Abaddon's Gate

Chapter Forty-Six: Clarissa

“What’s going on, Jojo?”

“I think we’ve got a problem, sir. Take a look.”

Monica Stuart appeared on the monitors, her professionally calm face like a being from a different reality.

“Today,” she said, her hands folded in her lap and a twinkle in her eye, “we’ll tell you how to go home.”

“What. The. Fuck!” Ashford shouted, dashing his hand across the display. “What is this?”

“They’re making a new broadcast, sir,” the security man said. Clarissa watched Ashford turn and stare at him, watched the man shrivel under the weight of his gaze.

“Exclusive to Radio Free Slow Zone,” Monica said, “we have reason to believe that if we in the united human fleet can reduce our energy output low enough to no longer appear threatening—”

“Shut her down,” Ashford said. “Call everyone that’s still in the drum and shut that feed off. Get me Ruiz. I want power cut to that whole section if we have to.”

“Is this something we need to concern ourselves with?” Cortez asked. His voice had an overtone of whining. “What they do or say can’t matter now, can it?”

“This is my ship!” Ashford shouted. “I’m in control.”

“Once we’ve destroyed the Ring, though—”

Clarissa put a hand on Cortez’s shoulder and shook her head once.

“He’s the father,” she said. “The ship is his house.”

“Thank you,” Ashford said to her, but with his eyes still on Cortez. “I’m glad that someone here understands how this works.”

“Suppression team is dispatched,” Jojo said. “You want me to pull from the guard units too?”

“Whatever it takes,” Ashford said. “I want you to get it done.”

On the screen, the view shifted, and Anna’s face filled the screen. Her hair was pulled back, and someone had given her makeup in a way that made her look like everyone else in broadcast. Clarissa felt a strange tug in her chest, resentment and alarm. Get out of there, she thought at the screen. God’s not going to stop bullets for you.

“The idea,” Anna said, “is that the station has identified us as an ongoing threat. Its actions toward us have been based in a kind of fear. Or, that’s wrong. A caution. We are as unknown and unpredictable to it as it is to us. And so we have reason to believe that if we appear to be less threatening, it may relax its constraints.”

The camera cut back to Monica Stuart, nodding and looking sober. All the physical cues that would indicate Anna was a serious woman with important opinions.

“And what is your plan, exactly?” Monica asked.

Anna’s laughter bubbled. “I wouldn’t call the plan mine. What we’re thinking is that if we power down the reactors in all the ships and reduce energy being used, the station can be induced to… well, to see us less as a threat and more as a curiosity. I mean, see this all from its perspective. A gate opened, and whatever it had been expecting to come through, instead there came a ship running ballistic at tremendous speed. Then a flotilla of new ships behind that, and armed soldiers who went aboard the station itself with weapons firing. If something came to us that way, we’d call it an invasion.”

“And so by giving some indication that we aren’t escalating the attack…?”

“We give whatever we’re dealing with here the opportunity to not escalate against us,” Anna said. “We’ve been thinking of the protomolecule and all the things that came from it as—”

The screen went dark. Ashford scowled at his control boards, calling up and dismissing information with hard, percussive taps. Cortez floated beside Clarissa, frowning. Humiliated. He had engineered Ashford’s escape and reconquest of the Behemoth, and she could see in the older man’s eyes that it wasn’t what he’d expected it to be. She wondered if her own father had that same expression in his cell back on Earth, or wherever it was they’d put him.

“Ruiz,” Ashford snapped. “Report. What’s our status?”

“I still have half an hour, sir,” the woman said through the connection.

“I didn’t ask how much time you had left,” the captain said. “I asked for a report.”

“The conductant is in place and curing,” the woman said. “It looks like it’ll be done on time. I’ve found a place in the breaker system that Sam… that Sam put in a power cutout.”

“You’ve replaced that?”

“I did, but I don’t know if there are others. She could have sabotaged the whole circuit.”

“Well,” Ashford said. “You have half an hour to check it.”

“That’s what I’m doing. Sir.”

Ashford tapped the control panel again. Clarissa found herself wishing he’d put the newsfeed back on. She wanted to know what Anna was saying, even if it was only as a way to pass the time. The air on the bridge wasn’t as hot and close as it had been in the drum, but the coolness wasn’t comforting. If anything, it seemed to underscore the time they’d been waiting. Her belly was beginning to complain with hunger, and she had to imagine that the others were feeling the same. They were holding the bridge of the largest spacecraft humanity had ever built, trapped in the starless dark by an alien power they barely began to comprehend, but they were still constrained by the petty needs of flesh, and their collective blood sugar was getting pretty low. She wondered what it said about her that she’d watched a women shot to death not two hours before and all she could think about now was lunch. She wondered what Anna would have thought.

“Have we shut those bitches up yet?” Ashford snapped.

“The suppression teams are arriving at the colonial administrative offices, sir,” Jojo said. And then, a moment later, “They’re encountering some resistance.”

Ashford smiled.

“Do we have targeting?” he asked.

“Sir?” one of the other guards said.

“Are the comm laser’s targeting systems online?”

“Um. Yes. They’re responsive.”

“Well, while they mop up downstairs, let’s line up our shot, shall we?”

“Yes, sir.”

Clarissa kept hold of a handle on the wall absently, watching the captain and his men coordinating. It was hard for her to remember how small the Ring was, and how vast the distances they’d traveled to be here. She had to admire the precision and care that they would need to destroy it. The beauty of it was almost surgical. Behind her, the security station popped and clicked. Among the alerts, she heard the murmur of a familiar voice, lifted in fear. She looked around. No one was paying any attention to her, so she pushed herself gently back.

The security station monitor was still on the newsfeed. Monica Stuart looked ashen under her makeup, her jaw set and her lips thin. Anna, beside her, was squeezing the tip of one thumb over and over anxiously. Another man was propped between them in a medical gurney.

“—anything we can to cooperate,” the earnest man was saying into the camera.

“Thank you, Lieutenant Williams,” Monica Stuart said. “I hate to add a complicating note to all this, but I’ve just been informed that armed men have arrive outside the studio and we are apparently under attack at the moment.” She laughed nervously, which Clarissa thought was probably newsfeed anchor code for, Oh my God, I’m going to die on the air. Anna’s voice came in a moment before the cameras cut to her.

“This is an extreme situation,” Anna said, “but I think something like this is probably going on in every ship that’s listening to us right now. We’re at the point where we, as a community, have to make a choice. And we’re scared and grieving and traumatized. None of us is sure what the right thing to do would be. And—”

In the background, the unmistakable popping of slug throwers interrupted Anna for a moment. Her face paled, but she only cleared her throat and went on.

“And violence is a response to that fear. I hope very much that we can come together, though, and—”

“She’ll go down talking,” Cortez said. Clarissa hadn’t heard him come in behind her, hadn’t sensed him approaching. “I have a tremendous respect for that woman.”

“But you think she’s wrong.”

“I think her optimism is misplaced,” Cortez said.

“—if we do escalate our attacks on the station and the Ring,” Anna said, “we have to expect that the cycle will go on, getting bigger and more dangerous until one side or the other is destroyed, and I wish—”

“What do you think she’d say about your pessimism?” Clarissa asked.

Cortez looked up at her, his eyes wide with surprise and amusement. “My pessimism?”

Clarissa fought the sudden, powerful urge to apologize. “What else would you call it?”

“We’ve looked the devil in the eyes out here,” Cortez said. “I would call it realism.”

You didn’t look into the devil’s eyes, she thought. You saw a bunch of people die. You have no idea what real evil is. Her memory seemed to stutter, and for a moment, she was back on the Cerisier, Ren’s skull giving way under her palm. There’s a difference between tragedy and evil, and I am that difference.

“Captain! They’re taking fire at engineering!”

Cortez turned back toward the bridge and launched himself awkwardly through the air. Clarissa took a last look at Anna on the screen, leaning forward and pressing the air with her hands as if she could push calm and sanity through the camera and into the eyes of anyone watching. Then she followed Cortez.

“How many down?” Ashford demanded.

“No information, sir,” Jojo said. “I have a video feed.”

The monitor blinked to life. The engineering deck flickered, pixelated, and came back. A dozen of Ashford’s men were training guns at a pressure door that was stuck almost a third of the way closed. Ashford strained against his belts, trying to get closer to the image. Something—a tiny object or a video feed artifact—floated across the screen, and everything went white. When the image came back, Ashford said something obscene.

Armed people poured through the opening like sand falling through an hourglass. Clarissa recognized Jim Holden by the way he moved, the intimacy of long obsession making him as obvious as her own family would have been. And so the tall figure beside him had to be Naomi, whom Melba had almost killed. And then, near the end, the only one walking in the null-g environment, Carlos Baca. Bull. The head of security, and Ashford’s nemesis. He walked slowly across the deck, his real legs strapped together and his mechanical ones lumbering step by painful step. One of Ashford’s people tried to fire and was shot, his body twisting in the air in a way that reminded her of seeing a caterpillar cut in half. She realized that the sound she was hearing was Ashford cursing under his breath. He didn’t seem to stop for breath.

“Lock down the perimeter,” Ashford yelled. “Ruiz! Ruiz! We have to fire. We have to fire now!”

“I can’t,” the woman’s voice said. “We don’t have a connection.”

“I don’t care if it’s stable, I have to fire now.”

“It’s not unstable, sir,” the woman said. “It’s not there.”

Ashford slammed his fist against the control panel and grimaced. She didn’t know if he’d broken his knuckles, but she wouldn’t have been surprised. For the next fifteen minutes, they watched the battle play out, the invading force sweeping through the engineering deck. Clarissa tried to keep tabs on where Holden and Naomi were, the way she might watch a dramatic show for one or two favorite minor actors.

“Redirect the suppression teams,” Ashford said.

“Yes… ah…”

Ashford turned toward Jojo. The guard’s face was pale. “I’m having trouble getting responses from the controls. I think… I think they’re locking us out.”

Ashford’s rage crested and then sank into a kind of deathly calm. He floated in his couch, his hands pressed together, the tips of both index fingers against his lower lip.

“Environmental controls aren’t responding,” Jojo said, his voice taking on the timbre of near panic. “They’re changing the atmosphere, sir.”

“Environmental suits,” Ashford said. “We’ll need environmental suits.”

Clarissa sighed and launched herself across the cabin to the open access panels.

“What are you doing?” Ashford shouted at her. She didn’t answer.

The internal structure of the Behemoth wasn’t that different from any other bridge, though it did have more redundancy than she’d expected. If it had been left in its original form, it would have been robust, but the requirements of a battleship were more rigorous than the elegant generation ship had been, and some of the duplicate systems had been repurposed to accommodate the PDCs, gauss guns, and torpedoes. She turned a monitor on, watching the nitrogen levels rise in the bridge. Without the buildup of carbon dioxide, they wouldn’t even feel short of breath. Just a little light-headed, and then out. She wondered whether Holden would let them die that way. Probably Holden wouldn’t have. Bull, she wouldn’t bet on.

It didn’t matter. Ren had trained her well. She disabled remote access to their environmental systems with the deactivation of a single circuit.

“Sir! I have atmo control back!” Jojo shouted.

“Well, get us some goddamn air, then!” Ashford shouted.

Clarissa looked at her work with a sense of calm pride. It wasn’t pretty, and she wouldn’t have wanted to leave it that way for long, but she’d done what needed doing and it hadn’t shut down the system. That was pretty good, given the circumstances.

“How much have you got?” Ashford snapped.

“I’ve got mechanical, atmosphere… everything local to command, sir.”

Like a thank-you would kill you, Clarissa thought as she floated back toward the door to the security station.

“Can we do it to them?” Ashford asked. “Can we shut off their air?”

“No,” Jojo said. “We’re just local. But at least we don’t need those suits.”

Ashford’s scowl changed its character without ever becoming a smile.

“Suits,” he said. “Jojo. Do we have access to the powered armor Pa took from those Martian marines?”

Jojo blinked, then nodded sharply. “Yes, sir.”

“I want you to find four people who’ll fit in them. Then I want you to go down to engineering and get me control of my ship.”

Jojo saluted, grinning. “Yes, sir.”

“And Jojo? Anyone gets in your way, you kill them. Understand?”

“Five by five.”

The guard unstrapped and launched himself toward the hallway. She heard voices in the hall, people preparing for battle. We have to expect the cycle will go on, getting bigger and more dangerous until one side or the other is destroyed. Who said that? It seemed like something she’d just heard. Under local control the ventilation system had a slightly different rhythm, the exhalations from recyclers coming a few seconds closer together and lasting half as long. She wondered why that would be. It was the sort of thing Ren would have known. It was the sort of thing she only noticed now.

Ren. She tried to imagine him now. Tried to see herself the way he would see her. She was going to die. She was going to die and make everyone else safe by doing it. It wouldn’t bring him back to life, but it would make his dying mean something. And it would avenge him. In her mind’s eye, she still couldn’t see him smiling about it.

Half an hour later, the four people Jojo had selected came into the room awkwardly. The power of the suits made moving without crashing into things difficult. The cowling shone black and red, catching the light and diffusing it. She thought of massive beetles.

“We’ve got no ammunition, sir,” one of them said. Jojo. His voice was made artificially flat and crisp by the suit’s speakers.

“Then beat them to death,” Ashford said. “Your main objective is the reactor. If all you can get is enough for us to fire the laser, we still win. After that, I want Bull and his allies killed. Anyone who’s there that isn’t actively fighting alongside you, count as an enemy. If they aren’t for us, they’re against us.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sir!” one of the men at the controls said.

“What?”

“I think we have someone in the external elevator shaft, sir.”

“Assault force?”

“No, but they may be trapping it.”

Clarissa turned away.

In the security station, the newsfeed was still spooling. Women’s voices punctuated by occasional gunfire. Ashford’s men hadn’t taken the station yet. She wondered whether he’d let his men gun down Monica Stuart and Anna on a live feed where everyone could see it. Then she wondered how he’d prevent it from happening even if he wanted to. It wasn’t like there would be any consequences. If they won and blew the Ring, they’d all die here one way or another. A few premature deaths along the way should be neither here nor there. When what came next didn’t matter, anybody could do anything. Nothing had consequences.

Except that everyone always dies. You’re distracting yourself from something.

Cortez floated in the security booth itself. His face lit from below by the monitor. He looked over as she approached, his smile gentle and calm.

“Ashford’s sending men down to retake engineering,” she said.

“Good. That’s very good.”

“—on the Corvusier,” a brown-skinned woman was saying. “You know me. You can trust me. All we’re asking is that you shut down the reactor for a few hours and pull the batteries from the emergency backups. Power down the systems, so we can get out of here.”

“They value their own lives so much,” Cortez said. “They don’t think about the price their survival brings with it. The price for everybody.”

“They don’t,” Clarissa agreed, but something sat poorly with the words. Something itched. “Do you believe in redemption?”

“Of course I do,” Cortez said. “Everything in my life has taught me that there is nothing that fully removes us from the possibility of God’s grace, though sometimes the sacrifices we must make are painfully high.”

“—if we can just come together,” Anna said on the screen, leaning in toward the camera. A lock of red hair had come out of place and fell over her left eye. “Together, we can solve this.”

“What about you?” Cortez asked. He put his hand against her back. “Do you believe in redemption?”

“No,” she said. “Just sacrifice.”

“Mao,” Ashford barked from the other room. “Get out here.”

Clarissa floated to the doorway. The captain looked grayer than he had before. There was swelling around his eyes that would have been dark circles if they’d had any gravity.

“Captain?”

“You understand how all this crap is wired up.”

“A little,” she said.

“I’ve got something I need you to do.”