Текст книги "Abaddon's Gate"
Автор книги: James S.A. Corey
Соавторы: Daniel Abraham
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Научная фантастика
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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 31 страниц)
Bull’s mouth went dry. Sam was still looking at Naomi Nagata’s bed, her face angry and despairing.
“Sam,” Bull said. “Got a minute?”
She looked up and nodded. Bull flicked the little joystick, and the mech trod awkwardly around. He steered it back out through the door and back to his own private room. By the time they got there, Sam’s expression had shifted to curious. Bull closed the door, coughing. He felt a little light-headed and his heart was racing. Fear, excitement, or being vertical for the first time since they’d passed through the Ring, he didn’t know.
“What’s up, boss?”
“The comm laser,” Bull said. “Say I wanted to make it into a weapon. What’s the most power we could put through it?”
Sam’s frown was more than an engineer making mental calculations. The spin gravity made her seem older. Or maybe bathing in death and fear just did that to people.
“I can make it about as hot as the middle of a star for a fraction of a second,” Sam said. “It’d burn that side of the ship down to a bad smell, though.”
“What’s the most we could do and get, say, three shots out of it? And not melt our ship?”
“It can already carve through a ship’s hull if you’ve got time to spare. I can probably pare that time down a bit.”
“Get that going, will you?”
Sam shook her head.
“What?” Bull asked.
“That big glowy ball out there can turn off inertia when it feels threatened. I don’t feel comfortable making light into a weapon. Seriously, what if it decides to stop all the photons or something?”
“If we have it, we won’t need to use it.”
Sam shook her head again.
“I can’t do that for you, Bull.”
“What about the captain? Would you do it for a Belter?”
Sam’s cheeks flushed. It might have been embarrassment or anger.
“Cheap shot.”
“Sorry, but would you take a direct order from Captain Pa?”
“From her, yes. But not because she’s a Belter. Because she’s the captain and I trust her judgment.”
“More than mine.”
Sam held up her hands in a Belter shrug.
“Last time I just did whatever you told me to, I wound up under house arrest.”
Bull had to give her the point. He fumbled to extricate his arm from the mech, scooped up his hand terminal, and put in a priority connection request to Pa. She took it almost immediately. She looked older too, worn, solid, certain. Crisis suited her.
“Mister Baca,” she said. “Where do we stand?”
“Captain Jakande isn’t going to bring her people over, even though they all know it would be better. And she won’t give up Holden.”
“All right,” Pa said. “Well, we tried.”
“But she might surrender to you,” Bull said. “And seems to me it’s going to be a lot easier being sheriff if we can get the only gun in the slow zone.”
Pa tilted her head.
“Go on,” she said.
Chapter Thirty-Four: Clarissa
The guards came, brought thinly rationed food-grade protein and measured bottles of water, led the prisoners to the head with pistols drawn, and then took them back. For the most part, Clarissa lay on the floor or stretched, hummed old songs to herself or drew on the skin of her arms—white fingernail scratches. The boredom would have been crushing if she’d felt it, but she seemed to have unconnected from time.
The only times she cried were when she thought of killing Ren and when she remembered her father. The only things she anticipated at all were another visit from Tilly or her mysterious friend, and death.
The woman came first, and when she did, Clarissa recognized her. With her red hair pulled down by spin, her face looked softer, but the eyes were unforgettable. The woman from the galley on the Thomas Prince. And then, later, from the Rocinante. Anna. She’d told Naomi that her name was Anna.
Just one more person Clarissa had tried to kill once.
“I have permission to speak with her,” Anna said. The guard—a broad-faced man with a scarred arm that he wore like a decoration—crossed his arms.
“She’s here, si no? Talk away.”
“Absolutely not,” Anna said. “This is a private conversation. I can’t have it in front of the others.”
“You can’t have it anywhere else,” the guard said. “You know how many people this coya killed? She’s got implants. Dangerous.”
“She knows,” Clarissa said, and Anna flashed a smile at her like they’d shared a joke. A feeling of unease cooled Clarissa’s gut. There was something threatening about a woman who could take being attacked and treat it like it was a shared intimacy. Clarissa wondered whether she wanted to talk with her after all.
“It’s the risk I came here to take,” Anna said. “You can find us a place. Anc an interview room. You have those, don’t you?”
The guard’s stance settled deeper into his knees and hips, immovable.
“Can stay here until the sun burns out,” he said. “That door’s staying closed.”
“It’s all right,” Clarissa said.
“No it isn’t,” Anna said. “I’m her priest, and the things we need to talk about are private. Please open the door and take us someplace we can talk.”
“Jojo,” the captain at the far end of the hall said. Ashford. That was his name. “It’s all right. You can put them in the meat freezer. It’s not in use and it locks from the outside.”
“Then I get a dead preacher, ano sa?”
“I believe that you won’t,” Anna said.
“Then you believe in vacuum fairies,” the guard said, but he unlocked the cell door. The bars swung open. Clarissa hesitated. Behind guard and priest, the disgraced Captain Ashford watched her, peering through his bars to get a look. He needed to shave and he looked like he’d been crying. For a moment, Clarissa gripped the cold steel bars of her door. The urge to pull them closed, to retreat, was almost overwhelming.
“It’s all right,” Anna said.
Clarissa let go of the door and stepped out. The guard drew his sidearm and pressed it against the back of her neck. Anna looked pained. Ashford’s expression didn’t shift a millimeter.
“Is that necessary?” Anna asked.
“Implants,” the guard said and prodded Clarissa to move forward. She walked.
The freezer was warm and larger than the galley back on the Cerisier. Strips of metal ran along floor and ceiling and both walls with notches every few centimeters to allow the Mormon colonists who never were to lock walls and partitions into place. It made sense that the veterinary stalls that had been pressed into service as her prison would be near the slaughterhouse. Harsh white light spilled from LEDs set into the walls, unsoftened and directional, casting hard shadows.
“I’m back in fifteen minutes,” the guard said as he pushed Clarissa through the doorway. “Anything looks funny, I’ll shoot you.”
“Thank you for giving us privacy,” Anna said, stepping through after her. The door closed. The latch sounded like the gates of hell, closing. The lights flickered, and the first thought that flashed across Clarissa’s mind, rich with disapproval, was, Shouldn’t tie the locking magnet to the same circuit as the control board. It was like a relic from another life.
Anna gathered herself, smiled, and put out her hand.
“We’ve met before,” she said, “but we haven’t really been introduced. My name’s Anna.”
A lifetime’s etiquette accepted the offered hand on Clarissa’s behalf. The woman’s fingers were very warm.
“My priest?” Clarissa said.
“Sorry about that,” Anna said. “I didn’t mean to presume. I was getting angry, and I tried to pull rank.”
“I know people who do worse. When they’re angry.”
Clarissa released the woman’s hand.
“I’m a friend of Tilly’s. She helped me after the ship crashed. I was hurt and not thinking very straight, and she helped me,” she said.
“She’s good that way.”
“She knew your sister too. Your father. The whole family,” Anna said, then pressed her lips together impatiently. “I wish they’d given us chairs. I feel like we’re standing around at a bus terminal.”
Anna took a deep breath, sighing out her nose, then sat there in the middle of the room with her legs crossed. She patted the metal decking at her side. Clarissa hesitated, then lowered herself to sit. She had the overwhelming memory of being five years old, sitting on a rug in kindergarten.
“That’s better,” Anna said. “So, Tilly’s told me a lot about you. She’s worried.”
Clarissa tilted her head. From just the form, it seemed like the place where she would reply. She felt the urge to speak, and she couldn’t imagine what she would say. After a moment, Anna went on, trying again without seeming to.
“I’m worried about you too.”
“Why?”
Anna’s eyes clouded. For a moment, she seemed to be having some internal conversation. But only for a moment. She leaned forward, her hands clasped.
“I didn’t help you before. I saw you just before the Seung Unblew up,” she said. “Just before you set off the bomb.”
“It was too late by then,” Clarissa said. Ren had already been dead. “You couldn’t have stopped it.”
“You’re right,” Anna said. “That’s not the only reason I’m here. I alsoc I lost someone. When all the ships stopped, I lost someone.”
“Someone you cared about,” Clarissa said. “Someone you loved.”
“Someone I hardly knew, but it was a real loss. And also I was scared of you. I amscared of you. But Tilly told me a lot about you, and it’s helped me to get past some of my fear.”
“Not all of it?”
“No. Not all of it.”
Something deep in the structure of the ship thumped, the whole structure around them ringing for a moment like a gigantic bell tolling far, far away.
“I could kill you,” Clarissa said. “Before they got the door open.”
“I know. I saw.”
Clarissa put her hand out, her palm against the notched runner. The finish was smooth and the metal cool.
“You want a confession, then?” she said.
“If you want to offer one.”
“I did it,” Clarissa said. “I sabotaged the Rocinanteand the Seung Un. I killed Ren. I killed some people back on Earth. I lied about who I was. All of it. I’m guilty.”
“All right.”
“Are we done, then?”
Anna scratched her nose and sighed. “I came out to the Ring even though it upset my wife. Even though it meant not seeing my baby for months. I told myself that I wanted to come see it. To help people make sense of it and, whatever it was, to not be afraid. You came out here toc save your father. To redeem him.”
“Is that what Tilly says?”
“She’s not as polite about it.”
Clarissa coughed out a laugh. Everything she could say felt trite. Worse, it felt naive and stupid. Jim Holden destroyed my familyand I wanted my father to be proud of meand I was wrong.
“I did what I did,” Clarissa said. “You can tell them that. The security people. You can tell them I confessed to it all.”
“If you’d like. I’ll tell them.”
“I would. I want that.”
“Why did you try to kill Naomi?”
“I wanted to kill all of them,” Clarissa said, and each word was hard to speak, as though they were too large to fit through her throat. “They were part of him, and I wanted him not to be. Just not to exist at all anymore. I wanted everyone to know he is a bad man.”
“Do you still want that?”
“I don’t care,” Clarissa said. “You can tell them.”
“And Naomi? I’m going to see her. Is there anything you’d want me to tell her in particular?”
Clarissa remembered the woman’s face, bruised and bleeding. She flexed her hand, feeling the mech’s glove against her fingers. It would have taken nothing to snap the woman’s neck, a feather’s weight of pressure. She wondered why she hadn’t. The difference between savoring the moment and hesitating warred at the back of her mind, and her memory supported both. Or neither.
“Tell her I hope she gets well soon.”
“Do you hope that?”
“Or am I just being polite, you mean?” Clarissa said. “Tell her whatever you want. I don’t care.”
“All right,” Anna said. “Can I ask a question?”
“Can I stop you?”
“Yes.”
The silence was no more than three long breaths together.
“You can ask me a question.”
“Do you want to be redeemed?”
“I don’t believe in God.”
“Do you want to be redeemed by something other than God, then? If there was forgiveness for you, could you accept it?”
The sense of outrage began in Clarissa’s stomach and bloomed out through her chest. It curled her lips and furrowed her brow. For the first time since she’d lost consciousness trying to beat her way through the locker on the Rocinante, she remembered what anger felt like. How large it was.
“Why should I be forgiven for anything? I did it. That’s all.”
“But if—”
“What kind of justice would that be? ‘Oh, you killed Ren, but you’re sorry now so it’s okay’? Fuckthat. And if that’s how your God works, then fuck Him too.”
The freezer door clanked. Clarissa looked up at it, resenting the accident of timing and then realizing they’d heard her yelling. They were coming to save the preacher. She balled her hands into fists and looked down at them. They were going to take her back to her cell. She felt in her gut and her throat how little she wanted that.
“It’s all right,” Anna said as the guard stepped into the freezer, his sidearm trained on Clarissa. “We’re okay.”
“Yeah, no,” the guard said. His gaze was sharp and focused. Frightened. “Time’s passed. Meeting’s over.”
Anna looked at Clarissa with something like frustration in her expression. Not with her, but with the situation. With not getting everything to be just the way she wanted it. Clarissa had some sympathy for that.
“I’d like to talk with you again,” Anna said. “If it’s all right.”
“You know where I live,” Clarissa said with a shrug. “I don’t go out much.”
Chapter Thirty-Five: Anna
Bull wasn’t in his office when she arrived. A muscular young woman with a large gun on her hip shrugged when Anna asked if she could wait for him, then ignored her and continued working. A wall screen was set to the Radio Free Slow Zone feed, where a young Earther man was leaning in toward Monica Stuart and speaking earnestly. His skin was a bright pink that didn’t seem to be his natural color. Anna thought he looked peeled.
“I haven’t changed my commitment to autonomy for the Brazilian shared interest zones,” he said. “If anything I feel like I’ve broadened it.”
“Broadened it how?” Monica asked. She seemed genuinely interested. It was a gift. The peeled man tapped at the air with his fingertips. Anna felt sure she’d seen him on the Thomas Prince, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember his name. She had the vague sense he was a painter. Some kind of artist, certainly.
“We’ve all changed,” he said. “By coming here. By going through the trials that we’re all going through, we’ve all beenchanged. When we go back, none of us will be the people we were before. The tragedy and the loss and the sense of wonderchanges what it means to be human. Do you know what I mean?”
Oddly, Anna thought she did.
Being a minister meant being in the middle of people’s lives. Anna had counseled dating congregation members, presided over their weddings, baptized their babies, and in one heartbreaking case presided over the infant’s funeral a year later. Members of the congregation included her in most of the important events of their lives. She was used to it, and mostly enjoyed the deep connection to people it brought. Charting the course of a life was making a map of the ways each event changed the person, leaving someone different on the other side. Passing through the Ring and the tragedies it had brought wouldn’t leave any of them the same.
The exodus from the rest of the fleet to the Behemothwas in full swing. The tent cities spread across the curved inner surface of the habitation drum like wildflowers on a field of flat, ceramic steel–colored earth. Anna saw tall gangly Belters helping offload wounded Earthers from emergency carts, plugging in IVs and other medical equipment, fluffing pillows and mopping brows. Inners and outers offloaded crates in mixed groups without comment. Anna couldn’t help but be warmed by that, even in the face of their recent disaster. Maybe it took real tragedy to get them all working together, but it did. They did. There was hope in that.
Now if they could just figure out how to do it without the blood and screaming.
“Your work has been criticized,” Monica Stuart said, “as advocating violence.”
The peeled man nodded.
“I used to reject that,” he said. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it may be valid, though. I think when we come home, there will be some readjustment.”
“Because of the Ring?”
“And the slow zone. And what’s happened here.”
“Do you think you would encourage other political artists to come out here?”
“Absolutely.”
Chris, her young officer, had asked about organizing mixed-group church services on the Behemoth. She’d assumed he meant mixed religions at first, but it turned out he meant a church group with Earthers and Martians and Belters. Mixed, as if God categorized people based on the gravity they’d grown up in. It had occurred to Anna then that there really wasn’t any such thing as a “mixed” church group. No matter what they looked like, or what they chose to call Him, when a group of people called out to God together, they were one. Even if there was no God, or one God, or many gods, it didn’t matter. Faith, hope, and love, Paul had written, but the greatest of these is love. Faith and hope were very important to Anna. But she could see Paul’s point in a way she hadn’t before. Love didn’t need anything else. It didn’t need a common belief, or a common identity. Anna thought of her child and felt a rush of longing and loneliness. She could almost feel Nami in her arms, almost smell the intoxicating new-baby scent on her head. Nono the Ugandan and Anna the Russian had blended themselves together and made Nami. Not a mix, nothing so crude as that. More than just the sum of her parts and origins. A new thing, individual and unique.
No mixed group, then. Just a group. A new thing, perfect and unique. She couldn’t imagine God would see it any other way. Anna was pretty sure she had her first sermon too. She was about halfway through typing up an outline for her “no mixed groups in God’s eyes” sermon on her handset when Bull came through the door, his mechanical legs whining and thumping with each step. Anna thought it gave Bull even more gravitas than he’d had before. He moved with a deliberateness caused by mechanical necessity, but easily mistaken for formality and stateliness. The electric whine of the machine and the heavy thump of his tread were a sort of herald calling out his arrival.
Anna imagined the annoyance Bull would feel if she told him this, and giggled a little to herself.
Bull was in the middle of speaking to a subordinate and didn’t even notice her. “I don’t care how they feel about it, Serge. The agreement was no armed military personnel on the ship. Even if there weren’t a shitload of guns built in, those suits would still be weapons. Confiscate their gear or throw them off the damn ship.”
“Si, jefe,” the other man with him replied. “Take it how, sa sa? Can opener?”
“Charm the bastards. If we can’t make them do anything now, while we’re all friends, what do we do when they decide we aren’t friends? Four marines in recon armor decide they own this ship, they fucking own it. So we take the armor away before they do. I don’t even want that stuff in the drum. Lock it in the bridge armory.”
Serge looked deeply unhappy at this task. “Some help, maybe?”
“Take as many as you want, but if you don’t need them it’s only gonna piss the marines off, and if you do, they won’t actually help.”
Serge paused, mouth open, then closed it with a snap and left. Bull noticed Anna for the first time and said, “What can I do for you, Preacher?”
“Anna, please. I came to talk about Clarissa Mao,” she said.
“If you’re not her lawyer or her union representative—”
“I’m her priest. What happens to her now?”
Bull sighed again. “She confessed to blowing up a ship. Nothing much good comes after that.”
“People say you spaced a man for selling drugs. They say you’re hard. Cold.”
“Do they?” Bull said. Anna couldn’t tell if the surprise in his voice was genuine or mocking.
“Please don’t kill her,” she said, leaning closer and looking him in the eye. “Don’t you let anyone else kill her either.”
“Why not?” The way he said it wasn’t a challenge or a threat. It was as if he just didn’t know that answer, and sort of wondered. Anna swallowed her dread.
“I can’t help her if she’s dead.”
“No offense, but that’s not really my concern.”
“I thought you were the law and order here.”
“I’m aiming for order, mostly.”
“She deserves a trial, and if everyone knows what you know about her, she won’t get one. They’ll riot. They’ll kill her. At least help me get her a trial.”
The large man sighed. “So are you looking for a trial, or just a way to stall for time?”
“Stall for time,” Anna said.
Bull nodded, weighing something in his mind, then gestured for her to precede him into his office. After she sat down next to his battered desk, he clumped around the small space making a pot of coffee. It seemed an extravagance considering the newly implemented water rationing, but then Anna remembered Bull was now the second most powerful person in the slow zone. The privileges of rank.
She didn’t want coffee, but accepted the offered cup to allow Bull a moment of generosity. Generosity now might lead to more later, when she was asking for something she really wanted.
“When Holden starts telling people who actually sabotaged the Seung Un—and he’s Jim Holden, so he will—the UN people are going to ask for Clarissa. And if they give me enough that I can get everyone here, together, and safe until we can get out of this trap, I’m going to give her to them. Not off the ship, but in here.”
“What will they do?” Anna took a companionable sip of her coffee. It burned her tongue and tasted like acid.
“Probably, they’ll put together a tribunal of flag officers, have a short trial, and throw her in a recycler. I’d say space her, normally, but that seems wasteful considering our predicament. Supplies sent from home will take as long to fly through the slow zone to us as they’ll take to get to the Ring.”
His voice was flat, emotionless. He was discussing logistics, not a young woman’s life. Anna suppressed a shudder and said, “Mister Baca, do you believe in God?”
To his credit, he tried not to roll his eyes. He almost succeeded.
“I believe in whatever gets you through the night.”
“Don’t be flip,” Anna said, and was gratified when Bull straightened a little in his walker. In her experience, most strong-willed men had equally strong-willed mothers, and she knew how to hit some of the same buttons.
“Look,” Bull said, trying to reclaim the initiative. Anna spoke over the top of him.
“Forget God for a moment,” she said. “Do you believe in the concept of forgiveness? In the possibility of redemption? In the value of every human life, no matter how tainted or corrupted?”
“Fuck no,” Bull said. “I think it is entirely possible to go so far into the red you can’t ever balance the books.”
“Sounds like the voice of experience. How far have you been?”
“Far enough to know there’s a too damn far.”
“And you’re comfortable being the judge of where that line is?”
Bull pulled on the frame of his walker, shifting his weight in the straps that held him. He looked wistfully at the office chair he could no longer use. Anna felt bad for him, broken at the worst possible time. Trying to keep his tiny world in order, and burning through the last reserves of his strength with reckless abandon. The bruised eyes and yellow skin suddenly seemed like a flashing battery indicator, warning that the power was almost gone. Anna felt a pang of guilt for adding to his burden.
“I don’t want to kill that girl,” he said, taking another sip of the terrible coffee. “In fact, I don’t give a shit about her one way or the other, as long as she’s locked up and isn’t a danger to my ship. The one you should talk to is Holden. He’s the one who’s gonna get the torches-and-pitchforks crowd wound up.”
“But the Martiansc”
“Surrendered twenty hours ago.”
Anna blinked.
“They’ve been wanting to for days,” Bull said. “We just had to find a way to let ’em save face.”
“Save face?”
“They got a story they can tell where they don’t look weak. That’s all they needed. But if we didn’t find something, they’d have stuck to their posts until they all died. Nothing ever killed more people than being afraid to look like a sissy.”
“Holden’s coming here, then?”
“Already be on a shuttle escorted by four recon marines, which is another fucking headache for me. But how about this? I won’t talk about the girl until I have reason to. What Holden does, though, he just does.”
“Fine, then I’ll talk to him when he arrives,” Anna said.
“Good luck with that,” Bull said.
Chapter Thirty-Six: Holden
When the Martians came for him—two men and two women, all in uniform and all armed—Holden’s isolation-drunk mind had spun out in a dozen directions at once. The captain had found room for him in the medical clinic and she wanted to grill him again about what happened on the station and they were going to throw him out an airlock and they’d had news that Naomi was dead and they’d had news that she wasn’t. It felt like every neuron he had from his brain down to his toes was on the edge of firing. It was all he could do not to launch himself off the cell’s wall and into the narrow corridor.
“The prisoner will please identify himself,” one of the men said.
“James Holden. I mean, it’s not like you have very many prisoners here, right? Because I’ve been trying to find someone to talk with for it feels like about a decade since I got here, and I’m pretty sure there isn’t so much as a dust mite in this place besides me.”
He bit his lips to stop talking. He’d been alone and scared for too long. He hadn’t understood how much it was affecting him. Even if he hadn’t been mentally ill when he came to the Hammurabi, he was going to be real soon now if nothing changed.
“Record shows prisoner identified himself as James Holden,” the man said. “Come along.”
The corridor outside the cells was so narrow that two guards ahead and two behind was effectively a wall. The low Martian gravity made their bodies more akin to Belters than to him, and all four of them hunched slightly, bending in over him. Holden had never felt so relieved to be in a tiny, cramped hallway in his life. But even the relief was pushed aside by his anxiety. The guards didn’t actually push him so much as start to move with an authority that suggested that he really should match them. The hatch was only five meters away, but after being in his cell, it seemed like a huge distance.
“Was there any word from the Roci?”
No one spoke.
“What’sc ahc what’s going on?”
“You’re being evacuated,” the man said.
“Evacuated?”
“Part of the surrender agreement.”
“Surrender agreement? You’re surrendering? Why are you surrendering?”
“We lost the politics,” one of the women behind him said.
If the skiff they loaded him onto wasn’t the same one that had taken him back from the station, it was close enough that he couldn’t tell the difference. There were only four soldiers this time, all of them in full combat armor. The rest of the spaces were taken up by men and women in standard naval uniform. Holden thought at first they were the wounded, but when he looked closer, none of them seemed to have anything worse than minor injuries. It was the exhaustion in their faces and bodies that made them seem broken. The acceleration burn wasn’t even announced. The thrust barely shifted the crash couches. All around him, the Martians slept or brooded. Holden scratched at the hard, flexible plastic restraints on his wrists and ankles, and no one told him to stop. Maybe that was a good sign.
He tried to do the math in his head. If the new top speed was about as fast as a launched grenade, then every hour, they’d travelc As tired as he was, he couldn’t make the numbers add up to anything. If he’d had his hand terminal, it would have been a few seconds’ work. Still, he couldn’t see asking to have it. And it didn’t matter.
He slept and woke and slept again. The proximity Klaxon woke him from a dream about making bread with someone who was his father Caesar and also Fred Johnson and trying to find the salt. It took him a moment to remember where he was.
The skiff was small enough that when the other ship’s crew banged against the airlock, Holden could hear it. From his seat, he couldn’t see the airlock open. The first thing he knew was a slightly different scent in the air. Something rich and oddly humid. And then four new people stepped into his view. They were Belters. A broad-faced woman, a thick man with a startling white beard, and two shaven-headed men so similar they might have been twins. The twins had the split circle of the OPA tattooed on their arms. All four wore sidearms.
The Behemoth, Holden thought. They’d surrendered to the Behemoth. That was weird.
One of the marines, still in battle armor, floated over to them. The Belters didn’t show any sign of fear. Holden gave them credit for that.
“I am Sergeant Alexander Verbinski,” the Martian said. “I have been ordered to hand over this skiff and her crew and company in accordance with the agreement of surrender.”
The woman and white-bearded man looked at each other. Holden thought he could see the question– You gonna tell them they can’t take their suits in?—pass between them. The woman shrugged.
“Bien alles,” she said. “Welcome aboard. Bring them through in sixpacks and we’ll get you sorted, sa sa?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Verbinski said.
“Corin,” one of the twins said. The woman turned to see him gesture toward Holden with his chin. “Pa con esá parlan, si?”
The woman’s nod was curt.
“We’ll take Holden out now,” she said.
“Your show,” the marine said. Holden thought from his tone he’d have been as happy to shoot him. That might have been paranoia, though.
The Belters escorted him through the airlock and a long Mylar tube to the engineering deck of the Behemoth. A dozen people were waiting with hand terminals at the ready, prepared for the slow, slogging administrative work of dealing with a defeated enemy. Holden got to skip the line, and he wasn’t sure it was an honor.
The woman floating near the massive doors at the transition point where the engineering section met the drum looked too young for her captain’s insignia. Her hair, pulled back in a severe bun, reminded him of a teacher he’d had once when he’d still been on Earth.
