Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate

by James S. A. Corey

  “Corin found the preacher, huddled up with half her congregation in their church tent.”

  “Great,” Holden said. “Things are starting to come together.”

  “Better than you think. Half the people in that room were UN and Martian military. They’re coming with her. She says they’ll back her story when she asks the other ships to shut down. It also won’t hurt to have a few dozen more able bodies to man the defenses when Ashford comes after us.”

  As Bull spoke, Holden saw Amos enter the offices pushing the bed Alex and Naomi were on. A knot he hadn’t even realized he had relaxed in his shoulders. Bull was still talking about utilizing the new troops for their defensive plans, but Holden wasn’t listening. He watched Amos move the gurney to a safe corner at the back of the room and then wander over to stand next to them.

  “Nothing new outside,” Amos said when Bull stopped talking. “Same small patrols of Ashford goons walking the drum, but they don’t act like they know anything’s up.”

  “They’ll know as soon as we do our first broadcast,” Monica said.

  “How’s that shoulder?” Holden asked.

  “Sore.”

  “I’ve been thinking I want you to take command of the defense here once the shit hits the intake.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Amos said. He knew Holden was asking him to protect Naomi and Alex. “I guess that means you’re going down to—”

  He was interrupted by a loud buzzing coming from Bull’s pocket. Bull pulled a beat-up hand terminal out and stared at it like it might explode.

  “Is that an alarm?” Holden asked.

  “Emergency alert on my private security channel,” Bull said, still not answering it. “Only the senior staff can use that channel.”

  “Ashford, trying to track you down?” Holden asked, but Bull ignored him and answered the call.

  “Bull here. Ruiz, I—” Bull started, then stopped and just listened. He grunted a few times, though Holden couldn’t tell if they were assents or negations. When he finished the call, he dropped the hand terminal on the desk behind him without looking at it. His brown skin, recently gray with sickness, had turned almost white. He reached up with both hands to wipe away what Holden realized with shock were tears. Holden would not have guessed the man was capable of weeping.

  “Ashford,” Bull started, then began a long coughing fit that looked suspiciously like sobbing. When he’d finally stopped, his eyes and mouth were covered with mucus. He pulled a rag out of his pocket and wiped most of it off, then said, “Ashford killed Sam.”

  “What?” Holden asked. His brain refused to believe this could be true. He’d heard the words clearly, but those words could not be, so he must have heard them wrong. “What?”

  Bull took a long breath, gave his face one last wipe with the rag, then said, “He brought her up to the bridge to ask about the laser mods, and then he shot her. He made Anamarie Ruiz the chief engineer.”

  “How do you know?” Monica asked.

  “Because that was Ruiz on the line just now. She wants us to get her the hell out of there,” Bull said. Almost all traces of his grief were gone from his face. He took another long, shuddering breath. “She knows Ashford has completely gone around the bend, but what can she do?”

  Holden shook his head, still refusing to believe it. Brilliant little Sam, who fixed his ship, who was Naomi’s best friend, whom Alex and Amos shared a good-natured crush on. That Sam couldn’t be dead.

  Amos was staring at him. The big man’s hands were curled into fists, his knuckles a bloodless white.

  “We have to hold this ground,” Holden said, hoping to head off Amos’ next words. “I need you to hold it or this whole thing falls apart.”

  “Then you kill him,” Amos said, his words terrifyingly flat and emotionless. “None of this trial bullshit. No righteous man among the savages bullshit. You fucking kill him, or so help me God…”

  Holden felt a sudden nausea almost drive him to his knees. He took a few deep breaths to push it back. This was what they had to offer to Sam’s memory. After all she’d done for them. All she’d meant to them. They had violence, arguments about the best way to get revenge. Sam, who as far as he knew had never hurt another person in her life. Would she want this? He could picture her there, telling Amos and Bull to put their testosterone away and act like adults. The thought almost made him vomit.

  Monica put a hand on his back. “Are you okay?”

  “I have to tell Naomi,” was all he could say, then he pushed her hand away and walked across a floor that moved under his feet like the rolling deck of an oceangoing ship.

  Naomi reacted only with sorrow, not with anger. She cried, but didn’t demand revenge. She repeated Sam’s name through her tears, but didn’t say Ashford’s once. It seemed like the right reaction. It seemed like love.

  He was holding Naomi while she gently wept when Bull clumped up behind him. He felt a flash of anger, but swallowed it.

  “What?”

  “Look,” Bull said, rubbing his buzz cut with both hands. “I know this is a shitty time, but we have to talk about where we go from here.”

  Holden shrugged.

  “Sam’s gone, and she was pretty central to our plans…”

  “I understand,” Naomi said. “I’ll go.”

  “What?” Holden said, feeling like they were having a conversation in some kind of code he didn’t understand. “Go where?”

  “With Sam gone, Naomi is the best engineer we’ve got,” Bull said.

  “What about this Ruiz person? I thought she was the chief engineer now.”

  “She was in charge of infrastructure,” Bull said. “And I’ve seen Nagata’s background. She’s got the training and the experience. And we trust her. If someone’s going to take Sam’s place—”

  “No,” Holden said without thinking about it. Naomi was hurt. She couldn’t fight her way into the engine room now. And Sam had been killed.

  “I’ll go,” Naomi repeated. “My arm is for shit, but I can walk. If someone can help me once we get there, I can take out the bridge and shut down the reactor.”

  “No,” Holden said again.

  “Yeah, me too,” Alex added. He was sitting on the edge of the gurney facing away from them. He’d been shaking like he was crying, but hadn’t made a sound. His voice sounded dry, like fallen leaves rustling in the wind. Brittle and empty. “I guess I have to go too.”

  “Alex, you don’t—” Naomi started, but he kept talking over the top of her.

  “Nobody pulled the Roci’s batteries off-line when we left, so if we’re shutting everything down, she’ll need someone to do it.”

  Bull nodded. Holden wanted to smack him for agreeing with any of this.

  “And that’ll be me,” Alex said. “I can tag along as far as engineering, grab an EVA pack there, and use the aft airlock to get out.”

  Amos moved over behind Bull, his face still flat, emotionless, but his hands in fists. “Alex is going?”

  “New plan,” Bull said loud enough for everyone to hear. People stopped whatever they were doing and moved over to listen. More must have arrived, because there were almost fifty in the office now. At the back of the room stood a small knot of people in military uniforms. Anna the redheaded preacher was with them. She was holding hands with an aggressively thin woman who alternated smoking and tapping her front teeth with her pinky fingernail. Bull spotted them at the same time Holden did, and waved them forward.

  “Anna, come on up here,” he said. “Most everyone is here now, so this is how it’s going to go down.”

  The room got quiet. Anna made her way up to Bull and waited. Her skinny friend came with her, staring at the crowd around the preacher with the suspicious eyes of a bodyguard.

  “In”—Bull stopped to look at a nearby wall panel with a clock on it—“thirty minutes, I will take a team made up of security personnel and the crew of the Rocinante to the southern drum access point. We will retake that access point and gain entrance
into the engineering level. Once we control engineering, Monica and her team will begin a broadcast explaining to the rest of the fleet about the need to kill the power. Preacher, that’s where you and your people come in.”

  Anna turned and smiled at her group, a motley collection of people in the uniforms of a variety of services and planetary allegiances. Most of them injured in one way or another. Some quite badly.

  “The target for the shutdown is 1900 hours local, about two and a half hours from now. We need them to keep it down for two hours. That’s our window. We need the Behemoth down during that two hours.”

  “We’ll make it happen,” Naomi said.

  “But when our broadcast starts, Ashford will probably try to take this location. Amos and the remainder of my team, along with any volunteers from among the rest of you, will hold this position as long as possible. The more bad guys you can tie up here, the fewer we’ll have trying to take engineering back from us. But I need you to hold. If we can’t keep Anna and her people on the air long enough to get everyone on board with our shutdown plan, this thing ends before it starts.”

  “We’ll hold,” Amos said. No one disagreed.

  “Once we control engineering, we’ll send a team forward to put restraints on the hopefully unconscious people on the bridge and we’ll own the ship. The lights go out, the aliens let us go, and we get the fuck out of this miserable stretch of space once and for all. How’s that sound?”

  Bull raised his voice with the final question, looking for a cheer from the group, and the group obliged. People began to drift back toward their various tasks. Holden squeezed Naomi’s uninjured shoulder and moved over to Anna. She looked lost. Along the way he grabbed Amos by the arm.

  “Anna,” Holden said. “Do you remember Amos?”

  She smiled and nodded. “Hello, Amos.”

  “How you doing, Red?”

  “Amos will be here to protect you and the others,” Holden continued. “If you need anything, you let him know. I feel safe in saying nothing will get in here to stop you from doing your job as long as he’s alive.”

  “That’s the truth,” Amos said. “Ma’am.”

  “Hey, guys,” someone called out from the doorway. “Look what followed me home. Can I keep them?”

  Holden patted Anna on the arm and gave Amos a meaningful look. Protect this one with your life. Amos nodded back. He looked vaguely offended.

  He left them together and caught up with Bull heading for the door. The security officer Corin, Bull’s new second-in-command, was leaning next to the door with a shit-eating grin.

  “Come on in, boys,” she said, and four Martians with military haircuts came into the room. They stood on the balls of their feet, slowly looking over every inch of the room. Holden had known someone who always entered a room that way. Bobbie. He found himself wishing she were here. The man in the lead was powerfully familiar.

  “Sergeant Verbinski,” Bull said to one of them. “This is a surprise.”

  Holden hadn’t recognized the man without his armor. He looked big.

  “Sir,” Verbinski said. “I heard you’re about to start a fight to get us all out of here.”

  “Yeah,” Bull said. “I am.”

  “Sounds like a noble cause,” Verbinski replied. “Need four grunts with nothing else to do?”

  “Yeah,” Bull said with a growing smile. “I really do.”

  Chapter Forty-Four: Anna

  They’d failed.

  Anna watched the busy men and women in the radio offices as they strapped on body armor, loaded weapons, hung grenades from their belts, and she felt only sadness and despair.

  A history professor at university had once told her, Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas. It’s attractive because it’s simple, it’s direct, it’s almost always available as an option. When you can’t think of a good rebuttal for your opponent’s argument, you can always punch them in the face.

  They’d run out of ideas. And now they were reaching for the simple, direct, always available option of shooting everyone they disagreed with. She hated it.

  Monica caught her eye from across the room and held up a small thermos of coffee in invitation. Anna waved her off with a smile.

  “Are you insane?” Tilly asked. She was sitting on the floor next to her in a back corner of the offices, trying to stay out of everyone’s way. “That woman has the only decent coffee on this entire ship.” She waved at Monica, pointing at herself.

  “I should have spent more time talking to Cortez,” Anna said. “The OPA captain might be intractable, but I could have reached Cortez with enough time.”

  “Life is finite, dear, and Cortez is an asshole. We’ll all be better off if someone puts a bullet in him before this is over.” Tilly accepted a pour of Monica’s coffee with a grateful smile. Monica set the thermos down and sat on the floor next to them.

  “Hey, we—” she started, but Anna didn’t notice.

  “You don’t mean that,” Anna said to Tilly, annoyance creeping into her voice. “Cortez isn’t a bad person. He’s frightened and unsure, and has made some bad choices, but at worst he’s misguided, not evil.”

  “He doesn’t deserve your sympathy,” Tilly said, then tossed back the last of her coffee like she was angry with it.

  “Who are we—” Monica started again.

  “He does. He does deserve it,” Anna said. Watching the young men and women prepare for war, preparing to kill and be killed right in front of her, made her more angry with Tilly than she probably would have been otherwise. But she found herself very angry now. “That’s exactly the point. They all deserve our sympathy. If Bull’s right about Ashford, and he’s gone crazy with fear and humiliation and the trauma of seeing his crew killed, then he deserves our sympathy. That’s a terrible place to be. Cortez deserves our understanding, because he’s doing exactly the same thing we are. Trying to find the right thing to do in an impossible situation.”

  “Oh,” Monica said. “Cortez. He’s the—”

  “That’s a load of crap, Annie. That’s exactly how you know who the good guys and the bad guys are: by what they do when the chips are down.”

  “This isn’t about good guys and bad guys,” Anna said. “Yes, we’ve picked sides now, because some of the actions they are about to take will have serious consequences for us, and we’re going to try to stop them. But what you’re doing is demonizing them, making them the enemy. The problem with that is that once we’ve stopped them and they can’t hurt us anymore, they’re still demons. Still the enemy.”

  “Believe me,” Tilly said, “when I get out of here, it will be my mission in life to burn Cortez to the ground for this.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why?”

  “He won’t be on a ship trying to destroy the Ring anymore. He won’t be supporting Ashford anymore. All of the circumstances that made him your enemy will be gone. What’s the value in clinging to the hate?”

  Tilly turned away and fumbled around in her pocket for her cigarettes. She smoked one aggressively, pointedly not looking at Anna.

  “What’s the answer, then?” Monica asked after a few tense moments of silence.

  “I don’t know,” Anna said, pulling her legs close and resting her chin on her knees. She tucked her back as far into the corner of the room as it would go, her body looking for a safe place with a small child’s insistence. But the hard green walls offered no comfort.

  “So it’s all just academic, then,” Monica said. Tilly snorted in agreement, still not looking at Anna.

  Anna pointed at the people getting ready in the room around them. “How many will be dead by the end of today?”

  “There’s no way to know,” Monica said.

  “We owe it to them to look for other answers. We’ve failed this time. We’ve run out of ideas, and now we’re reaching for the gun. But maybe next time, if we’ve thought about what led us here, maybe next time we find a different answer. Certainty doesn�
��t have a place in violence.”

  For a while, they were silent. Tilly angrily chain-smoked. Monica typed furiously on her terminal. Anna watched the others get ready for war, and tried to match faces with names. Even if they won out today, there was a very good chance she’d be presiding over more than one funeral tomorrow.

  Bull clunked over to them, his walking machine whining to a stop. He had deteriorated during the few hours they’d spent in the office. He was coughing less, but he’d begun using his inhaler a lot more often. Even the machine seemed ill now, its sounds harsher, its movements jerkier. As though the walker and Bull had merged into one being, and it was dying along with him.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Fine,” Anna said. She considered telling him he needed rest, then abandoned the idea. She didn’t need to lose another argument just then.

  “So we’re getting pretty close to zero hour here,” Bull said, then stifled a wet-sounding cough. “You have everything you need?”

  No, Anna thought. I need an answer that doesn’t include what you’re about to do.

  “Yes,” she said instead. “Monica has been making notes for the broadcast. I’ve compiled a list of all the ships we have representatives from. We’re missing a few, but I’m hoping planetary allegiance will be enough to get their cooperation. Chris Williams, a junior officer from the Prince, has been a big help on that.”

  “You?” Bull asked, jabbing a thick hand toward Monica.

  “My team is ready to go,” she said. “I’m a bit worried about getting the full broadcast out before Ashford’s people stop us.”

  Bull laughed. It was a wet, unpleasant sound. “Hold on.” He called out to Jim Holden, who was busy reassembling a stripped-down rifle of some sort and chatting with one of the Martian marines. Holden put the partly assembled rifle on a table and walked over.

  “What’s up?”

  “These people need reassurance that they’ll be protected long enough to finish their broadcast,” Bull said.

  Holden blinked twice, once at Bull, once at the three women sitting cross-legged on the floor. Anna had to suppress a giggle. Holden was so comically earnest, she just wanted to give him a hug and pat him on the head.