Текст книги "Abaddon's Gate"
Автор книги: James S.A. Corey
Соавторы: Daniel Abraham
Жанр:
Научная фантастика
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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 31 страниц)
Crippled.
With a sick feeling, he walked his fingertips down his throat, to his chest, and to the invisible line where the skin stopped feeling like his own and turned into something else. Meat. His mind skittered off the thought. He’d been hurt before and gotten back from it. He’d damn near died four or five different times. Something always happened that got him back on his feet. He always got lucky. This time would be the same. Somehow, somehow he’d get back. Have another story to tell and no one to tell it to.
He knew he was lying to himself, but what else could he do? Apart from stand aside. And maybe he should. Let Pa take care of it. Give Ashford his shot. No one would give him any shit if he took the medical coma. Not even Fred. Hell, Fred would probably have told him to do it. Ordered him.
Bull closed his eyes. He’d sleep or he wouldn’t. Or he’d drift into some half-lucid place that wasn’t either. One of the doctors was weeping in the corridor, a slow, autonomic sound, more like being sick than expressing sorrow. Someone coughed wetly. Pneumonia was the worst danger now. Null g messed with the sensors that triggered the kinds of coughing that actually cleared lungs until it was too late. After that, strokes and embolisms as the blood that gravity should have helped to drain pooled and clotted instead. On all the other ships, it was the same. Survivable injuries made deadly just by floating. If they could just get under thrust. Get some gravityc
We’re all on the same team, Pa said in his half drowse, and Bull was suddenly completely awake. He scooped up his hand terminal, but Ashford and Pa were both refusing connections. It was the middle of their night. He considered putting through an emergency override, but didn’t. Not yet. First, he tried Sam.
“Bull?” she said. Her skin looked grayish, and there were lines at the corners of her mouth that hadn’t been there before. Her one blood-red eye seemed like an omen.
“Hey, Sam. Look, we need to get all the other crews from all the other ships onto the Behemoth. Bring everyone together so no one does anything stupid.”
“You want a pony too?”
“Sure,” Bull said. “Thing is, we got to give them a reason to come here. Something they need and they can’t get anyplace else.”
“Sounds great,” Sam said, shaking her head. “Maybe I’m not at my cognitive best here, sweetie, but are you asking me for something?”
“They’ve all got casualties. They all need gravity. I’m asking you how long it would take you to spin up the drum.”
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 Princeuntil 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 Princeand hated Rocinante, all her burdens seemed light.
The EVA suit had a simple heads-up display that outlined the Rocinantewith 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 Princeor 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 Rocinantegrew 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 Rocinantehiding 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 Rocinantewas 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 Rocinantehad 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 Rocinantehad 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?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Anna
The woman—Naomi Nagata—replied by coughing up a red glob of blood.
“I’m an idiot, of course you’re not all right,” Anna said, then floated over to her, pausing to push the still-twitching Melba to the other side of the compartment. Girl and mech drifted across the room, bounced off a bulkhead, and came to a stop several meters away.
“Emergency locker,” Naomi croaked, and pointed at a red panel on one wall. Anna opened it to find flashlights, tools, and a red-and-white bag not too different from the one Tilly had been carrying on the Prince. She grabbed it. While Anna extracted a package of gauze and a can of coagulant spray for the nasty wound on Naomi’s shoulder, the Belter pulled out several hypo ampules and began injecting herself with them one at a time, her movements efficient and businesslike. Anna felt like something was tearing in her shoulders every time she wrapped the gauze around Naomi’s upper torso, and she almost asked for another shot for herself.
Years before, Anna had taken a seminar on ministering to people with drug addictions. The instructor, a mental health nurse named Andrew Smoot, had made the point over and over that the drugs didn’t only give pleasure and pain. They changed cognition, stripped away the inhibitions, and more often than not, someone’s worst habits or tendencies—what he called their “pathological move”—got exaggerated. An introvert would often withdraw, an aggressive person would grow violent. Someone impulsive would become even more so.
Anna had understood the idea intellectually. Almost three hours into her spacewalk, the amphetamines Tilly had given her began to fade and a clarity she hadn’t known she lacked began to return to her. She felt she had a deeper, more personal insight into what her own pathological move might be.
Anna had spent only a few years living among Belters and outer planets inhabitants. But that was long enough to know that their philosophy boiled down to “what you don’t know kills you.” No one growing up on Earth ever really understood that, no matter how much time they later spent in space. No Belter would have thrown on a space suit and EVA pack and rushed out the airlock without first knowing exactly what the environment on the other side was like. It wouldn’t even occur to them to do so.
Worse, she’d run out that airlock without stopping to send a message to Nono. You don’t ask for permission, you ask for forgivenessechoed in her head. If she died doing this, Nono would have it carved as her epitaph. She’d never get that last chance to say she was sorry.
The brightly colored display, which always seemed to float at the edge of her vision no matter which way her face was pointed, had said that she had 83 percent of her air supply remaining. Not knowing how long a full tank would last robbed that information of some much-needed context.
As she’d tried to slow her breathing back down and keep from panicking, the gauge ticked to 82 percent. How long had it been at 83 percent before it did? She couldn’t remember. A vague feeling of nausea made her think about how bad throwing up in her space suit would be, which only made the feeling worse.
The girl, Melba, or Claire now, was far ahead and gaining, moving with the easy grace of long practice. Someone for whom walking in a space suit with magnetic boots was normal. Anna tried to hurry and only managed to kick her boot with her other foot and turn the magnet up high enough to lock it to the hull of the ship. The momentum of her step tugged against the powerful magnetic clamp. After several lost seconds figuring out how to fix that problem, she’d found the controls and slid the grip back down to a normal human range. After that, she gave up on haste and aimed for a safe, consistent pace. Slow and steady, but she wasn’t winning the race. She lost sight of the girl, but she’d told herself it didn’t matter. She guessed well enough where Clarissa Mao was going. Or Melba Koh. Whoever this woman was.
She had seen images of the Rocinanteon newsfeeds before. It was probably as famous as a ship could be. James Holden’s central role in the Eros and Ganymede incidents along with a peppering of dogfights and antipiracy actions had kept his little corvette mentioned in the media on and off for years. As long as there weren’t two Martian corvettes parked next to each other, Anna felt confident she’d be able to spot it.
Fifteen long minutes later, she did.
The Rocinantewas shaped like a stubby black wedge of metal; a fat chisel laid on its side. The flat surface of the hull was occasionally broken up by a domed projection. Anna didn’t know enough about ships to know what they were. It was a warship, so sensors or guns, maybe, but definitely not doors. The tail of the ship had been facing her, and the only obvious opening in it was at the center of the massive drive cone. She walked to the edge of the ship she was on and then from side to side trying to get a better look at the rest of the Rocinantebefore jumping over to it. The irony of looking before she leapt at this late stage of the game made her laugh, and she felt some of the tension and nausea fading.
Just to the right of the drive cone was a bubble of plastic attached to the ship, pale as a blister. A moment later she was through the wound in the ship’s cargo doors and inside. It had occurred to her, as she looked at the maze of crates locked against the hull with magnets much like the ones on her own feet, that she hadn’t thought her plan through past this. Did this room connect to the rest of the ship? The doors behind her didn’t have an airlock, which probably meant that this space was usually kept in vacuum. She had no idea where anyone would be in relation to that room, and more worrisome, she had no idea if the girl she was chasing was still in there, hiding behind one of the boxes.
Anna carefully pulled herself from crate to crate to the other end of the long, narrow compartment. Bits of plastic and freeze-dried food drifted around her like a cloud of oddly shaped insects. The broken crates might have been relics of a fight or debris created by the speed change; she had no way to know. She reached into the small bag tethered to her EVA pack and pulled out the taser. She’d never fired one in microgravity or in vacuum. She hoped neither thing affected it. Another gamble no Belter would ever take.
To her great relief, she found an airlock at the other end of the room, and it opened at a touch of the panel. Cycling it took several minutes, while Anna pulled the heavy EVA pack off her back and played with the taser to make sure she knew how to turn the safety off. The military design was intuitive, but less clearly labeled than the civilian models she was accustomed to. The panel flashed green and the inner doors opened.
No one was in sight. Just a deck that looked like a machine shop with tool lockers and workbenches and a ladder set into one wall. Bookending the ladder were two hatches, one going toward the front of the ship, the other toward the back. Anna was thinking that she was most likely to run into crewmembers by going toward the front of the ship when there was a loud bang from the back and the lights went out.
Yellow LEDs set into the walls came on a moment later, and a genderless voice said, “Core dump, emergency power only,” and repeated it several times. Her helmet muffled the sound, but there was clearly still air in the ship. She pulled the helmet off and hung it from her harness.
Anna was fairly certain you only ejected the core in emergencies related to the engine room, so she moved to that hatch instead. With the constant rumble of the ship gone and her helmet removed she could hear faint noises coming through the hatch. It took her several long moments to figure out how to access it, and when she finally did the hatch snapped open so suddenly it made her almost yelp with surprise.
Inside, Melba was murdering someone.
A Belter woman with long dark hair and a greasy coverall was having her throat crushed by the mechanical arms Melba wore. The woman—Anna could see now that it was James Holden’s second-in-command, Naomi Nagata—looked like Melba had beaten her badly. Her arm and shoulder were covered in blood, and her face was a mass of scrapes and contusions.
Anna drifted down into the vaulted chamber. The reactor room’s walls curving inward like a church, the cathedrals of the fusion age. She felt an almost overwhelming need to hurry, but she knew she’d only get one shot with the taser, and she didn’t trust herself to fire on the move.
Naomi’s face was turning a dark, bruised purple. Her breath the occasional wet rasp. Somehow, the Belter managed to raise one hand and flip Melba off. Anna’s feet hit the decking, and her boots stuck. She was less than three meters behind Melba when her finger pressed the firing stud, aiming for the area of her back not covered by the skeletal frame of the mech, hoping the taser would work through a vacuum suit.
She missed, but the results were impressive anyway.
Instead of hitting the fabric of Melba’s suit, the taser’s two microdarts hit the mech dead center. The trailing wires immediately turned bright red and began to fall apart like burning string. The taser got so hot Anna could feel it through her glove, so she let go just before it melted into a glob of gooey gray plastic. The mech arced and popped and the arms snapped straight out. The room smelled like burning electrical cables. All of Melba’s hair was standing straight up, and even after the taser had died her fingers and legs continued to twitch and jerk. A small screen on the mech’s arm had a flashing red error code.
