Abaddon's Gate

Chapter Thirty-One: Melba

She was in her prison cell when they spun up the drum. In its previous life, the cell had been some sort of veterinary ward for large animals. Horses, maybe. Or cows. A dozen stalls, six to a side, with brushed steel walls and bars. Real bars, just like all the old videos, except with a little swinging door at the top where they could shovel in hay. Everything else was antiseptic white. Everything was locked. Her clothes were gone, replaced by a simple pale pink jumpsuit. Her hand terminal was gone. She didn’t miss it. She floated in the center of the space, the walls just out of reach of her fingers and toes. It had taken a dozen attempts, reaching the wall and pushing back more and more gently, to find just the right thrust for the air resistance to stop her out where nothing could touch or be touched. Where she could float and be trapped by floating.

The man in the other cell bounced off his walls. He laughed and he shouted, but mostly he sulked. She ignored him. He was easy to ignore. The air surrounding her had a slight breeze, the way everything did in a ship. She’d heard a story once on the way out about a ship whose circulation failed in the middle of a night shift. The whole crew had died from the zone of exhausted gas that bubbled around them, drowning in their own recycled air. She didn’t think the story was true, because they would have woken up. They would have gasped and thrashed around and gotten up out of their couches, and so they would have lived. People who wanted to live did that. People who wanted to die, on the other hand, just floated.

The Klaxons sounded through the whole ship, the blatting tone resonating through the decks, taking on a voice like a vast trumpet. First, a warning. Then another. Then another. Then, silently, the bars retreated from her, falling away, and the back wall touched her shoulder like it wanted her attention but hesitated to ask. Inch by inch, her skin came to rest against the wall. For almost half a minute, the wall touched her, its energy and her inertia pressing them together like praying hands. The drum’s acceleration was invisible to her. She only felt the spin sweeping her forward, and then because forward, down. Her body slid inch by inch, moving down the wall toward the deck. Her body began to take on weight; the joints in her knees and spine shifting, bearing load. She remembered reading somewhere that a woman coming back from a long time at null g could have grown almost two inches just from the disks in her spine never having the fluid pushed out of them. Between that and the muscle atrophy, coming back to weight—spin, thrust, or gravity—was the occasion for the most injury. Spinal disks were supposed to be pushed on, supposed to have the fluids go into them and back out. Without that, they turned into water balloons, and sometimes, they popped.

Her knee brushed the floor, then pressed into it. It had to have been an hour or more since the Klaxons. Up and down existed again, and she let down take her. She folded against herself, empty as damp paper. There was a drain in the floor, white ceramic unstained by any animal’s blood or piss. The lights overhead flickered and grew steady again. The other prisoner was shouting for something. Food, maybe. Water. A guard to escort him to the head.

It was natural to think of it as the head now. Not the restroom. Not the water closet. She didn’t call for anyone to help her, she just felt her body grow heavier, being pulled down. And because down, out. It wasn’t real gravity, so it wasn’t real weight. It was her mass trying to fly off into the dark and being restrained. Someone came for the other prisoner. She watched the thick plastic boots flicker across her line of sight. Then voices. Words like loyal and mutiny. Phrases like When the time’s right and Restore order. They washed over her and she let them go. Her head hurt a little where her temple pushed against the floor. She wanted to sleep, but she was afraid to dream.

More footsteps, the same boots going the other way, passing her. More voices. The boots coming back. The deep metallic clank of the shackle being taken off the stall’s door. Her body didn’t move, but her attention focused. The guard was different. A woman with broad shoulders and a gun in her hand. She looked at Melba, shrugged, and put a hand terminal into her field of vision.

The man on the screen didn’t look like a cop. His skin was pale brown, like cookie dough. There was something strange about the shape of his face—broad chin, dark eyes, wrinkles in his forehead and the corners of his mouth—that she couldn’t place until he spoke and she saw him in motion. Then it was clear he was lying down and looking up at the camera.

“My name’s Carlos Baca,” the lying-down man said. “I’m in charge of security on the Behemoth. So this prison you’re in? It’s mine.”

All right, Melba thought.

“You, now. I’m thinking you got a story to tell. The UN records of your DNA says you’re Melba Koh. A bunch of people I’ve got no reason to disbelieve say you’re Clarissa Mao. The XO of the Rocinante says you tried to kill her, and this Russian priest lady’s backing her story. And then there’s this sound engineer who says you hired him to place interruption electronics on the Rocinante.” He went quiet for a moment. “Any of that ringing a bell?”

The case on the hand terminal was green ceramic. Or maybe enameled metal. Not plastic. A hairline scratch in the screen made an extra mark across the man’s cheek, like a pirate’s dueling scar in a kid’s book.

“All right, how about this,” he said. “Doctor says you’ve got a modified endocrine bundle. The kind of things terrorists use when they need to do something showy and hard to detect. And, you know, they don’t give a shit if it turns their nervous system into soup in a few years. Not the kind of thing a maintenance tech could afford. Or have much reason to get.”

It felt strange, the weight of her head pressing against the floor and looking down from the camera into the man’s face both at the same time. Partly, she supposed that was from being weightless for so long. Her brain was still getting used to the spin gravity after relying on visual clues, and now here was this anomalous visual cue. She knew intellectually what it was, but the special analysis part of her brain still gnawed at it.

The man on the screen—he’d said his name, but she didn’t remember it—pressed his lips together, then coughed once. It was a wet sound, like he was fighting off pneumonia.

“I don’t think you understand how much trouble you’re in,” he said. “There’s people accusing you of blowing up an Earth military vessel, and the case they’re building is pretty goddamn good. You can take it from me, the UN has no sense of humor about that kind of thing. They will kill you. You understand that? They’ll put you in front of a military tribunal, listen to a couple lawyers for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. Then they’ll blow your brains out. I can help you avoid that, but you have to talk to me.

“You know what I think? I don’t think you’re a professional. I think you’re an amateur. You made a bunch of amateur mistakes, and things got away from you. You tell me if I’m right, and we’ll go from there. But you keep playing this catatonia shit, and you’re going to get killed. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

He had a good voice. It had what her singing coach would have called a thorough range. Deep as gravel, but with reedy overtones. It was the kind of voice she’d expect in a man who’d been well bruised by the world. Her singing voice had always been a little reedy too, like her father’s. Petyr, poor thing, had never been able to hold a melody. The others—Michael, Anthea, Julie, Mother—had all had very pure voices. Like flutes. The problem with a flute was that it couldn’t help being pure. Even sorrow sounded posed and over-lovely when the flute was expressing it. Reeds had that deeper buzz, that dirtiness, and it gave the sound authenticity. She and her father were reeds.

“Corin?” the man on the screen said. “Does she understand what I’m saying?”

The woman with the gun picked up the hand terminal, looked down at Melba, and then into the screen.

“I don’t think so, chief.”

“The doctor said there wasn’t any brain damage.”

“Did,” the woman agreed. “That don’t make her right, though.”

The sigh carried.

“Okay,” the man’s voice said. “We’re going to have to go from a different angle. I got an idea, but you should come back in first.”

“Sa sa,” the woman said. She stepped out of the cell. The bars closed again. They were narrow enough to keep a horse’s hoof from passing through. She could imagine a horse trying to kick, getting its leg stuck, panicking. That would be bad. Better to avoid the problem. Wiser. Easier to stay out than to get out. Someone had said that to her once, but she didn’t know who.

“Hey. Hey,” the other prisoner said. He wasn’t shouting, just talking loud enough that his voice carried. “Was that true? You have glandular implants? Can you break the door? I’m the captain of this ship. If you can get me out of here, I can help you.”

Julie had been the best singer, except that she wouldn’t do it. Didn’t like performing. Father had been the performer. He’d always been the one to lead when there were songs to be sung. He was always the one to direct the poses when the family pictures were taken. He was a man who knew what he wanted and how to get it. Only he was in prison now. Not even a name, only a number. She wondered whether his cell was like hers. It would be nice if it was. Only his would be under a full g, of course. The spin gravity wasn’t even up to a half g. Maybe a third, maybe even less. Like Mars or Ceres. Funny that of all the places humans lived, the Earth was always the highest gravity. It was like if you could escape from home, you could escape from anything.

“Are you there? Are you awake? I saw them bring you in. Help me, and I’ll help you. Amnesty. I can get you amnesty. And protection. They can’t extradite from Ceres.”

That wasn’t true, and she knew it. Annoyance almost moved her to speak. Moved her to move. But not quite. The floor was a single sheet of polymer plating, formed to slant down to the drain. With her head against the floor like this, the drain was hardly more than a black line in a field of white. A crow on a frozen lake.

“I have been taken prisoner in an illegal mutiny,” the man said. “We can help each other.”

She wasn’t entirely sure that she could be helped. Or if she could, what she would be helped to do. She remembered wanting something once. Holden. That was right. She’d wanted him dead and worse than dead. Her fantasies of it were so strong, they were like memories. But no, she had done it. Everyone had hated him. They’d tried to kill him. But something else had gone wrong, and they’d thought that Julie did it.

She’d been so close. If she could have killed the Rocinante, they would never have found her. If she’d died on it, they’d never have been sure, and Holden would have gone down in history as the smug, self-righteous bastard that he was. But her father would have known. All that way away, he’d have heard what happened, and he would have guessed that she’d done it. His daughter. The one he could finally be proud of.

It occurred to her that the other prisoner had gone quiet. That was fine. He was annoying. Her knees ached. Her temple hurt where it pressed against the floor. They called bedsores pressure sores. She wondered how long it took for skin to macerate just from not moving. Probably a pretty long time, and she was basically healthy. She wondered how long it had been since she’d moved. It had been a long time. She found she was oddly proud of that.

The footsteps came again. More of them, this time. The plastic boots made a satisfying clump-clump, but there were other ones now. High, clicking footsteps, like a dog’s claws on tile. She felt a tiny flicker of curiosity, like a candle in a cathedral. The boots came, and with them, little blue pumps. An older woman’s ankles. The bars clanked and swung open. The pumps hesitated at the threshold, and then came in. Once they were in motion, the steps were confident. Sure.

The woman in the pumps sat, her back against the wall. Tilly Fagan looked down at her. Her hair was dyed, and her lipstick the same improbable red that made her lips look fuller than they were.

“Claire, honey?” The words were soft and uncomfortable. “It’s me.”

Tension crawled up her back and into her cheeks. Tension, and resentment at the tension. Aunt Tilly didn’t have any right to be here. She shouldn’t have been.

Tilly put a hand out, reaching down and stroking her head like it was a cat. The first human touch she could remember since she’d come to. The first gentle one she could remember at all. When Tilly spoke, her voice was low and soft and full of regret.

“They found your friend.”

I don’t have a friend, she thought, and then something deep under her sternum shifted and went hollow. Ren. They’d found Ren. She pulled her arm out from under her body, pressed the back of her hand against her mouth. The tears were warm and unwelcome and thick as a flood. They’d found Ren. They’d opened her tool chest and found his bones and now Soledad would know. And Bob and Stanni. They’d know what she’d done. The first sob was like a cough, and then the one after it and the one after, and Tilly’s arms were around her. And God help her, she was screaming and crying into Tilly Fagan’s thighs while the woman stroked her hair and made little hushing sounds.

“I’m sorry,” she shrieked. The words ripped at her throat. They had hooks on them. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“I know, honey. I know.”

She had her arms around Tilly’s waist now, burying her face against her side, holding on to her like Tilly’s body could keep her from sinking down. From drowning. The guard said something, and she felt Tilly shaking her head no, the motion translated through their bodies.

“I did it,” she said. “I killed him. I thought I had to. I told him to look at the readout so that he’d bend, so that he’d bend his neck, and he did. And I—and I—and I—Oh, God, I’m going to puke.”

“Trashy people puke,” Tilly said. “Ladies are unwell.”

It made her laugh. Despite everything, Clarissa laughed, and then she put her head down again and cried. Her chest hurt so badly she was sure something really was breaking. Aortic aneurysm, pulmonary embolism, something. Sorrow couldn’t really feel like a heart breaking, could it? That was just a phrase.

It went on forever. And then past that, and then it slowed. Her body was as limp as a rag. Tilly’s blouse was soaked with tears and snot and saliva, but she was still sitting just as she’d been. Her hand still ran through Clarissa’s hair. Her fingernails traced the curve of her ear.

“You put the bomb on the Seung Un,” Tilly said, “and framed Jim Holden for it.”

It wasn’t a question or an accusation. She didn’t want Clarissa to confess, just to confirm. Clarissa nodded against Tilly’s lap. When she spoke, her voice clicked and her throat felt thick and raw.

“He hurt Daddy. Had to do something.”

Tilly sighed.

“Your father is a first-class shit,” she said, and because it was her saying it, it didn’t hurt to hear.

“I’ve got to tell the chief,” the guard said, apology in her voice. “I mean about what happened. He wants me to report in.”

“I’m not stopping you,” Tilly said.

“You need to come with me,” the guard said. “I can’t leave you there with her. It’s not safe.”

A flash of panic lit her mind. She couldn’t be alone. Not now. They couldn’t leave her locked up and alone.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tilly said. “You go do whatever it is you need to do. I’ll be here with Claire.”

“Ah. That girl killed a lot of people, ma’am.”

The silence was just a beat, and without shifting her head, Clarissa knew what look was on Tilly’s face. The guard cleared her throat.

“I’ll have to lock the door, ma’am.”

“Do what you need to, Officer,” Tilly said.

The bars shifted and crashed. The lock clacked home. The footsteps retreated. Clarissa wept for Ren. Maybe the others would come later. The dead soldiers on the Seung Un. Holden’s lover whom she’d beaten and brutalized. All the men and women who’d died because they’d followed Holden through the Ring. She might have tears for them, but now it was only Ren, and she didn’t think she would stop in her lifetime.

“I deserve to die,” she said. “I’ve become a very bad person.”

Tilly didn’t disagree, but she didn’t stop cradling her either.

“There’s someone I’d like you to talk to,” she said.