Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate (22 page)

The ship was quiet. Monica and her two camera operators had been confined to the crew decks again, and last time Holden had checked they were together in the galley, not talking. Cohen’s betrayal had taken them by surprise as well, and they were still working through it. Cohen himself was in the airlock. It was the closest thing they had to a brig. Holden had to assume the man was quietly panicking.

Alex was back in the cockpit. After Amos had thrown Cohen into the airlock he’d disappeared back down to his machine shop to brood. Holden had let him go. Of them all, Amos took betrayal the hardest. Holden knew that Cohen’s life was hanging on whether Amos could get past it or not. If he decided to take action, Holden wouldn’t be able to stop him, and didn’t even know if he’d want to try.

So he and Naomi sat alone together on the ops deck as she made the last few adjustments to get the comm array back up and running. With Cohen’s device disabled, they’d been able to reboot it without being hijacked.

Naomi was waiting for him to speak. He could feel the tension in her shoulders from across the room. But he had no idea what to say. For a year, Miller had been a confused phantasm that appeared randomly and spouted nonsense. Now everything Miller had said over the last year took on the weight of dark portents. Prophetic riddles whose meaning must be teased out or risk catastrophe. And Miller wasn’t the only ghost haunting Holden.

Julie Mao had joined the game.

Somehow, while Miller had followed Holden around the solar system, the protomolecule had been using Julie, working on its own secret plans. Julie had arranged for the Martian lawsuit that stripped him of safe ports and employment. She’d arranged to have a documentary crew placed on his ship to send him to the Ring. And now it appeared she’d engineered an elaborate betrayal that forced him to actually go through the Ring to stay alive. The ghost Julie didn’t resemble his Miller at all. It was working with very specific purpose. It had access to money and powerful connections. The only thing it had in common with Miller was that it seemed to be focused on him. And if this was all true, then everything it had done had been with a single purpose in mind.

To bring him here. To
force
him to go through the Ring.

A shiver crawled its way up his spine, sending all the hairs on his arms and neck standing straight up. He turned on the closest workstation and brought up the external telescopes. Nothing at all in this starless void except a lot of inactive rings and the massive blue ball at its center. As he watched, the missile that had chased them through the gate drifted into view and joined the slowly circling ring of flotsam that orbited the station.

Everything comes to me, eventually
, the station seemed to be saying.

“I have to go there,” he said out loud even as the thought popped into his head.

“Where?” Naomi asked, turning away from her work on the comm. The relief he could see on her face now that he’d finally said something wouldn’t last long. He felt a pang of guilt for that.

“The station. Or whatever it is. I have to go there.”

“No you don’t,” she said.

“Everything that’s happened over the last year has been to bring me here, now.” Holden rubbed his face with both hands, itching his eyes and hiding from Naomi’s scrutiny at the same time. “And that thing is the only place in here. There’s nothing else. No other open gates, no planets, no other ships. Nothing.”

“Jim,” Naomi said, a warning in her voice. “This thing where you always have to be the guy who goes…”

“I’ll never know why the protomolecule is talking to me until I get there, face-to-face.”

“Eros, Ganymede, the
Agatha King
,” Naomi continued. “You always think you have to go.”

Holden stopped rubbing his face and looked at her. She stared back, beautiful and angry and sad. He felt his throat threaten to close up, so he said, “Am I wrong? Tell me I’m wrong and we’ll think of something else. Tell me how all of what’s happened means something else and I’m just not seeing it.”

“No,” she said again, meaning something else this time.

“Okay.” He sighed. “Okay then.”

“It’s getting old being the one who stays behind.”

“You’re not staying behind,” Holden said. “You’re keeping the crew alive while I do something really stupid. It’s why we’re an awesome team. You’re the captain now.”

“That’s a shit job and you know it.”

I
n the last hours before they shot the Ring, a kind of calm descended on the
Behemoth
. In the halls and galleries, people talked, but their voices were controlled, quiet, brittle. The independent feeds, always a problem, were pretty subdued. The complaints coming to the security desk fell to nothing. Bull kept an eye on the places people could get liquored up and stupid, but there were no flare-ups. The traffic going through the comm laser back toward Tycho Station and all points sunward spiked to six times its usual bandwidth. A lot of people on the ship wanted to say something to someone—a kid, a sister, a dad, a lover—before they passed through the signal-warping circumference and into whatever was on the other side.

Bull had thought about doing it too. He’d logged into the family group feed for the first time in months, and let the minutiae of the extended Baca family wash over him. One cousin was engaged, another one was divorcing, and they were trading notes and worldviews. His aunt on Earth was having trouble with her hip, but since she was on basic, she was on a waiting list to get a doctor to look at it. His brother had dropped a note to say that he’d gotten a job on Luna, but he didn’t say what it was or anything about it. Bull listened to the voices of the family he never saw except on a screen, the lives that didn’t intersect his own. The love he felt for them surprised him, and kept him from putting his own report in among them. It would only scare them, and they wouldn’t understand it. He could already hear his cousins telling him to jump ship, get on something that wasn’t going through. By the time the message got there, he’d already have gone anyway.

Instead, he recorded a private video for Fred Johnson, and all he said in it was, “After this, you owe
me
one.”

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 could 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.