Serge answered almost immediately.
“Ganne nacht, boss,” the tattooed Belter said. “Was wondering when you were going to check in.”
“Ashford,” Bull said.
“On top of it,” Serge said. “Looks like he’s got about a third of our boys and a bunch of crazy-ass coyos from other ships. Right now they got the transition points off the drum north to command and south to engineering, the security office and the armory, y some little wolf packs going through the drum stirring up trouble.”
“How well armed?”
“Nicht so bien sa moi,” Serge said, grinning. “They savvy they got us locked out of the communications too, but I got back door open.”
“You what?”
“Always ready for merde mal, me. Bust me down later,” Serge said. “I’m putting together squads, clean up the drum. We’ll get this all smashed flat by bedtime.”
“You have to be careful with these guys, Serge.”
“Will, boss. Know what we’re doing. Know the ship better than anyone. You get safe, let us take care.”
Bull swallowed. Giving over control ached.
“Okay.”
“We been trying to get the captain, us,” Serge said.
“I warned her. She may be refusing connections until she knows more who she can trust,” Bull said. He didn’t add, Or they may have found her.
“Check,” Serge said, and Bull heard in the man’s voice that he’d had the same thought. “When we track Ashford?”
“We don’t have permission to kill him,” Bull said.
“A finger slips, think we can get forgiveness?”
“Probably.”
Serge grinned. “Got to go, boss. Just when es se cerrado, and they make you XO, keep me in mind for your chair, no?”
“Screw that,” Bull said. “When this shit’s done, you can be XO.”
“Hold you to, boss,” Serge said, and the connection went dead.
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Anna
The first sermon Anna had delivered in front of a congregation, fresh out of seminary and filled with zeal, was seventeen pages of single-spaced notes. It had been a lengthy dissection of the first chapter of Malachi, focusing on the prophet’s exhortation not to deliver substandard sacrifices to God, and how that related to modern worship. It had been detailed, backed by all of the evidence and argument Anna’s studious nature and seven years of graduate school could bring to bear. By the end of it, Anna was pretty sure not one member of the audience was still awake.
She’d learned some important lessons from that. There was a place for detailed Bible scholarship. There was even a place for it in front of the congregation. But it wasn’t what people came to church for. Learning a bit more about God was part of feeling closer and more connected to Him, and the closeness was what mattered. So Anna’s sermons now tended to be just a page or two of notes, and a lot more speaking from the heart. She’d delivered her message on “mixed” churches in God’s eyes without looking at the notes once, and it seemed to go over very well. After she concluded with a short prayer and began the sacrament, Belters and Martians and Earthers got into line together in companionable silence. A few shook hands or clapped each other on the back. Anna felt like it might be the most important message she’d ever delivered.
“Well, it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” Tilly said once the service was over. She had the twitchy look she got when she wanted a cigarette, but Anna had asked her not to smoke in the meeting tent and she’d agreed. “Though, admittedly, my tolerance for lovey togetherness is low.”
“That’s very flattering,” Anna whispered, then paused to shake hands with a Belter woman who tearfully thanked her for organizing the meeting. Tilly gave the woman her most insincere smile but managed not to roll her eyes.
“I need a drink,” Tilly said once the woman had left. “Come with. I’ll buy you a lemonade.”
“They closed the bar. Rationing.”
Tilly laughed. “I have a supplier. The guy running the rationing sold me a bottle of their best Ganymede hooch for the low price of a thousand dollars. He tossed in the lemonade for free.”
“A thousand—”
“One of two things will happen,” Tilly said, taking out a cigarette and putting it in her mouth but leaving it unlit. “We’ll get out of here, back into the solar system where I’m rich and a thousand bucks doesn’t matter, or we won’t get out and nothing will matter.”
Anna nodded because she didn’t know what else to say. As much as she’d come to enjoy and rely on Tilly’s friendship, she was occasionally reminded how utterly different their worlds were. If she and Nono had an extra thousand UN dollars lying around, it would have immediately gone into Nami’s college fund. Tilly had never in her life had to sacrifice a luxury to get a necessity. If there was any actual mixing in the congregation, it was that. The one thing the Belters and inner planet naval people had in common was that none of them would be drinking thousand-dollar alcohol that night, but Tilly would.
God might not care about financial standing, but He was the only one.
“I admit, lemonade sounds nice,” Anna said, fanning her face with her hand terminal. The Behemoth’s big habitat drum was built to house a lot more people than it currently held, but they’d stripped a lot of the environmental systems out of it when they converted it to a warship. It was starting to seem like they were reaching the atmosphere processing limits. Or maybe just the air conditioning. The temperature was generally higher now than a girl raised in Russia and most recently living on one of Jupiter’s icy moons enjoyed.
After one more tour of the tent to say goodbye to the last lingering remnants of her congregation, Anna followed Tilly out. It wasn’t much cooler outside the tent, but the spin of the drum and the air recycling system did combine to create a gentle breeze. Tilly looked over her flushed red face and sweat-plastered hair with a critical eye and said, “Don’t worry, everyone who’s coming over is here. I heard Cortez talking to some OPA bigwig a couple days ago. This is as hot as it’s going to be. And as soon as they find a way to cool us down that doesn’t involve venting our atmosphere into space, they’ll do it.”
Anna couldn’t help but laugh. When Tilly raised an eyebrow, Anna explained, “We flew across the entire solar system, almost to the orbit of Neptune, a world so cold and distant from the sun we didn’t even know it was there until Bouvard noticed that something was bumping Uranus around.”
Tilly’s eyebrow crept higher. “Okay.”
“And when we get here, who knows how far from the sun and with billions of kilometers of empty space in every direction? We somehow manage to be hot and crowded.”
“Thank God the Belters thought to bring this rattletrap with them,” Tilly said, ducking to enter her tent. She flopped down into a folding chair and started rummaging in a plastic cooler next to it. “Can you imagine trying to stuff everyone onto the Prince? We’d be twelve to a bunk there. Lovely culture, these Belters.”
Anna pulled her cassock off and laid it over the edge of Tilly’s cot. Underneath she was wearing a white blouse and a knee-length skirt that was much less stifling. Tilly pulled a plastic bulb of lemonade out of the cooler and handed it to her, then poured herself a glass of something as clear as water that smelled like hospital cleanser. When Anna took the bulb she was surprised to find it cold. Small drops of condensation were already forming on its surface. She put the cool bottle against the back of her neck and felt a delightful chill run down her spine.
“How did you manage ice?”
“Dry ice,” Tilly said around a lit cigarette, then paused to down her first shot. “Apparently it’s easy for the people in atmosphere processing to make. Lots of carbon dioxide just lying around.”
If Tilly was spending a thousand dollars a bottle for the antiseptic she was drinking, Anna didn’t want to know what a steady supply of ice was costing her. They drank in companionable silence for a while, the cool lemonade doing wonders for Anna’s heat e
xhaustion. Tilly brought up the idea of finding something to eat, and they wandered out of her tent in search of a supply kiosk.
There were people walking through the crowded tent city carrying guns.
“This looks bad,” Tilly said. It did. These weren’t bored security officers with holstered sidearms. These were grim-faced Belter men and women with assault rifles and shotguns carried in white-knuckled grips. The group moving between the tents was at least a dozen strong, and they were looking for something. Or someone.
Anna tugged at Tilly’s sleeve. “Maybe we should try to get people to go back to the church tent to wait this out.”
“Annie, if the bullets start flying in here, even God can’t make that tent a safe place to hide. I want to know what’s going on.”
Anna reluctantly followed her in a path that paralleled the armed group, which moved with purpose, occasionally stopping to look in tents or quietly question people. Anna began to feel very frightened without being sure why.
“Oh,” Tilly said. “Here we go.”
Bull’s second-in-command—Serge was his name, Anna thought—rounded one of the larger tents trailing half a dozen security people behind him. They were all armed as well, though only with handguns. Even to Anna’s untrained eye, the difference between six people with pistols and twelve people with rifles was dramatic. Serge had a faint smile on his face as though he hadn’t noticed. Anna saw the muscular young woman from the security office standing behind him, though her face was a worried scowl. Oddly enough, seeing someone else look worried made Anna feel better.
“No guns in the drum, sa sa?” Serge said to the armed Belter group, though the volume of his voice made it clear he was speaking to the onlookers as well. “Drop ’em.”
“You have guns,” a Belter woman said with a sneer. She held a rifle at the ready.
“We’re the cops,” Serge said, placing one hand on the butt of his gun and grinning back at her.
“Not anymore,” she replied and in one quick movement shifted her rifle and shot him in the head. A tiny hole appeared in his forehead, and a cloud of pink mist sprayed into the air behind him. He sank slowly to the floor, an expression of vague puzzlement on his face.
Anna felt her gorge rise, and had to double over and pant to keep from vomiting. “Jesus Christ,” Tilly said in a strangled whisper. The speed with which the situation had gone from unsettling to terrifying took Anna’s breath away. I’ve just seen a man have his brains blown out. Even after the horrors of the slow zone catastrophe, it was the worst thing she’d ever seen. The security man hadn’t thought the woman would shoot him, hadn’t suspected the true nature of the threat, and the price he’d paid for it was everything.
At that thought, Anna threw up all over her shoes and then sank to her knees, gagging. Tilly dropped down next to her, not even noticing that the knees of her pants were in a pool of vomit. Tilly hugged her for a second then whispered, “We need to go.” Anna nodded back because she couldn’t open her mouth without fear of losing control again. A few dozen meters away, the Belters were disarming the security team and tying their arms behind their backs with plastic strips.
At least they weren’t shooting anyone else.
Tilly pulled her to her feet, and they hurried back to her tent, all thought of food forgotten. “Something very bad is happening on this ship,” Tilly said. Anna had to suppress a manic giggle. Given their current circumstances, things would have to be very bad indeed for Tilly to think the situation had gotten worse. Sure, they were all trapped in orbit around an alien space station that periodically changed the rules of physics and had killed a bunch of them, but now they’d decided to start shooting each other too.
Yes, very bad.
Hector Cortez came to Tilly’s tent about an hour after the shooting. Anna and Tilly had spent the time staying as close to the floor of the tent as possible, arranging Tilly’s few bits of furniture into barricades around them. It had the feeling of performing ritual magic. Nothing in the room would actually stop a bullet, but they arranged it anyway. A blanket fort to keep the monsters at bay.
Mercifully, there hadn’t been any further sounds of gunfire.
The few times they peeked out of the tent, they saw smaller groups of no more than two or three armed Belters patrolling the civilian spaces. Anna avoided meeting their eyes, and they ignored her.
When Cortez arrived, he cleared his throat loudly outside the tent, then asked if he could enter. They were both afraid to answer, but he came in anyway. Several people waited for him outside, though Anna couldn’t see who.
He glanced once around the inside of the gloomy space, looking over their flimsy barricade, then pulled a chair away from it and sat down without commenting on it.
“The shooting is over. It’s safe to sit,” he said, gesturing at the other chairs. He looked better than he had in a while. His suit had been cleaned and somehow he’d found a way to wash his thick white hair. But that wasn’t all of it. Some of his self-assurance had returned. He seemed confident and in charge again. Anna climbed up off the floor and took a chair. After a moment, Tilly did the same.
“I’m sorry you were frightened,” Cortez said with a smile that didn’t seem sorry at all.
“What’s going on, Hank?” Tilly asked, her eyes narrowing. She took out a cigarette and began playing with it without lighting it. “What are you up to?”
“I’m not up to anything, Matilda,” Cortez said. “What’s happening is that the rightful authority on this ship has been restored, and Captain Ashford is once more in command.”
“Okay, Hector,” Tilly replied, “but how are you involved? Seems like internal OPA politics to me. What’s your play?”
Cortez ignored her and said to Anna, “Doctor Volovodov, may we speak privately?”
“Tilly can hear anything—” Anna started, but Tilly waved her off.
“I think I’ll go outside for a smoke.”
When she’d left the tent, Cortez pulled his chair close enough that his knees were almost touching Anna’s. He leaned forward, taking her hands in his own. Anna had never had the sense that Hector was interested in her sexually, and still didn’t, but somehow the closeness felt uncomfortably intimate. Invasive.
“Anna,” he said, giving her hands a squeeze. “Things are about to change dramatically on this ship, and in our calling here. I’ve been fortunate in that Captain Ashford trusts me and has sought my counsel, so I’ve had some input on the direction these changes take.”
The forced intimacy, combined with the bitter taste still in her mouth from having seen a man murdered, brought up an anger she hadn’t expected. She pulled her hands away from him with more violence than she intended, then couldn’t help but feel a twinge of satisfaction at the hurt and surprise on his face.
“How nice for you,” she said, carefully keeping her tone neutral.
“Doctor Volovodov… Anna, I would like your support.” Anna couldn’t stop the snort of disbelief in time, but he pressed on. “You have a way with people. I’m fine in front of a camera, but I’m not as good one-on-one, and that’s where you shine. That’s your gift. And we are about to face terrible personal challenges. Things people will have a hard time understanding. I would like your voice there with me to reassure them.”
“What are you talking about?” Anna said, barely squeezing the words past a growing lump in her throat. She had the sense of a terrible secret about to be revealed. Cortez shone with the invincible certainty of the true believer.
“We are going to close the gate,” he said. “We have a weapon in our possession that we believe will work.”
“No,” Anna said more in disbelief than in denying his claims.
“Yes. Even now engineers work to refit this vessel’s communications laser to make it powerful enough to destroy the Ring.”
“I don’t mean that,” Anna started, but Cortez just continued speaking.
“We are lost, but we can protect those we’ve left behind. We can end the gr
eatest threat the human race has ever known. All it requires is that we sacrifice any hope of return. A small price to pay for—”
“No,” Anna said again, more forcefully. “No, you don’t get to decide that for all of these people.” For me, she thought. You don’t get to take my wife and daughter away like that. Just because you’re afraid.
“In times of great danger and sacrifice such as this, some will step forward to make the difficult decisions. Ashford has done that, and I support him. Now it is our role to make sure the people understand and cooperate. They need to know that their sacrifice will protect the billions of people we’ve left behind.”
“We don’t know that,” Anna said.
“This station has already claimed hundreds of lives, maybe thousands.”
“Because we keep making decisions without knowing what the consequences are. We chased Holden’s ship through the Ring, we sent soldiers to the station to hunt him, we keep acting without information and then being angry when it hurts us.”
“It didn’t hurt us. It killed us. A lot of us.”
“We’re like children,” Anna said, pushing herself to her feet and lecturing down at him. “Who burn their hands on a hot stove and then think the solution is to blow up all the stoves.”
“Eros,” Cortez started.
“We did that! And Ganymede, and Phoebe, all the rest! We did it. We keep acting without thinking and you think the solution is to do it one more time. You have allied yourself with stupid, violent men, and you are trying to convince yourself that being stupid and violent will work. That makes you stupid too. I will never help you. I’ll fight you now.”
Cortez stood up and called to the people waiting outside. A Belter with protective chest armor and a rifle came into the tent.
“Will you shoot me too?” Anna said, putting as much contempt into the words as she could.
Cortez turned his back on her and left with the gunman.