Holden didn’t know if the missile had been that close when they went through. He suspected not. More likely, they’d just wound up that close once they’d both stopped moving. Even so, the sight of the massive weapon, engine burning as it still fought to reach him, made a shiver go down his spine and his balls creep up into his belly. Ten meters closer and they’d have been in proximity. It would have detonated.
As he watched, the missile was slowly pulled away, dragged off to who knew where by whatever power set the speed limit on this side of the Ring.
“We made it,” he said. “We’re through.”
“Yeah,” Miller said.
“This is what you wanted, isn’t it? This is why you did it.”
“You’re giving me too much credit.”
Amos and Naomi both groaned as they started to wake. The documentary crew was motionless. They might even be dead. Holden couldn’t tell without unstrapping, and his body wouldn’t allow that yet. Miller leaned close to the screen, squinting at it like he was searching for something. Holden pulled up the sensor data. A host of information flooded in. Numerous objects, clustered within a million kilometers, close as seeds in a pod. And past them, nothing. Not even starlight.
“What are they?” Holden asked. “What’s out there?”
Miller glanced down at the display. His face was expressionless.
“Nothing,” the dead man said. And then, “It scares the shit out of me.”
Chapter Seventeen: Bull
“The hell are we?” Serge said, floating gently by the security desk. “Security or fucking babysitters?”
“We’re whatever gets the job done,” Bull said, but he couldn’t put much force behind the words.
It was thirty hours since the Behemoth had gone dark, and he had slept for six of them. Serge, Casimir, Jojo, and Corin had been trading off duty at the desk, coordinating the recovery. The rest of the security staff had been in ad hoc teams, putting down two little panic riots, coordinating the physical resources to free a dozen people trapped in storage bays where the air recycler hadn’t booted back up, arresting a couple of mech jockeys who’d taken the chaos as opportunity to settle a personal score.
The lights were on all across the ship now. The damage control systems, woken from their coma, were working double time to catch up. The crews were exhausted and frightened and on edge, and James fucking Holden had escaped through the Ring into whatever was on the other side. The security office smelled like old sweat and the bean curd masala that Casimir had brought in yesterday. For the first day, there had been an unconscious effort to keep a consistent physical orientation—feet toward the floor, head toward the ceiling. Now they all floated in whatever direction they happened to fall into. It seemed almost natural to the Belters. Bull still suffered the occasional bout of vertigo.
“Amen alles amen,” Serge said with a laugh. “Lube for the machine, us.”
“Least fun I’ve ever had with lube,” Corin said. Bull noted that when Corin got tired, she got raunchy. In his experience, everyone dealt with pushing too hard differently. Some got angry and irritable, some got sad. At a guess, it was all loss of inhibition. Wear down the façade with too much work or fear or both, and whoever was waiting underneath came out.
“All right,” Bull said. “You two go take a rest. I’ll watch the shop until the others get back. You two have done more than—”
The security desk chimed. The connection request was from Sam. Bull lifted a finger to Serge and Corin, and pulled himself over to the desk.
“Sam?” he said.
“Bull,” she replied, and the single syllable, short and sharp, carried a weight of annoyance and anger that verged on rage. “I need you to come down here.”
“You can call whoever you want,” a man’s voice said in the background. “I don’t care, you hear? I don’t care anymore. You do whatever you want.”
Bull checked the connection location. She was down near the machine shops. It wasn’t too far.
“I need to bring a sidearm?” Bull asked.
“I won’t stop you, sweetie,” Sam said.
“On my way,” he said, and dropped the connection.
“Gehst du,” Corin said to Serge. “You’ve been up longer. I’ll keep the place from burning.”
“You going to be all right?” Serge asked, and it took Bull a second to realize the man was talking to him.
“Unstoppable,” Bull said, trying to mean it.
Being exhausted in zero gravity wasn’t the same as it was under thrust or down a gravity well. Growing up, Bull had been dead tired pretty often, and the sense of weight, of his muscles falling off the bone like overcooked chicken, was what desperate fatigue meant. He’d been off of Earth for more years now than he’d been on it, and it still confused him on an almost cellular level to be worn to the point of collapse and not feel it in his joints. Intellectually, he knew it left him feeling that he could do more than he actually could. There were other signs: the grit against his eyes, the headache that bloomed slowly out from the center of his skull, the mild nausea. None of them had the same power, and none of them convinced.
The corridors weren’t empty, but they weren’t crowded. Even at full alert, with every team working double shifts and busting ass, the Behemoth was mostly empty. He moved through the ship, launching himself handhold to handhold, sailing down each long straightaway like he was in a dream. He was tempted to speed up, slapping at the handholds and ladders as they passed and adding just a touch of kinetic energy to his float the way he and his men had back in his days as a marine. More than one concussion had come out of the game, and he didn’t have time for it now. He wasn’t young anymore either.
He found Sam and her crew in a massive service bay. Four men in welding rigs floated near the wall, fixing lengths of conduit to the bulkhead with showers of sparks and lights brighter than staring at the sun. Sam floated nearby, her body at a forty-five-degree angle from the work. A young Belter floated near her, his body at an angle that pointed his feet toward her. Bull understood it was an insult.
“Bull,” Sam said. The young man’s face was a pale mask of rage. “This is Gareth. He’s decided laying conduit’s icky.”
“I’m an engineer,” Gareth said, spitting out the word so violently it gave him a degree of spin. “Did eight years on Tycho Station! I’m not going to get used like a fucking technician.”
The other welders didn’t turn from their work, but Bull could see them all listening. He looked at Sam, and her face was closed. Bull couldn’t tell if calling him in for help had been hard for her or if it was part of how she expected him to make things right to her after the thing with Pa. That it had been the shortest detention on record didn’t pull the sting of being caught up in his political struggles. Either way, she’d escalated the problem to him, and so it was his now.
Bull took a deep breath.
“So what are we working on here?” he asked, less because he cared than that it would give him a few extra seconds to think and his brain wasn’t at its best.
“I’ve got a major line faulting out,” Sam said. “I can take three days and diagnose the whole thing or I can take twenty hours and put up a workaround.”
“And the conduit’s for the workaround?”
“Is.”
Bull lifted his fist in the Belter’s equivalent of a nod and then turned his attention to the boy. Gareth was young and he was tired and he was an OPA Belter, which meant he’d never been through any kind of real military indoctrination. Bull had to figure Sam had yelled at him enough before she’d called for backup.
“All right, then,” Bull said.
“Está-hey bullshit is,” the man said, his educated grammar fracturing.
“I understand,” Bull said. “You can go. Just help me get your rig on first.”
Gareth blinked. Bull thought he saw the ghost of a smile in the corners of Sam’s bloodshot eyes, but that could have meant anything. Pleasure at the weariness in Bull’s voice or
at Gareth’s confusion, or maybe she’d understood what Bull was doing and she thought he was really clever.
“I talk to the guys on the other ships some,” Bull said. “Earth or Mars. Someone’ll be sending a ship back. I’ll see if I can’t get you a ride as far as Ceres anyway.”
Gareth’s mouth opened and closed like a goldfish. Sam pushed off, hooking the welder’s rig with one hand, pulling it close to speed up the turn and then extending her arm to slow it. Bull took it from her and started pulling on the straps.
“You know how to do this?” Sam asked.
“Good enough to hang conduit,” Bull said.
“Security can lose you?”
“Shift’s done,” Bull said. “I was just heading for my bunk, but this needs doing, I can do it.”
“All right, then,” Sam said. “Take the length at the end, and I’ll have someone join it up with Marca’s. I’ll come check your work in a minute.”
“Sounds good,” Bull said. He was spinning just a few degrees each second and he let the momentum carry him around to face the boy. The rage was still there, but it was sinking under a layer of embarrassment. All his arguments and bluster about not doing something because it was beneath him, and now the head of security was using his off-shift to do the same work. Bull could feel the attention of the other welders on them. Bull lit his torch, just testing it out, and the air between them went white for a second. “Okay, then. I got this. You can go if you want.”
The boy shifted, getting ready to launch himself back across the bay and out into the ship. Bull tried to remember the last time he’d actually welded something with no gravity. He was pretty sure he could do it, but he’d have to start slow. Then Gareth’s shoulders cupped forward, and he knew he wouldn’t have to. Bull started taking off the straps, and Gareth moved forward to help him.
“You’re tired,” Bull said, his voice low enough not to carry to the others. “You been working too hard, and it got to you a little. Happens to everyone.”
“Bien.”
He put the torch in the boy’s hand and squeezed it there.
“This is a privilege,” Bull said. “Being out here, doing this bullshit, working our asses off for no one to give a shit? It’s a privilege. Next time you undermine Chief Engineer Rosenberg’s authority, I will ship your ass home with a note that says you couldn’t handle it.”
The boy muttered something Bull couldn’t make out. The flare from the other torches made the boy’s face dance white and brown and white again. Bull put a hand on his arm.
“Yes, sir,” Gareth said. Bull let go, and the boy pushed off to the wall, situating himself over the length of pipe that was waiting there for him. Sam appeared at Bull’s elbow, sliding down from the blind spot above and behind him.
“That worked,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t hurt that you’re an Earther.”
“Didn’t. How’s it all coming?”
“Apart,” Sam said. “But we’ll stick it back together with bubblegum if we have to.”
“Least no one was shooting at us.”
Sam’s laugh had some warmth in it.
“They wouldn’t have had to do it twice.”
The alert tone came from all their hand terminals at once, simultaneous with the ship address system. Bull felt his lips press thin.
“Well, that timing’s a little ominous,” Sam said before Captain Ashford’s voice rang out through the ship. The openness of the spaces and the different speakers made the words echo like the voice of God.
“This is your captain speaking. I have just received confirmation from the OPA central authority that the actions undertaken by the criminal James Holden were unauthorized by any part of the Outer Planets Alliance. His actions put not only this ship but the reputation and good standing of the alliance in threat. I have informed the central authority that we took swift and decisive action against Holden, and that he escaped from us only by retreating through the Ring.”
“Thanks for that, by the way,” Sam said.
“De nada.”
“I have requested and received,” Ashford continued, “the authority to continue action to address this insult as I deem fit. The evidence of our own sensors and of the Martian and Earth feeds to which we have access all show that the Rocinante has passed through the Ring in good condition and appears to have sustained no damage despite the physical anomalies on the other side.
“In light of that, I have made the decision to follow Holden through the Ring and take him and his crew into custody. I will be sending out specific instructions to all department heads outlining what preparations we will need to complete before we begin our burn, but I expect to be in pursuit within the next six hours. It is imperative for the pride, dignity, and honor of the OPA that this insult not go unanswered and that the hands that bring Holden to justice be ours.
“I want you all to know that I am honored to serve with such a valiant crew, and that together we will make history. Take these next hours, all of you, to rest and prepare. God bless each and every one of you, and the Outer Planets Alliance.”
With a resounding click from a hundred speakers, Ashford dropped the connection. The flashing white light of the welding torches was gone, and the bay was darker. Laughter warred against despair in Bull’s gut.
“Is he drunk, do you think?” Sam said.
“Worse. Embarrassed. He’s trying to save face,” Bull said.
“The Behemoth filled its diddies in front of God and everyone, so now we’re going to be the biggest badass in the system to make up for it?”
“Pretty much.”
“Gonna talk him out of it?”
“Gonna try.”
Sam scratched her cheek.
“Could be hard to back down after that little once-more-into-the-breach thing.”
“He won’t,” Bull said. “But I’ve got to try.”
The inner planets came out to the black with an understanding that they were soldiers sent to a foreign land. Bull remembered the feeling from when he’d first shipped out: the sense that his home was behind him. For the inners, the expansion out into the solar system had always had the military at its core.
The Belters didn’t have that. They were the natives here. The forces that had brought their ancestors out to the Belt had roots in trade, commerce, and the overwhelming promise of freedom. The OPA had begun its life more like a labor union than a nation. The difference was subtle but powerful, and it showed in strange ways.
If they had been in any of the Earth or Mars ships that floated now in the darkness near the Ring, Bull would have come from his thorough and profound dressing down by the captain to seek out XO Pa in a galley or mess hall. But this was the Behemoth, so he found her in a bar.
It was a small place with bulbs of alcohol, chocolate, coffee, and tea all set with temperature controls in the nipple, so the uniformly tepid drinks could come out anywhere from almost boiling to just this side of ice. The décor was cheap nightclub, with colored lights and cheap graphic films to hide the walls. Half a dozen people floated on handholds or tethers, and Pa was one of them.
His first thought as he pulled himself toward her was that she needed a haircut. With the false gravity of acceleration gone, her hair floated around her, too short to tie back but still long enough to interfere with her vision and creep into her mouth. His second thought was that she looked as tired as he was.
“Mister Baca,” Pa said.
“XO. You mind if I join you?”
“I was expecting you. You’ve been to see the captain?”
Bull wished he could sit down, not for any actual reason so much as the small physical punctuation it would have given their conversation.
“I have. He wasn’t happy to see me. Showed me the proposal you’d built up on how to remove me from my position.”
“It was a contingency plan,” she said.
“Yeah. So this idea where we take the Behemoth through the Ring? We can’t do
that. We start any kind of serious burn, we’re going to have two navies on our butts. And we don’t know what’s on the other side except that it’s way more powerful than we are.”
“Do you want an alien civilization taking its ideas of humanity from Jim Holden?”
Ashford had said the same thing, word for word. It had been his most cogent argument, and now Bull knew where he’d borrowed it from. He’d had the long trip down in the lift to let his sleep-deprived brain come up with its counterargument.
“That’s not even going to come into play if they shoot our nuts off before we get there,” he said. “You really think Earth and Mars are going to go for the whole ‘we’re just playing sheriff’ line? There’s going to be a bunch of them who still think whatever Holden was up to, we were in on it. But even if they don’t, the part where they stand to the side and let us take the lead isn’t going to happen. You can bet your ass the head of the Mars force is asking his XO if they want an alien civilization taking its ideas of humanity from Ashford.”
“That was nice,” Pa said. “The reversal thing? That was good.”
“The inner planets may not be making threats yet,” Bull said, “but—”
“They are. Mars has threatened to open fire on us if we get within a hundred thousand kilometers of the Ring.”
Bull put his hand to his mouth. He could feel his mind struggling to make sense of the words. The Martian navy had already laid down an ultimatum. Ashford hadn’t even mentioned it.
“So what the hell are we doing?”
“We’re preparing for burn in four and three-quarter hours, Mister Baca,” Pa said. “Because that’s what we’ve been ordered to do.”
The bitterness wasn’t only in her voice. It was in her eyes and the angle of her mouth. Sympathy and outrage battled in Bull’s mind, and underneath them a rising panic. He was too tired to be having this conversation. Too tired to be doing what had to get done. It had stripped away all the protections that would have made him hesitate to speak. If he could have gotten just one good cycle’s rest, maybe he could have found another way, but this was the hand he’d been dealt, so it was the hand he’d play.