Abaddon's Gate

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Melba

The darkness was beautiful and surreal. The ships of the flotilla, drawn together by the uncanny power of the station, hugged closer to each other than they ever would have under human control. The only lights came from the occasional exterior maintenance array and the eerie glow of the station. It was like walking through a graveyard in the moonlight. The ring of ships and debris glittered in a rising arc before her and behind, as if any direction she chose would lead up from where she was now.

The EVA suit had limited propellant, and she wanted to conserve it for her retreat. She scuttled through the vacuum, magnetic boots clicking against the hull of the Prince until she reached its edge and launched herself into the gap between vessels, aiming toward a Martian supply ship. The half mech and emergency airlock folded on her back massed almost fifty kilos, but with their courses matched, they were as weightless as she was. It was an illusion, she knew, but in the timeless reach between the Thomas Prince and hated Rocinante, all her burdens seemed light.

The EVA suit had a simple heads-up display that outlined the Rocinante with a thin green line. It wasn’t the nearest ship. The trip out to it would take hours, but she didn’t mind. It was as trapped as all the others. It couldn’t go anyplace.

She hummed to herself as she imagined her arrival. Rehearsed it. She let herself daydream that he would be there: Jim Holden returned from the station. She imagined him raging at her as she destroyed his ship. She imagined him weeping and begging her forgiveness, and seeing the despair in his eyes when she refused. They were beautiful dreams, and folded safely inside them, she could forget the blood and horror behind her. Not just the catastrophe on the Prince, but all of it—Ren, her father, Julie, everything. The dim blue light of the not-moon felt like home, and the impending violence like a promise about to be kept.

If there was another part of her, a sliver of Clarissa that hadn’t quite been crushed yet that felt differently, it was small enough to ignore.

Of course it was just as likely they’d all be dead when she got there. The catastrophe would have hit them as hard as the Thomas Prince or any of the other ships. Holden’s crew might be nothing but cooling meat already, only waiting for her to come and light their funeral pyre. There was, she thought, a beauty in that too. She ran across the skins of the ships, leaped from one to the next like a nerve impulse crossing a synapse. Like a bad idea being thought by a massive, moonlit brain.

The air in the suit smelled like old plastic and her own sweat. The impact of the magnetic boots pulling her to the ships and then releasing her again translated up her leg, tug and release, tug and release. And before her, as slowly as the hour hand of an analog clock, the ghost-green Rocinante grew larger and nearer.

She knew the ship’s specs by heart. She’d studied them for weeks. Martian corvette, originally assigned to the doomed Donnager. The entry points were the crew airlock just aft of the ops deck, the aft cargo bay doors, and a maintenance port that ran along beneath the reactor. If the reactor was live, the maintenance access wouldn’t work. The fore airlock had almost certainly had its security profile changed once the ship fell into Holden’s control. Only a stupid man wouldn’t change it, and Melba refused to believe a stupid man could bring down her father. The service records she’d gleaned suggested that the cargo bay had been breached once already. Repairs were always weaker than the original structure. The choice was easy.

The attitude of the ship put the cargo bay on the far side of the ship, the body of the Rocinante hiding its flaw from the light. Melba stepped into shadow, shivering as if it could actually be colder in the darkness. She fastened the mech to the ship’s skin and assembled it for use under the glare of the EVA suit’s work lamps. The mech was the yellow of fresh lemons and police tape. The cautions printed in three alphabets were like little Rosetta stones. She felt an inexplicable fondness for the machine as she strapped it across her back, fitting her hands into the waldoes. The mech hadn’t been designed for violence, but it was suited for it. That made her and it the same.

She lit the cutting torch and the EVA suit’s mask went dark. Melba clung to the ship and began her slow invasion. Sparks and tiny asteroids of melted steel flew off into the darkness around her. The repair work where the bay doors had been bent out and refitted was almost invisible. If she hadn’t known to look, she wouldn’t have seen the weaknesses. She wondered if they knew she was coming. She imagined them hunched over their security displays, eyes wide with fear at what was digging its way under the Rocinante’s skin. She found herself singing softly, snatches of popular songs and old holiday tunes, whatever came to mind. Bits of lyrics and melody matched to the hum of the torch’s vibration.

She breached the Rocinante, a patch of glowing steel no wider than her finger popping out. No air vented through the gap into the vacuum. They didn’t keep the cargo bay pressurized. That meant the atmosphere wasn’t dropping inside, and the ship alarms weren’t blaring. One problem solved even without her help. It felt like fate. She killed the torch and unfolded the emergency airlock, sealing it against the hatch. She unzipped the outer layer, closed it, unzipped the inner one, and stepped into the small additional room she’d created. She didn’t know how much damage she’d have to do to get into the inner areas of the ship. She didn’t want an accidental loss of atmosphere to rob her of her vengeance. Holden needed to know who’d done this to him, not gasp out his last breaths thinking his ship had merely broken.

Gently, she slipped the mech’s hand into the hole, braced, and peeled back the cargo door, long strips of steel blooming like an iris blossom. When it was wide enough, she took the sides of the hole in her mechanical hands and pulled herself into the cargo bay. Supply crates lined the walls and floors, held in place by electromagnets. One had shattered, a victim of the catastrophe. A cloud of textured protein packets floated in the air. The LED on the panel beside the interior airlock door was green; the bay hadn’t been locked down. Why would it? She punched the button to enter the airlock and begin the cycle. Once the green pressure light came on, she slipped her hands out of the mech and lifted off the helmet. No Klaxons were ringing. No voices shouted or threatened. She’d made it on without alarming anyone. Her grin ached.

Back in the mech, she opened the airlock into the interior of the ship and paused. Still no alarms. Melba pulled herself gently, silently into enemy territory.

The Rocinante was built floor by floor from the reactor up to the engineering deck, to the machine shop, then the galley and crew cabins and medical bays, storage deck containing the crew airlock, then on up to the command deck and pilot’s station farthest forward. Under thrust, it would be like a narrow building. Without thrust, the ship was directionless.

She had choices to make now. The cargo bay was close enough to give her access to engineering and the reactor. She could sneak in there and start the reactor on its overload. Or she could go up, try taking the crew by surprise, and set the ship to self-destruct from the command deck.

She took a deep breath. The Rocinante had four regular crew including Holden, and she didn’t know whether the documentary crew were still on board. At least two of the regular crew had military training and experience. She might be able to take them in a fight if she got the drop on them or came across them one at a time.

The risk was too high. The reactor was nearest, it was easiest, and she could get out through the cargo bay. She pulled herself along the corridors she knew only from simulations, toward the reactor and the death of the ship.

When she opened the hatch to engineering, a woman floated above an opened control panel, a soldering iron in one hand and a spool of wire in the other. She had the elongated frame and slightly oversized head of someone who’d grown up under low g. Brown skin and dark hair pulled back in a utilitarian knot. Naomi Nagata. Holden’s lover.

Melba felt a sudden urge to tear off the mech suit, swirl her tongue across the roof of her mouth, feel the chemical rush. To grab the narrow Belter’s neck in her bare hands and feel the bones snap. It would be a yearlong dream of revenge made tactile and perfect. But two other crew members were on the ship, and she didn’t know where they were. The terror she’d felt in that sleazy Baltimore casino came rushing back. Crawling helplessly on the floor in the post-drug collapse while people banged at the door to get in. She couldn’t risk a crash until she knew where everyone was.

Naomi looked up at the sound of the door, pleasure in the woman’s dark eyes as if the interruption were a happy surprise, and then shock, and then a cold fury.

For a moment, neither one moved.

With a yell, the woman launched herself at Melba, spinning the spool of wire in front of her. Melba tried to dodge, but the bulk of the mech and its slow response made it impossible. The wire hit her left cheek with a sound like a brick falling to earth, and for a moment her head rang. She brought up the mech’s arm in a rough block, taking the Belter solidly in the ribs and sending them both spinning. Melba grabbed at a handhold, missed it, and then tried for another. The mech’s hand latched on, crushing the metal flat and almost pulling it from the wall, but the Belter was ahead of her, skimming through the air at Melba, teeth bared like a shark. Melba tried to get the mech’s free arm up to bat her away, but the Belter was already too close. She grabbed the front of Melba’s jumpsuit, balling it in a fist, and used the leverage to swing a hard knee into her ribs, punctuating each blow with a word.

“You. Don’t. Get. To hurt. My. Ship.”

Melba felt a rib give way. She reached her tongue for the roof of her mouth, but again she didn’t make the small private circles that would flush her blood with fire. She had to be awake and functional when the fight was over. She gritted her teeth and curled the mech’s free arm in, bending it against itself, and then snapped her hand closed. The Belter screamed. The mech’s claw had her by the shoulder. Melba squeezed again and heard the muffled, wet sound of bone breaking.

She threw the Belter across the room as hard as the motors let her. Where the woman bounced off the far wall, a smear of blood marked it. Melba waited, watching the Belter rotate in the air, directionless and loose as a rag doll sinking to the bottom of a swimming pool. A growing sphere of blood adhered to the woman’s shoulder and neck.

“I do what I want,” Melba said, and the voice sounded like someone else’s.

Carefully, she pulled herself to the control panel. The panel was off, fixed to the deck with a length of adhesive tape. The guts within were a mess of wires and plates. The Rocinante had taken some damage in the catastrophe, but not so much that Melba couldn’t do what was needed. She shrugged out of the mech, cracked her knuckles, traced the major control nodes, and plugged them back into the panel. The local memory check took only a few seconds, and she overrode the full system check. It was nothing she could have done before she left Earth, but Melba Koh had spent months learning about the guts of military ships. This was just the sort of thing Soledad, Stanni, and Bob would have checked on if they’d been working maintenance. It was something Ren would have taught her.

Her fingers curled, stumbling over the keyboard for a moment, but she got it back.

The control specs of the reactor came up. Releasing the magnetic bottle that kept the core from melting through the ship was deliberately designed to be difficult. Changing the limits on the reaction itself until it would eventually outstrip the bottle’s ability to contain it was also hard, but less so. And it would give her a little time to tell Holden what she’d done, then get out of the ship and back toward the Thomas Prince. In the chaos of the day, no one might even know that someone had survived the death of the Rocinante.

A flicker in her peripheral vision was the only warning she had, but it was enough. Melba twisted out of the way, the Belter’s massive wrench hissing through the air where her temple had been. Melba pushed back with her legs, struggling frantically to worm back into the mech. She tensed against the coming attack, but no blows came. She shrugged into the metal and jammed her hands into the waldoes, grabbing the wall and spinning back to the fight just as the Belter looked up from the control panel. Blood was crawling up the woman’s neck, held to her by surface tension, and her smile was triumphant. The control panel flashed red and a screen of code crawled over it too fast to read. The lights in the room went off, and the emergency LEDs flickered on. Melba felt her throat go tight.

The Belter had dumped core. The reaction Melba had come to overload was dissipating in a cloud of gas behind the ship. The Belter’s smile was feral and triumphant.

“Doesn’t change anything,” Melba said. It hurt to talk. “You have torpedoes. I’ll overload one of those.”

“Not in my lifetime,” the Belter said, and attacked again.

Her swing was lopsided, though. Clumsy. The wrench clanged against the mech’s joint, but it didn’t do any damage. The Belter launched herself out of reach just as Melba swung an arm at her. The Belter wasn’t using her injured arm at all, and she left spinning droplets of blood whenever she changed direction.

Melba wondered why the woman didn’t call for help. On little ships like this, opening a communications channel was often as simple as saying it out loud. Either the computer was down, the rest of the crew dead or incapacitated, or it simply hadn’t occurred to her. It didn’t matter. It didn’t change what Melba had to do. She shifted to her right, sliding through the air, moving handhold to handhold, never giving the other woman the chance to catch her unmoored and spin her into the open air at the center of the room. The Belter perched on the wall, her dark eyes darting one way, then other, searching for advantage. There was no fear in them, no sentimentality. Melba had no doubt that if the opportunity came, Naomi would kill her.

She reached the hatch, setting the mech’s claw to grip a handhold, and then slipping one arm free to reach for the door’s controls. It was a provocation, and it worked. The Belter jumped, not straight at Melba, but to the deck above her, then turned, kicked, off, and drove down, her heels aiming for Melba’s head.

Melba drove her arm back into the mech and snapped the free arm up, catching the Belter in mid-flight. Her handhold broke free of the wall, and the pair of them floated together into the open air of the room. The Belter’s injured arm was caught in the mech’s clamp, and she kicked savagely with her heels. One blow connected, and Melba’s vision narrowed for a moment. She pulled the Belter through the air, worrying at her like a terrier with a rat, and then managed to swing the free arm up and catch the woman by the neck.

The Belter’s hand flew up to the clamp, panic in her expression. Her eyes went wide and bright. It would take a twitch of Melba’s fingers to crush the woman’s throat, and they both knew it. A sense of triumph and overwhelming joy washed through her. Holden might not be here, but she had his lover. She would take someone he loved from him just the way he’d taken her own father from her. This wasn’t even fighting anymore. This was justice.

The Belter’s face was flushing red, her breath constricted and rough. Melba grinned, enjoying the moment.

“This is his fault,” she said. “All of this is what he had coming.”

The Belter scratched at the mech’s claw. The blood that came away might have been from the old wound, or the mech’s grip might already have broken the skin. Melba closed her fingers a fraction, the pressure feather light. The mech’s servos buzzed as it closed a millimeter more. The Belter tried to say something, pushing the word out past her failing windpipe, and Melba knew she couldn’t let her speak. She couldn’t let her beg or weep and cry mercy. If she did, Melba suddenly wasn’t sure she could go through with it, and it had to be done. Sympathy is for the weak, her father’s voice whispered in her ear.

“You’re Naomi Nagata,” Melba said. “My name is Clarissa Melpomene Mao. You and your people attacked my family. Everything that’s happened here? Everything that’s going to happen. It’s your fault.”

The light was fading from the Belter’s eyes. Her breath came in ragged gasps. All it would take was a squeeze. All she had to do was make a fist and snap the woman’s neck.

With the last of her strength, the Belter woman lifted her free hand in a gesture of obscenity and defiance.

Melba’s body buzzed like she’d stepped into the blast from a firehose. Her head bent back, her spine arching against itself. Her hands flexed open, her toes curled back until it seemed like they had to break. She heard herself scream. The mech spread its arms to the side and froze, leaving her crucified in the metal form. The buzzing stopped, but she couldn’t move. No matter how much she willed it, her muscles would not respond.

Naomi came to rest against the opposite wall, a knot of panting and blood.

“Who are you?” the Belter croaked.

I am vengeance, Melba thought. I am your death made flesh. But the voice that answered came from behind her.

“Anna. My name’s Anna. Are you all right?”