Abaddon's Gate

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 farthest 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.

In the chaos it was hard to say, but at a guess, Bull thought he still had between fifteen and twenty people standing. It wasn’t great, but it could have been worse. Once they got into engineering, things would open up again. There would be cover. The few meters beyond the second door, though, would be a kill zone. It was the space all his people had to go through to get anyplace else. If Ashford’s people had any tactical sense at all, they’d be there, waiting for the first sign of movement.

It was a standoff, and he was going to have to be the one to break it. Verbinski skimmed by, as comfortable weightless as a fish in water. He turned, tapped his feet against the wall, and came to something close to a dead stop.

“Going to be a bear making it through there,” the Martian said.

“I was just thinking that,” Bull said.

Verbinski looked at the half-closed door like a carpenter sizing up a board.

“Be nice if we had some explosives,” he said. “Something to clear the area a little. Give us some breathing room.”

“You trying to tell me something, Sergeant?”

Verbinski shrugged and took a thin black cassette out of his pocket. Bull hoisted his eyebrows.

“Concussion?” he said.

“Two thousand kilojoules. We call them spine crackers.”

“You smuggled arms onto my ship, Sergeant?”

“Just felt a little naked without ’em.”

“I’ll overlook it this time,” Bull said and raised his hands, rallying the troops to him. They took cover behind the half-closed door. Verbinski crawled out onto the surface and peeked over the side, out and back fast as a lizard’s tongue. Half a dozen bullets split the air where his head had been. The Martian floated in the air, his legs in lotus position, as he armed the little black grenade. Bull waited, Holden and Corin at his side.

“Just to check,” Holden said. “We’re throwing grenades into the place that controls the reactor?”

“We are,” Bull said.

“So the worst-case scenario?”

“Worst-case scenario is we lose and Ashford kills the solar system,” Bull said. “Losing containment on the reactor and we all die is actually second worst.”

“Never a sign things have gone well,” Holden said.

Verbinski held up a fist, and everyone in the group put their hands over their ears. Verbinski did something sharp with his fingers and flicked the black cassette through the gap between the door and its frame. The detonation came almost at once. Bull felt like he’d been dropped into the bottom of a swimming pool. His vision pulsed in time with his heart, but he pushed the joysticks forward. His ears rang and he felt his consciousness starting to slip a little. As he maneuvered his mech through the space into engineering, it occurred to him that he was going to be lucky if he didn’t pass out during the fight. He had a broken spine and his lungs were half full of crap. No one would have thought less of him if he’d stayed behind. Except he didn’t care what people thought about him. It was Ashford who cared about that.

The fight on the other side was short. The grenade had been much worse for the defenders. Half of the soldiers had dropped their weapons before all of Bull’s people made it in. Only Garza had held out, holding the long corridor between main engineering and the communications array board until Corin had stepped into the space and shot him in the bridge of the nose, doing with a pistol what would have been a difficult shot with a scoped rifle. They took half a dozen of Ashford’s men alive, the prisoners zip-tied to handholds in the bulkheads. None of them had been Bull’s.

They found Ruiz under a machining table, curled with her arms around her knees. When she came out, her skin had a gray cast to it, and her hands were trembling. Naomi moved around her, shifting from a display panel to the readouts on the different bits of equipment, checking what was being reported in one place against what it said elsewhere. Holden hovered behind her like the tail of a kite.

“Anamarie,” Bull said. “You all right?”

Ruiz nodded.

“Thank you,” she said, and then before she could say anything else, Naomi sloped in, stopping herself against the desk.

“Was this where Sam was working?” she asked.

Ruiz looked at her for a moment, uncomprehending. When she nodded, it seemed almost tentative.

“What are you seeing?” Bull said. “Can you shut it down?”

“If you just want to drop the core, I can probably do that,” Naomi said. “But I don’t know if I can get her started again, and there are some folks on the ship who might want to keep breathing. Controlled shutdown would be better.”

Bull smiled.

“We need to shut everything down,” Holden said. “The reactor. The power grid. Everything.”

“I know, honey,” Naomi said, and Holden looked chagrined.

“Sorry.”

In one of the far corners of the deck, someone yelped. Corin came gliding across the open space, serenely holding in a choke an Earther Bull didn’t recognize. It occurred to him that she might be having too much fun with this part. Might not be healthy.

“I don’t know what Sam put in place to sabotage the comm laser,” Naomi said. “I have to do an audit before I can undo any of it. And without—” Naomi stopped. Her jaw slid forward. She cleared her throat, swallowed. “Without Sam, it’s going to be harder. This was her ship.”

“Can you just take the laser off-line?” Bull asked.

“Sure,” Naomi said. “As long as no one’s shooting at me while I’m doing it.”

“And how about turning up the nitrogen in the command enough that everyone up there takes a little nap?”

“I can help with that,” Ruiz said. Her voice sounded a little stronger.

“All right,” Bull said. “Here’s what we’re doing. Nagata’s in charge of engineering. Anything she says, you do.” Ruiz nodded, too numb to protest. “Your first priority is get the laser off-line so none of those pendejos in control can fire it. Your second priority is to tweak the environmental controls on the command deck. Your third priority is to shut down the ship so we can bring it back up, see if Mister Holden’s ghost is going to keep its promises.”

“Sir,” Naomi said.

“Corin!” Bull shouted. The coughing stopped him for a moment. It still wasn’t violent, and it didn’t bring anything up. He didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one. Corin launched herself to the control board. “You and Holden head up the external elevator shaft with a handful of zip ties. When everyone up there’s asleep, you two make sure they don’t get confused and hurt themselves.”

Corin’s smile was cold. Might be that Ashford wasn’t a problem he’d have to solve. Bull tried to bring himself to care one way or the other, but his body felt like he’d been awake for a week.

“Why am I doing that?” Holden asked.

“To keep you out of her way,” Bull said. “We’ll keep your XO safe. We need her.”

He could see Holden’s objections gathering like a storm, but Naomi stopped them. “It’s okay.” And that seemed to be that.

“Alex is going to the Roci to shut down whatever we left on,” Holden said, shrugging. “I’ll help him with the EVA suit before I go.”

“Okay,” Bull said gravely. He was willing to pretend they’d struck some kind of compromise, if that helped. He heard the sound of men laughing and recognized the timbre of Sergeant Verbinski’s voice. “Excuse me.”

The mech clanked across the deck, magnetic locks clinging and releasing. The others all floated freely in the air, but with three-quarters of his body dead and numb, Bull knew he wouldn’t be able to maneuver. It was like he was the only one still constrained by gravity.

Verbinski and his squad were in an alcove near the supply shop. One of the marines had been shot in the elbow. His forearm was a complication of bone and meat, but he was laughing and talking while the others dressed the wound. Bull wondered how much they’d doped him. He caught Verbinski’s gaze and nodded him closer.

“You and your people,” Bull said when they were out of earshot. “You did good work back there.”

“Thank you,” Verbinski said. The pride showed right through the humble. “We do what we can. If we’d had our suits, now—”

“Thing is,” Bull said. “Those grenades? How many of them you still have on you?”

“Half a dozen,” Verbinski said.

“Yeah.” Bull sighed. “Nothing personal, but I’m going to need to confiscate those.”

Verbinski looked shocked for a moment. Then he laughed.

“Always the hardass,” he said.