Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate

  Everyone had lost something in the wake of the protomolecule. The species as a whole had lost its sense of its own importance. Its primacy in the universal plan.

  Holden had lost his certainty.

  When he thought back to the man he’d been before the death of the Cant, he remembered a man filled with righteous certainty. Right was right, wrong was wrong, you drew the lines thus and so. His time with Miller had stripped him of some of that. His time working for Fred Johnson had, if not removed, then filed down what remained. A sort of creeping nihilism had taken its place. A sense that the protomolecule had broken the human race in ways that could never be repaired. Humanity had gotten a two-billion-year reprieve on a death sentence it hadn’t known it had, but time was up. All that was left was the kicking and screaming.

  Oddly enough, it was Miller who had given him his sense of purpose back. Or whatever the Miller construct was. He couldn’t really remember that version of himself who’d known exactly where all the lines were drawn. He wasn’t sure of much of anything anymore. But whatever had climbed up off of Venus and built the Ring, it had built Miller too.

  And it had wanted to talk. To him.

  A small thing, maybe. The new Miller didn’t make much sense. It had an agenda that it wasn’t explaining. The protomolecule didn’t seem particularly sorry for all the chaos and death it had caused.

  But it wanted to talk. And it wanted to talk to him. Holden realized he’d found a lifeline there. Maybe there was a way out of all of the chaos. Maybe he could help find it. He recognized that latching on to the idea that the protomolecule, or at least their agent Miller, had picked him as their contact fed all of his worst inclinations to arrogance and self-importance. But it was better than despair.

  And now, only starting to see that murky path out of the hole the protomolecule had dug and humanity had hurled itself into with self-destructive gusto, now he was about to be killed because of yet another petty human with more power than sense. It didn’t seem fair. He wanted to live to see how humanity bounced back. He wanted to be part of it. For the first time in a long time he felt like he might be able to turn into the kind of man who could make a difference.

  And he wanted to explain this to Naomi. To tell her that he was turning into a better person. The kind of person who would have seen her as more than just a good engineer all those years ago. As if he could, by being a different person now, retroactively fix the shallow, vain man he’d been then. Maybe even make himself worthy of her.

  “I like you,” he said instead.

  “Jim,” she replied after a moment. Her voice was thick.

  “I’ve enjoyed your company ever since we met. Even when you were just an engineer and shipmate, you were a very likable one.”

  There was only a faint static hiss on the radio. Holden pictured Naomi retreating into herself, letting her hair fall across her eyes to hide them in that way she did when she was in an uncomfortable emotional situation. Of course, that was silly. With no gravity her hair wouldn’t do that. But the image made him smile.

  “Thank you,” he said, letting her off the hook. “Thank you for everything.”

  “I love you, Jim,” she finally said. Holden felt his body relax. He saw his coming death, and wasn’t afraid of it anymore. He’d miss all the good stuff to follow, but he’d help make it happen. And a very good person loved him. It was more than most people got in a lifetime.

  A low screech started, which cycled up into a howl. For a second, Holden thought Naomi was screaming into her headset. He almost started comforting her before he realized he could feel the vibration in his feet. The sound wasn’t coming across the radio. It was transmitting through his boots on the elevator wall. The entire ship was vibrating.

  Holden placed his helmet against the wall to get a better sound, and the scream of the ship was almost deafening. It stopped after an endless minute with an ear-shattering bang. Silence followed.

  “What the fuck?” Corin said under her breath.

  “Naomi? Bull? Anyone still on the line?” Holden yelled, thinking that whatever had happened had torn the ship apart.

  “Yeah,” Bull said. “We’re here.”

  “What—” Holden started.

  “Mission change,” Bull continued. “That sound was them slamming the brakes on the habitat drum. Catastrophic inertia change 2.0. There are a lot of people in that drum getting thrown around right now.”

  “Why would they do that? Just to stop the broadcast?”

  “Nope,” Bull said with a tired sigh. He sounded like a man who’d just been informed he was going to have to pull a double shift. “It means they think we fortified the elevator shaft and they’re coming the other way.”

  “We’re on our way back,” Holden said, gesturing at Corin to follow him.

  “Negative,” Bull said. “If they get the laser back online here while Ashford’s still sitting at that control panel, we lose.”

  “So what? We’re supposed to get up there, break into the bridge, and shoot everyone while their guys are down there breaking into engineering and shooting all of you?”

  Bull’s sigh sounded tired.

  “Yeah.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight: Bull

  They came out of the maintenance shaft like an explosion. Four black-and-red monsters in roughly human shape. Bull and the people he’d managed to gather opened fire as soon as they saw them. A dozen guns against a maelstrom.

  “Don’t let them get to the reactor controls,” Bull shouted.

  “Roger that,” one of the Earthers said. “Any idea how we stop them, sir?”

  He didn’t have one. He unloaded his pistol’s clip with one hand, driving the mech backward across the deck with the other. One of the Martian marines cut across overhead, rifle blazing. Small white marks appeared on the breastplate of the nearest attacker, like a child’s thumbprints on a window. The man in powered armor reached the nearest workstation, ripped the crash couch out of the decking with one hand, and threw it like a massive baseball. The couch sang through the air and shattered against the bulkhead where it hit. If there had been anyone in its path, it would have been worse than a bullet.

  Bull kept backing up. When his clip ran out, he gave his full attention to driving the mech. The last of the attackers out of the shaft tried to leap across the room, but the armor’s amplification made it more like a launch. The red-and-black blur careened off the far wall with a sound like a car wreck.

  “And that,” Sergeant Verbinski said across the radio, “is why we spend six months training before they put us in those things.” He sounded amused. Good thing somebody was.

  Fighting in null g complicated the tactics of a firefight, but the basic rule stayed the same. Hold territory, stay behind cover, have someone there to keep the other side busy when you had to move. The problem, Bull saw almost at once, was that they didn’t have anything that would damage their opponents. The best they could do was make loud noises and trust the people in the battle armor to give in to their reflexive caution. It wouldn’t win the war. Hell, it would barely postpone losing the battle.

  “Naomi,” Bull said. “How’re you doing back there?”

  “I can dump the core, power this whole bastard down. Just give me three more minutes,” she said. He could hear the focus and drive in her voice. The determination. It didn’t count for shit.

  “That’s not going to happen,” he said.

  “Just… just hold on.”

  “They’re coming back that way now,” Bull said. “And there’s not a goddamn thing we can do to stop them.”

  The four attackers bounced through engineering like grasshoppers, massive bodies crashing into walls and consoles, shearing off bits of the bulkhead where they scraped against it. At this point, their best hope was that the enemy force would beat itself to death against the walls. Bull pulled back toward the entryway to the drum, then took a position behind a crate and started firing at the enemy, trying to draw them toward him. If he could get the en
emy out into the habitation drum, he might be able to close down the transition point and make the bastards dig back through. It might even give Naomi the minutes she needed.

  The people in power armor didn’t seem to notice he was there. One caught a desk, the steel bending in the suit’s glove, and started pulling hand over hand toward the reactor controls.

  “Can anybody stop that guy?” Bull asked. No one on the frequency answered. He sighed. “Naomi. You got to leave now.”

  “Core’s out. I can drop the grid too. Just a few more minutes.”

  “You don’t have them. Come out now, and I’ll try to get you back in when things cool down.”

  “But—”

  “You’re no good to anyone dead,” he said. The channel went quiet, and for a long moment he thought the Belter had been caught, been killed. Then she came sailing out of the hallway, leading with her chin, her good arm and hair streaming behind her like stabilizing fins. The nearest of the people in power suits grabbed at her, but she was already gone, and they were too timid to try jumping after her.

  Bull saw another of the enemy struggling with something. A gun. The massive glove was too thick to fit through the weapon’s trigger guard. As Bull watched, the enemy snapped the guard off and settled the gun in its fist, like a child’s toy carried by a large man. Bull fired at it a few more times without much hope of doing damage.

  Four Earthers shouted with one voice and launched themselves at the one with the gun. The attacker didn’t fire. Just swept one big metal arm through the air, scattering Bull’s people like they were sparrows.

  His people were going to get killed—were getting killed—and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  “Okay kids,” he said. “Let’s pack up and go home. It’s getting too hot in here.”

  “Bull!” Verbinski shouted. “Watch your six!”

  Bull tried to swivel in the mech, but something hit him hard in the back. The magnetic feet creaked and lost their grip, and he was floating. The world all around began to shimmer gold and blue as his consciousness slipped away. He was aware distantly of a hand on his shoulder, slowing his fall, and he saw Naomi’s face. Something had scraped her cheek, and she had a long bubble of blood clinging to her skin. He tried to turn and failed. That was right. No spine. He should have remembered that.

  “What?” he said.

  “They cut us off from the drum,” Naomi said and turned him so that his mech’s feet could touch deck. The air was a debris field. Twists of metal and shattered ceramic, sprays of blood slowly coalescing and growing larger like planets forming out of dust. Electricity arced from the ruins of a control panel, and the shattered glass floated in the tiny play of lightning. Two of the people in power armor stood rooted by the passage to the transition point. One held a rifle by the barrel as a club, the other had pistols with the trigger guard snapped off in either hand. A third was flailing in the air just above the maintenance shaft that they’d arrived through, struggling to get purchase on something. The fourth was shuffling across the deck toward them, its movements deliberate and controlled to keep from kicking off into the air.

  “Elevator shaft airlock,” Bull said. “Fall back.”

  “Everyone,” Naomi said into her hand terminal. “We’re falling back to the elevator shaft on my go. Go!”

  Naomi pulled him around, then attached herself to his back in rescue hold and jumped. The enemy’s guns opened fire. Bull caught a glimpse of a woman just as a bullet passed through her leg. Saw the grimace on her face and the blood fountaining out of her. I’m sorry, he thought.

  The wall of the elevator shaft airlock loomed up, and Naomi pushed off from him, landing on the bulkhead with the grace of a woman born to zero g. Two more bodies came through the space, Martian marines, both of them. He recognized the man called Juarez and the woman named Cass. Naomi slapped the controls and the airlock doors began to collapse. Just as the opening seemed too narrow for a human form, two more came through. Sergeant Verbinski and a man from Bull’s side of the security force schism.

  Bull’s head was swimming. He felt like he’d just run twenty miles in the hot New Mexican sun. He clapped his hands together less to command the attention of the people in the lock and more to bring himself back to awareness.

  “That shaft’s in vacuum,” he said. “If that’s the way we’re going, we need to get suited up. Lockers are over there. Let’s see what we’ve got to work with.” A massive blow rang against the airlock door. Then another. “Might want to hurry,” he said.

  “You aren’t going to fit,” Verbinski said. “Not with that contraption.”

  “Yeah,” Bull said. “Okay.”

  “Come on, big boy,” the sergeant said. “Let’s get you out of that.”

  No, Bull wanted to say. I’m all right. But Juarez and the other marine were already shucking him out of his brace, then out of the mech that Sam had made for him. He was a cripple again. That wasn’t true. He’d been crippled ever since the catastrophe. Now he just had one fewer tool.

  He’d worked with less.

  The banging on the airlock door was getting louder, more intense. Along with the impact, there was something that sounded like tearing. He imagined the powered armor picking up handfuls of steel between massive fingers and pulling back, ripping at the skin of the ship. He clambered over to his mech, his body flowing out behind him, useless as a kite. He popped open the storage and took what was left of his pistol’s ammunition and his hand terminal. For a moment, he didn’t recognize the flat black package that he took out next. And then he did.

  “If we’re not staying, we’d best leave,” Verbinski said.

  “Let’s go,” Bull said, pushing the grenades into the pouch on the EVA suit’s thigh.

  Naomi cycled the door to the shaft. The sounds of the attack grew fainter and farther away as the air leaked out, and then the shaft was open below them. A full kilometer’s fall to the trapped elevator, and then another past that to… what? Ashford? Certain death? Bull didn’t know anymore what he was running from. Or to.

  One by one, they pushed off, pulling themselves through the vacuum. Verbinski and the security man, Naomi and the marine, then Bull and Juarez. Without discussing it, they’d all paired off with someone who wasn’t theirs. In Bull’s sagging mind, that seemed important.

  “Juarez?” Verbinski said on the radio, and Bull was surprised to hear his voice.

  “Sir.”

  “If you get a good shot, you think you could crack the visors on those suits?”

  “Your suit, maybe,” Juarez said. “I keep mine in pretty good condition.”

  “Do your best,” Verbinski said.

  Bull felt it when the enemy force breached the airlock. He couldn’t even say what it was exactly. Some little press of a shock wave, a whisper-thin breath of atmosphere. He looked down past his dead feet, and there was light at the bottom of the shaft where there shouldn’t have been. There were probably about a thousand safety measures slamming down in engineering right now. He hoped so. Far below, he saw a muzzle flash, but they were so far ahead, the bullet almost certainly hit the sides of the shaft and spent itself before it could reach them.

  Juarez turned, his rifle steadied between his feet. The man’s face went calm and soft and the rifle flashed silently.

  “Got one, Verb,” he said. And then, “Sergeant?”

  Verbinski didn’t answer. He was still floating, skimming along the steel tracks that would guide the elevator, but his eyes were closed. His face was slack, and foam flecked his lips and nostrils. Bull hadn’t even known the man was injured.

  “Sergeant!” Juarez yelled.

  “He’s gone,” Cass said.

  The rest of the trip to the elevator was a thing carved from nightmares. Bull’s body kept drifting wildly behind him, and his lungs felt full and wet. He’d stopped coughing, though. He didn’t know if that was a good thing. Just as they reached the elevator, a lucky shot from their pursuers took the security man in the back,
blowing out his air supply. Bull watched the man die, but he didn’t hear it. The hatchway Corin had burned through the elevator’s base seemed too small to fit through, but he got one arm in and Naomi pulled him the rest of the way.

  In the body of the elevator car, Juarez took a position firing down the hole at the pursuers. Bull didn’t know how much ammunition the marine had, but it had to be getting close to the end of his supply. Bull would have slouched against the wall if there had been any gravity. Instead he shifted his suit radio to the channel for Naomi.

  “Give me a gun,” she said before he could speak. “Give me something.”

  “You keep going,” he said. “Get to the top of the shaft.”

  “But—”

  “Maybe you can get the hatch open for them. Get into command.”

  “You can’t access the controls from inside the shaft.”

  “In this piece-of-shit boat, you never know,” Bull said. “Someone might have put a self-destruct button there. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “That’s your plan B?”

  “I think we’re pretty much on plan Z at this point,” Bull said. “Anyway, you’re the engineer. There’s fuck-all you can do here. And I heard you with Holden before. You might as well get to see him again. Not like it costs us anything.”

  He watched her face as she decided. Fear, despair, regret, calm, in that order. Impressive woman. He wished he’d had a chance to know her better. And if she was able to ship with Jim Holden and love him, maybe he wasn’t as bad as Bull thought either.

  “Thank you,” she said, then turned and launched herself along the elevator shaft toward command and her lover. That was sweet, Bull thought. Juarez’s rifle flashed again and Bull shifted his radio frequencies to include the two marines.