hadn’t understood how much it was affecting him. Even if he hadn’t been mentally ill when he came to the Hammurabi, he was going to be real soon now if nothing changed.

  “Record shows prisoner identified himself as James Holden,” the man said. “Come along.”

  The corridor outside the cells was so narrow that two guards ahead and two behind was effectively a wall. The low Martian gravity made their bodies more akin to Belters than to him, and all four of them hunched slightly, bending in over him. Holden had never felt so relieved to be in a tiny, cramped hallway in his life. But even the relief was pushed aside by his anxiety. The guards didn’t actually push him so much as start to move with an authority that suggested that he really should match them. The hatch was only five meters away, but after being in his cell, it seemed like a huge distance.

  “Was there any word from the Roci?”

  No one spoke.

  “What’s… ah… what’s going on?”

  “You’re being evacuated,” the man said.

  “Evacuated?”

  “Part of the surrender agreement.”

  “Surrender agreement? You’re surrendering? Why are you surrendering?”

  “We lost the politics,” one of the women behind him said.

  If the skiff they loaded him onto wasn’t the same one that had taken him back from the station, it was close enough that he couldn’t tell the difference. There were only four soldiers this time, all of them in full combat armor. The rest of the spaces were taken up by men and women in standard naval uniform. Holden thought at first they were the wounded, but when he looked closer, none of them seemed to have anything worse than minor injuries. It was the exhaustion in their faces and bodies that made them seem broken. The acceleration burn wasn’t even announced. The thrust barely shifted the crash couches. All around him, the Martians slept or brooded. Holden scratched at the hard, flexible plastic restraints on his wrists and ankles, and no one told him to stop. Maybe that was a good sign.

  He tried to do the math in his head. If the new top speed was about as fast as a launched grenade, then every hour, they’d travel… As tired as he was, he couldn’t make the numbers add up to anything. If he’d had his hand terminal, it would have been a few seconds’ work. Still, he couldn’t see asking to have it. And it didn’t matter.

  He slept and woke and slept again. The proximity Klaxon woke him from a dream about making bread with someone who was his father Caesar and also Fred Johnson and trying to find the salt. It took him a moment to remember where he was.

  The skiff was small enough that when the other ship’s crew banged against the airlock, Holden could hear it. From his seat, he couldn’t see the airlock open. The first thing he knew
was a slightly different scent in the air. Something rich and oddly humid. And then four new people stepped into his view. They were Belters. A broad-faced woman, a thick man with a startling white beard, and two shaven-headed men so similar they might have been twins. The twins had the split circle of the OPA tattooed on their arms. All four wore sidearms.

  The Behemoth, Holden thought. They’d surrendered to the Behemoth. That was weird.

  One of the marines, still in battle armor, floated over to them. The Belters didn’t show any sign of fear. Holden gave them credit for that.

  “I am Sergeant Alexander Verbinski,” the Martian said. “I have been ordered to hand over this skiff and her crew and company in accordance with the agreement of surrender.”

  The woman and white-bearded man looked at each other. Holden thought he could see the question—You gonna tell them they can’t take their suits in?—pass between them. The woman shrugged.

  “Bien alles,” she said. “Welcome aboard. Bring them through in sixpacks and we’ll get you sorted, sa sa?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Verbinski said.

  “Corin,” one of the twins said. The woman turned to see him gesture toward Holden with his chin. “Pa con esá parlan, si?”

  The woman’s nod was curt.

  “We’ll take Holden out now,” she said.

  “Your show,” the marine said. Holden thought from his tone he’d have been as happy to shoot him. That might have been paranoia, though.

  The Belters escorted him through the airlock and a long Mylar tube to the engineering deck of the Behemoth. A dozen people were waiting with hand terminals at the ready, prepared for the slow, slogging administrative work of dealing with a defeated enemy. Holden got to skip the line, and he wasn’t sure it was an honor.

  The woman floating near the massive doors at the transition point where the engineering section met the drum looked too young for her captain’s insignia. Her hair, pulled back in a severe bun, reminded him of a teacher he’d had once when he’d still been on Earth.

  “Captain Pa,” the security woman—Corin, one of the twins had called her—said. “You wanted to talk with this one.”

  “Captain Holden,” Captain Pa said with a nod. “Welcome aboard the Behemoth. I’m giving you liberty of the ship, but I want you to understand that there are some conditions.”

  Holden blinked. He’d expected another brig at least. Freedom of the ship was pretty much the same as freedom period. It wasn’t like there were a lot of places he could go.

  “Ah. All right,” he said.

  “You are to make yourself available for debriefing whenever you are called upon. No exceptions. You are not to discuss what happened or didn’t happen on the station with anyone besides myself or the security chief.”

  “I know how to shut it off,” Holden said.

  The younger captain’s expression shifted.

  “You what?”

  “I know how to get the protomolecule to take us all off of lockdown,” he said, and went on to explain all of what he’d told Captain Jakande again—seeing Miller, the plan to lull the station into a lower alert level so that the dead man could shut it down—fighting to sound calm, rational, and sane as he did it. He didn’t go so far as the massive civilization-destroying invasion that had wiped out the protomolecule’s creators. It all sounded bad enough without that.

  Pa listened carefully, her face a mask. She wasn’t someone he’d want to play poker against. He had the powerful, painful memory of Naomi telling him that she’d teach him how to play poker, and his throat closed.

  The security man with the white beard floated up, two angry-looking Martians matching vector behind him.

  “Captain?” the Belter said, barely restrained rage in his voice.

  “Just a minute, Mister Gutmansdottir,” she said, then turned back to Holden. She had to be overwhelmed, but it was only a tightness in her jaw, if it was even that much. “I’ll… take that under advisement, but for the immediate future—”

  “My crew?”

  “They’re in the civilian medical bay,” Pa said, and the white-bearded man cleared his throat in a way that meant he hadn’t needed to. “There are directions posted. If you’ll excuse me.”

  “Captain, there’s a load of contraband among the new prisoners,” Gutmansdottir said, hitting the last word hard. “Thought you’d want to address that before it got to Bull.”

  Pa took a deep breath and pushed off after her security man. A few seconds later, Holden realized he hadn’t been dismissed so much as forgotten. Fallen down the list of things that the young captain had to do right now, and so fuck him. He moved out past the transition point and to the platforms where the axis of the little world spun. There was a long ramp for carts, and he shuffled down it, the spin slowly shifting from pure Coriolis to the sensation of weight. He could feel in his knees how long he’d been on the float and hoped that the medical bays weren’t too far away.

  If they’d been on the far side of the system, though, he’d have grabbed an EVA suit, as much spare air as he could haul, and started out, though. The idea that he was breathing the same air as Naomi and Alex and Amos was like a drug.

  Only Captain Pa hadn’t actually said that. All she’d said was that his crew was there. The “remaining” might have been implied. He tried to jog, but got winded after only a couple of minutes and had to pause to catch his breath.

  The great body of the drum stretched out before him, a world wrapped into a tube. The long strip of the false sun glowed white above him, now that there was a clear “above,” and reached out across two kilometers to a swirling ramp at the other end, the mirror of the one he was on. Thin clouds drifted in tori around the unbearable brightness. The air clung to him, the heat pressing at his skin, but he could imagine the bare metal of the drum’s surface covered in green, the air sweet with the scent of apple blossoms, the cycle of evaporation and condensation cooling it all. Or if not, at least making it into a long, permanent summer afternoon.

  It was a dream. Someone else’s and doomed now to failure, but worthy. Beautiful, even in ruins.

  “Captain Holden? Can I speak with you?”

  It was a small woman with bright red hair pulled into tight braids, and wearing a plain brown suit. She was the sort of very comfortable middle-aged that always made him think of his mothers.

  “My name is Annushka Volovodov,” she said with a smile. “But you can call me Anna if you like.”

  “You can call me Jim,” he said, holding out a hand. He almost had his wind back. Anna shook his hand without a hint of fear. His “most dangerous man in the solar system” reputation must not have reached her yet. “Eastern European?”

  “Russian,” she replied with a nod. “Born in Kimry. But a Muscovite for most of my adult life. North American?”

  “Montana. Farming collective.”

  “I hear Montana is nice.”

  “Population density is good. Still more cows than people.”

  Anna nodded and plucked at her suit. Holden got the sense that she actually had something she wanted to say but was having a hard time getting to the point. “Kimry was like that. It’s a tourist place you know, the lakes—” Anna started.

  “Anna,” Holden cut her off gently. “Do you need to say something to me?”

  “I do,” she said. “I need to ask you not to tell anyone about Clarissa, and what she did.”

  Holden nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “Who’s Clarissa and what did she do?”

  The woman tilted her head.

  “They didn’t tell you?”

  “I don’t think they liked me much,” Holden said. “Is there something I should know?”

  “Well, this is awkward. Just after the catastrophe, a girl calling herself Melba attacked your ship,” Anna said. “It’s a long story, but I followed her and tried to help. Your first officer? Naomi? She was hurt in the attack. Badly.”

  Holden felt the universe contract. Naomi was hurt while he’d
been dicking around with Miller on the station. His hands were shaking.

  “Where is she?” he asked, not sure if he meant Naomi or the woman who’d hurt her.

  “Naomi’s here. They brought her over to the Behemoth,” Anna said. “She’s in the medical bay right now receiving treatment. They assure me she’ll recover. The rest of your crew is here too. They were hurt earlier. When the speed limit changed.”

  “They’re alive?”

  “Yes,” Anna said. “They are.”

  The mix of relief and sorrow and anger and guilt made the ship seem to spin a little beneath him. Anna put a hand on his arm to steady him.

  “Who is this Melba and why did she attack my crew?”

  “It’s not her real name. My friend knows her, knows her family. Apparently she has something of an obsession with you. Her name is Clarissa Mao.”

  Mao.

  The mysterious and powerful Julie. The Julie rebuilt by the protomolecule like his ghostly Miller. The Julie who had hired Cohen the soundman to hack their ship, the Julie he’d sculpted for them later who’d never looked quite right. The Julie who’d been manipulating every detail of his life for the last year just to get them through the gate and down to the station.

  It wasn’t Julie at all.

  “She’s not well,” Anna was saying, “but I believe that she can be reached. If there’s time. But if they kill her—”

  “Where’s Naomi? Do you know where she is?”

  “I do,” Anna said. And then, “I’m sorry. I may have been a little wrapped up in my own issue. Can I take you there?”

  “Please,” Holden said.

  Fifteen minutes later, Holden stepped into a small room in the medical ward that his little family had to themselves. Naomi lay on a gurney, one arm in an inflatable cast. Her face was mottled with half-healed bruises. Tears stung his eyes, and for a moment he couldn’t speak. A killing rage burned in him. This wasn’t a disaster. It wasn’t an accident. Someone had done this to her.

  When she saw him, her smile was gentle and amused.