Bull, Fred had said. Just that, at first. He could still remember Fred’s dark eyes meeting his. The shame had made Bull try to stand straighter, to suck in his gut a little. In that moment, he saw how far he’d fallen. Two seconds of seeing himself through Fred Johnson’s eyes was all it took for that.
Sir, Bull had replied, then stood back and let Johnson into the hole. The place stank of yeast and old tofu. And flop sweat. Fred ignored it all. I need you back on duty, soldier.
Okay, Bull had said. And the secret he carried with him, the one he’d take to his grave, was this: He hadn’t meant it. In that moment, all he’d wanted was for Fred Johnson to go away and let Bull forget him again. Lying to his old commanding officer, to the man who’d kept him from bleeding out under fire, came as naturally as breathing. It didn’t have anything to do with Earth or the Belt or Anderson Station. It wasn’t some greater loyalty. He just wasn’t done destroying himself. And even now, sitting alone at the security desk betraying Sam, he thought that Fred had known. Or guessed.
Fred had pressed a credit chip into his palm. It was one of the cheap, vaguely opalescent ones that the OPA had used to keep its funds untraceable, back in the bad old days. Get yourself a new uniform. Bull had saluted, already thinking about the booze he could buy.
The chit carried six months’ wages at his old pay grade. If it had been less, Bull wouldn’t have gone. Instead, he shaved for the first time in days, got a new suit, packed a valise, and threw out anything that didn’t fit in it. He hadn’t had a drink since, even on the nights he’d wanted one more than oxygen.
The security system chimed that the lockout was finished. Bull noted it and leaned back in the chair, reading the be-on-alert notice from the Cerisier and letting his mind wander. When Gathoni arrived to take the next shift, he walked two corridors down to a little mom-and-pop bodega, bought a blister-pack with four bulbs of beer, and headed over to Sam’s quarters. The guard on duty nodded to him. Legally, Bull didn’t have to knock. As head of security, he could have walked into Sam’s rooms at any time, with or without being welcome. He knocked.
Sam was wearing a simple sweater and black workpants with magnetic strips down the sides. Bull held up the beer. For a long moment, Sam glared at him. She stepped back and to the side. He followed her in.
Her rooms were clean, neat, and cluttered. The air smelled like industrial lubricant and old laundry. She leaned against the arm of a foam couch.
“Peace offering?” she said bitterly.
“Pretty much,” Bull said. “Pa’s pissed off at me, and she’s taking it out on you. She figured either I do it and I lose my best ally or I don’t and I’m the one confined to quarters, right? No way to lose for her.”
“This is bullshit.”
“It is,” Bull said. “And I’m sorry as hell about the whole damn thing.”
Sam’s breath rattled with anger. Bull accepted it. He had it coming. She walked across to him, grabbing the four-pack out of his hand, twisting it to shatter the plastic, and plucking one of the bulbs free.
“You want one?” she asked.
“Just water for me,” he said.
“What chafes me,” Sam said, “is the way Ashford just sits there like he’s so happy about the whole thing. He knows the score. He’s as much a part of it as Pa. Or you. Don’t think you can buy me off with a few cheap brews. You’re just as much at fault as they are.”
“I am.”
“I got into engineering because I didn’t want all the petty social birdshit. And now look at me.”
“Yeah,” Bull said.
Sam dropped to the couch with a sigh and said something obscene and colorful. Bull sat down across from her.
“Okay, stop that,” she said.
“What?”
“That looking repentant thing. I feel like I’m supposed to genuflect or something. It’s creepy.” She took a long pull at the bulb, the soft plastic collapsing under the suction, then expanding out a little as the beer outgassed. “Look, you and Pa are both doing what you think you ought to, and I’m getting screwed. I get it. Doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it. Thing is, you’re right. She wants you to lose allies. So no matter how much I want to tell you to go put your dick in a vise? I’m not going to, just because it would mean Pa won.”
“Thank you for that, Sam.”
“Go put your dick in a vise, Bull.”
Bull’s hand terminal chimed.
“Mister Baca?” Gathoni’s voice said. “You should come back to the office, maybe.”
Sam’s expression sobered and she put down the bulb. Bull’s belly tightened.
“What’s going on?” he asked. When Gathoni answered, her voice was controlled and calm as a medic calling for more pressure.
“Earth destroyer Seung-Un? It just blew up.”
Chapter Fourteen: Melba
When she’d thought about it, planning the final, closing stages of her vengeance, she’d pictured herself as the conductor of a private symphony, moving her baton to the orchestrated chaos. It didn’t happen that way at all. The morning she went to the Thomas Prince, she didn’t know that the day had finally come.
“Active hands to stations,” a man’s voice announced over the general channel.
“Wish to fuck they’d stop doing that,” Melba said. “Always makes me feel like I should be doing something.”
“Savvy, boss. When they start paying me navy wages, I’ll start jumping for their drills,” Soledad said, her voice pressed thin by the hand terminal’s speaker. “I’ve got nothing on this couple. Unless Stanni’s got it, we got to move down a level, try again.”
“Copy that,” Melba said. “Stanni, what are you seeing?”
The channel went silent. Melba looked around the service corridor at a half kilometer of nothing: conduit and pipes and the access grating that could shift to accommodate any direction of thrust. The only sounds were the creaking, hissing, and muttering of the Thomas Prince. The seconds stretched.
“Stanni?” Soledad said, dread in her voice, and the channel crackled.
“Perdón,” Stanni said. “Looking at some weird wiring, but it’s not the goose we’re hunting. Lost in my head, me. I’m fine. I’m here.”
Soledad said something obscene under her breath.
“Sorry,” Stanni said again.
“It’s okay,” Melba said. “Did you check the brownout buffers?”
“Did.”
“Then let’s just keep moving. Next level.”
The thing that surprised her, the one she hadn’t seen coming, was how everyone on the Cerisier was ready to put Ren’s disappearance at the foot of the Ring. It was rare for people to go missing on a ship. The Cerisier, like any other long-haul vessel, was a closed system. There was nowhere to go. She’d assumed there would be the usual, human suspicions. Ren had crossed someone, stolen something, slept with the wrong person, and he’d been disposed of. Thrown out an airlock, maybe. Fed into the recycling and reduced to his basic nutrients, then passed into the water or food supply. It wasn’t that there were no ways to hide or dispose of a body, it was that there were so few ways for it to go unnoticed. Traveling between the planets had never eliminated murder. So many highly evolved primates in the same box for months on end, a certain death rate had to be expected.
This time, though, it was different. It made sense to people that someone would go missing, vanish, as they approached the Ring. It felt right. The voyage itself was ill-omened, and strange things were supposed to happen when people drew too near the uncanny, the dangerous, the haunted. The others were all on edge, and that gave her cover too. If she started weeping, they’d think they understood why. They’d think it was fear.
Melba packed her diagnostic array back in its sleeve, stood, and headed down to the lift. The internal service lifts were tiny, with hardly enough room for one person and the gear. Traveling between decks here was like stepping into a coffin. As she shifted down to the next level, she imagined the power failing. Being trap
ped there. Her mind flickered, and for a moment, she saw her own storage locker. The one in her quarters. The one filled with sealant foam and Ren. She shuddered and forced her mind elsewhere.
The Thomas Prince was one of the larger ships in the Earth flotilla, the home of the civilian horde that the UN had put together. Artists, poets, philosophers, priests. Even without changing the physical structures of the ship, it gave her the feeling of being less a military vessel and more a poorly appointed, uncomfortable cruise liner. Clarissa had been on yachts and luxury ships most of the times she’d traveled outside Earth’s gravity well, and she could imagine the thousand complaints the ship’s captain would suffer about the halls not being wide enough and the screens on the walls too low a quality. It was the sort of thing she would have been concerned with, in her previous life. Now it was less than nothing.
It shouldn’t have bothered her. One more death, more or less. It shouldn’t have mattered. But it was Ren.
“In position,” Stanni said.
“Give me a second,” Melba said, stepping out of the lift. The new corridor was nearly identical to the one above it. These decks were all quarters and storage, with very little of the variation that she’d see when they reached the lowest levels—engineering, machine shops, hangar bays. Tracking down the electrical anomaly, they’d started here because it was easy. The longer it took, the harder it would get. Like everything.
She found the junction, took the diagnostic array out of its sleeve, and plugged it in.
“Solé?”
“In place,” Soledad said.
“Okay,” Melba said. “Start the trace.”
When it had happened, she’d gotten Ren to her quarters and laid him out on the floor. She’d already felt the crash coming on, so she’d lain down on her bunk and let it come. It might only have been her imagination that made that one seem worse than the ones before. For a long horrified moment at the end, she thought that she’d voided herself, but her uniform was clean. She’d gone then, Ren still on her floor, gotten a bulb of coffee, put Ren’s hand terminal in a stall of the group head, and found the security officer. He was a thin Martian named Andre Commenhi, and he’d listened to her informal report with half an ear. Ren had called her and asked her to consult with him. When she’d gone to see him at his usual workstation, he wasn’t there. She’d been through the ship, but she hadn’t found him, and he wasn’t answering connection requests. She was starting to get concerned.
While they’d done a sweep of the ship, she’d gotten the tubes of sealant foam, gone back to her quarters, and entombed him. His hair had seemed brighter, the orange like something from a coral reef. His skin was pale as sunlight where the blood had drained away from it. Purple as a bruise where it had pooled. Rigor hadn’t set in, so she was able to fold him together, curled like a fetus, and fill the spaces around him with foam. It had taken minutes to harden. The foam was engineered to be airtight and pressure-resistant. If she’d done it right, the corpse smell would never leak out.
“Nadie,” Soledad said, sounding resigned. “You guys got anything?”
“Hey!” Stanni said. “Think I do. I’ve got a ten percent fluctuation on this box.”
“Okay,” Melba said. “Let’s reset it and see if that clears the issue.”
“On it,” Stanni said. “Grab some lunch while it run?”
“I’ll meet you in the galley,” Melba said. Her voice seemed almost normal. She sounded like someone else.
The galley was nearly empty. By the ship’s clock, it was the middle of the night, and only a few officers lurked at their tables watching the civilians as they passed. The terms of the service contract meant they got to use the officers’ mess. She’d heard there was a certain level of distrust among the navy crews for civilians like her and her team. She would have resented it more if she hadn’t been the living example of why their suspicions were justified. Soledad and Stanni were already at a table, drinking coffee from bulbs and sharing a plate of sweet rolls.
“I’m gonna miss these when we cut thrust,” Stanni said, holding one of the rolls up. “Best cook flying can’t bake right without thrust. How long you think we’re going to be on the float?”
“As long as it takes,” Melba said. “They’re planning for two months.”
“Two months at null g,” Soledad said, but her voice and the grayness of her face were clear. Two months at the Ring.
“Yeah,” Stanni said. “Any word on Bob?”
The fifth of the team—fourth now—was still back on the Cerisier. It turned out he and Ren had both been having a relationship with a man on the medical team, and security were rounding up the usual suspects. Most times someone went missing, it was domestic. Melba felt her throat going thick again.
“Nothing yet,” she said. “They’ll clear him. He wouldn’t have done anything.”
“Yeah,” Soledad said. “Bob wouldn’t hurt anyone. He’s a good man. Everyone knew about everything, and he loved Ren.”
“Could stop the passato,” Stanni said. “We don’t know he’s dead.”
“With esse coisa out there, dead’s the best thing he could be,” Soledad said. “I’ve been having bad dreams since we flipped. I don’t think we’re making it back from this run. Not any of us.”
“Talking like that won’t help,” Stanni said.
A woman walked into the galley. Middle-aged, thick red hair pulled into a severe-looking bun that competed with her smile. Melba looked at her to try not to be at the table, then looked away.
“Whatever happened to Ren,” she said, “we’ve got our job to do. And we’ll do it.”
“Damn right,” Stanni said, and then again with a catch in his voice. “Damn right.”
They sat together quietly for a moment while the older man wept. Solé put a hand on his arm, and Stanni’s shuddering breath slowed. He nodded, swallowed. He looked like an icon of grief and courage. He looked noble. It struck Melba for the first time that Stanni was probably her father’s age, and she had never seen her father weep for anyone.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She hadn’t planned to speak the words, but there they were, coughed up on the table. They seemed obscene.
“It’s okay,” Stanni said. “I’m all right. Here, boss, have a roll.”
Melba reached out, fighting herself not to weep again. Not to speak. She didn’t know what she’d say, and she was afraid of herself. The alert chimed on her hand terminal. The diagnostic was finished. It only took a second to see that the spike was still there. Stanni said something profane, then shrugged.
“No rest for the wicked, no peace for the good,” he said, standing.
“Go ahead,” Melba said. “I’ll catch up.”
“Pas problema,” Soledad said. “You hardly got to drink your coffee, sa sa?”
She watched them go, relieved that they wouldn’t be there and wanting to call them back, both at the same time. The thickness in her throat had traveled to her chest. The sweet rolls looked delicious and nauseating. She forced herself to take a few deep breaths.
It was almost over. The fleets were there. The Rocinante was there. Everything was going according to her plan, or if not quite that, at least near enough to it. Ren shouldn’t have mattered. She’d killed men before him. It was almost inevitable that people would die when the bomb went off. Vengeance called forth blood, because it always did. That was its nature, and she had made herself its instrument.
Ren wasn’t her fault, he was Holden’s. Holden had killed him by making her presence necessary. If he had respected the honor of her family, none of this would have happened. She stood up, squared herself, prepared to get back to the job of fixing the Thomas Prince, just the way the real Melba would have.
“I’m sorry, Ren,” she said, thinking it would be the last time, and the sorrow that shook her made her sit back down.
Something was wrong. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Her control was slipping. She wondered if after all she’d done, she simply wasn’t str
ong enough. Or if there was something else. Maybe the artificial glands had begun to leak their toxins into her bloodstream without being summoned. She was getting more emotionally labile. It could be a symptom. She rested her head on her arms and tried to catch her breath.
He’d been kind to her. He’d been nothing but kind. He’d helped her, and she’d killed him for it. She could still feel his skull giving way under her hand; crisp and soft, like standing at the bank of a river and feeling the ground fall away. Her fingers smelled like sealant foam.
Ren touched her shoulder, and her head snapped up.
“Hi,” someone said. “I’m Anna. What’s your name?”
It was the redhead who’d been talking to the naval officer a moment ago.
“I saw you sitting here,” she said, sitting down. “It looked like you could use some company. It’s okay to be afraid. I understand.”
She knows.
The thought ran through Melba’s body like a sheet of lightning. Even without her tongue touching her palate, she felt the glands and bladders hidden in her flesh engorging. Her face and hands felt cold. Before the woman’s eyes could widen, Melba’s sorrow and guilt turned to a cold rage. She knew, and she would expose everything, and then all of it would have been wasted.
She didn’t remember rising to her feet, but she was there now. The woman stood and took a step back.
I have to kill her.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
The woman’s hands were half raised, as if that were enough to ward off a blow. It would be simple. She didn’t look strong. She didn’t know how to fight. Kick her in the gut until she bled out. Nothing simpler.
A small voice in the back of Melba’s mind said, She’s one of those idiot priests looking for someone to save. She doesn’t know anything. You’re in public. If you attack her, they’ll catch you.