With an hour to go before they passed through, Bull put the whole ship on battle-ready status. Everyone in their couches, one per. No sharing. All tools and personal items secured, all carts in their stations and locked down, the bulkheads closed between major sections so that if something happened, they’d only lose air one deck at a time. He got a few complaints, but they were mostly just grousing.
They made the transit slowly, the thrust gravity hardly more than a tendency for things to drift toward the floor. Bull couldn’t say whether that was a technical decision on Sam’s part meant to keep them from moving too quickly in the uncanny reduced speed beyond the ring, or Ashford giving the Earth and Mars ships the time to catch up so that they’d all be passing through at more or less the same time. Only if it was that, it wouldn’t have been Ashford. That kind of diplomatic thinking was Pa.
Probably it was just that the main drive couldn’t go slow enough, and this was as fast as the maneuvering thrusters could move them.
Bull wasn’t that worried about the Earth forces. They’d been the ones to broker the deal, and they had civilians on board. Mars, on the other hand, might call itself a science mission, but its escort was explicitly military, and until Earth stepped in they’d been willing to poke holes in the Behemoth until the air ran out.
Too many people with too many agendas, and everyone was worried that the other guy would shoot them in the back. Of all the ways to go and meet the God-like alien whatever-they-were that built the protomolecule, this was the stupidest, the most dangerous, and—for Bull’s money—the most human.
The transit actually took a measurable amount of time, the great bulk of the Behemoth sulking through the Ring in a few seconds. An eerie fluting groan passed through the ship, and Bull, in his crash couch at the security office waiting for the next disaster, felt the gooseflesh on his arms and neck. He flipped through the security monitors like a dad walking through the house to see if the windows were all locked, all the kids safely in their beds. Memories of the Eros feed tugged at the back of his mind: black whorls of filament covering the corridors; the bodies of the innocent and the guilty alike warping, falling apart, and becoming something else without actually dying in between; the blue firefly glow that no one had yet explained. With every new monitor, he expected to see the Behemoth in that same light, and every time he didn’t, his dread moved on to the one still to come.
He moved to the external sensor feed. The luminous blue object in the center of a sphere of anomalies that the computers interpreted as being approximately the same size as the Ring. Gates to God knew where.
“I don’t know what the hell we’re doing here,” he said under his breath.
“A-chatté-men, brother,” Serge said, pale-faced, from his desk.
A connect request popped on Bull’s hand terminal, the alert-red of senior staff. With dread growing at the back of his throat, Bull accepted it. Sam appeared on the screen.
“Hey,” she said. “This whole act-like-we’re-in-a-battle thing where we aren’t supposed to get out of our crash couches? I’d really appreciate it if you could ease up enough to let us make sure the ship isn’t falling apart.”
“You getting alerts?”
“No,” Sam admitted. “But we just sailed the Behemoth into a region of space with different, y’know, laws of physics and stuff? Makes me want to take a peek.”
“We got eight ships coming in right behind us,” Bull said. “Hold tight until we see how that shakes down.”
Sam smiled in a way that expressed her annoyance with him perfectly.
“You can get the teensiest bit paternalistic sometimes, Bull. You know that?”
A new alert popped up by Sam’s face. A high-priority message was coming into the comm array. From the Rocinante.
“Sam, I got something here. I’ll get back to you.”
“I’ll be sitting here in my couch doing nothing,” she said.
He flipped over to the incoming message. It was a broadcast. A Belter woman, with black hair pulled back from her face in a style that gave Bull the impression she’d been welding something before she’d begun the broadcast and would be again as soon as she was finished, looked into the camera.
“. . . Nagata, executive officer of the Rocinante. I want to make it very clear that the previous broadcast claiming our ownership of the Ring was a fake. Our communications array was hijacked, and we were locked out of it. The saboteur on board has confessed, and I am including a datafile at the end of this transmission with all the evidence we have about the real perpetrator of these crimes. I am also including a short documentary presentation on what we’ve discovered in the time we’ve been here that Monica Stuart and her team produced. I want to reiterate here, Captain Holden had no mandate from anyone to claim the Ring, he had no intention of doing so, and none of us had any participation in or knowledge of the bomb on the Seung Un or on any other ship. We were here solely as transport and support for a documentary team, and pose no intentional threat whatsoever to any other vessel.”
Serge grunted, unconvinced. “You think they fragged him?”
“Keep Jim Holden from grabbing the camera? Fragged him or tied him up,” Bull said. It was a joke, but there was something in it. Why wasn’t the Rocinante’s captain the one making the announcement?
“We will not surrender our ship,” the Belter said, “but we will invite inspectors aboard to verify what we’ve reported, with the following conditions. First, the inspectors will have to comply with basic safety—”
Five more communication alerts popped up, all from different ships. All broadcast. If they were flying into the teeth of a vast and malefic alien intelligence, by God, they we’re going to go down squabbling.
“—unacceptable. We demand the immediate surrender of the Tachi and all accompanying—”
“—what confirmation you can provide that—”
“—James Holden at once for interrogation. If your claims are verified, we will—”
“—Message repeats. Please confirm and clarify EVA activity, Rocinante. Who’ve you got out there, and where are they going?”
Bull pulled up the sensor array and began a careful sweep of the area around Holden’s ship. It took him half a minute to find it. A single EVA suit, burning away from the ship and heading for the blue-glowing structure in the center of the sphere. He said something obscene. Five minutes later, the XO of the Rocinante spoke again to confirm Bull’s worst suspicions.
“This is Naomi Nagata,” she said, “executive officer and acting captain of the Rocinante. Captain Holden is not presently available to take questions, meet with any representatives, or surrender himself into anybody’s custody. He is…” She looked down. Bull couldn’t tell if it was fear or embarrassment or a little of both. The Belter took a deep breath and continued, “He is conducting an EVA approach of the base at the middle of the slow zone. We have reason to believe he was… called there.”
Bull’s laughter pulled Serge’s attention. Serge lifted his hand, the physical Belter idiom for asking a question. Bull shook his head.
“Just trying to think of a way we could be doing this worse,” he said.
Ashford insisted that they meet in person, so even though Bull had ordered that all crew members not performing essential functions remain in their couches, he himself floated to the lift and headed to the bridge.
The crew was a muted cacophony. Every station was juggling telemetry and signal switching and sensor data, even though basically nothing was going on. It was just that the excitement demanded that everything be busy and serious and fraught. The excitement or else the fear. The monitors were set to a tactical display, Earth in blue, Mars in red, the Behemoth in orange, and the artifact at the center of the sphere in a deep forest green. The debris ring was marked in white. And two dots of gold: one for the Rocinante, well ahead of the other ships, and another for her captain. The scale was so small, Bull could see the shapes of the larger ships, boxy and awkward in the way that structures built for vacuum cou
ld be. The universe, shrunk down to a knot smaller than the sun and still unthinkably vast.
And in that bubble of darkness, mystery, and dread, two matched dots—one blue, the other red—moving steadily toward the little gold Holden. Marine skiffs, hardly more than a wide couch strapped on the end of a fusion drive. Bull had ridden on boats like them so long ago it seemed like a different lifetime, but if he closed his eyes, he could still feel the rattle of the thrusters transferred through the shell of his armor. Some things he would never forget.
“How long,” Ashford said, “until you can put together a matching force?”
Bull rubbed his palm against his chin, shrugged.
“How long’d it take to get back to Tycho?”
Ashford’s face went red.
“I’m not interested in your sense of humor, Mister Baca. Earth and Mars have both launched interception teams against the outlaw James Holden. If we don’t have a force of our own out there, we look weak. We’re here to make sure the OPA remains the equal of the inner planets, and we’re going to do that, whatever it takes. Am I clear?”
“You’re clear, sir.”
“So how long would it take?”
Bull looked at Pa. Her face was carefully blank. She knew the answer as well as he did, but she wasn’t going to say it. Leaving the shit job for the Earther. Well, all right.
“It can’t be done,” Bull said. “Each one of those skiffs is carrying half a dozen marines in full battle dress. Powered armor. Maybe Goliath class for the Martians, Reaver class for the Earthers. Either way, I don’t have anything in that league. And the soldiers inside those suits have trained for exactly this kind of combat every day for years. I’ve got a bunch of plumbers with rifles I could put on a shuttle.”
The bridge went quiet. Ashford crossed his arms.
“Plumbers. With rifles. Is that how you see us, Mister Baca?”
“I don’t question the bravery or commitment of anyone on this crew,” Bull said. “I believe that any team we sent over there would be willing to lay down their lives for the cause. Of course, that would only take about fifteen seconds, and I won’t send our people into that.”
The implication floated in the air as gently as they did. You’re the captain. You can make the order, but you’ll own the consequences. And they’ll know the Earther told you what would happen. Pa’s eyes were narrow and looked away.
“Thank you, Mister Baca,” Ashford said. “You’re dismissed.”
Bull saluted, turned, and launched himself for the lift. Behind him, the bridge crew started talking again, but not as loud. Probably they’d all get reamed once Bull was gone just because they’d been in the room when Ashford got embarrassed. The chances were slim that they’d be sending anyone to the thing. Nucleus, base, whatever it was. Bull couldn’t think of a way to do any better than that, so that would count for a win.
On the way back to his station, he looked over the datafile the Rocinante had sent out. The saboteur seemed legitimate enough. Bull had seen enough faked confessions to recognize the signs, and this didn’t have them. After that, though, the whole damn thing turned into a fairy tale. A mysterious woman who manipulated governments and civilians, who was willing to kill dozens of people and risk thousands in order to… do what? Put James Holden through the Ring, where he was going now?
The image the prisoner had built looked like it had been carved from ice. No one had added color. Bull put on an even olive flesh tone and brown hair, and the face didn’t look familiar. Juliette Mao, they said. She hadn’t been the first person infected with the protomolecule, but everyone before her had gotten thrown in an autoclave one way or the other. She’d been the seed crystal that Eros had used to make itself, to make the Ring. So who was to say she couldn’t be wandering around hiring traitors and placing bombs?
The problem with living with miracles was that they made everything seem plausible. An alien weapon had been lurking in orbit around Saturn for billions of years. It had eaten thousands of people, hijacking the mechanisms of their bodies for its own ends. It had built a wormhole gate into a kind of haunted sphere. So why not the rest? If all that was possible, everything was.
Bull didn’t buy it.
Back at the security desk, he checked the status. The skiff of Earth marines had gone too fast, trying to race ahead of the Martian force. The slow zone had caught them, and the skiff was drifting off toward the ring of debris. Chances were that all the men in it were dead. The Martian skiff was still on track, but Holden would reach the structure before they got to him. It was too bad, in a way. The Martians had been the trigger-happy ones all along. Chances of someone getting to question Holden were looking pretty long.
Bull sucked his teeth, half-formed ideas shifting in the back of his mind. Holden wasn’t getting interrogated, but that didn’t mean no one would. He checked his security codes. Ashford hadn’t blocked him from using the comm laser. Protocol would have been to discuss this with Ashford or at least Pa, but they had their hands full right now anyway. And if it worked, it would be hard for them to object. They’d have a bargaining chip.
The Rocinante’s XO appeared on the screen.
“What can I do for you, Behemoth?”
“Carlos Baca here. I’m security chief. Wanted to talk about maybe taking a problem off your hands.”
She hoisted her eyebrows, her head shaking like she was trying to stay awake. She had a smart face.
“I’ve got a lot of problems right now,” she said. “Which one were you thinking about?”
“You got a bunch of civvies on your ship. One of ’em under arrest. Mars is still saying you’re flying their ship. Earth is wondering whether you blew the shit out of one of theirs. I can take custody of your prisoner and give the rest of them a safer place than you can.”
“Last I checked, the OPA was the only one that’s actually shot at us so far,” she said. She had a good smile. Too young for him, but ten years ago he’d have been asking her if he could make her dinner around now. “Doesn’t put you at the top of my list.”
“That was me,” Bull said. “I won’t do it this time.” It got him a chuckle, but it was the bleak kind. The one that came from someone wading through hell. “Look, you got a lot going on, and you’ve got a bunch of people on there who aren’t your crew. You got to keep them safe, and it’s a distraction. You send ’em over here, and everyone’ll see you aren’t trying to control access to them. Makes this whole thing about how it wasn’t you that blew the shit out of the Seung Un that much easier for people to believe.”
“I think we’re past goodwill gestures,” she said.
“I think goodwill gestures are the only chance you have to avoid a field promotion,” Bull said. “They’re sending killers after your captain. Good ones. No one’s thinking straight here. You and me, we can start cooling things down. Acting like grown-ups. And if we do, maybe they do too. No one else needs to get killed.”
“Thin hope,” she said.
“It’s all the hope I got. You got nothing to hide, then show them that. Show everyone.”
It took her twenty seconds.
“All right,” she said. “You can have them.”
Chapter Twenty-Two: Holden
“Wow,” Holden said to himself, “I really don’t want to do this.”
The sound echoed in his helmet, competing only with the faint hiss of his radio.
“I tried to talk you out of it,” Naomi replied, her voice somehow managing to be intimate even flattened and distorted by his suit’s small speakers.
“Sorry, I didn’t think you were listening.”
“Ah,” she said. “Irony.”
Holden tore his eyes way from the slowly growing sphere that was his destination and spun around to look for the Rocinante behind him. She wasn’t visible until Alex fired a maneuvering thruster and a gossamer cone of steam reflected some of the sphere’s blue glow. His suit told him that the Roci was over thirty thousand kilometers away—more than twice as far as an
y two people on Earth could ever be from each other—and receding. And here he was, in a suit of vacuum armor, wearing a disposable EVA pack that had about five minutes of thrust in it. He’d burned one minute accelerating toward the sphere. He’d burn another slowing down when he got there. That left enough to fly back to the Roci when he was done.
Optimism expressed as conservation of delta V.
Ships from the three fleets had begun coming through the gate even before he’d started his trip. The Roci was now protected from them only by the absolute speed limit of the slow zone. She was drifting off at just under that limit to put as much space between her and the fleets as possible. They had a sphere a million kilometers in diameter to play with, even without going beyond the area marked by the gates. The gates had close to fifty thousand kilometers of empty space between them, but the idea of flying out of the slow zone and into that starless void beyond made Holden’s skin crawl. He and Naomi had agreed it would be a maneuver of last resort.
As long as no one could fire a ballistic weapon, the Roci should be plenty safe with five hundred quadrillion square kilometers to move around in.
Holden spun back around, using two quarter-second blasts from his EVA pack, and took a range reading to the sphere. He was still hours away. The minute-long burst he’d fired from the pack to start his journey had accelerated him to a slow crawl, astronomically speaking, and the Roci had come to a relative stop before releasing him. He’d never have had enough juice in the EVA pack to stop himself if the ship had flung him out at the slow zone’s maximum speed.
Ahead in the middle of all that starless black, the blue sphere waited.
It had waited for two billion years for someone to come through his particular gate, if the researchers were right about how long ago Phoebe had been captured by Saturn. But lately the strangeness surrounding the protomolecule and the Ring left Holden with the disquieting feeling that maybe all of the assumptions they’d made about its origins and purpose were wrong.