Like being pulled backward through an infinitely long tunnel of light, Holden was returned to his body. For one vertiginous moment he felt too small, like the tiny wrapping of skin and meat would explode trying to contain him.
Then he just felt tired, and sat down on the floor with a thump.
“Okay,” Miller said, rubbing his cheek with an open palm. “I guess that’s a start. Sort of explains everything, sort of nothing. Pain in the ass.”
Holden flopped onto his back. He felt like someone had run him through a shredder and then badly welded him back together. Trying to remember what it felt like to be the size of a galaxy gave him a splitting headache, so he stopped.
“Tell me everything it explains,” he said when he could remember how to speak. Being forced to move moist flaps of meat in order to form the words felt sensual and obscene.
“They quarantined the systems. Shut down the network to stop whatever was capping the locals.”
“So, behind each of those gates is a solar system full of whatever made the protomolecule?”
Miller laughed. Something in the sound of it sent a shiver down Holden’s spine. “That seems pretty fucking unlikely.”
“Why?”
“This station has been waiting for the all-clear signal to open the network back up for about two billion years. If they’d found a solve, they wouldn’t still be waiting. Whatever it was, I think it got them all.”
“All of them but you,” Holden said.
“Nah, kid. I’m one of them like the Rocinante is one of you. The Roci’s smart for a machine. It knows a lot about you. It could probably gin up a rough simulation of you if someone told it to. Those things? The ones you felt like? Compared to them, I’m a fancy kind of hand terminal.”
“And the nothing it explains,” Holden said. “You mean what killed them.”
“Well, if we’re gonna be fair, it’s not really nothing,” Miller said, crossing his arms. “We know it ate a galaxy spanning hive consciousness like it was popcorn, so that’s something. And we know it survived a sterilization that was a couple hundred solar systems wide.”
Holden had a powerfully vivid memory of watching the station hurl fire through the ring gates, of the stars on the other side blowing up like balloons, of the gates themselves abandoned to the fire and disappearing. Even just the echo of it nearly blinded him with remembered pain. “Seriously, did they blow up those stars to stop it?”
Holden’s image of Miller patted the column at the center of the room, though he knew now that Miller wasn’t really touching it. Something was pressing the right buttons on his synaptic keyboard to make him think Miller was.
“Yup. Autoclaved the whole joint. Fed a bunch of extra energy in and popped ’em like balloons.”
“They can’t still do that, though, right? I mean, if the things that ran this are all gone, no one to pull that trigger. It won’t do that to us.”
Miller’s grim smile chilled Holden’s blood. “I keep telling you. This station is in war mode, kid. It’s playing for keeps.”
“Is there a way we can make it feel better about things?”
“Sure. Now I’m in here, I can take off the lockdown,” Miller said, “but you’re going to have to—”
Miller vanished.
“To what?” Holden shouted. “I’m going to have to what?”
From behind came an electronically amplified voice. “James Holden, by authority of the Martian Congressional Republic, you are placed under arrest. Get down on your knees and place your hands on your head. Any attempt to resist will be met with lethal response.”
Holden did as he was told, but turned his head to look behind. Seven marines in recon armor had come into the room. They weren’t bothering to point their guns at him, but Holden knew they could catch him and tear him to pieces just using the strength of their suits.
“Guys, seriously, you couldn’t have given me five more minutes?”
Chapter Twenty-Six: Bull
Voices. Light. A sense of wrongness deep in places he couldn’t identify. Bull tried to grit his teeth and found his jaw already clenched hard enough to ache. Someone cried out, but he didn’t know where from.
The light caught his attention. Simple white LED with a sanded backsplash to diffuse it. An emergency light. The kind that came on when power was down. It hurt to look at, but he did, using it to focus. If he could make that make sense, everything else would come. A chiming alarm kept tugging at his attention, coming from outside. In the corridor. Bull’s mind tried to slide that way, going into the corridor, out into the wide, formless chaos, and he pulled it back to the light. It was like trying to wake up except he was already awake.
Slowly, he recognized the alarm as something he’d hear in the medical bay. He was in the medical bay, strapped onto a bed. The tugging sensation at his arm was a forced IV. With a moment of nauseating vertigo, his perception of the world shifted—he wasn’t standing, he was lying down. Meaningless distinctions without gravity, but human brains couldn’t seem to help trying to assert direction on the directionless. His neck ached. His head ached. Something else felt wrong.
There were other people in the bay. Men and women on every bed, most with their eyes closed. A new alarm sounded, the woman in the bay across from him losing blood pressure. Crashing. Dying. He shouted, and a man in a nurse’s uniform came floating past. He adjusted something on her bed’s control board, then pushed off and away. Bull tried to grab him as he went by, but he couldn’t.
He’d been in his office. Serge had already gone for the night. A few minor incidents were piled up from the day, the constant friction of a large, poorly disciplined crew. Like everyone else, he’d been waiting to see whether Holden and the Martians came back out of the station. Or if something else would. The fear had made sleep unlikely. He started watching the presentation that the Rocinante had sent, James Holden looking surprisingly young and charming saying, This is what we’re calling the slow zone. He remembered noticing that everyone had accepted Holden’s name for the place, and wondered whether it was just that the man had gotten there first or if there was something about charisma that translated across the void.
And then he’d been here. Someone had attacked, then. A torpedo had gotten past their defenses or else sabotage. Maybe the whole damn ship was just coming apart.
There was a comm interface on the bed. He pulled it over, logged in, and used his security override to open its range to the full ship and not just the nurses’ station. He requested a connection to Sam, and a few heartbeats later she appeared on the screen. Her hair was floating around her head. Null g always made him think of drowned people. The sclera of her left eye was the bright red of fresh blood.
“Bull,” she said with a grin that looked like relief. “Jesus Christ with a side of chips, but I never thought I’d be glad to hear from you.”
“Need a status report.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I better come by for this one. You in your office?”
“Medical bay,” Bull said.
“Be there in a jiff,” she said.
“Sam. What happened?”
“You remember that asshole who shot the Ring and got turned into a thin paste when his ship hit the slow zone? Same thing.”
“We went too fast?” Bull said.
“We didn’t. Something changed the rules on us. I’ve got a couple techs doing some quick-and-dirty tests to figure out what the new top speed is, but we’re captured and floating into that big ring of ships. Along with everybody else.”
“The whole flotilla?”
“Everybody and their sisters,” Sam said. A sense of grim despair undercut the lightness of her words. “No one’s under their own power now except the shuttles that were inside the bays when it happened, and no one’s willing to send them going too fast either. The Behemoth was probably going the slowest when it happened. Other ships, it’s worse.”
How bad floated in his mind, but something about the words refused to be asked. Hi
s mind skated over them, flickering. The deep sense of wrongness welled up in him.
“First convenience,” he said.
“On my way,” Sam said, and the connection dropped. He wanted to sag back into a pillow, wanted to feel the comforting hand of gravity pressing him down. He wanted the New Mexican sun streaming in through a glass window and the open air and blue sky. None of it was there. None of it ever would be.
Rest when you’re dead, he thought, and thumbed the comm terminal on again. Ashford and Pa weren’t accepting connections, but they both took messages. He was in the process of connecting to the security office when a doctor came by and started talking with him. Mihn Sterling, her name was. Bennie Cortland-Mapu’s second. He listened to her with half his attention. A third of the crew had been in their rest cycle, safely in their crash couches. The other two-thirds—him included—had slammed into walls or decks, the hand terminals they’d been looking at accelerating into projectiles. Something about network regrowth and zero gravity and spinal fluid. Bull wondered where Pa was. If she was dead and Ashford alive, it would be a problem.
Disaster recovery could only go two ways. Either everyone pulled together and people lived, or they kept on with their tribal differences and fear, and more people died.
He had to find a way to coordinate with Earth and Mars. Everyone was going to be stressed for medical supplies. If he was going to make this work, he had to bring people together. He needed to see if Monica Stuart and her team—or anyway the part of her team that wasn’t going to be charged with sabotage and executed—were still alive. If he could start putting out his own broadcasts, something along the lines of what she’d done with Holden…
The doctor was getting agitated about something. He didn’t notice when Sam came into the room; she was just floating there. Her left leg was in an improvised splint of nylon tape and packing foam. Bull put his palm out to the doctor, motioning for silence, and turned his attention to Sam.
“You’ve got the report?” he asked.
“I do,” Sam said. “And you can have it as soon as you start listening to what she’s saying.”
“What?”
Sam pointed to Doctor Sterling.
“You have to listen to her, Bull. You have to hear what she’s saying. It’s important.”
“I don’t have time or patience—”
“Bull!” Sam snapped. “Can you feel anything—I mean anything—lower than your tits?”
The sense of wrongness flooded over him, and with it a visceral, profound fear. Vertigo passed through him again, and he closed his eyes. All the words the doctor had been saying—crushed spinal cord, diffuse blood pooling, paraplegic—finally reached his brain. To his shame, tears welled up in his eyes, blurring the women’s faces.
“If the fibers grow back wrong,” the doctor said, “the damage will be permanent. Our bodies weren’t designed to heal in zero g. We’re built to let things drain. You have a bolus of blood and spinal fluid putting pressure on the wound. We have to drain that, and we have to get the bone shards out of the way. We could start the regrowth now, but there are about a dozen people who need the nootropics just to stay alive.”
“I understand,” Bull said around the lump in his throat, hoping she’d stop talking, but her inertia kept her going on.
“If we can stabilize the damage and get the pressure off and get you under at least one-third g, we have a good chance of getting you back to some level of function.”
“All right,” Bull said. The background of medical alerts and voices and the hum of the emergency air recyclers stood in for real silence. “What’s your recommendation?”
“Medical coma,” the doctor said without hesitating. “We can slow down your system. Stabilize you until we can evacuate.”
Bull closed his eyes, squeezing the tears between the lids. All he had to say was yes, and it was all someone else’s problem. It would all go away, and he’d wake up somewhere under thrust with his body coming back together. Or he wouldn’t wake up at all. The moment lasted. He remembered walking among the defunct solar collectors. Climbing them. Bracing a ceramic beam with his knees while one of the other men on his team cut it. Running. He remembered a woman he’d been seeing on Tycho Station, and the way his body had felt against her. He could get it back. Or some part of it. It wasn’t gone.
“Thank you for your recommendation,” he said. “Sam, I’ll have that damage report now.”
“Bull, no,” Sam said. “You know what happens when one of my networks grows back wrong? I burn it out and start over. This is biology. We can’t just yank out your wiring and reboot you. And you can’t macho your way through it.”
“Is that what I’m doing?” Bull said, and he almost sounded like himself.
“I’m serious,” Sam said. “I don’t care what you promised Fred Johnson or how tough you think you are. You’re going to be a big boy and take your nasty medicine and get better. You got it?”
She was on the edge of crying now. Blood was darkening her face. Some of her team were surely dead. People she’d known for years. Maybe her whole life. People she’d worked with every day. With a clarity that felt almost spiritual, he saw the depth of her grief and felt it resonate within him. Everyone was going to be there now. Everyone who’d lived on every ship would have seen people they cared about broken or dead. And when people were grieving, they did things they wouldn’t do sober.
“Look where we are, Sam,” Bull said gently. “Look what we’re doing here. Some things don’t go back to normal.” Sam wiped her eyes with a sleeve cuff, and Bull turned to the doctor. “I understand and respect your medical advice, but I can’t take it right now. Once the ship and crew are out of danger, we’ll revisit this, but until then staying on duty is more important. Can you keep me cognitively functioning?”
“For a while, I can,” the doctor said. “But you’ll pay for it later.”
“Thank you,” Bull said, his voice soft and warm as flannel. “Now, Chief Engineer Rosenberg, give me the damage report.”
It wasn’t good.
The best thing Bull could say after reading Sam’s report and consulting with the doctors and his own remaining security forces was that the Behemoth had weathered the storm better than some of the other ships. Being designed and constructed as a generation ship meant that the joints and environmental systems had been built with an eye for long-term wear. She’d been cruising at under 10 percent the slow zone’s previous maximum speed when the change came.
The massive deceleration had happened to all the ships at the same time, slowing them from their previous velocity to the barely perceptible drifting toward the station’s captive ring in just under five seconds. If it had been instantaneous, no one would have lived through it. Even with the braking spread out, it had approached the edge of the survivable for many of them. People asleep or at workstations with crash couches had stood a chance. Anyone in an open corridor or getting up for a bulb of coffee at the wrong moment was simply dead. The count stood at two hundred dead and twice that many wounded. Three of the Martian ships that had been significantly faster than the Behemoth weren’t responding, and the rest reported heavy casualties. The big Earth ships were marginally better.
To make matters worse, the radio and laser signals going back out of the Ring to what was left of the flotilla were bent enough that communication was just about impossible. Not that it would have mattered. The slow zone—shit, now he was thinking of it that way too—was doing everything it could to remind them how vast the distances were within it. At the velocities they had available to them now, getting to the Ring would take as long as it had to reach it from the Belt. Months at least, and that in shuttles. All the ships were captured.
However many of them were left, they were on their own.
The station’s grip was pulling them into rough orbit around the glowing blue structure, and no amount of burn was able to affect their paths one way or the other. They couldn’t speed up and they couldn’t stop. No on
e was under thrust, and it was making the medical crisis worse as zero g complicated the injuries. The Behemoth’s power grid, already weakened and patched after the torpedo launch debacle, had suffered a cascading shipwide failure. Sam’s team was trekking through the ship, resetting the tripped safeties, adding new patches to the mess. One of the Earth ships had come close to losing core containment and gone through an automatic shutdown that left it running off batteries, another was battling an environmental systems breakdown with the air recylers. The Martian navy ships might be fine or they might be in ruins, but the Martian commander wasn’t sharing.
If it had been a battle, it would have been a humbling defeat. It hadn’t even been an attack.
“Then what would you call it?” Pa asked from the screen of his hand terminal. She and Ashford had both survived. Ashford was riding roughshod over the recovery efforts, trying—Bull thought—to micromanage the crisis out of existence. That left Pa at the helm to coordinate with all the other ships. She was better suited for it anyway. There was a chance, at least, that she would listen.
“If I were doing it, I’d call it progressive restraint,” Bull said. “That asshole who shot the Ring came through doing something fierce and he got locked down. There’s rules about how fast you can go. Then Holden and those marines go to the station, something happens. Whatever’s running the station gets its jock in a twist, and things lock down harder. I don’t know the mechanism of how they do it, but the logic’s basic training stuff. It’s allowing us as much freedom as it can, but the more we screw it up, the tighter the choke.”
“Okay,” Pa said, running a hand through her hair. She looked tired. “I can see that. So as long as it doesn’t feel threatened, maybe things don’t get worse.”
“But if someone gets pissed,” Bull said. “I don’t know. Some Martian pendejo just lost all his friends or something? He decides to arm a nuke, walk it to the station, and set it off, maybe things get a lot worse.”