The doors slid open, and the Belters launched themselves into the transition with the grace of men and women who’d spent their childhoods in low or null g. She and Cortez didn’t embarrass themselves, but they would never have the autonomic grace of a Belter on the float.
The command decks were beautiful. The soft indirect lighting took everyone’s shadows away. Melba launched herself after Ashford and the Belters, swimming through the air like a dolphin in the sea.
The command center itself was beautifully designed. A long, lozenge-shaped room with control boards set into ceramic desks. On one end of the lozenge, a door opened into the captain’s office, on the other, to the security station. The gimbaled crash couches looked less like functional necessities than the natural, beautiful outgrowth of the ship. Like an orchid. The walls were painted with angels and pastoral scenes. The effect was only slightly spoiled by the half dozen access panels that stood open, repairs from the sudden stop still uncompleted. Even the guts of the command center were beautiful in their way. Clarissa found herself wanting to go over and just look in to see if she could make sense of the design.
Three men floated at the control boards, all of them Belters. “Welcome back, Captain,” one of them said.
Ashford sailed through the empty air to the captain’s station. Three of the soldiers drifted out to take positions in the corridor, the others arraying themselves around the room, all with sightlines on the doors leading in. Anyone who tried to take the command center would have to walk through a hailstorm of bullets. Clarissa pulled herself over to the door of the security station, as much to get out of the way as anything, and Cortez followed her, his expression focused, serious, and a little agitated.
Ashford keyed in a series of commands, and his control panel shifted, growing brighter. His eyes tracked over the readouts and screens. Lit from below, he looked less like the man set to save all of humanity at the sacrifice of himself and his crew and more like a lower university science teacher trying to get his simulations to work they way they were meant to.
“Jojo?” he said, and the voice of the prison guard came from the control deck like the man was standing beside them.
“Here, Captain. We’ve got the engineering transition point locked down. Anyone wants to get in here, we’ll give ’em eight kinds of hell.”
“Good man,” Ashford said. “Do we have Chief Engineer Rosenberg?”
“Yes, sir. She’s making the modifications to the comm array now.”
“Still?”
“Still, sir.”
“Thank you,” he said, then tapped the display, his fingertips popping against the screen. “Sam. How long before the modifications are done?”
“Two hours,” she said.
“Why so long?”
“I’m going to have to override every safety device in the control path,” she said. “This thing we’re doing? There’s a lot of built-in design that was meant to keep it from happening.”
Ashford scowled.
“Two hours,” he said, and stabbed the connection closed.
The waiting began. Two hours later, the same woman explained that the targeting system had been shaken out of round by the catastrophe. It just meant a delay getting lock for most purposes, but since this was a one-shot application, she was realigning it. Three more hours. Then she was getting a short loop error that he had to track down. Two more hours.
Clarissa saw Ashford’s mood darken with every excuse, every hour that stretched past. She found the toilets tucked at the back of the security station and started wondering about getting a few tubes of food. If the only working commissary was in the drum, that might actually be a problem. Cortez had strapped himself into a crash couch and slept. The guards slowly became more and more restless. Clarissa spent an hour going from access panel to access panel, looking at the control boards and power relays that fed the bridge. It was surprising how many of them were the same as the ones she’d worked with on the Earth ships coming out. Cut an Earther or a Belter, they both bled the same blood. Crack an access panel on the Behemoth and the Prince, and both ships had the same crappy brownout buffers.
She wondered how the Behemoth felt about being the Behemoth and not the Nauvoo. She wondered how she felt about being Clarissa Mao and not Melba Koh. Would the ship feel the nobility of its sacrifice? Lost forever in the abyss, but with everyone else redeemed by her sacrifice. The symmetry seemed meaningful, but it might only have been the grinding combination of fear and uncertainty that made it seem that way.
Seven hours after they’d taken the bridge, Ashford stabbed at the control console again, waited a few seconds, and punched the console hard enough that the blow pushed him back into his couch. The sound of the violence startled Cortez awake and stopped the muttered conversation between the guards. Ashford ignored them all and tapped at the screen again. His fingertips sounded like hailstones striking rock.
The light from the screen flickered.
“Sir?”
“Where’s Sam Rosenberg?” Ashford snapped.
“Last I saw her, she was checking the backup power supply for the reactor bottle, sir. Should I find her?”
“Who’s acting as her second?”
“Anamarie Ruiz.”
“Get Sam and Anamarie up to command, please. If you have to take them under guard, that’s fine.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ashford closed the connection and pushed away from the console, his crash couch shushing on its bearings.
“Is there a problem, Captain?” Cortez asked. His voice was thick and a little bleary.
“Nothing I can’t handle,” Ashford replied.
It was almost another hour before Clarissa heard the doors from the external elevator shaft open. New voices came down the hall. The gabble of conversation tried to hide some deeper strain. Ashford tugged at his uniform.
Two women floated in the room. The first was a pretty woman with a heart-shaped face and grease-streaked red hair pulled back in a bun. It made her think of Anna. The second was thin, even for a Belter, with skin the color of dry soil and brown eyes so dark they were black. Three men with pistols followed them in.
“Chief Rosenberg,” Ashford said.
“Sir,” the red-haired woman said. She didn’t sound like Anna.
“We are on our fourth last-minute delay now. The more time we waste, the more likely it is that the rogue elements in the drum will cause trouble.”
“I’m doing my best, Captain. This isn’t the kind of thing we get to take a second shot at, though. We need to be thorough.”
“Two hours ago, you said we’d be ready to fire in two hours. Are we ready to fire now?”
“No, sir,” she said. “I looked up the specs, and the reactor’s safeties won’t allow an output the size we need. I’m fabricating some new breakers that won’t screw us up. And then we have to replace some cabling as well.”
“How long will that take?” Ashford asked. His voice was dry. Clarissa thought she heard danger in it, but the engineer didn’t react to it.
“Six hours, six and a half hours,” she said. “The fab printers only go so fast.”
Ashford nodded and turned to the second woman. Ruiz.
“Do you agree with that assessment?”
“All respect to Chief Rosenberg, I don’t,” Ruiz said. “I don’t see why we can’t use conductive foam instead.”
“How long would that take?”
“Two hours,” Ruiz said.
Ashford drew a pistol. Almost before the chief engineer’s eyes could widen, the gun fired. In the tight quarters, the sound itself was an assault. Sam’s head snapped back and her feet kicked forward. A bright red globe shivered in the air, smaller droplets flying out from it. Violent moons around a dead planet.
“Mister Ruiz,” Ashford said. “Please be ready to fire in two hours.”
For a moment, the woman was silent. She shook her head like she was trying to come back from a dream.
“Sir,” she said.<
br />
Ashford smiled. He was enjoying the effect he’d just had.
“You can go,” he said. “Tick-tock. Tick-tock.”
Ruiz and the three guards pulled themselves back out. Ashford put his pistol away.
“Would someone please clean this mess away,” he said.
“My God,” Cortez said, his voice somewhere between a prayer and blasphemy. “Oh my God. What have you done?”
Ashford craned his neck. Two of the guards moved forward. One of them had a utility vacuum. When he thumbed it on, the little motor whined. When he put it in the blood, the tone of it dropped half a tone from E to D-sharp.
“I shot a saboteur,” Ashford said, “and cleared the way to saving humanity from the alien threat.”
“You killed her,” Cortez said. “She had no trial. No defense.”
“Father Cortez,” Ashford said, “these are extreme circumstances.”
“But—”
Ashford turned, bending his just-too-large Belter head forward.
“With all respect, this is my command. These are my people. And if you think I am prepared to accept another mutiny, you are very much mistaken.” There was a buzz in the captain’s voice like a drunk man on the edge of a fight. Clarissa put a hand on Cortez’s shoulder and shook her head.
The older man frowned, ran a hand across his white hair, and put on a professionally compassionate expression.
“I understand the need for discipline, Captain,” Cortez said. “And even some violence, if it is called for, but—”
“Don’t make me put you back in the drum,” Ashford said. Cortez closed his mouth, his head bowed as if being humbled was old territory for him. Even though she knew that wasn’t true, Clarissa felt a warm sympathy for him. He’d seen dead people. He’d seen people die. Seeing someone killed was different. And killing someone was different than that, so in some ways, she was ahead of him.
“Come on,” she said. Cortez blinked at her. There were tears in his eyes, floating more or less evenly across his sclera, unable to fall. “The head’s this way. I’ll get you there.”
“Thank you,” he said.
Two of the guards were wrapping the dead engineer with tape. The bullet had struck just above her right eye, and a hemisphere of blood adhered to it, shuddering but not growing larger. The woman wasn’t bleeding anymore. She was the enemy, Clarissa thought, but the idea had a tentative quality about it. Like she was trying on a vest to see how it fit. She was the enemy and so she deserved to die even though she had red hair like Anna. It wasn’t as comforting as she’d hoped.
In the head, Cortez washed his face and hands with the towelettes and then fed them into the recycler. Clarissa mentally followed them down to the churn and through the guts of the ship. She knew how it would work on the Cerisier or the Prince. Here, she could only speculate.
You’re trying to distract yourself, a small part of herself said. The thought came in words, just like that. Not from outside, not from someone else. A part of her talking to the rest. You’re trying to distract yourself.
From what? she wondered.
“Thank you,” Cortez said. His smile looked more familiar now. More like the man she saw on screens. “I knew that there would be some resistance to doing the right thing here. But I wasn’t ready for it. Spiritually, I wasn’t ready for it. Surprised me.”
“It’ll do that,” Clarissa said.
Cortez nodded. He was about her father’s age. She tried to imagine Jules-Pierre Mao floating in the little space, weeping over a dead engineer. She couldn’t. She couldn’t imagine him here at all, couldn’t picture what he looked like exactly. All of her impressions were of his power, his wit, his overwhelming importance. The physical details were beside the point. Cortez looked at himself in the mirror, set his own expression.
He’s about to die, she thought. He’s about to condemn himself and everyone on this ship to dying beyond help, here in the darkness, because he thinks it is the right and noble thing to do. Was that what Ashford was doing too? She wished now that she’d talked to him more when they’d been prisoners together. Gotten to understand him and who he was. Why he was willing to die for this. And more than that, why he was willing to kill. Maybe it was altruism and nobility. Maybe it was fear. Or grief. As long as he did what needed doing, it didn’t matter why, but she found she was curious. She knew why she was here, at least. To redeem herself. To die for a reason, and make amends.
You’re trying to distract yourself.
“—don’t you think?” Cortez said. His smile was gentle and rueful, and she didn’t have any idea what he’d been saying.
“I guess,” she said and pushed back from the doorframe to give him room. Cortez pulled himself by handholds, trying to keep his body oriented with head toward the ceiling and feet toward the floor, even though crawling along the walls was probably safer and more efficient. It was something people who lived with weight did by instinct. Clarissa only noticed it because she wasn’t doing it. The room was just the room, no up or down, anything a floor or a wall or a ceiling. She expected a wave of vertigo that didn’t come.
“You know it doesn’t matter,” she said.
Cortez smiled at her, tilting his head in a question.
“If we’re all sacrifices, it doesn’t matter when we go,” Clarissa said. “She went a little before us. We’ll go a little later. It doesn’t even matter if we all go willingly to the altar, right? All that matters is that we break the Ring so everyone on the other side is safe.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Cortez said. “Thank you for reminding me.”
An alert sounded in the next room, and Clarissa turned toward it. Ashford had undone his straps and was floating above his control panel, his face stony with rage.
“What’s going on, Jojo?”
“I think we’ve got a problem, sir…”
Chapter Forty-Three: Holden
Everything about the former colonial administrative offices made Holden sad. The drab, institutional green walls, the cluster of cubicles in the central workspace, the lack of windows or architectural flourishes. The Mormons had been planning to run the human race’s first extrasolar colony from a place that would have been equally at home as an accounting office. It felt anticlimactic. Hello, welcome to your centuries-long voyage to build a human settlement around another star! Here’s your cubicle.
The space had been repurposed in a way that at least gave it a lived-in feel. A cobbled-together radio occupied one entire closet, just off the main broadcasting set. The size saying more about the slapdash construction than about the broadcasting power. The current fleet was in a small enough space to pick up a decent handheld set. A touch screen on one wall acted as a whiteboard for the office, lists of potential interviews and news stories listed along with contact names and potential public interest. Holden was oddly flattered to see his name next to the note Hot, find a way to get this.
Now the room buzzed with activity. Bull’s people were trickling in a few at a time. Most of them brought duffel bags full of weapons or ammunition. A few brought tools in formed plastic cases with wheels on the bottom. They were preparing to armor the former office space into a mini-fortress. Holden leaned against an unused desk and tried to stay out of everyone’s way.
“Hey,” Monica said, appearing at his side out of nowhere. She nodded her head at the board. “When I heard you were back from the station, I was hoping I could get an interview from you. Guess I missed my chance, though.”
“Why?”
“Next to this end-of-the-world shit, you’ve slipped a couple notches in the broadcast schedule.”
Holden nodded, then shrugged. “I’ve been famous before. It’s not so great.”
Monica sat on the desk next to him and handed him a drinking bulb. When Holden tasted it, it turned out to be excellent coffee. He closed his eyes for a moment, sighing with pleasure. “Okay, now I’m just a little in love with you.”
“Don’t tease a girl,” she replied. “Wi
ll this work? This plan of Bull’s?”
“Am I on the record?”
Someone started welding a sheet of metal to the wall, forcing them both to throw up their hands to block the light. The air smelled like sulfur and hot steel.
“Always,” Monica said. “Will it?”
“Maybe. There’s a reason military ships are scuttled the second someone takes engineering. If you don’t own that ground, you don’t own the ship.”
Monica smiled as if that all made sense to her. Holden wondered how much actually did. She wasn’t a wartime reporter. She was a documentary producer who’d wound up in the wrong place at the right time. He finished off the last of his coffee with a pang of regret and waited to see if she had anything else to ask. If he was nice, maybe she’d find him a refill.
“And this Sam person can do that?” she said.
“Sam’s been keeping the Roci in the air for almost three years now. She was one of Tycho’s best and brightest. Yeah, if she’s got your engine room and she doesn’t like you, you’re screwed.”
“Want more coffee?”
“Good God, yes,” Holden said, holding out his bulb like a street beggar.
Before Monica could take it, Bull came clumping over to them in his mechanical walker. He started to speak and then began a wet, phlegmy cough that lasted several seconds. Holden thought he looked like a man who was dying by centimeters.
“Sorry,” Bull said, spitting into a wadded-up rag. “That’s disgusting.”
“If you die,” Monica said, “I won’t get my exclusive.”
Bull nodded and began another coughing fit.
“If you die,” Holden said, “can I have all your stuff?”
Bull gave a grand, sweeping gesture at the office around them. “Someday, my boy, this will all be yours.”
“What’s the word?” Holden asked, raising the bulb to his lips and being disappointed at its emptiness all over again.