Abaddon's Gate

Chapter Twenty-Three: Melba

Julie saved her. There was no other way to look at it.

True to style, Holden’s proxy had given everything away. Cohen, discovered, told everything he knew, and put the image he’d stolen along with it. Melba had it on her hand terminal: a portrait of the young woman as ice sculpture. She hadn’t known the soundman had taken the data when she’d met with him, but she should have guessed he would. The mistake was obvious in retrospect.

It ought to have ended the chase. The people in power should have seen it, shrugged, and thrown her out an airlock. Except that it came with its own misinterpretation. Here, Holden said, is Julie Mao, and that’s what everyone saw. The differences that were obvious to her became invisible to others. They expected to see the protomolecule infiltrating and threatening and raising the dead, and so they saw it.

She did what she could to keep anyone from noticing the similarities. She’d met Cohen on Earth with a full g pulling down. With the Thomas Prince already close to the Ring’s velocity limit, there was no acceleration thrust. Her cheeks looked fuller, her face round. She’d had her hair down then, so now she pulled it back in a braid. The image had no color, so she wore a little makeup to alter the shape of her eyes and lips. Doing something radical would only call attention, so she went small. She might not even have needed to do that.

Her schedule in the Thomas Prince was full. They were going to work her—work all of them—like dogs. She didn’t care. The service gantries and accessways would be safe. No one who knew Clarissa Mao would be there. She would stay away from the public parts of the ship as much as she could, and more often than not she could get one of the other techs to grab a tube of something from the commissary and bring it to her.

In the off-shifts, she would build her arsenal.

Holden was beyond her reach for the time being. It was almost funny. She’d gone to so much effort to make him seem like an unrepentant megalomaniac, and then left to his own devices, he named himself de facto ambassador of the whole human race. Julie had fooled him too. With any luck at all, he’d die in a firefight or get killed by the protomolecule. Her work had narrowed to destroying the evidence of Holden’s innocence. It wouldn’t be hard.

The Rocinante had begun its life as an escort corvette on the battleship Donnager. It was well designed and well constructed, but also now years past its last upgrade. The weaknesses in its defense were simple: The cargo doors nearest the reactor had been damaged and repaired, and would almost certainly be weaker than the original. The forward airlock had been built with a software glitch vulnerable to hacking; real Martian naval ships would have been updated as a matter of course, but Holden might have been sloppy.

Her first hope was the airlock. A short-range access transmitter built for troubleshooting malfunctioning airlocks had found its way in among her things. If that failed, getting through the cargo door was harder. She hoped for something explosive, but the Thomas Prince took its munitions very seriously. The equipment manifests did include a half-suit exoskeleton mech. It would fit over her chest and arms—it wasn’t designed for legs—and with a cutting torch to make the initial breach, it could probably bend the plating enough to let her through. It was also small and lightweight enough to carry, and her access card was a high enough grade for the system to let her take one away.

Once she was on, it would be simple. Kill everyone, overload the reactor, and blow the ship to atoms. With any luck at all, it would reignite suspicions about the bomb on the Seung Un. If she got out, fine. If she didn’t, she didn’t.

The only tricks now were getting there, and waiting like everyone else to hear what happened on the station.

She was dreaming when catastrophe came.

In it, she was walking through a field outside a schoolhouse. She knew that it was on fire, that she had to find a way in. She heard fire engine sirens, but their dark shapes never appeared in the sky. There were people trapped inside and she was supposed to get to them. To free them or to keep them from escaping or both.

She was on the roof, going down through a hole. Smoke billowed out around her, but she could still breathe because she’d been immunized against flames. She stretched down, fingertips brushing against low-g handholds. She realized someone was holding her wrist, supporting her as she strained in toward the darkness and fire. Ren. She couldn’t look at him. Sorrow and guilt welled up in her like a flood and she collapsed into a blue-lit bar with crash couches where all the tables should have been. Couples ate dinner and talked and screwed in the dim around her. The man across from her was both Holden and her father. She tried to speak, to say that she didn’t want to do this. The man took her by the shoulders, pressing her into the soft gel. She was afraid for a moment that he’d crawl on top of her, but he brought his fists down on her chest with a killing impact and she woke up to the sound of Klaxons and droplets of blood floating in the air.

The pain in her body was so profound and inexplicable that it didn’t feel like pain; it was only the sense that something was wrong. She coughed, launching a spray of blood across the room. She thought that somehow she’d triggered her false glands in her sleep, that what was wrong was only her, but the ship alarms argued that it was something worse. She reached for her hand terminal, but it wasn’t in its holder. She found it floating half a meter from the door, rotating in the air. A star-shaped fracture in the resin case showed where it had hit something hard enough to break. The network access displayed a bright red bar. No status. System down.

Melba pulled herself to the door and cycled it open.

The dead woman floating in the corridor had her arms out before her, her hair splayed around her like someone drowned. The left side of her face was oddly shaped, softer and rounder and bluer than it should have been. Her eyes were half open, the whites the bright red of burst vessels. Melba pushed past the corpse. Farther down the corridor, a sphere of blood the size of a soccer ball floated slowly toward the air intake with no sign where it had come from.

In the wider corridors toward the middle of the ship, things were worse. Bodies floated at every door, in every passageway. Everything not bolted down floated now by the walls, thrown toward the bow. The soft gray walls were covered with dents where hand terminals and tools and heads had struck them. The air smelled like blood and something else, deeper and more intimate.

Outside the commissary, three soldiers were using sealant foam to stick the dead to the walls, keeping them out of the way. In gravity, they would have been stacking bodies like cordwood.

“You all right?” one of them said. It took Melba a second to realize that the woman was speaking to her.

“I’m okay,” Melba said. “What happened?”

“Who the fuck knows? You’re one of the maintenance techs, yes?” the woman said sharply.

“I am,” Melba said. “Melba Koh. Electrochemical.”

“Well, you can get your ass to environmental, Koh,” the woman said. “I’m guessing they need you there.”

Melba nodded, the motion sending her spinning a little until the woman put out a hand to steady her.

She’d never been in a battle or at the scene of a natural disaster. The nearest had been a hurricane that hit São Paulo when she was eight, and her father had hidden the family in the corporate shelters until the flooding was gone. She’d seen more of that damage on the newsfeeds than in person. The Thomas Prince was a scene from hell. She passed knots of people working frantically, but the dead and dying were everywhere. Droplets of blood and chips of shattered plastic formed clouds where the eddies of the recyclers pushed them together. In zero g, blood pooled in the wounds and wouldn’t clear. Inflammation was worse. Lungs filled with fluid more easily. However many had died already, more would. Soon. If she hadn’t been in her crash couch, she’d have been thrown into a wall at six hundred meters per second, just like all the others. No, that couldn’t be right. No one would have survived that.

She hadn’t spent much of her time on environmental decks. Most of her work before with Stanni and Soledad had been with power routing. The air and water systems had technicians of their own, specialists at a higher pay grade than hers. The architecture of the rooms kept everything close without being as cramped as the Cerisier. She floated in with a sense of relief, as if reaching her goal accomplished something in itself. As if it gave her some measure of control.

The air smelled of ozone and burned hair. A young man, face covered with blue-black bruises, was stuck to the bulkhead with a rope and two electromagnets. He waved something similar to a broom with a massive mesh of fabric on the end like a gigantic fly swatter. Clearing blood from the air. His damaged face was impassive, shocked. A thickening layer of tears encased his eyes, blinding him.

“You! Who the hell are you?”

Melba turned. The new man wore a navy uniform. His right leg was in an inflatable pressure cast. The foot sticking out the end was a bluish purple, and his breath was labored in a way that made her think of pneumonia, of internal bleeding.

“Melba Koh. Civilian electrochemical tech off the Cerisier.”

“Who do you answer to?”

“Mikelson’s my group supervisor,” she said, struggling to remember the man’s name. She had only met him once, and he hadn’t left much of an impression on her.

“My name’s Nikos,” the broken-legged man said. “You work for me now. Come on.”

He pushed off more gracefully than should have been possible. She followed him a little too fast and had to grab a handhold to keep from running into his back. He led her through a long passageway into engineering. A huge array of thin metal and ceramic sheets stood at one wall, warnings in eight languages printed along its side. Scorch marks drew circles on the outermost plate, and the air stank of burnt plastic and something else. A hole two feet across had been punched through the center. A human body was still in it, held in place by shards of metal.

“You know what that is, Koh?”

“Air processing,” she said.

“That’s the primary atmosphere processing unit,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken. “And it’s a big damn problem. Secondary processor’s still on fire just at the moment, and the tertiary backups will get us through for about seven hours. Everyone on my team is busted or dead, so you’re about to rebuild this one. Understand?”

I can’t do that, she thought. I’m not really an electrochemical technician. I don’t know how to do this.

“I’ll… get my tools.”

“Don’t let me stop you,” he said. “If I find someone can help out, I’ll send ’em your way.”

“That would be good,” she said. “What about you? Are you all right? Can you help?”

“At a guess? Crushed pelvis, maybe something worse going on in my gut. Keep passing out a little,” he said with a grin. “But I’m high as a kite on the emergency speed, and there’s work. So hop to.”

She pushed off. Her throat was tight, and she could feel her mind starting to shut down. Overstimulation. Shock. She made her way through the carnage and wreckage to the storage bay where the toolboxes from the Cerisier were. Her card unlocked them. One had shattered, the remains of a testing deck floating in the air, green ceramic shards and bits of gold wire. Ren was there, his coffin toolbox shifted in place despite the electromagnetic clamps. For a moment, the dream of the fire washed over her. She wondered if she might still be sleeping, the wave of death just part of the same blackness in her own brain. She put her hand on Ren’s box, half expecting to feel him knocking back. A sudden vertigo washed through her, and the sense that she and the ship were falling, that it would land on her. Crush her. All the blood and all the terror, every dead person held in place to keep the corpses from floating, they all began here. Every sin she’d committed, backward and forward in time, had its center in the bones beneath her hand.

“Stop,” she said. “Just stop.”

She took her tool chest, the real one, and sped back to engineering and the shattered air processing controller. Nikos had found two other people, a man in civilian dress and an older woman in naval uniform.

“You’re Koh?” the woman said. “Good, grab his legs.”

Melba set her toolbox against the deck and activated the magnets, then pushed over to the hole in the atmosphere processor. The machine had been loosened from its housing, giving the body a little more room to move. Melba put her hands on the dead man’s thighs, wadding the cloth of his trousers in her fists. She braced herself against the metal siding of the unit.

“Ready?” the man asked.

“Ready.”

The woman counted down from three, and Melba pulled. For a long moment, she thought the corpse wouldn’t come out, but then something tore, the vibrations of it transferring through to her hands. The body slid free.

“Score one for the good guys,” Nikos said from across the bay. His face was developing an ashy gray tone. Like he was dying. She wished he would go to the medical bays, but they were probably swamped. He could die here doing his work, or there waiting for an open bay. “Clear him away. Got him out, we don’t need him drifting back.”

Melba nodded, took a firm grip, and pushed off on a trajectory that would land them on the far bulkhead. The back of the corpse’s head had been crushed almost flat, but death had come so swiftly, there was very little blood. At the wall, she secured him with a spray of foam and held him for a moment while it set. The dead man’s face was close to hers. She could see the whiskers he’d missed when he’d shaved. The brown of his empty eyes. She felt a sudden urge to kiss him and then pushed the impulse away, disgusted.

From his uniform, he’d been an officer. Lieutenant, maybe. The white identity card on the lanyard around his neck had a picture of him looking solemn. She took it in her fingers. Not lieutenant. Lieutenant commander. Lieutenant Commander Stepan Arsenau, who would never have come through the Ring if it weren’t for her. Who wouldn’t have died here. She tried to feel guilt, but there wasn’t room for him inside of her. She had too much blood already.

She was reaching out to tuck his card back in place when the small voice in the back of her mind said, I bet he could get an EVA pack with this. Melba blinked. Her mind seemed to click back into focus, and she looked around her, the last wisps of dream or delirium leaving her mind. She had access to the equipment she needed. The ship was in chaos. This was it. This was the opportunity she’d been waiting for. She plucked the card off its lanyard and slipped it in her pocket, then looked around nervously.

No one had noticed.

She licked her lips.

“I’m going to need something to crack this,” the young man was saying. “The bolt head’s sheared round. I can’t get it out.”

The older woman swore and turned to her.

“Got anything that’ll do the trick?”

“Not here,” Melba said. “I have an idea where I could get something to drill it out, though.”

“Move fast. We don’t want this place gettin’ stuffy.”

“Okay. You guys do what you can. I’ll be right back,” Melba lied.