“How many down?” Ashford demanded.
“No information, sir,” Jojo said. “I have a video feed.”
The monitor blinked to life. The engineering deck flickered, pixelated, and came back. A dozen of Ashford’s men were training guns at a pressure door that was stuck almost a third of the way closed. Ashford strained against his belts, trying to get closer to the image. Something—a tiny object or a video feed artifact—floated across the screen, and everything went white. When the image came back, Ashford said something obscene.
Armed people poured through the opening like sand falling through an hourglass. Clarissa recognized Jim Holden by the way he moved, the intimacy of long obsession making him as obvious as her own family would have been. And so the tall figure beside him had to be Naomi, whom Melba had almost killed. And then, near the end, the only one walking in the null-g environment, Carlos Baca. Bull. The head of security, and Ashford’s nemesis. He walked slowly across the deck, his real legs strapped together and his mechanical ones lumbering step by painful step. One of Ashford’s people tried to fire and was shot, his body twisting in the air in a way that reminded her of seeing a caterpillar cut in half. She realized that the sound she was hearing was Ashford cursing under his breath. He didn’t seem to stop for breath.
“Lock down the perimeter,” Ashford yelled. “Ruiz! Ruiz! We have to fire. We have to fire now!”
“I can’t,” the woman’s voice said. “We don’t have a connection.”
“I don’t care if it’s stable, I have to fire now.”
“It’s not unstable, sir,” the woman said. “It’s not there.”
Ashford slammed his fist against the control panel and grimaced. She didn’t know if he’d broken his knuckles, but she wouldn’t have been surprised. For the next fifteen minutes, they watched the battle play out, the invading force sweeping through the engineering deck. Clarissa tried to keep tabs on where Holden and Naomi were, the way she might watch a dramatic show for one or two favorite minor actors.
“Redirect the suppression teams,” Ashford said.
“Yes… ah…”
Ashford turned toward Jojo. The guard’s face was pale. “I’m having trouble getting responses from the controls. I think… I think they’re locking us out.”
Ashford’s rage crested and then sank into a kind of deathly calm. He floated in his couch, his hands pressed together, the tips of both index fingers against his lower lip.
“Environmental controls aren’t responding,” Jojo said, his voice taking on the timbre of near panic. “They’re changing the atmosphere, sir.”
“Environmental suits,” Ashford said. “We’ll need environmental suits.”
Clarissa sighed and launched herself across the cabin to the open access panels.
“What are you doing?” Ashford shouted at her. She didn’t answer.
The internal structure of the Behemoth wasn’t that different from any other bridge, though it did have more redundancy than she’d expected. If it had been left in its original form, it would have been robust, but the requirements of a battleship were more rigorous than the elegant generation ship had been, and some of the duplicate systems had been repurposed to accommodate the PDCs, gauss guns, and torpedoes. She turned a monitor on, watching the nitrogen levels rise in the bridge. Without the buildup of carbon dioxide, they wouldn’t even feel short of breath. Just a little light-headed, and then out. She wondered whether Holden would let them die that way. Probably Holden wouldn’t have. Bull, she wouldn’t bet on.
It didn’t matter. Ren had trained her well. She disabled remote access to their environmental systems with the deactivation of a single circuit.
“Sir! I have atmo control back!” Jojo shouted.
“Well, get us some goddamn air, then!” Ashford shouted.
Clarissa looked at her work with a sense of calm pride. It wasn’t pretty, and she wouldn’t have wanted to leave it that way for long, but she’d done what needed doing and it hadn’t shut down the system. That was pretty good, given the circumstances.
“How much have you got?” Ashford snapped.
“I’ve got mechanical, atmosphere… everything local to command, sir.”
Like a thank-you would kill you, Clarissa thought as she floated back toward the door to the security station.
“Can we do it to them?” Ashford asked. “Can we shut off their air?”
“No,” Jojo said. “We’re just local. But at least we don’t need those suits.”
Ashford’s scowl changed its character without ever becoming a smile.
“Suits,” he said. “Jojo. Do we have access to the powered armor Pa took from those Martian marines?”
Jojo blinked, then nodded sharply. “Yes, sir.”
“I want you to find four people who’ll fit in them. Then I want you to go down to engineering and get me control of my ship.”
Jojo saluted, grinning. “Yes, sir.”
“And Jojo? Anyone gets in your way, you kill them. Understand?”
“Five by five.”
The guard unstrapped and launched himself toward the hallway. She heard voices in the hall, people preparing for battle. We have to expect the cycle will go on, getting bigger and more dangerous until one side or the other is destroyed. Who said that? It seemed like something she’d just heard. Under local control the ventilation system had a slightly different rhythm, the exhalations from recyclers coming a few seconds closer together and lasting half as long. She wondered why that would be. It was the sort of thing Ren would have known. It was the sort of thing she only noticed now.
Ren. She tried to imagine him now. Tried to see herself the way he would see her. She was going to die. She was going to die and make everyone else safe by doing it. It wouldn’t bring him back to life, but it would make his dying mean something. And it would avenge him. In her mind’s eye, she still couldn’t see him smiling about it.
Half an hour later, the four people Jojo had selected came into the room awkwardly. The power of the suits made moving without crashing into things difficult. The cowling shone black and red, catching the light and diffusing it. She thought of massive beetles.
“We’ve got no ammunition, sir,” one of them said. Jojo. His voice was made artificially flat and crisp by the suit’s speakers.
“Then beat them to death,” Ashford said. “Your main objective is the reactor. If all you can get is enough for us to fire the laser, we still win. After that, I want Bull and his allies killed. Anyone who’s there that isn’t actively fighting alongside you, count as an enemy. If they aren’t for us, they’re against us.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir!” one of the men at the controls said.
“What?”
“I think we have someone in the external elevator shaft, sir.”
“Assault force?”
“No, but they may be trapping it.”
Clarissa turned away.
In the security station, the newsfeed was still spooling. Women’s voices punctuated by occasional gunfire. Ashford’s men hadn’t taken the station yet. She wondered whether he’d let his men gun down Monica Stuart and Anna on a live feed where everyone could see it. Then she wondered how he’d prevent it from happening even if he wanted to. It wasn’t like there would be any consequences. If they won and blew the Ring, they’d all die here one way or another. A few premature deaths along the way should be neither here nor there. When what came next didn’t matter, anybody could do anything. Nothing had consequences.
Except that everyone always dies. You’re distracting yourself from something.
Cortez floated in the security booth itself. His face lit from below by the monitor. He looked over as she approached, his smile gentle and calm.
“Ashford’s sending men down to retake engineering,” she said.
“Good. That’s very good.”
“—on the Corvusier,” a brown-skinned woman was saying. “You know me. You can trust me. All we’re asking is that you
shut down the reactor for a few hours and pull the batteries from the emergency backups. Power down the systems, so we can get out of here.”
“They value their own lives so much,” Cortez said. “They don’t think about the price their survival brings with it. The price for everybody.”
“They don’t,” Clarissa agreed, but something sat poorly with the words. Something itched. “Do you believe in redemption?”
“Of course I do,” Cortez said. “Everything in my life has taught me that there is nothing that fully removes us from the possibility of God’s grace, though sometimes the sacrifices we must make are painfully high.”
“—if we can just come together,” Anna said on the screen, leaning in toward the camera. A lock of red hair had come out of place and fell over her left eye. “Together, we can solve this.”
“What about you?” Cortez asked. He put his hand against her back. “Do you believe in redemption?”
“No,” she said. “Just sacrifice.”
“Mao,” Ashford barked from the other room. “Get out here.”
Clarissa floated to the doorway. The captain looked grayer than he had before. There was swelling around his eyes that would have been dark circles if they’d had any gravity.
“Captain?”
“You understand how all this crap is wired up.”
“A little,” she said.
“I’ve got something I need you to do.”
Chapter Forty-Seven: Holden
The elevator shaft that ran outside the entire two-kilometer length of the Behemoth’s drum section stretched out ahead of him. With Naomi consolidating control over the ship, most of the ancillary systems were down or unsafe to use. The primary elevator was locked at the shaft’s midway point. There was a secondary elevator in storage near the top of the shaft, but it could only be activated if the first elevator was removed from the tracks and locked down. So instead of a comfortable four-minute ride, the trip to the bridge was a two-kilometer-long zero-g float through hard vacuum with a big steel-and-ceramic box blocking the midpoint.
It could be worse. From the security camera streams Naomi had been able to dig into, it didn’t look like Ashford expected anyone to come at the bridge that way. He’d fortified his position at the command-level transition point once word had gone out about the attack on engineering. But so far they hadn’t reinforced the elevator shaft at all. They’d been expecting to hold both ends, and apparently it hadn’t occurred to them yet that they didn’t.
Bull had warned him that Ashford might be losing his mind under the stress of the situation, but he wasn’t a stupid man. He’d had a notably mistake-free career as an OPA captain up to that point, which was why he’d seemed the safe choice to Fred Johnson. Holden couldn’t count on him to make mistakes that would make things easy. But if Naomi won out in engineering it wouldn’t matter. By the time they reached the bridge everyone there would be blissfully asleep.
Holden had the broadcast from Radio Free Slow Zone playing at low volume in his helmet. Anna and Monica were still explaining to the flotilla about the need to shut down all the power in a back-and-forth sort of interview format while occasional volleys of gunfire popped in the background. Somehow it made the crazy things Anna was saying seem sane. Holden gave Monica points for knowing it would work that way. And, so far, the sounds of fighting seemed light. Amos was probably bored.
They’d made a plan, and so far everything was more or less going the way they’d hoped. The thought left Holden increasingly terrified.
Without warning the wall-mounted LEDs in the shaft went out. Holden turned on his suit lights but didn’t slow his climb. He threw a strange double shadow on the bulkhead when Corin’s suit lights came on.
“I’m not sure if that means we’re winning or losing,” he said, just to have something to say.
Corin grunted at him noncommittally. “I see the lift.”
Holden tilted his torso back to shine the suit lights farther up the shaft. The bottom of the elevator was visible a hundred meters ahead as a wall of metal and composite.
“There’s supposed to be a maintenance hatch we can open.”
Corin held up a fist in assent, and while still drifting up the elevator shaft began rummaging around in the duffel she’d brought from engineering. She pulled out a handheld plasma torch.
Holden rotated his body to hit the bottom of the elevator feet first, then kicked on his boot magnets. He walked over to the hatch and tried to open it, but as they suspected it was locked from the inside. Without waiting to be asked Corin started cutting it open with her torch.
“Bull, you there?” Holden asked, switching to the agreed-upon channel.
“Trouble?”
“Just cutting the elevator right now, wanted to check in.”
“Well,” Bull said, drawing the word out. “We’re hitting either home runs or strikes here. We own the essential systems, we’ve got the laser down, and we’re working on killing the reactor.”
“What are we missing?” Holden asked. Corin’s torch sputtered and went out, and she began a quiet profanity-laced conversation with herself as she replaced the power pack with another from her duffel.
“Naomi can’t get into the bridge systems. They’ve got her totally locked out, which means no knockout gas for the entry.”
Which meant, by last count, him and Corin fighting their way past at least fifteen of Ashford’s people, and possibly more. Through a narrow doorway, down a long corridor with no cover. It would make the entry into engineering look like a walk in the park.
“We can’t do that with two people,” Holden said. “There’s no chance.”
Corin, who’d been listening in on her radio, looked up. She hit the elevator hatch with one gauntleted fist and the cut piece fell inside, edges glowing dull red. She made no move to enter, waiting for the outcome of his conversation with Bull. Her expression was blank; it could have meant anything.
“We’re sending some help, so sit tight at the command deck entry hatch and wait for—” He stopped, and Holden could hear someone speaking to him, though the words were too low to make out. It sounded like Naomi.
“What’s up?” Holden asked, but Bull didn’t answer. An increasingly animated conversation happened on Bull’s end for several minutes. Bull’s replies were fragments that without context meant nothing to Holden. He waited impatiently.
“Okay, new problem,” Bull finally said.
“Bigger than the ‘we can’t get into the bridge without dying’ problem?”
“Yeah,” Bull said. Holden felt his stomach drop. “Naomi caught something on a security cam they missed in the corridor outside the bridge. Four people in power armor just left the command deck. It’s the armor we took from the Martians. No way to track them, but I can guess where they’re headed.”
There was only one place Ashford would be sending that much firepower. Engineering.
“Get out,” Holden said, more panic in his voice than he’d hoped to hear. “Get out now.”
Bull chuckled. It was not a reassuring sound. “Oh, my friend, this will be a problem for you before it is for us.”
Holden waited. Corin shrugged with her hands and climbed inside the elevator to open the upper hatch. No need to cut it. The locks were on the inside.
“There are only three ways to get to us,” Bull continued. “They can go down through the drum, but that’s messy. The maintenance corridor on the other side of the drum can’t be accessed when the drum is rotating. That leaves one good way to head south on this beast.”
“Right through us,” Holden said.
“Yup. So guess what? Your mission just changed.”
“Delaying action,” Corin said.
“Give the lady a prize. We still might be able to win this thing if we can buy Naomi a little more time. You get to buy it for her.”
“Bull,” Holden said. “There are two of us with light assault rifles and sidearms here. Those people have force recon armor. I’ve watched some
one work in that gear up close. We won’t be a delay. We’ll be a cloud of pink mist they fly through at full speed.”
“Not quite that fast. I’m not an idiot, I pulled all the ammo from the suits, and as an added precaution I went ahead and yanked the firing contacts in the guns.”
“That’s good news, actually, but can’t they just tear us limb from limb?”
“Yeah,” Bull said. “So don’t let them grab you if you can avoid it. Buy us as much time as you can. Bull out.”
Holden looked at Corin, who was looking back at him, the same blank expression on her broad face. His heart was beating triple time. Everything took on a sense of almost painful reality. It was like he’d just woken up.
He was about to die.
“Last stand time,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady.
“This is as good a place as any.” She pointed at the boxy and solid-looking elevator. “Use the upper hatch for cover, they’ll have to come at us without any cover of their own, and without guns they’ll have to close and engage at point blank. We can dump a lot of fire into them as they approach.”
“Corin,” Holden said. “Have you ever seen one of those suits at work?”
“Nope. Does it change what we need to do here?”
He hesitated.
“No,” he said. “I guess it really doesn’t.” He pulled the assault rifle off his back and left it floating next to him. He checked his ammo. Still the same six magazines it had been when he stuffed them in the bandolier.
Nothing to do but wait.
Corin found a spot by the hatch where she could hook one foot under a handhold set into what would be the wall under thrust. She settled in, staring up the elevator shaft through her sights. Holden tried doing the same, but got antsy and had to start moving around.
“Naomi?” he said, switching to their private channel and hoping she was still on the radio.
“I’m here,” she said after a few seconds.
Holden started to reply, then stopped. Everything that came into his head to say seemed trite. He’d been about to say that he’d loved her since the moment he met her, but that was ludicrous. He’d barely even noticed Naomi when they first met. She’d been a tall, skinny engineer. When he got to know her better, she’d become a tall, skinny, and brilliant engineer, but that was it. He felt like they’d eventually became friends, but the truth was he could barely remember the person he’d been back on the Canterbury now.