From his uniform, he’d been an officer. Lieutenant, maybe. The white identity card on the lanyard around his neck had a picture of him looking solemn. She took it in her fingers. Not lieutenant. Lieutenant commander. Lieutenant Commander Stepan Arsenau, who would never have come through the Ring if it weren’t for her. Who wouldn’t have died here. She tried to feel guilt, but there wasn’t room for him inside of her. She had too much blood already.
She was reaching out to tuck his card back in place when the small voice in the back of her mind said, I bet he could get an EVA pack with this. Melba blinked. Her mind seemed to click back into focus, and she looked around her, the last wisps of dream or delirium leaving her mind. She had access to the equipment she needed. The ship was in chaos. This was it. This was the opportunity she’d been waiting for. She plucked the card off its lanyard and slipped it in her pocket, then looked around nervously.
No one had noticed.
She licked her lips.
“I’m going to need something to crack this,” the young man was saying. “The bolt head’s sheared round. I can’t get it out.”
The older woman swore and turned to her.
“Got anything that’ll do the trick?”
“Not here,” Melba said. “I have an idea where I could get something to drill it out, though.”
“Move fast. We don’t want this place gettin’ stuffy.”
“Okay. You guys do what you can. I’ll be right back,” Melba lied.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Anna
Eschatology had always been Anna’s least favorite study of theology. When asked about Armageddon, she’d tell her parishioners that God Himself had been pretty circumspect on the topic, so it didn’t do much good to worry about it. Have faith that God will do what’s best, and avoiding His vengeance against the wicked should be the least compelling reason for worship.
But the truth was that she’d always had a deeply held disagreement with most futurist and millennialist interpretations. Not the theology itself, necessarily, since their guess at what the end times prophecies really meant was as good as anyone else’s. Her disagreement was primarily with the level of glee over the destruction of the wicked that sometimes crept into the teachings. This was especially true in some millennialist sects that filled their literature with paintings of Armageddon. Pictures of terrified people running away from some formless fiery doom that burned their world down behind them, while smug worshipers—of the correct religion, of course—watched from safety as God got with the smiting. Anna couldn’t understand how anyone could see such a depiction as anything but tragic.
She wished she could show them the Thomas Prince.
She’d been reading when it happened. Her hand terminal had been propped on her chest with a pillow behind it, her hands behind her head. A three-tone alarm had sounded a high-g alert, but it was late to the party. She was already being mashed into her crash couch so hard that she could feel the plastic of the base right through twenty centimeters of impact gel. It seemed to last forever, but it was probably just a few seconds. Her hand terminal had skidded down her chest, suddenly heavier than Nami the last time she’d picked her daughter up. It left a black-and-blue trail of bruises up her breastbone and slammed into her chin hard enough to split the skin. The pillow mashed into her abdomen like a ten-kilo sandbag, filling her mouth with the taste of stomach acid.
But worst of all was the pain in her shoulders. Both arms had snapped back flat against the bed, temporarily dislocating them. When the endless seconds of deceleration were over, both joints popped back into place with a pain even worse than when they’d come out. The gel of the couch, stressed beyond its design specifications, hadn’t gripped her the way it was meant to. Instead, it rebounded back into its prior shape and launched her in slow motion toward the ceiling of her cabin. Trying to put her hands in front of her sent bolts of agony through her shoulders, so she drifted up and hit the ceiling with her face. Her chin left a smear of blood on the fabric-covered foam.
Anna was a gentle person. She’d never in her life been in a fight. She’d never been in a major accident. The worst pain she’d ever felt before was childbirth, and the endorphins that had followed had mostly erased it from her memory. To suddenly be so hurt in so many different places at once left her dazed and with a sort of directionless anger. It wasn’t fair that a person could be hurt so much. She wanted to yell at the crash couch that had betrayed her by letting this happen, and she wanted to punch the ceiling for hitting her in the face, even though she’d never thrown a punch in her life and could barely move her arms.
When she could finally move without feeling light-headed she went looking for help and found that the corridor outside her room was worse.
Just a few meters from her door, a young man had been crushed. He looked as though a malevolent giant had stomped on him and then ground him under its heel. The boy was not only smashed, but torn and twisted in ways that barely left him recognizable as a human. His blood splashed the floor and walls and drifted around his corpse in red balls like grisly Christmas ornaments.
Anna yelled for help. Someone yelled back in a voice filled with liquid and pain. Someone from farther down the corridor. Anna carefully pushed off the doorjamb of her room and drifted toward the voice. Two rooms down, another man was half in and half out of his crash couch. He must have been in the process of getting out of bed when the deceleration happened, and everything from his pelvis down was twisted and broken. His upper torso still lay on the bed, arms waving feebly at her, his face a mask of pain.
“Help me,” he said, and then coughed up a glob of blood and mucus that drifted away in a red-and-green ball.
Anna drifted up high enough to push the comm panel on the wall without using her shoulder. It was dead. All the lights were the ones she’d been told came on in emergency power failures. Nothing else seemed to be working.
“Help me,” the man said again. His voice was weaker and filled with even more of a liquid rasp. Anna recognized him as Alonzo Guzman, a famous poet from the UN’s South American region. A favorite of the secretary-general, someone had told her.
“I will,” Anna said, not even trying to stop the tears that suddenly blinded her. She wiped her eyes on her shoulder and said, “Let me find someone. I’ve hurt my arms, but I’ll find someone.”
The man began weeping softly. Anna pushed back into the corridor with her toes, drifting past the carnage to find someone who wasn’t hurt.
This was the part the millennialists never put in their paintings.
They loved scenes of righteous Godly vengeance on sinful mankind. They loved to show God’s chosen people safe from harm, watching with happy faces as they were proved right to the world. But they never showed the aftermath. They never showed weeping humans, crushed and dying in pools of their own fluids. Young men smashed into piles of red flesh. A young woman cut in half because she was passing through a hatchway when catastrophe hit.
This was Armageddon. This is what it looked like. Blood and torn flesh and cries for help.
Anna reached an intersection of corridors and ran out of strength. Her body hurt too badly to continue. And in all four directions, the corridor floors and walls were covered with the aftermath of violent death. It was too much. Anna drifted in the empty space for a few minutes, and then she gently floated to the wall and stuck to it. Movement. The ship was moving now. Very slow, but enough to push her to the wall. She pushed away from it and floated again. Not still accelerating, then.
She recognized that her interest in the relative movements of the ship was just her mind trying to find a distraction from the scene around her, and started crying again. The idea that she might never come home from this trip crashed in on her. For the first time since coming to the Ring, she saw a future in which she never held Nami again. Never smelled her hair. Never kissed Nono, or climbed into a warm bed beside her and held her close. The pain of those things being ripped away from her was worse than anything physical she’d s
uffered. She didn’t wipe away the tears that came, and they blinded her. That was fine. There was nothing here she wanted to see.
When something grabbed her from behind and spun her around, she tensed, waiting for some new horror to reveal itself.
It was Tilly.
“Oh, thank God,” the woman said, hugging Anna tight enough to send new waves of pain through her shoulders. “I went to your room and there was blood on the walls and you weren’t there and someone was dead right outside your door…”
Unable to hug back, Anna just put her cheek against Tilly’s for a moment. Tilly pushed her out to arm’s length, but didn’t let go. “Are you okay?” She was looking at the gash on Anna’s chin.
“My face is fine. Just a little cut. But my arms are hurt. I can barely move them. We need to get help. Alonzo Guzman’s in his room, and he’s hurt. Really hurt. Do you know what happened?”
“I haven’t met anyone yet who knows,” Tilly said, rotating Anna first one way, then the other, looking her over critically. “Move your hands. Okay. Bend your elbows.” She felt Anna’s shoulders. “They’re not dislocated.”
“I think they were for a second,” Anna said after the gasp of pain Tilly’s touch brought. “And everything else hurts. But we have to hurry.”
Tilly nodded and pulled a red-and-white backpack off one shoulder. When she opened it, it was filled with dozens of plastic packages with tiny black text on them. Tilly pulled a few out, read them, put them back. After several tries, she stripped the packaging off of three small injection ampules.
“What is that?” Anna said, but Tilly just jabbed her with all three in answer.
Anna felt a rush of euphoria wash over her. Her shoulders stopped hurting. Everything stopped hurting. Even her fear about never seeing her family again seemed a distant and minor problem.
“I was sleeping when it happened,” Tilly said, tossing the empty ampules into the first aid pack. “But I woke up feeling like a forklift had run over me. I think my ribs were popped out of place. I could barely breathe. So I dug up this pack from the emergency closet in my room.”
“I didn’t think to look there,” Anna said, surprised she hadn’t. She had a vague memory of being disoriented by pain, but now she felt great. Better than ever before. And sharp. Hyper-aware. Stupid not to think of the emergency supplies. This being, after all, an emergency. She wanted to slap herself on the forehead for being so stupid. Tilly was holding her arms again. Why was she doing that? They had work to do. They had to find the medics and send them after the poet.
“Hey, kiddo,” Tilly said, “takes a second for that first rush to ease down a bit. I spent a full minute trying to resuscitate a pile of red paste before I realized how wired I was.”
“What is this?” Anna asked, moving her head from side to side, which made the edges of Tilly’s face blurry.
Tilly shrugged. “Military-grade amphetamines and painkillers, I’m guessing. I gave you an anti-inflammatory too. Because what the hell.”
“Are you a doctor?” Anna asked, marveling at how smart Tilly was.
“No, but I can read the directions on the package.”
“Okay.” Anna nodded, her face serious. “Okay.”
“Let’s go find someone who knows what’s going on,” Tilly said, pulling Anna down the corridor with her.
“And after, I need to find my people,” Anna said, letting herself be pulled.
“I may have given you too much. Nono and Nami are at home, in Moscow.”
“No, my people. My congregation. Chris and that other guy and the marine. She’s angry, but I think I can talk to her. I need to find them.”
“Yeah,” Tilly said. “May have overdosed you a bit. But we’ll find them. Let’s find help first.”
Anna thought of the poet and felt her tears threatening to return. If she was sad, maybe the initial rush of the drugs was wearing off a little. She found herself regretting that for a moment.
Tilly stopped at a printed deck map on the wall. It was right next to a black and unresponsive network panel. Of course military ships would have both, Anna thought. They were built with the expectation that things would stop working when the ship got shot. That thought made Anna sad too. Some distant part of her consciousness recognized the drug-fueled emotional roller coaster she was on, but was powerless to do anything about. She started weeping again.
“Security station.” Tilly tapped on a spot on the map, then yanked Anna down the corridor after her. They made two turns and wound up at a small room filled with people, guns, and computers that seemed to still be working. A middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair and a grim expression on his face pointedly ignored them. The other four people in the room were younger, but equally uninterested in their arrival.
“Get 35C open first,” the older man said to the two young men floating to his left. He pointed at something on a map. “There were a dozen civvies in there.”
“EMT?” one of the young men asked.
“Don’t have them to spare, and that galley doesn’t have crash couches. Everyone in there is pasta sauce, but the El Tee says look anyway.”
“Roger that,” the young man replied, and he and his partner pushed out of the room past Anna and Tilly, barely glancing at them as they went.
“You two do a corridor sweep,” the older man said to the other two young sailors in the room. “Tags if you can find them, pictures and swabs if you can’t. Everything sent to OPCOM on red two one, got me?”
“Aye-aye,” one of them said, and they floated out of the room.
“The man in 295 needs help,” Anna said to the security officer. “He’s hurt badly. He’s a poet.”
He tapped something onto his desk terminal and said, “Okay, he’s in the queue. EMTs will get there as soon as they can. We’re setting up a temporary emergency area in the officers’ mess. I suggest you two ladies get there double time.”
“What happened?” Tilly asked, and gripped a handhold on the wall like she meant to stay a while. Anna grabbed on to the nearest thing she could find, which turned out to be a rack of weapons.
The security officer looked Tilly up and down once, and seemed to come to the conclusion that giving her what she wanted was the easiest solution. “Hell if I know. We decelerated to a dead stop in just a shade under five seconds. The damage and injuries are all high-g trauma. Whatever grabbed us only grabbed the skin of the ship and didn’t give a shit about the stuff inside.”
“So the slow zone changed?” Tilly was asking. Anna looked over the guns in the rack, her emotions more under control, but her mind was still racing. The rack was full of pistols of various kinds. Big blocky ones with large barrels and fat magazines. Smaller ones that looked like the kind you saw on cop shows. And in a special rack all their own, tasers like the one she’d had on Europa. Well, not really like it. These were military models. Gray and sleek and efficient-looking, with a much bigger power pack than hers. In spite of their non-lethal purpose, they managed to appear dangerous. Her old taser at home had looked like a small hair dryer.
“Don’t touch those,” the security officer said. Anna hadn’t even realized she was reaching for one until he said it.
“That could mean a damn lot of casualties,” Tilly said. Anna had the feeling she was reentering the conversation after having missed a lot of it.
“Hundreds on the Prince,” the security officer said. “And we weren’t going anywhere near the old speed limit. Some of the ships were. We get no broadcasts from those now.”
Anna looked at the various terminals working in the office around her. Damage reports and security feeds and orders. Anna couldn’t understand much of them. They used a lot of acronyms and numbers for things. Military jargon. One small monitor was displaying pictures of people. Anna recognized James Holden in one, then another version of him with a patchy beard. Wanted posters? But she didn’t recognize any of the other people until the sculpture of the girl that Naomi, Holden’s second-in-command, had blamed for the att
ack.
“Maybe it was the space girl,” Anna said before she’d realized she was going to. She still felt stoned, and suppressed an urge to giggle.
The security officer and Tilly were both staring at her.
Anna pointed at the screen. “Julie Mao, the girl from Eros. The one the Rocinante blamed. Maybe she did this.”
Both the security officer and Tilly turned to look at the screen. A few seconds later the image of Julie the space girl disappeared and was replaced by someone Anna didn’t recognize.
“Someone’s going to get James Holden in an interrogation room for a few hours, and then we’ll have a much better idea of where to put the blame.”
Tilly just laughed.
“Is that who they blamed?” she said when she’d finished. “That isn’t Julie Mao. And there’s no way Claire’s out here.”
“Claire?” Anna and the officer said at the same time.
“That’s Claire. Clarissa Mao. Julie’s little sister. She’s living on Luna with her mother, last I heard. But that’s definitely not Julie.”
“Are you sure?” Anna said. “Because the executive officer from the Rocinante said—”
“I dandled both those girls on my knee back in the day. The Maos used to be regular guests at our house in Baja. Brought the kids out during the summers to swim and eat fish tacos. And that one is Claire, not Julie.”
“Oh,” said Anna as her drug-enhanced mind ran out the entire plot. The angry girl she’d seen in the galley, the explosion of the UN ship, the ridiculous message from Holden’s ship, followed by the protestations of innocence. “It was her. She blew up the ship.”