Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate

  Alexi Myerson-Freud was a nutritionist. He’d worked mid-level jobs on Tycho, mostly in the yeast vats, tuning the bioengineering to produce the right mix of chemicals, minerals, and salts for keeping humans alive. He’d been married twice, had a kid he hadn’t seen in five years, was part of a network war-gaming group that simulated ancient battles, pitting themselves against the great generals of history. He was eight years younger than Bull. He had mouse-ass brown hair, an awkward smile, and a side business selling a combination stimulant and euphoric the Belters called pixie dust. Bull had worked it all until he was certain.

  And even once he knew, he’d waited a few days. Not long. Just enough that he could follow Alexi around on the security system. He needed to make sure there wasn’t a bigger fish above him, a partner who was keeping a lower profile, or a connection to Bull’s own team—or else, God forbid, Ashford’s. There wasn’t.

  Truth was, he didn’t want to do it. He knew what had to happen, and it was always easier to put it off for another fifteen minutes, or until after lunch, or until tomorrow. Only every time he did, it meant someone else was going on shift stoned, maybe making a stupid mistake, breaking the ship, getting injured, or getting killed.

  The moment came in the middle of second shift. Bull turned down his console, stood up, took a couple of guns from the armory, and made a connection on his hand terminal.

  “Serge?”

  “Boss.”

  “I’m gonna need you and one other. We’re going to go bust a drug dealer.”

  The silence on the line sounded like surprise. Bull waited. This would tell him something too.

  “You got it,” Serge said. “Be right there.”

  Serge came into the office ten minutes later with another security grunt, a broad-shouldered, grim-faced woman named Corin. She was a good choice. Bull made a mental note in Serge’s favor, and handed them both guns. Corin checked the magazine, holstered it, and waited. Serge flipped his from hand to hand, judging the weight and feel, then shrugged.

  “What’s the plan?” he asked.

  “Come with me,” Bull said. “Someone tries to keep me from doing my job, warn them once, then shoot them.”

  “Straightforward,” Serge said, and there was a sense of approval in the word.

  The food processing complex was deep inside the ship, close to the massive, empty inner surface. In the long voyage to the stars, it would have been next to the farmlands of the small internal world of the Nauvoo. In the Behemoth, it wasn’t anywhere in particular. What had been logical became dumb, and all it took was changing the context. Bull drove them, the little electric cart’s foam wheels buzzing against the ramps. In the halls and corridors, people stopped, watched. Some stared. It said something that three armed security agents traveling together stood out. Bull wasn’t sure it was something good.

  Near the vats, the air smelled different. There were more volatiles and unfiltered particulates. The processing complex itself was a network of tubs and vats and distilling columns. Half of the place was shut down, the extra capacity mothballed and waiting for a larger population to feed. Or else waiting to be torn out.

  They found Alexi knee deep in one of the water treatment baths, orange rubber waders clinging to his legs and his hands full of thick green kelp. Bull pointed to him, and then to the catwalk on which he, Serge, and Corin stood. There might have been a flicker of unease in Alexi’s expression. It was hard to say.

  “I can’t get out right now,” the dealer said, holding up a broad wet leaf. “I’m in the middle of something.”

  Bull nodded and turned to Serge.

  “You two stay here. Don’t let him go anywhere. I’ll be right back.”

  “Sa sa, boss,” Serge said.

  The locker room was down a ladder and through a hall. The bank of pea-green private storage bins had been pulled out of the wall, turned ninety degrees, and put back in to match the direction of thrust. Blobs and filaments of caulk still showed at the edges where it failed to sit quite flush. Two other water processing techs were sitting on the bench in different levels of undress, talking and flirting. They went silent when Bull walked in. He smiled at them, nodded, and walked past to a locker on the far end. When he reached it, he turned back.

  “This belong to anyone?” he asked.

  The two techs looked at each other.

  “No, sir,” the woman said, pulling her jumpsuit a little more closed. “Most of these are just empty.”

  “Okay, then,” Bull said. He thumbed in his override code and pulled the door open. The duffel bag inside was green and gray, the kind of thing he’d have put his clothes in when he went to work out. He ran a finger along the seal. About a hundred vials of yellow-white powder, a little more grainy than powdered milk. He closed the bag, put it on his shoulder.

  “Is there a problem?” the male tech asked. His voice was tentative, but not scared. Curious, more. Excited. Well, God loved rubberneckers, and so did Bull.

  “Myerson-Freud just stopped selling pixie dust on the side,” Bull said. “Should go tell all your friends, eh?”

  The techs looked at each other, eyebrows raised, as Bull headed out. Back at the kelp tank, he dropped the bag, then pointed to Alexi and to the catwalk beside him, the same motions he’d used before. This time Alexi’s face went grim. Bull waited while the tech slogged through the deep water and pulled himself up.

  “What’s the problem?” Alexi said. “What’s in the bag?”

  Bull shook his head slowly, and only once. The chagrin on Alexi’s face was like a confession. Not that Bull had needed one.

  “Hey, ese,” Bull said. “Just want you to know, I’m sorry about this.”

  He punched Alexi in the nose. Cartilage and bone gave way under his knuckle and a bright red fountain of blood spilled slowly past the tech’s startled mouth.

  “Put him on the back of the cart,” Bull said. “Where folks can see him.”

  Serge and Corin exchanged a look that was a lot like the pair in the locker room.

  “We heading to the brig, boss?” Serge asked, and his tone of voice meant he already knew the answer.

  “We have a brig?” Bull asked as he scooped up the duffel bag.

  “Pretty don’t.”

  “Then we’re not going there.”

  Bull had planned the route to pass through all the most populated public areas between the innermost areas of the ship and its skin. Word was already going around, and there were spectators all along the way. Alexi was making a high keening sound when he wasn’t shouting or begging or demanding to see the captain. Bull had the sudden, visceral memory of seeing a pig carried to the slaughter when he’d been younger. He didn’t know when it had happened; the memory was just there, floating unconnected from the rest of his life.

  It took almost half an hour to reach the airlock. A crowd had gathered, a small sea of faces, most of them on wide heads and thin bodies. The Belters watching the Earther kill one of their own. Bull ignored them. He keyed in his passcode, opened the inner door of the lock, walked back to the cart, and hefted Alexi with one arm. In the low gravity it should have been easy, but Bull felt himself getting winded before he got back to the lock. It didn’t help that Alexi was thrashing. Bull pushed him in, closed the inner door, put in the override code, and opened the exterior door without evacuating the air first. The pop rang through the metal deck like a distant bell. The monitor showed that the lock was empty. Bull closed the exterior door. While the lock refilled, he walked back to the cart. He stood on the back of the cart where Alexi had been, the duffel bag over his head in both hands. Blood stained his sleeve and his left knee.

  “This is pixie dust, right?” he said to the crowd. He didn’t use his terminal to amplify his voice. He didn’t need to. “I’m gonna leave this in the airlock for sixteen hours, then I’m spacing it. Any other dust comes in to join it before then, well, it just happened. No big deal. Any of this goes away, and that’s a problem. So everybody go tell everybody. And the next pen
dejo signs on shift high comes and talks to me.”

  He walked back to the airlock slowly, letting everyone see him. He opened the inner door, slung the bag through, and turned away, leaving the door open behind him. Climbing back behind the wheel of the cart, he could feel the tension in the crowd, and it didn’t bother him at all. Other things did. What he’d just done was the easy part. What came next was harder, because he had less control over it.

  “You want to set a guard on that, boss?” Serge asked.

  “Think we need to?” Bull asked. He didn’t expect an answer, and he didn’t get one. The cart lurched forward, the spectators parting before it like a herd of antelope before a lion. Bull aimed them back toward the ramps that would take him to the security offices.

  “Hardcore,” Corin said. She made it sound like a good thing.

  Religious art decorated the captain’s office. Angels in blue and gold held the parabolas of the archways that rose overhead to meet at the image of a calm and bearded God. A beneficent Christ looked down from the wall behind Ashford’s desk, Caucasian features calm and serene. He didn’t look anything like the bloody, bent, crucified man Bull was familiar with. Arrayed at the Savior’s side were images of plenty: wheat, corn, goats, cows, and stars. Captain Ashford paced back and forth by Jesus’ knees, his face dark with blood and fury. Michio Pa was seated in the other guest chair, carefully not looking at Ashford or at Bull. Whatever the situation was with the Martian science ships and their military escort, with the massive Earth flotilla, it was forgotten for the moment.

  Bull didn’t let the anxiety show in his face.

  “This is unacceptable, Mister Baca.”

  “Why do you think that, sir?”

  Ashford stopped, put his wide hands on the desk, and leaned forward. Bull looked into his bloodshot eyes and wondered whether the captain was getting enough sleep.

  “You killed a member of my crew,” Ashford said. “You did it with clear premeditation. You did it in front of a hundred witnesses.”

  “Shit, you want witnesses, there’s surveillance footage,” Bull said. It wasn’t the right thing to do.

  “You are relieved of duty, Mister Baca. And confined to quarters until we return to Tycho Station, where you will stand trial for murder.”

  “He was selling drugs to the crew.”

  “Then he should have been arrested!”

  Bull took a deep breath, exhaling slowly through his nose.

  “You think we’re more running a warship or a space station, sir?” he asked. Ashford’s brow furrowed, and he shook his head. To Bull’s right, Pa shifted in her seat. When neither of them spoke, Bull went on. “Reason I ask is if I’m a cop, then yeah, I should have taken him to the brig, if we had a brig. He should have gotten a lawyer. We could have done that whole thing. Me? I don’t think this is a station. I think it’s a battleship. I’m here to maintain military discipline in a potential combat zone. Not Earth navy discipline. Not Martian navy discipline. OPA discipline. The Belter way.”

  Ashford stood up.

  “We aren’t anarchists,” he said, his voice dripping with scorn.

  “OPA tradition, maybe I’m wrong, is that someone does something that intentionally endangers the ship, they get to hitchhike back to wherever there’s air,” Bull said.

  “You hauled him out of a water vat. How was he endangering the ship? Was he going to throw kelp at it?” Pa said, her voice brittle.

  “People been coming on shift high,” Bull said, lacing his fingers together on one knee. “Don’t trust me. Ask around. And, c’mon. Of course they are, right? We’ve got three times as much work needs to get done as we can do. Pixie dust, and they don’t feel tired. Don’t take breaks. Don’t slow down. Get more done. Thing about bad judgment? You got to have good judgment to notice you’ve got it. We already got people hurt. Matter of time before someone died. Or worse.”

  “You’re saying this man was responsible for all those other people performing badly at their work, so you killed him?” Ashford said, but the wind was out of his sails. He was going to fold like wet cardboard. Bull recognized that Ashford’s weakness was going to work to his advantage this time, but he still hated it.

  “I’m saying he was putting the ship at risk for his own financial gain, just like he was stealing air filters. And sure he did. There was a demand, he filled it. If I lock him up, that makes it so that the risk is higher. Prices are higher. Get caught, you maybe go to jail when we get back to Tycho.”

  “And you made it so that the risk is death.”

  “No,” Bull said. “I mean, yeah, but I don’t shoot him. I do what you do to people who risk the ship. Belters know what getting spaced means, right? It frames the issue.”

  “This was a mistake.”

  “I’ve got a list of fifty people he sold to,” Bull said. “Some of them are skilled technicians. A couple are mid-level overseers. We could lock ’em all up, but then we’ve got less people to do the work. And anyway, they won’t be doing it anymore. Supply’s gone. But if you want I could talk to them. Let ’em know I’m keeping an eye open.”

  Pa’s chuckle was mirthless.

  “That would be difficult if you’re in the brig on charges,” she said.

  “We don’t have a brig,” Bull said. “Plan was the church elders were just gonna talk everything out.” He kept his tone carefully free of sarcasm.

  Ashford waffled. It was like watching a cat trying to decide whether to jump from one tree limb to another. His expression was calculating, internal, uncertain. Bull waited.

  “This never happens again,” Ashford said. “You decide someone needs to go out the airlock, you come to me. I’ll be the one that pushes the button.”

  “All right.”

  “All right, what?” Ashford bit the words. Bull lowered his head, looking at the deck. He’d gotten what he came for. He could let Ashford feel like he’d gotten a little win too.

  “I mean, yes, sir, Captain. Solid copy. I understand and will comply.”

  “You’re damn right you will,” Ashford said. “Now get the hell back to work.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  When the door closed behind him, Bull leaned against the wall and took a few deep breaths. He was intensely aware of the sound of the ship—low hum of the air recyclers, the distant murmur of voices, the chimes and beeps of a thousand different system alerts. The air smelled of plastic and ozone. He’d taken his calculated risk, and he’d pulled it off.

  Walking back down, level by level, he felt the attention on him. In the lift, a man tried not to stare at him. In the hall outside the security office, a woman smiled at him and nodded, nervous as a mouse that smells cat. Bull smiled back.

  In the security office, Serge and another man from the team—a Europan named Casimir—lifted their fists, greeting him in the physical idiom of the Belt. Bull returned the gesture and ambled over.

  “What we got?” Bull asked.

  “A couple dozen people came to pay respects,” Serge said. “I figure about half a kilo more dust just appeared out of nowhere.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “I’ve got a file of everyone who went in. You want me to flag them in the system?”

  “Nope,” Bull said. “I told them it was no big deal. It’s no big deal. You can kill the file.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  “I’ll be in my office,” Bull said. “Let me know if something comes up. And somebody start a pot of coffee.”

  He sat down on the desk, his feet resting on the seat of his chair, and leaned forward. He was suddenly exhausted. It had been a long, bad day, and losing the dread he’d been carrying for the weeks leading up to it was like being released from prison. It took a minute or two to notice he had a message waiting from Michio Pa. The XO hadn’t requested a connection. She didn’t want to talk to him, then. She just wanted to say something.

  In the recording, her face was lit from below with the backsplash of her hand terminal screen. Her smile was thin a
nd tight and sort of faded away somewhere around her cheekbones.

  “I saw what you did there. That was very nice. Very clever. Wrapping yourself in the OPA flag, making the old man wonder if the crew wouldn’t take your side. More-Belter-than-thou. It was graceful.”

  Bull scratched his chin. The stubble that had grown in since morning made his fingernails sound like a rasp. It was probably too much to ask that he not make any enemies with this, but he was sorry it was Pa.

  “You can’t sugarcoat it with me. We both know that killing someone doesn’t make you admirable. I’m not about to forget this. I just hope you have enough soul left that what you’ve done still bothers you.”

  The recording ended, and Bull smiled at the blank screen wearily.

  “Every time,” he told the hand terminal. “And next time too.”

  Chapter Ten: Holden

  The Rocinante was not a small ship. Her normal crew complement was over a dozen navy personnel and officers, and on many missions she’d also carry six marines. Running the Roci with four people meant each of them did several jobs, and that didn’t leave a lot of downtime. It also meant that it was pretty easy at first to avoid the four strangers living on the ship. With the documentary crew restricted from entering ops, the airlock deck, the machine shop, or engineering, they were stuck on the two crew decks with access only to their quarters, the head, the galley, and sick bay.

  Monica was a lovely person. Calm, friendly, charismatic. If even a part of her charm translated to the other side of the camera, it was easy to see how she’d succeeded. The others—Okju, Clip, Cohen—made clear overtures of friendship, cracking jokes with the Rocinante’s crew, making dinners. Reaching out, but it wasn’t clear to Holden whether it was the usual honeymoon period that came when any crew first came together for a long voyage or something more calculated. Maybe a little of both.

  What he did see was his own crew drawing back. After two days of the documentary team being on board, Naomi simply retreated to the ops deck where she couldn’t be found. Amos had made a halfhearted pass at Monica, and a slightly more serious attempt with Okju. When both failed, he began spending most of his time in the machine shop. Of them all, only Alex took time to socialize with their passengers, and him not all that often. He’d taken to sometimes sleeping in the pilot’s couch.