Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate, Page 44

  “Amos will make sure you’re not interrupted,” he finally said.

  “Right,” Bull said. “Tell them why that’s reassuring.”

  “Oh. Well, when Amos is angry he’s the meanest, scariest person I’ve ever met, and he’d walk across a sea of corpses he personally created to help a friend. And one of his good friends just got murdered by the people who are going to be trying to take this office.”

  “I heard about that,” Anna said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yes,” Holden said. “And the last people in the galaxy I’d want to be are the ones that are going to try and break in here to stop you. Amos doesn’t process grief well. It usually turns into anger or violence for him. I have a feeling he’s about to process the shit out of it on some Ashford loyalists.”

  “Killing people won’t make him feel better,” Anna said, regretting the words the second they left her mouth. These people were going to be risking their lives to protect her. They didn’t need her moralizing at them.

  “Actually,” Holden said with a half smile, “I think it might for him, but Amos is a special case. You’d be right about most anyone else.”

  Anna looked across the room at Amos. He was sitting quietly by the front door to the broadcast office, some sort of very large rifle laid across his knees. He was a large man, tall and thick across the shoulders and chest. But with his round shaved head and broad face, he didn’t look like a killer to Anna. He looked like a friendly repairman. The kind who showed up to fix broken plumbing or swap out the air recycling filters. According to Holden, he would kill without remorse to protect her.

  She imagined trying to explain their current situation to Nono. I’ve fallen in with killers, you see, but it’s okay because they are the right killers. The good guy killers. They don’t shoot innocent chief engineers. They shoot the people who do.

  Monica was asking Holden something. When he started to answer, Anna got up and left with an apology to everyone and no one. She dodged through the crowded office, smiling and patting people on the arm as she passed, distributing gentle reassurance to everyone around her. It was all she had to offer them.

  She pulled an unused chair over next to Amos and sat down. “Red,” he said, giving her a tiny nod.

  “I’m sorry.” She put her hand on his arm. He stared down at it as though he couldn’t figure out what it was.

  “Okay,” he said, not asking the obvious question. Not pretending not to understand. Anna found herself liking him immediately.

  “Thank you for doing this.”

  Amos shifted in his chair to face her. “You don’t need to—”

  “In a few hours, we might all be dead,” she said. “I want you to know that I know what you’re doing, and I know why, and I don’t care about any of that. Thank you for helping us.”

  “God damn, Red,” Amos said, putting his hand on hers. “You must be hell on wheels as a preacher. You’re making me feel the best and worst I’ve felt in a while at the same time.”

  “That’s all I wanted to say,” Anna said, then patted his hand once and stood up.

  Before she could leave, Amos grabbed her hand in an almost painfully tight grip. “No one’s gonna hurt you today.”

  There was no boast in it. It was a simple statement of fact. She gave him a smile and pulled her hand away. Good-hearted unrepentant killers were not something she’d had to fit into her worldview before this, and she wasn’t sure how it would work. But now she’d have to try.

  “All right, people, listen up,” Bull yelled out over the noise. The room fell silent. “It’s zero hour. Let’s get the action teams divided up and ready to go.”

  A shadow fell across Anna. Amos was standing behind her, clutching his large gun. “Defense,” he called out. “To me.”

  A group of maybe two dozen extricated themselves from the general crowd and moved over to Amos. Anna found herself surrounded by heavily armed and armored Belters with a few inner planet types mixed in. She was not a tall woman, and it felt like being at the bottom of a well. “Excuse me,” she said, but no one heard her. A strong hand gripped her arm, pulled her through the knot of people, and deposited her outside of it. Amos gave her a smile and said, “Might want to find a quiet corner, Red.”

  Anna thought about trying to cross the room back to Tilly and Monica, but there were too many people in the way. Amos had a sort of personal field that kept anyone from standing too close to him, so Anna just stayed inside it to keep from getting trampled on. Amos didn’t appear to mind.

  “Assault team,” Holden called out, “to me.”

  Soon he had a group of two dozen around him, including Naomi and Alex from the Rocinante, the four Martian marines, a bunch of Bull’s security people, and Bull himself. The only people in the group without obvious physical injuries were the four marines. Alex and Naomi looked especially bad. Naomi’s shoulder was bound tight in a harness that immobilized it and her arm, and she winced every time she took a step. Alex’s face was swollen so badly that his left eye was almost completely closed. Blood spotted the bandages around his head.

  These are the people who helped stop Protogen, who fought the monsters around Ganymede, she told herself. They’re tough, they’ll make it. It sounded thin even in her own head.

  “Well,” Bull said. The crowd seemed to be waiting for last words from him. “I guess this is it. Good hunting, everyone.”

  A few people clapped or called out to him. Most didn’t. Across the room Monica was talking to her camera people. Anna knew she should join them, but found herself not wanting to. All these people would be risking their lives to buy her time. Her. So it was all on her whether the whole plan succeeded or failed. If she couldn’t convince an entire flotilla of ships from three separate governments that turning off their power for a couple hours was the right thing to do, then it would all be for nothing. She found herself wanting to delay that moment as long as possible. To keep it from being her responsibility as long as she could.

  “Better go, Red,” Amos whispered to her.

  “What if they’re all too scared to shut down their ships?” she replied. “We’re in the haunted house, and I’m about to tell everyone that the way to escape is to turn out all the lights. I would find that unconvincing in their shoes.”

  Amos nodded thoughtfully. Anna waited for the words of encouragement.

  “Yeah,” he finally said. “That’ll be a bitch. My job’s a lot easier. Good luck.”

  Somehow, the honesty in not even trying to sugarcoat it cracked the last of Anna’s fear, and she found herself laughing. Before she could reconsider, she grabbed Amos around the middle and gave him a squeeze.

  “Again,” she said, letting him go after a few seconds, “thank you. I was being a big scaredy-cat. You’re a good person, Amos.”

  “Nah, I’m not. I just hang with good company. Get going, Red. I gotta get my game face on.”

  The assault team was heading for the door, and Anna moved to the wall to let them by. Holden stopped next to Amos and said, “Be here when I get back, big man.”

  Amos shook his hand and slapped him on the back once. Holden’s face was filled with worry. Anna had a sudden vision of her future, sending Nami off to school one day, being terrified that she wouldn’t be there to look after her and having to let her go anyway.

  “Keep Naomi and Alex safe,” Amos said, pushing Holden toward the door. From Anna’s position, she could see the worry lines on Holden’s face only deepen at that. He was going to have to let them go too. Even if they all survived the assault on engineering, Alex would be leaving the ship to fly to the Rocinante, and Naomi would be left behind to keep the power shut down while Holden continued on toward the bridge. Anna knew the little crew had been together for several years now. She wondered if they’d ever had to split up and fight like this before.

  Holden’s face seemed to be saying they hadn’t.

  Anna was watching them file out the door, again trying to memorize faces and names, trying not to
think about why. Monica grabbed her and started pulling her toward the makeshift film studio.

  “Time to start working,” she said. She deposited Anna just outside the camera view and stepped in front of the unadorned green wall they used as a backdrop.

  “Welcome,” she said, her face and voice shifting into cheery video host mode. “I’m Monica Stuart in the offices of Radio Free Slow Zone. I’ve got some exciting guests today, including Doctor Anna Volovodov, and a number of UN and Martian military officers. But even more exciting, today we’re bringing you the most important broadcast we’ve ever done.

  “Today, we’ll tell you how to go home.”

  Chapter Forty-Five: Bull

  Bull felt the time moving past like it was something physical, like he was falling through it and couldn’t catch himself. Anamarie Ruiz had an hour left before she had to decide whether to do what Ashford wanted or get killed. If she didn’t have to choose, she wouldn’t choose wrong, and every minute that he wasn’t in the engineering deck took them closer to where they couldn’t get back.

  They’d left the colonial administration offices in a small convoy. Six electric carts with twenty-five people, including Jim Holden and three-quarters of his crew, the four Martian marines, an even dozen of the Behemoth’s crew who’d stayed loyal to Pa, and five Earth soldiers whom Corin had found in the drum and brought along. They had some riot armor that hadn’t been taken out of the armory before Ashford’s forces occupied it. They had an ugly collection of slug-throwing pistols and shotguns loaded with ballistic gel rounds; a mix of weapons designed to subdue without permanent injury and those meant to assure the enemy’s death. The four Martian marines had the four best guns they’d been able to scrounge up, but there were too few of both. The whole thing stank of improvisation.

  He couldn’t sit down, so he’d taken the canopy off the electric cart and wedged his mech in the back. He sailed through the hot, close air of the drum like a figurehead on the prow of some doomed pirate ship. Corin was at the wheel, hunched over it like she could make it go faster by the raw act of will. The Martian sergeant Verbinski who’d brought Jim Holden to the Behemoth in restraints sat at her side looking focused and bemused at the same time.

  They passed through the main corridors heading south. The tires made a loud ripping sound against the decking. High above, the long, thin strip of blinding white illuminated the curve of the drum. The southern transfer point loomed ahead of them like a ceramic steel cliff face.

  People parted before them, making a path. Bull watched them as he passed. Anger and fear and curiosity. These were his people. They hadn’t all been to start with, but he’d brought them here to the Behemoth. He’d made the ship important and the OPA’s role in the exploration beyond the Ring central. Earthers and Martians and Belters. The ones who’d lived. As the faces turned toward him, watching the convoy pass like flowers back on Earth tracking the arc of the sun, he wondered what Fred Johnson would have thought of all this. It was a clusterfuck from start to finish, no question about that. He hoped that when it came time to settle up accounts, he’d done more good than harm.

  “We’re a pretty compromised force,” Verbinski said, craning his neck back and up to look at Bull. “How many people you think we’re going up against?”

  “Not sure,” Bull said. “Probably a little more than we got, but they’re divided between engineering and command.”

  “They as banged up as we are?”

  Bull glanced over his shoulder. The truth was at least half of the people he was about to take into battle were already injured. There were people with pressure casts holding their arms together, with sutures keeping their skin closed. In normal circumstances, half his force would still be in the infirmary. Hell, he didn’t have any damn business going into a fire zone either, except that he wasn’t going to stay back and send people into a meat grinder he wouldn’t step into himself.

  “Just about,” Bull said.

  “You know, if I still had that recon armor you took off of us, I could just go get this done. Not even me and my squad. Just me.”

  “Yeah. I know that.”

  “Kind of makes you wish you’d trusted me a little bit, doesn’t it?”

  “Kind of does,” Bull said.

  There were two ways to reach the transfer point. The elevator was big enough to fit half the force into a box small enough that when the doors opened at the top, a single grenade would incapacitate nearly all of them. The alternative was a wide, sloping ramp that rose from the floor of the drum and spun up in a tight spiral to the axis. Its curve was going into the drum’s spin, so the faster they drove up it, the more the cart tires would push down into the floor. That wouldn’t matter down here, but when they reached the top where the fighting would essentially be in free fall, every bit of stability and control they could glean would matter.

  The first shots came down from the axis, spraying bits of the ceramic roadway up in front of the lead cart. Bull tried to bend his head back far enough to see whether the attack was coming from the transfer point itself or a barricade closer in.

  “Juarez!” Verbinski shouted. “Cover us.”

  “Yes, sir,” a voice called from one of the back carts. Bull swiveled the mech enough to look over his shoulder. On the third cart back, one of the Martian marines was lying on his back, a long scoped rifle pointing up. He looked like he was napping until the rifle fired once. Bull tried to look up again, but the mech prevented him. He took out his hand terminal and used its camera like a mirror. High above them, a body was floating in the null-g zone, a pink cloud of blood forming around its waist.

  “One less,” Verbinski said.

  The firing continued as they took the ramp at speed. The semi-adhesive ripping of the tires against the deck changed its tone as less and less weight pressed against them. Bull felt his body growing lighter in its brace. The edge of the ramp was a cliff now, looking down almost a third of a kilometer to the floor of the drum below. Ashford’s men were above them, but not so far now that Bull couldn’t see the metal barricades they’d welded to the walls and deck. He was painfully aware of being the highest target. His neck itched.

  Two heads popped up from behind the barricades. The muzzle flashes were like sparks. The Martian’s rifle barked behind him, and one of the attackers slumped down, the other retreating.

  “Okay,” Bull said. “This is as close as we get without cover.”

  Corin spun the cart nose in to the wall and slipped out, taking cover with Verbinski behind it while the next cart came ahead mirroring her. They were in microgravity here. Maybe a tenth of a g. Maybe less. Bull had to turn the magnets on in his mech’s feet to keep from floating away. By the time he’d gotten off the cart, the fighting was already far ahead of him. He drove the mech forward, marching up past the improvised barricades of the carts. The closest of them was less than ten meters from the first of Ashford’s barricades, and Jim Holden, Corin, and one of the Earthers were already pressed against the enemy’s cover, ducking to the side, firing, and falling back. The smell of spent gunpowder soured the air.

  “Where’s Naomi?” Bull shouted. He didn’t have a clear idea whether any of the technical staff in there besides Ruiz were still loyal to Pa, and if they got their only real engineer killed before they made it into engineering, he was going to be pissed. Something detonated behind the barrier and two bodies pinwheeled out into the empty air. The light was behind them, and he couldn’t tell if they were his people or Ashford’s. At the last of the carts, he stopped. The battle was well ahead of him now, almost at the transfer point itself. That was good. It meant they were winning.

  A thin man was still at the cart’s wheel. At a guess, he was in his early twenties, brown skin and close-cropped hair. The hole in his chest had already stopped bleeding and his eyes were empty. Bull felt a moment’s regret and pushed it away. He’d known. They’d all known. Not just coming to this fight, but when they’d put their boots on the Behemoth and headed out past the farthes
t human habitation, they’d known they might not make it back. Maybe they’d even known that the thing that killed them might not be the Ring, but the people who’d gone out alongside them. People like Ashford. People like him.

  “Sorry, ese,” Bull said, and drove the joysticks forward.

  Ashford’s forces were pulling back. There was no question about it now. Verbinski and his team were laying down a withering and professional spray of gunfire. The sniper, Juarez, didn’t fire often, but when he did it was always a kill shot. The combination of constant automatic weapons fire and the occasional but lethal bark of Juarez’s rifle kept moving the enemy back in toward the transfer point like they were boxing in the queen on a chessboard. Even the most powerful of Ashford’s guns couldn’t find a safe angle on them, and Verbinski kept the pressure on, pushing back and back and back until Ashford’s people broke, running.

  The transfer point itself was a short hallway with emergency decompression doors at each end. As Bull watched, the vast red-painted circular hatches groaned and began rolling into place. They wouldn’t be enough to stop Bull and his people, but they’d slow things down. Maybe too much.

  “Charge!” Bull shouted, then fell into a fit of coughing that was hard to stop. When he could, he croaked, “Come on, you bastards! Get in there before they lock us out!”

  They launched through the air, guns blazing. The noise was deafening, and Bull could only imagine what it would sound like from farther away. Distant thunder in a land that had never known rain. He pushed his mech forward, magnetic boots clamping and releasing, as the doors rolled their way nearer to closed. He was the last one into the corridor. At the far end, the air was a cloud of smoke and blood. The farther door was almost closed, but at the side, Naomi Nagata was elbow deep in an access panel, Holden at her back with assault rifle in hand. As Bull approached, the woman pulled something free. A stream of black droplets geysered out into the empty space of the corridor, and the sharp smell of hydraulic fluid cut through the air. The door stopped closing.