In the chaos it was hard to say, but at a guess, Bull thought he still had between fifteen and twenty people standing. It wasn’t great, but it could have been worse. Once they got into engineering, things would open up again. There would be cover. The few meters beyond the second door, though, would be a kill zone. It was the space all his people had to go through to get anyplace else. If Ashford’s people had any tactical sense at all, they’d be there, waiting for the first sign of movement.
It was a standoff, and he was going to have to be the one to break it. Verbinski skimmed by, as comfortable weightless as a fish in water. He turned, tapped his feet against the wall, and came to something close to a dead stop.
“Going to be a bear making it through there,” the Martian said.
“I was just thinking that,” Bull said.
Verbinski looked at the half-closed door like a carpenter sizing up a board.
“Be nice if we had some explosives,” he said. “Something to clear the area a little. Give us some breathing room.”
“You trying to tell me something, Sergeant?”
Verbinski shrugged and took a thin black cassette out of his pocket. Bull hoisted his eyebrows.
“Concussion?” he said.
“Two thousand kilojoules. We call them spine crackers.”
“You smuggled arms onto my ship, Sergeant?”
“Just felt a little naked without ’em.”
“I’ll overlook it this time,” Bull said and raised his hands, rallying the troops to him. They took cover behind the half-closed door. Verbinski crawled out onto the surface and peeked over the side, out and back fast as a lizard’s tongue. Half a dozen bullets split the air where his head had been. The Martian floated in the air, his legs in lotus position, as he armed the little black grenade. Bull waited, Holden and Corin at his side.
“Just to check,” Holden said. “We’re throwing grenades into the place that controls the reactor?”
“We are,” Bull said.
“So the worst-case scenario?”
“Worst-case scenario is we lose and Ashford kills the solar system,” Bull said. “Losing containment on the reactor and we all die is actually second worst.”
“Never a sign things have gone well,” Holden said.
Verbinski held up a fist, and everyone in the group put their hands over their ears. Verbinski did something sharp with his fingers and flicked the black cassette through the gap between the door and its frame. The detonation came almost at once. Bull felt like he’d been dropped into the bottom of a swimming pool. His vision pulsed in time with his heart, but he pushed the joysticks forward. His ears rang and he felt his consciousness starting to slip a little. As he maneuvered his mech through the space into engineering, it occurred to him that he was going to be lucky if he didn’t pass out during the fight. He had a broken spine and his lungs were half full of crap. No one would have thought less of him if he’d stayed behind. Except he didn’t care what people thought about him. It was Ashford who cared about that.
The fight on the other side was short. The grenade had been much worse for the defenders. Half of the soldiers had dropped their weapons before all of Bull’s people made it in. Only Garza had held out, holding the long corridor between main engineering and the communications array board until Corin had stepped into the space and shot him in the bridge of the nose, doing with a pistol what would have been a difficult shot with a scoped rifle. They took half a dozen of Ashford’s men alive, the prisoners zip-tied to handholds in the bulkheads. None of them had been Bull’s.
They found Ruiz under a machining table, curled with her arms around her knees. When she came out, her skin had a gray cast to it, and her hands were trembling. Naomi moved around her, shifting from a display panel to the readouts on the different bits of equipment, checking what was being reported in one place against what it said elsewhere. Holden hovered behind her like the tail of a kite.
“Anamarie,” Bull said. “You all right?”
Ruiz nodded.
“Thank you,” she said, and then before she could say anything else, Naomi sloped in, stopping herself against the desk.
“Was this where Sam was working?” she asked.
Ruiz looked at her for a moment, uncomprehending. When she nodded, it seemed almost tentative.
“What are you seeing?” Bull said. “Can you shut it down?”
“If you just want to drop the core, I can probably do that,” Naomi said. “But I don’t know if I can get her started again, and there are some folks on the ship who might want to keep breathing. Controlled shutdown would be better.”
Bull smiled.
“We need to shut everything down,” Holden said. “The reactor. The power grid. Everything.”
“I know, honey,” Naomi said, and Holden looked chagrined.
“Sorry.”
In one of the far corners of the deck, someone yelped. Corin came gliding across the open space, serenely holding in a choke an Earther Bull didn’t recognize. It occurred to him that she might be having too much fun with this part. Might not be healthy.
“I don’t know what Sam put in place to sabotage the comm laser,” Naomi said. “I have to do an audit before I can undo any of it. And without—” Naomi stopped. Her jaw slid forward. She cleared her throat, swallowed. “Without Sam, it’s going to be harder. This was her ship.”
“Can you just take the laser off-line?” Bull asked.
“Sure,” Naomi said. “As long as no one’s shooting at me while I’m doing it.”
“And how about turning up the nitrogen in the command enough that everyone up there takes a little nap?”
“I can help with that,” Ruiz said. Her voice sounded a little stronger.
“All right,” Bull said. “Here’s what we’re doing. Nagata’s in charge of engineering. Anything she says, you do.” Ruiz nodded, too numb to protest. “Your first priority is get the laser off-line so none of those pendejos in control can fire it. Your second priority is to tweak the environmental controls on the command deck. Your third priority is to shut down the ship so we can bring it back up, see if Mister Holden’s ghost is going to keep its promises.”
“Sir,” Naomi said.
“Corin!” Bull shouted. The coughing stopped him for a moment. It still wasn’t violent, and it didn’t bring anything up. He didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one. Corin launched herself to the control board. “You and Holden head up the external elevator shaft with a handful of zip ties. When everyone up there’s asleep, you two make sure they don’t get confused and hurt themselves.”
Corin’s smile was cold. Might be that Ashford wasn’t a problem he’d have to solve. Bull tried to bring himself to care one way or the other, but his body felt like he’d been awake for a week.
“Why am I doing that?” Holden asked.
“To keep you out of her way,” Bull said. “We’ll keep your XO safe. We need her.”
He could see Holden’s objections gathering like a storm, but Naomi stopped them. “It’s okay.” And that seemed to be that.
“Alex is going to the Roci to shut down whatever we left on,” Holden said, shrugging. “I’ll help him with the EVA suit before I go.”
“Okay,” Bull said gravely. He was willing to pretend they’d struck some kind of compromise, if that helped. He heard the sound of men laughing and recognized the timbre of Sergeant Verbinski’s voice. “Excuse me.”
The mech clanked across the deck, magnetic locks clinging and releasing. The others all floated freely in the air, but with three-quarters of his body dead and numb, Bull knew he wouldn’t be able to maneuver. It was like he was the only one still constrained by gravity.
Verbinski and his squad were in an alcove near the supply shop. One of the marines had been shot in the elbow. His forearm was a complication of bone and meat, but he was laughing and talking while the others dressed the wound. Bull wondered how much they’d doped him. He caught Verbinski’s gaze and nodded him closer.
br /> “You and your people,” Bull said when they were out of earshot. “You did good work back there.”
“Thank you,” Verbinski said. The pride showed right through the humble. “We do what we can. If we’d had our suits, now—”
“Thing is,” Bull said. “Those grenades? How many of them you still have on you?”
“Half a dozen,” Verbinski said.
“Yeah.” Bull sighed. “Nothing personal, but I’m going to need to confiscate those.”
Verbinski looked shocked for a moment. Then he laughed.
“Always the hardass,” he said.
Chapter Forty-Six: Clarissa
“What’s going on, Jojo?”
“I think we’ve got a problem, sir. Take a look.”
Monica Stuart appeared on the monitors, her professionally calm face like a being from a different reality.
“Today,” she said, her hands folded in her lap and a twinkle in her eye, “we’ll tell you how to go home.”
“What. The. Fuck!” Ashford shouted, dashing his hand across the display. “What is this?”
“They’re making a new broadcast, sir,” the security man said. Clarissa watched Ashford turn and stare at him, watched the man shrivel under the weight of his gaze.
“Exclusive to Radio Free Slow Zone,” Monica said, “we have reason to believe that if we in the united human fleet can reduce our energy output low enough to no longer appear threatening—”
“Shut her down,” Ashford said. “Call everyone that’s still in the drum and shut that feed off. Get me Ruiz. I want power cut to that whole section if we have to.”
“Is this something we need to concern ourselves with?” Cortez asked. His voice had an overtone of whining. “What they do or say can’t matter now, can it?”
“This is my ship!” Ashford shouted. “I’m in control.”
“Once we’ve destroyed the Ring, though—”
Clarissa put a hand on Cortez’s shoulder and shook her head once.
“He’s the father,” she said. “The ship is his house.”
“Thank you,” Ashford said to her, but with his eyes still on Cortez. “I’m glad that someone here understands how this works.”
“Suppression team is dispatched,” Jojo said. “You want me to pull from the guard units too?”
“Whatever it takes,” Ashford said. “I want you to get it done.”
On the screen, the view shifted, and Anna’s face filled the screen. Her hair was pulled back, and someone had given her makeup in a way that made her look like everyone else in broadcast. Clarissa felt a strange tug in her chest, resentment and alarm. Get out of there, she thought at the screen. God’s not going to stop bullets for you.
“The idea,” Anna said, “is that the station has identified us as an ongoing threat. Its actions toward us have been based in a kind of fear. Or, that’s wrong. A caution. We are as unknown and unpredictable to it as it is to us. And so we have reason to believe that if we appear to be less threatening, it may relax its constraints.”
The camera cut back to Monica Stuart, nodding and looking sober. All the physical cues that would indicate Anna was a serious woman with important opinions.
“And what is your plan, exactly?” Monica asked.
Anna’s laughter bubbled. “I wouldn’t call the plan mine. What we’re thinking is that if we power down the reactors in all the ships and reduce energy being used, the station can be induced to… well, to see us less as a threat and more as a curiosity. I mean, see this all from its perspective. A gate opened, and whatever it had been expecting to come through, instead there came a ship running ballistic at tremendous speed. Then a flotilla of new ships behind that, and armed soldiers who went aboard the station itself with weapons firing. If something came to us that way, we’d call it an invasion.”
“And so by giving some indication that we aren’t escalating the attack… ?”
“We give whatever we’re dealing with here the opportunity to not escalate against us,” Anna said. “We’ve been thinking of the protomolecule and all the things that came from it as—”
The screen went dark. Ashford scowled at his control boards, calling up and dismissing information with hard, percussive taps. Cortez floated beside Clarissa, frowning. Humiliated. He had engineered Ashford’s escape and reconquest of the Behemoth, and she could see in the older man’s eyes that it wasn’t what he’d expected it to be. She wondered if her own father had that same expression in his cell back on Earth, or wherever it was they’d put him.
“Ruiz,” Ashford snapped. “Report. What’s our status?”
“I still have half an hour, sir,” the woman said through the connection.
“I didn’t ask how much time you had left,” the captain said. “I asked for a report.”
“The conductant is in place and curing,” the woman said. “It looks like it’ll be done on time. I’ve found a place in the breaker system that Sam… that Sam put in a power cutout.”
“You’ve replaced that?”
“I did, but I don’t know if there are others. She could have sabotaged the whole circuit.”
“Well,” Ashford said. “You have half an hour to check it.”
“That’s what I’m doing. Sir.”
Ashford tapped the control panel again. Clarissa found herself wishing he’d put the newsfeed back on. She wanted to know what Anna was saying, even if it was only as a way to pass the time. The air on the bridge wasn’t as hot and close as it had been in the drum, but the coolness wasn’t comforting. If anything, it seemed to underscore the time they’d been waiting. Her belly was beginning to complain with hunger, and she had to imagine that the others were feeling the same. They were holding the bridge of the largest spacecraft humanity had ever built, trapped in the starless dark by an alien power they barely began to comprehend, but they were still constrained by the petty needs of flesh, and their collective blood sugar was getting pretty low. She wondered what it said about her that she’d watched a women shot to death not two hours before and all she could think about now was lunch. She wondered what Anna would have thought.
“Have we shut those bitches up yet?” Ashford snapped.
“The suppression teams are arriving at the colonial administrative offices, sir,” Jojo said. And then, a moment later, “They’re encountering some resistance.”
Ashford smiled.
“Do we have targeting?” he asked.
“Sir?” one of the other guards said.
“Are the comm laser’s targeting systems online?”
“Um. Yes. They’re responsive.”
“Well, while they mop up downstairs, let’s line up our shot, shall we?”
“Yes, sir.”
Clarissa kept hold of a handle on the wall absently, watching the captain and his men coordinating. It was hard for her to remember how small the Ring was, and how vast the distances they’d traveled to be here. She had to admire the precision and care that they would need to destroy it. The beauty of it was almost surgical. Behind her, the security station popped and clicked. Among the alerts, she heard the murmur of a familiar voice, lifted in fear. She looked around. No one was paying any attention to her, so she pushed herself gently back.
The security station monitor was still on the newsfeed. Monica Stuart looked ashen under her makeup, her jaw set and her lips thin. Anna, beside her, was squeezing the tip of one thumb over and over anxiously. Another man was propped between them in a medical gurney.
“—anything we can to cooperate,” the earnest man was saying into the camera.
“Thank you, Lieutenant Williams,” Monica Stuart said. “I hate to add a complicating note to all this, but I’ve just been informed that armed men have arrive outside the studio and we are apparently under attack at the moment.” She laughed nervously, which Clarissa thought was probably newsfeed anchor code for, Oh my God, I’m going to die on the air. Anna’s voice came in a moment before the cameras cut to her.
“This is an e
xtreme situation,” Anna said, “but I think something like this is probably going on in every ship that’s listening to us right now. We’re at the point where we, as a community, have to make a choice. And we’re scared and grieving and traumatized. None of us is sure what the right thing to do would be. And—”
In the background, the unmistakable popping of slug throwers interrupted Anna for a moment. Her face paled, but she only cleared her throat and went on.
“And violence is a response to that fear. I hope very much that we can come together, though, and—”
“She’ll go down talking,” Cortez said. Clarissa hadn’t heard him come in behind her, hadn’t sensed him approaching. “I have a tremendous respect for that woman.”
“But you think she’s wrong.”
“I think her optimism is misplaced,” Cortez said.
“—if we do escalate our attacks on the station and the Ring,” Anna said, “we have to expect that the cycle will go on, getting bigger and more dangerous until one side or the other is destroyed, and I wish—”
“What do you think she’d say about your pessimism?” Clarissa asked.
Cortez looked up at her, his eyes wide with surprise and amusement. “My pessimism?”
Clarissa fought the sudden, powerful urge to apologize. “What else would you call it?”
“We’ve looked the devil in the eyes out here,” Cortez said. “I would call it realism.”
You didn’t look into the devil’s eyes, she thought. You saw a bunch of people die. You have no idea what real evil is. Her memory seemed to stutter, and for a moment, she was back on the Cerisier, Ren’s skull giving way under her palm. There’s a difference between tragedy and evil, and I am that difference.
“Captain! They’re taking fire at engineering!”
Cortez turned back toward the bridge and launched himself awkwardly through the air. Clarissa took a last look at Anna on the screen, leaning forward and pressing the air with her hands as if she could push calm and sanity through the camera and into the eyes of anyone watching. Then she followed Cortez.