Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate (21 page)

Around her, people began standing up. From the bored looks and the quiet, she figured they were beginning the walking tour. She’d been through the
Thomas Prince
before. She was already familiar with the high ceilings and wide corridors where three people could walk abreast. She might not know where everything was, but she could fake it. She fell in line with the others.

“In case of emergency, all you’ll have to do is get back to your quarters and strap in,” the yeoman said, walking backward so that he could keep lecturing them while they all moved, bumping against each other like cattle. Someone behind her made a soft mooing sound, and someone else chuckled. The joke had gone out to the darkness of space even where cows hadn’t.

“Now, through here is the civilian commissary,” the yeoman said as they passed through a pair of sliding steel doors. “Those of you who were working here before might be used to getting your food and coffee from the officers’ mess, but now that we’re on a military operation, this is going to be the place to go.”

The civilian commissary was a low gray box of a room with tables and chairs bolted to the floor, and a dozen people of all ages and dress sat scattered around. A thin man with improbably pale hair leaned against a crash-padded wall, drinking something from a bulb. Two older men in black robes and clerical collars sat huddled together like the unpopular kids at a cafeteria. Melba was already beginning to turn inward again, ignoring them all, when something caught her. A familiar voice.

Twenty feet away, Tilly Fagan leaned in toward an older man who looked like he was struggling between annoyance and flirtation. Her hair was up and her laughter caustic in a way that recalled long, uncomfortable dinner parties with both of their families. Melba felt a sudden atavistic shame at being so underdressed. For a sickening moment, her false self slipped away and she was Clarissa again.

Forcing herself to move slowly, calmly, she drifted to the back of the crowd, making herself as small and difficult to notice as she could. Tilly glanced over at the nattering yeoman and his herd of technicians with undisguised annoyance, but didn’t notice Melba. Not this time. The yeoman led them all back out of the commissary, down the long hallway to their new quarters. Melba took her ponytail down and brushed her hair in close around her face. She’d known, of course, that the
Prince
had the delegation from Earth, but she’d discounted them. Now she wondered how many other people here knew Clarissa Mao. She had the horrible image of turning a corner and seeing Micha Krauss or Steven Comer. She could see their eyes going wide with surprise, and she wondered whether she could bring herself to kill them too. If she couldn’t, the brig and the newsfeeds and a prison cell like her father’s would follow.

The yeoman was talking about their quarters, assigning them out one by one to all the volunteer technicians. They were tiny, but the need for each person to have a crash couch in case of emergency meant they wouldn’t be hot-bunking. She could stay in there, bribe one of the others to bring her food. Except, holed up like a rat, tracking and killing Holden became exponentially more difficult. There had to be a way…

The yeoman called her name, and she realized it wasn’t the first time.

“Here,” she said. “Sorry.”

She scuttled into her room, the door recognizing her white card and unlocking for her, then closing once she was inside. She stood for a long moment, scratching her arm. The room was bright and clean and as unlike the
Cerisier
as Nepal was from Colombia.

“You came to improvise,” she said, and her voice sounded like it came from someone else. “Well, here you are. Start improvising.”

I
nstead of putting him at ease, the weeks and months of interviews had given Holden a new persona. A version of himself that stood in front of a camera and answered questions. That explained things and told stories in ways entertaining enough to keep the focus on himself. It wasn’t the sort of thing that he’d have expected to have any practical application.

One more surprise among many.

“This,” Holden said, gesturing to the large video monitor behind him on the operations deck, “is what we are calling the slow zone.”

“That’s a terrible name,” Naomi said. She was at the ship operations panel, just out of view of the documentary crew’s cameras. “Slow zone? Really?”

“You have a better name?” Monica asked. She whispered something to Clip and he shifted a few degrees to his left, camera moving with him in a slow pan. The burst blood vessel in his eye was starting to fade. The high-g burn through the Ring had been hard on all of them.

“I still like Alex’s name,” Naomi replied.

“Dandelion sky?” Monica said with a snort. “First of all, only people from Earth and Mars have even the slightest idea what a dandelion is. And second of all, no, it sounds stupid.”

Holden knew he was still on camera, so he just smiled and let the two of them hash it out. The truth was, he’d been partial to Alex’s name. Where they sat, looking out, it did sort of look like being at the center of a dandelion, the sky filled with fragile-looking structures in an enormous sphere around them.

“Can we finish this?” Monica asked, shooting the comment at Naomi without looking at her.

“Sorry I interrupted,” Naomi replied, not looking sorry at all. She winked at Holden and he grinned back.

“And, three… two…” Monica pointed at him.

“The slow zone, based on the sensor data we’re able to get, is approximately one million kilometers across.” Holden pointed at the 3D representation on the screen behind him. “There are no visible stars, so the location of the zone is impossible to determine. The boundary is made up of one thousand three hundred and seventy-three individual rings evenly spaced into a sphere. So far, the only one we’ve been able to find that’s ‘open’ is the one we came through. The fleets we traveled out with are still visible on the other side, though the Ring seems to distort visual and sensor data, making readings through it unreliable.”

Holden tapped on the monitor, and the center of the image enlarged rapidly.

“We’re calling this Ring Station, for lack of a better term. It appears to be a solid sphere of a metallic substance, measuring about five kilometers in diameter. Around it is a slow-moving ring of other objects, including all of the probes we’ve fired into the slow zone, and the Belter ship
Y Que
. The torpedo that chased us through the Ring is headed toward the station in a trajectory that seems to indicate it will become part of the garbage ring too.”

Another tap and the central sphere took up the entire screen. “We’re calling it a station pretty much only because it sits at the center of the slow zone, and we’re making the entirely unfounded assumption that some sort of control station for the gates would be located there. The station has no visible breaks in its surface. Nothing that looks like an airlock, or an antenna, or a sensor array, or anything. Just that big silvery blue glowing ball.”

Holden turned off the monitor and both of the camera operators swiveled to put him at the center of their shots.

“But the most intriguing factor of the slow zone, and the one that gives it its name, is the absolute speed limit of six hundred meters per second. Any object above the quantum level traveling faster than that is locked down by what seems to be an inertial dampening field, and then dragged off to join the garbage circling the central station. At a guess, this is some sort of defensive system that protects the Ring Station and the gates themselves. Light and radar still work normally, but radiation made up of larger particles like alpha and beta radiation does not exist inside the slow zone. At least outside the ship, that is. Whatever controls the speeds here only seems concerned by the exterior of the objects, not the interior. We’ve done radiation and object speed tests inside the ship, and so far everything works as normal. But the last probe we fired was immediately grabbed by the field and is now making its way down to the garbage ring. The lack of alpha and beta radiation leads me to believe that there’s a thin cloud of loose electrons and helium nuclei orbiting that station as part of the garbage ring.”

“Can you tell us what your plan is now?” Monica said from off camera. Cohen pointed his mic at her, then back at Holden.

“Our plan now is to remain motionless, avoid attracting the Ring Station’s attention, and keep studying the slow zone using what instruments we have. We can’t leave until we repair the comm array and let everyone outside know that we aren’t psychotic murderers bent on claiming the Ring for ourselves.”

“Great!” Monica said, giving him the thumbs-up. Clip and Okju moved around the room getting shots to cut in later. They shot the instrument panels, the monitor behind Holden, even Naomi lounging in her ops station crash couch. She smiled sweetly and flipped them off.

“How’s everyone doing after the burn?” Holden asked, Clip’s blood-pinked eye still drawing his attention.

Cohen touched his side and grimaced. “Got a rib that I think just slid back into place this morning. I’ve never been on a ship doing maneuvers that violent before. It gave me a little more respect for the navy.”

Holden pushed off the bulkhead and drifted over to Naomi. In a low voice he said, “Speaking of the navy, how’s that comm array coming along? I’d really love to start protesting my innocence before someone figures out a way to lob a slow-moving torpedo in here after us.”

She blew out an exasperated breath at him and started tugging on her hair like she did when she was lost in a complex problem. “That little Trojan horse that keeps grabbing control? Every time I wipe and reboot, it finds its way back in. I’ve got comms totally isolated from the other systems, and it’s still getting in.”

“And the weapons?”

“They keep on powering up, but they never fire.”

“So there has to be some connection.”

“Yes,” Naomi said, and waited. Holden felt a self-conscious discomfort.

“That doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t know.”

“No.”

Holden pulled himself down into the crash couch next to hers and buckled in. He was trying to play it cool, but the truth was the longer they went without presenting a defense or at least a denial to the fleets outside, the more risk there was that someone would find a way to destroy the
Roci
, slow zone or not. The fact that Naomi couldn’t figure it out only added to the worry. If whoever was doing this was clever enough to outsmart Naomi with an engineering problem, they were in a lot of trouble.

“What’s the next plan?” he asked, trying to keep the impatience out of his voice. Naomi heard it anyway.

“We’re taking a break from it,” she said. “I’ve got Alex doing ladar sweeps of all the other rings that make up the boundary of the slow zone. Just to see if one is different in some way. And I’ve got Amos fixing that light bulb in the head. There’s nothing else to do, and I wanted him out of my hair while I come up with another way to attack this comm problem.”

“What can I do to help?” Holden asked. He’d already gone through every other system on the ship three times looking for malicious and hidden programs. He hadn’t found any, and he couldn’t think of anything else that might be useful.

“You’re doing it,” Naomi said, subtly moving her head toward Monica without actually looking at her.

“I feel like I’ve got the shit job here.”

“Oh, please,” Naomi said with a grin. “You love the attention.”

The deck hatch slid open with a bang, and Amos came up the crew ladder. “Mother
fucker
!” he yelled as the hatch closed behind him.

“What?” Holden started, but Amos kept yelling.

“When I peeled that twitchy power circuit open in the head, I found this little bastard hiding in the LED housing, sucking off our juice.”

Amos threw something, and Holden barely managed to catch it before it hit him in the face. It looked like a small transmitter with power leads coming off one end. He held it up to Naomi, and her face darkened.

“That’s it,” she said, reaching out to take it from Holden.

“You’re fucking right that’s it,” Amos bellowed. “Someone hid that in the head, and it’s been loading the software hijacker onto our system every time we boot up.”

“Someone with access to the ship’s head,” Naomi said, looking at Holden, but he’d already gone past that and was unbuckling his restraints.

“Are you armed?” Holden asked Amos. The big mechanic pulled a large-caliber pistol out of his pocket and held it against his thigh. In the microgravity it would shove Amos around if he fired it, but surrounded by bulkheads that wouldn’t be too much of a problem.

“Hey,” Monica said, her face shifting from confusion to fear.

“One of you hijacked my comm array,” Holden said. “One of you is working for whoever is doing this to us. Whoever it is should really just tell me now.”

“You forgot to threaten us,” Cohen said. He sounded almost ill.

“No. I didn’t.”

Naomi had unbuckled her harness as well, and was floating next to him now. She tapped a wall panel and said, “Alex, get down here.”

“Look,” Monica said, patting the air with her hands. “You’re making a mistake blaming us for this.” Clip and Okju moved behind her, pulling Cohen to them. The documentary crew formed a small circle facing outward, unconsciously creating a defensive perimeter. More Pleistocene-age behavior that humans still carried with them. Alex drifted down from the cockpit; his usually jolly face had a hard expression on it. He was carrying a heavy wrench.

“Tell me who did it,” Holden repeated. “I swear by everything holy that I will space the whole damn lot of you to protect this ship if I have to.”

“It wasn’t
us
,” Monica said, the fear on her face draining the bland video star prettiness away, making her look older, gaunt.

“Fuck this,” Amos said, pointing the gun at them. “Let me drag one of ’em down to the airlock and space them right now. Even if only one of them did it, I got me a twenty-five percent chance to get the right one. Got a thirty-three percent chance with the second one I toss. Fifty-fifty by the third, and those are odds I’ll take any day.”

Holden didn’t acknowledge the threat, but he didn’t argue with it either. Let them sweat.

“Shit,” Cohen said. “I don’t suppose it will matter that I got set up just as bad as you guys, will it?”

Monica’s eyes went wide. Okju and Clip turned to stare at the blind man.

“You?” Holden said. It didn’t make any sense not to, not really, but he honestly hadn’t suspected the blind guy. It made him feel betrayed and guilty of his prejudices at the same time.

“I got paid to stick that rig on the ship,” Cohen said, moving out of the defensive circle and floating a half meter closer to Holden. Pulling himself out of the group, so that if anything happened, they wouldn’t get hurt. Holden respected him for that. “I had no idea what it would do. I figured someone was spying on your comms, is all. When that broadcast went out and the missiles started flying, I was just as surprised as you guys. And my ass was just as much on the line.”

“Motherfucker,” Amos said again, this time without the heat. Holden knew him well enough to know that angry Amos was not nearly as dangerous as cold Amos. “I was thinking I’d have a tough time spacing a blind guy, but turns out I’m gonna be just fine with it.”

“Not yet,” Holden said, waving Amos off. “Who paid you to do this. Lie to me and I let Amos have his way.”

Cohen held up both hands in surrender. “Hey, you got me, boss. I know my ass is hanging by a thread right now. I got no reason not to come clean.”

“Then do.”

“I only met her once,” Cohen continued. “Young woman. Nice voice. Had lots of money. Asked me to plant this thing. I said, ‘Sure, get me on that ship and I plant whatever you want.’ Next thing I know Monica’s got a gig doing this doc about you and the Ring. Damned if I know how she swung that.”

“Son of a bitch,” Monica said, clearly as surprised by this revelation as anyone else. That actually made Holden feel a little better.

“Who was this young woman with all the money?” Holden asked. Amos hadn’t moved, but he wasn’t pointing the gun at anyone anymore. Cohen’s tone didn’t have a hint of deception in it. He sounded like a man who knew that his life hung on every word.

“Never got a name, but I can sculpt her pretty easy.”

“Do that,” Holden said, then watched as Cohen plugged his modeling software into the big monitor. Over the next several minutes, the image of a woman slowly formed. It was all one color, of course, and the hair was a sculpted lump, not individual strands. But when Cohen had finished, Holden had no doubt about who it was. She was changed, but not so much that he couldn’t recognize the dead girl.

Julie Mao.