Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate

  “Why the fuck did you let them in here?” he said. His tone dripped acid.

  “I didn’t kill them,” Clarissa said. “So you don’t get to.”

  “She was in distress,” Cortez said, moving himself between her and Ashford. Shielding her with his body. “She misunderstood something I said. It wasn’t an act of malice, Captain. The girl only—”

  “Someone shoot her,” Ashford said.

  “No!” Cortez cried out. He sounded like someone was about to shoot him.

  The guard nearest them turned. The barrel of his gun seemed suddenly enormous, but when the sound of gunfire came, it wasn’t from him. A shape—maybe a woman, maybe a man—flickered at the edge of the corridor to the bridge, and the staccato sound of gunfire filled the room. Clarissa, forgotten, pushed herself back through the doorway into the security office. Cortez followed her, his hands up around his ears to block the noise or a bullet or both. He put his hand on her shoulder as if to comfort her, but it only pushed her a little lower to the floor, him a little nearer the ceiling.

  “Oh,” Cortez murmured, “I wish you hadn’t done that. I wish you hadn’t done that.”

  Anna was still speaking on the security station monitor. Radio Free Slow Zone, soldiering on. There was a fresh crackle of gunfire from the bridge. Ashford shouted, “Take them out! Take them all out!” But as far as she could tell, the guards hadn’t rushed the corridor. They didn’t need to. Sooner or later, Holden and Naomi and whoever they had with them would run out of bullets, and then they’d die. Or Ashford and all his men would, and then Holden would kill them. Either way, she didn’t see how it looked good for her. And that was fine. That was what she’d come here for.

  Except.

  “You heard what she said? What Anna said?”

  “Anna Volovodov is seriously mistaken about what is happening here,” Cortez said. “It was a mistake letting her into the project in the first place. I knew I should have asked for Muhammed al Mubi instead.”

  “Did you hear what she said?”

  “What are you talking about, child?”

  “She said if we attack the Ring, it’ll take action against the people on the other side. Against everyone.”

  “She can’t know that,” Cortez said. “It’s just the sort of thing the enemy would say to trick us.”

  “It wasn’t her,” Clarissa said. “Holden told her.”

  “The same James Holden who started a war by ‘telling’ people things?”

  Clarissa nodded. He’d started at least one war. He’d destroyed Protogen, and by doing so set up the dominoes that would eventually topple Mao-Kwik and her father. He’d done all of that.

  But.

  “He didn’t lie. All those other things he did. He never lied once.”

  Cortez opened his mouth to reply, his face already in a sneer. Before he could, the gunfire boomed again. She could feel Cortez flinch from it. The air was filling with the smell of spent gunpowder, and the air recyclers were moving into high-particulate mode. She could hear the difference in the fans. Probably no one else on the bridge would have any idea what that meant. It would just be a slightly higher whirring to them. If it was anything.

  Cortez ran his fingers through his hair.

  “Stay out the way,” he said. “When it’s over, when he’s done this, I can speak with Ashford. Explain that you didn’t mean to undermine him. It was a mistake. He’ll forgive you.”

  Clarissa bowed her head. Her mind was a mass of confusion, and the hunger and gunfire weren’t doing anything to help. Jim Holden was out there in the corridor. The man she’d come so far to disgrace and destroy, and now she didn’t want him dead. Her father was back on Earth and she was about to save him and everyone else or possibly destroy them all. She’d killed Ren, and there was nothing she could ever do that would make that right. Not even die for him.

  She had been so certain. She’d given so much of herself. She’d given everything, and in the end all she’d felt was empty. And soiled. The money and the time and all of the people she could have been if she hadn’t been worshiping at the altar of her family name had already been sacrificed. Now she had offered her life, except that after speaking to Anna, she wasn’t sure that wouldn’t be an empty sacrifice too.

  Her confusion and despair were like a buzzing in her ears and the voice that rose out of it was peculiarly her own: contempt and rage and the one certainty she could hold to.

  “Who is Ashford to forgive me for anything?” she said.

  Cortez blinked at her, as if seeing her for the first time.

  “For that matter,” she said, “who the hell are you?”

  She turned and kicked gently for the doorframe, leaving Cortez behind. Ashford and his men were all armed, all waiting for the next round of gunfire. Ashford, stretched out behind his control panel, pistol before him, slammed his palm against the controls.

  “Ruiz!” he shouted. His voice was hoarse. How many hours had they been waiting for this apocalypse to come? She could hear the strain in him. “Are we ready to fire? Tell me we’re ready to fire!”

  The woman’s voice came, shrill with fear.

  “Ready, sir. The grid is back online. The diagnostics are all green. It should work. Please don’t kill me. Please.”

  This was it, then. And with an almost physical click, she knew how to fix it, if there was time.

  She put her tongue to the roof of her mouth and pressed, swirling in two gentle counterclockwise circles. The extra glands in her body leapt into life as if they’d been waiting for her, and the world went white for a moment. She thought that she might have cried out in the first rush, but when she was back to herself—to better than herself—no one had reacted to her. They were all pointing their guns at the corridor. All drawn to the threat of James Holden the way she had been herself. All except Ashford. He was letting go of his weapon, leaving the pistol to hang in the air while he keyed in the firing instructions. That was how long she had. It wasn’t enough. Even high as a kite on battle drugs, she couldn’t do what needed to be done before Ashford fired the laser.

  So he became step one.

  She pulled both feet up to the doorframe and pushed out into the open air of the bridge. The air seemed viscous and thick, like water without the buoyancy. A woman ducked out of cover, firing toward Ashford, and Ashford’s people returned fire, muzzles blooming flame that faded away to smoke and then bloomed again. She couldn’t see the bullets, but the paths they made through the air persisted for a fraction of a second. Tunnels of nothing in nothing. She tucked her knees into her chest. She had almost reached Ashford. His finger was moving down, ready to touch the control screen, ready, perhaps, to fire the comm laser. She kicked out as hard as she could.

  The sensation of her muscles straining, ligaments and tendons pushed past their maximum working specifications, was a bright pain, but not entirely without joy. Her timing was only a little off. She didn’t hit Ashford in the center of his body, but his shoulder and head. She felt the impact through her whole body, felt her jaw clicking shut from the blow. He slid back through the air away from the control panel, his eyes growing wider. Two of the guards began to swing toward her, but she bent her body against the base of the crash couch and then unfolded, moving away. The guns flashed, one then another, then two together, like watching lightning in a thunderstorm. Bullets flew, and she spun through the air, pulling her arms tight against her to make her spin faster. Rifling herself.

  One of the women in the corridor leaned in, spraying gunfire through the room. A bullet caught one of the guards, and Clarissa watched as she moved toward the farthest wall. It was like seeing frames from an old movie. The woman in the corridor, the muzzle of her weapon alive with fire, then Clarissa turned. The guard, unmoved, but blood already splashing out from his neck, the little wave radiating through his skin out from the impact like the ripple of a stone dropped in a pond, then she turned. The guard falling back, blood blooming out of him like a rose blossom. The same would hap
pen to her, she knew. The drugs flowing through her blood, lighting her brain like a seizure, couldn’t change the abilities of her flesh. She couldn’t dodge a bullet if one found her. So instead she hoped that none would and did what needed to be done.

  The access panel was open, the guts of the ship exposed. She grabbed the edge of the panel gently, slowing herself. Blood welled up from her palm where the metal cut into her. She didn’t feel it as pain. Just a kind of warmth. A message from her body that she could ignore. The brownout buffer sat behind an array control board. She slid her hand down to it, her fingers caressing the pale formed ceramic. The fault indicator glowed green. She took a breath, gripped the buffer, pushed it down, turned and then pulled. The unit came loose in her hand.

  A gun went off. A scar appeared on the wall before her, bits of metal spinning out from it. They were shooting at her. Or near her. It didn’t matter. She flipped the unit end for end and reseated it. The buffer’s indicator blinked red for a moment, then green. Just the way Ren had showed her. Terrible design, she thought with a grin and held down the buffer’s reset. Two more guns fired, the sound pushing against her eardrums like a blow. Time stuttered. She didn’t know how long she’d been holding the reset, if she’d slipped it off and back on. She thought it should have gone by now, but time was so unreliable. The world stuttered again. She was crashing.

  The buffer’s readout went red. Clarissa smiled and relaxed. She saw the cascading failure as if she were the ship itself. One bad readout causing the next causing the next, the levels of failure rapid and incremental. The nervous system of the Behemoth sensing a danger it couldn’t define. Doing what it could to be safe, or at least to be sure it didn’t get worse.

  Failing closed.

  She turned. Ashford stood on his couch, holding the restraint straps in one hand and pressing his feet into the gel. His mouth was a square gape of rage. Two of his people had shifted to face her as well, their guns trained on her, their faces almost blank.

  Behind them all, far across the bridge, Cortez was framed by the security office doorway. His face was a mask of distress and surprise. He wasn’t, she thought, a man who dealt well with the unexpected. Must be hard for him. She hadn’t noticed before how much he looked like her own father. Something about the shape of their jaws, maybe. Or in their eyes.

  The lights flickered. She felt her body starting to shudder. It was over. For her, for all of them. The first twitch of the collapse pulled at her back like a cramp. A rising nausea came to her. She didn’t care.

  I did it, Ren, she thought. You showed me how, and I did it. I think I just saved everyone. We did.

  Ashford caught his pistol out of the air and swung toward her. She heard his screaming like it was meat ripping. Behind him, Cortez was shouting, launching himself through the space. There was a contact taser in the old man’s hand, and the grief on the old man’s face was gratifying. It was good to know that on some level, he cared what happened to her. The lights flared once and went out as Ashford brought the barrel to bear on her. The emergency lighting didn’t kick in.

  Everything was darkness, and then, for a moment, light.

  And then darkness.

  Chapter Fifty-Two: Holden

  Holden ejected his spent magazine and reached for a new one. His fingers hit only an empty space where he expected it to be. He hadn’t been managing his ammo well. He’d wanted to keep at least one magazine in reserve. Corin was firing around him with her rifle. She had spare pistol ammo on her belt. Without asking, he started pulling magazines off her belt and putting them in his. She fired off a few more shots and waited for him to finish. It was that sort of fight.

  Cass was leaning around the corner firing. Answering bullets hit everyplace on her side of the corridor except where she was. Holden was about to shout at her to get back into cover when the lights went out.

  It wasn’t just the lights. So many things about his physical situation changed all at once that his hindbrain couldn’t keep up. It told him to be nauseated just in case he’d been poisoned. It was working with fifty-million-year-old response algorithms.

  Holden collapsed to his knees with the nausea, the sudden appearance of gravity being one of the many changes. His knees banged against the floor because he was no longer wearing a heavy environment suit. Which also meant he could smell the air. It had a vaguely swampy, sulfurous odor. His inner ear didn’t report any Coriolis, so they weren’t spinning. There were no engine sounds, so the Behemoth wasn’t under thrust.

  Holden fumbled at the ground around him. It felt like dirt. Damp soil, small rocks. Something that felt like ground-cover plants.

  “Oh, hey, sorry,” a voice said. Miller’s. The light level came up with no visible source. Holden was kneeling naked on a wide plain of something that looked like a mix of moss and grass. It was as dark as a moonlit night, but no moons or stars shone overhead. In the distance, something like a forest was visible. Beyond that, mountains. Miller stood a few meters away, looking up at the sky, still wearing his old gray suit and goofy hat. His hands were in his pockets, his jacket rumpling around them.

  “Where?” Holden started.

  “This planet was in the catalog. Most Earth-like one I could find. Thought it’d be calming.”

  “Am I here?”

  Miller laughed. Something in the timbre of his voice had changed since the last time Holden had spoken to him. He sounded serene, whole. Vast. “Kid, I’m not even here. But we needed a place to talk, and this seemed nicer than a white void. I’ve got processing power to spare now.”

  Holden stood up, embarrassed to be naked even in a simulation, but without any way of changing it. But if this was a simulation, then that brought up other issues.

  “Am I still in a gunfight?”

  Miller turned, not quite facing him. “Hmmm?”

  “I was in a gunfight before you grabbed me. If this is just a sim running in my brain, then does that mean I’m still in that gunfight? Am I floating in the air with my eyes rolled back or something?”

  Miller looked chagrined.

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Maybe. Look. Don’t worry about it. This won’t take long.”

  Holden walked over to stand next to him, to look him in the eyes. Miller gave him his sad basset hound smile. His eyes glowed a bright electric blue.

  “We did it, though? We got under the power threshold?”

  “Did. And I talked the station into thinking you were essentially dirt and rocks.”

  “Does that mean we saved the Earth?”

  “Well,” Miller replied with a small Belter shrug of the hands. “We also saved the Earth. Never was the big plan, but it’s a nice bonus.”

  “Good that you care.”

  “Oh,” Miller said with that same vaguely frightening laugh. “I really don’t. I mean, I remember being human. The simulation is good. But I remember caring without really caring, if you know what I mean.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh, hey, look at this,” Miller said, pointing at the black sky. Instantly the sky was filled with glowing blue Rings. The thousand-plus gates of the slow zone, orbiting around them like Alex’s dandelion seeds, seen from the center of the flower. “Shazam!” Miller said. As one, the gates shifted in color and became mirrors reflecting thousands of other solar systems. Holden could actually see the alien stars, and the worlds whirring in orbit around them. He assumed that meant Miller was taking a little artistic license with his simulation.

  There was a croaking sound at his feet, and Holden looked down to see something that looked like a long-limbed frog, with grayish skin and no visible eyes. Its mouth was full of sharp-looking little teeth, and Holden became very aware of his bare toes just a few dozen centimeters from it. Without looking down, Miller kicked the frog thing away with his shoe. It blurred away across the field on its too-long limbs.

  “The gates are all open out there?”

  Miller gave him a quizzical look.

 
“You know,” Holden continued. “In reality?”

  “What’s reality?” Miller said, looking back up at the swirling gates and the night sky.

  “The place where I live?”

  “Yeah, fine. The gates are all open.”

  “And are there invading fleets of monsters pouring through to kill us all?”

  “Not yet,” Miller said. “Which is kind of interesting in its own way.”

  “I was joking.”

  “I wasn’t,” Miller said. “It was a calculated risk. But it looks clear for now.”

  “We can go through those gates, though. We can go there.”

  “Can,” Miller said. “And knowing you, you will.”

  For a moment, Holden forgot about Ashford, the Behemoth, the deaths and the violence and the thousand other things that had distracted him from where they really were. What they were really doing.

  What it all meant.

  He would live to see humanity’s spread to the stars. He and Naomi, their children, their children’s children. Thousands of worlds, no procreation restrictions. A new golden age for the species. And the Nauvoo had made it happen, in a way. Fred could tell the Mormons. Maybe they’d stop suing him now.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “Yeah, well let’s not get too happy,” Miller said. “I keep warning you. Doors and corners, kid. That’s where they get you. Humans are too fucking stupid to listen. Well, you’ll learn your lessons soon enough, and it’s not my job to nursemaid the species through the next steps.”

  Holden scuffed at the ground cover with his toe. When it was scraped, a clear fluid that smelled like honey seeped out. This world was in the station’s catalog, Miller had said. I could live here someday. The thought was astounding.

  The sky shifted, and now all the ships that had been trapped around the station were visible. They drifted slowly away from each other. “You let them go?”

  “I didn’t. Station’s off lockdown,” Miller said. “And I’ve killed the security system permanently. No need for it. Just an accident waiting to happen when one of you monkeys sticks a finger where it doesn’t belong. Is this Ashford cocksucker really thinking he can hurt the gates?”