Текст книги "Abaddon's Gate"
Автор книги: James S.A. Corey
Соавторы: Daniel Abraham
Жанр:
Научная фантастика
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Текущая страница: 30 (всего у книги 31 страниц)
Cortez ran his fingers through his hair.
“Stay out the way,” he said. “When it’s over, when he’s done this, I can speak with Ashford. Explain that you didn’t mean to undermine him. It was a mistake. He’ll forgive you.”
Clarissa bowed her head. Her mind was a mass of confusion, and the hunger and gunfire weren’t doing anything to help. Jim Holden was out there in the corridor. The man she’d come so far to disgrace and destroy, and now she didn’t want him dead. Her father was back on Earth and she was about to save him and everyone else or possibly destroy them all. She’d killed Ren, and there was nothing she could ever do that would make that right. Not even die for him.
She had been so certain. She’d given so much of herself. She’d given everything, and in the end all she’d felt was empty. And soiled. The money and the time and all of the people she could have been if she hadn’t been worshiping at the altar of her family name had already been sacrificed. Now she had offered her life, except that after speaking to Anna, she wasn’t sure that wouldn’t be an empty sacrifice too.
Her confusion and despair were like a buzzing in her ears and the voice that rose out of it was peculiarly her own: contempt and rage and the one certainty she could hold to.
“Who is Ashfordto forgive me for anything?” she said.
Cortez blinked at her, as if seeing her for the first time.
“For that matter,” she said, “who the hell are you?”
She turned and kicked gently for the doorframe, leaving Cortez behind. Ashford and his men were all armed, all waiting for the next round of gunfire. Ashford, stretched out behind his control panel, pistol before him, slammed his palm against the controls.
“Ruiz!” he shouted. His voice was hoarse. How many hours had they been waiting for this apocalypse to come? She could hear the strain in him. “Are we ready to fire? Tell me we’re ready to fire!”
The woman’s voice came, shrill with fear.
“Ready, sir. The grid is back online. The diagnostics are all green. It should work. Please don’t kill me. Please.”
This was it, then. And with an almost physical click, she knew how to fix it, if there was time.
She put her tongue to the roof of her mouth and pressed, swirling in two gentle counterclockwise circles. The extra glands in her body leapt into life as if they’d been waiting for her, and the world went white for a moment. She thought that she might have cried out in the first rush, but when she was back to herself—to better than herself—no one had reacted to her. They were all pointing their guns at the corridor. All drawn to the threat of James Holden the way she had been herself. All except Ashford. He was letting go of his weapon, leaving the pistol to hang in the air while he keyed in the firing instructions. That was how long she had. It wasn’t enough. Even high as a kite on battle drugs, she couldn’t do what needed to be done before Ashford fired the laser.
So he became step one.
She pulled both feet up to the doorframe and pushed out into the open air of the bridge. The air seemed viscous and thick, like water without the buoyancy. A woman ducked out of cover, firing toward Ashford, and Ashford’s people returned fire, muzzles blooming flame that faded away to smoke and then bloomed again. She couldn’t see the bullets, but the paths they made through the air persisted for a fraction of a second. Tunnels of nothing in nothing. She tucked her knees into her chest. She had almost reached Ashford. His finger was moving down, ready to touch the control screen, ready, perhaps, to fire the comm laser. She kicked out as hard as she could.
The sensation of her muscles straining, ligaments and tendons pushed past their maximum working specifications, was a bright pain, but not entirely without joy. Her timing was only a little off. She didn’t hit Ashford in the center of his body, but his shoulder and head. She felt the impact through her whole body, felt her jaw clicking shut from the blow. He slid back through the air away from the control panel, his eyes growing wider. Two of the guards began to swing toward her, but she bent her body against the base of the crash couch and then unfolded, moving away. The guns flashed, one then another, then two together, like watching lightning in a thunderstorm. Bullets flew, and she spun through the air, pulling her arms tight against her to make her spin faster. Rifling herself.
One of the women in the corridor leaned in, spraying gunfire through the room. A bullet caught one of the guards, and Clarissa watched as she moved toward the farthest wall. It was like seeing frames from an old movie. The woman in the corridor, the muzzle of her weapon alive with fire, then Clarissa turned. The guard, unmoved, but blood already splashing out from his neck, the little wave radiating through his skin out from the impact like the ripple of a stone dropped in a pond, then she turned. The guard falling back, blood blooming out of him like a rose blossom. The same would happen to her, she knew. The drugs flowing through her blood, lighting her brain like a seizure, couldn’t change the abilities of her flesh. She couldn’t dodge a bullet if one found her. So instead she hoped that none would and did what needed to be done.
The access panel was open, the guts of the ship exposed. She grabbed the edge of the panel gently, slowing herself. Blood welled up from her palm where the metal cut into her. She didn’t feel it as pain. Just a kind of warmth. A message from her body that she could ignore. The brownout buffer sat behind an array control board. She slid her hand down to it, her fingers caressing the pale formed ceramic. The fault indicator glowed green. She took a breath, gripped the buffer, pushed it down, turned and then pulled. The unit came loose in her hand.
A gun went off. A scar appeared on the wall before her, bits of metal spinning out from it. They were shooting at her. Or near her. It didn’t matter. She flipped the unit end for end and reseated it. The buffer’s indicator blinked red for a moment, then green. Just the way Ren had showed her. Terrible design, she thought with a grin and held down the buffer’s reset. Two more guns fired, the sound pushing against her eardrums like a blow. Time stuttered. She didn’t know how long she’d been holding the reset, if she’d slipped it off and back on. She thought it should have gone by now, but time was so unreliable. The world stuttered again. She was crashing.
The buffer’s readout went red. Clarissa smiled and relaxed. She saw the cascading failure as if she were the ship itself. One bad readout causing the next causing the next, the levels of failure rapid and incremental. The nervous system of the Behemothsensing a danger it couldn’t define. Doing what it could to be safe, or at least to be sure it didn’t get worse.
Failing closed.
She turned. Ashford stood on his couch, holding the restraint straps in one hand and pressing his feet into the gel. His mouth was a square gape of rage. Two of his people had shifted to face her as well, their guns trained on her, their faces almost blank.
Behind them all, far across the bridge, Cortez was framed by the security office doorway. His face was a mask of distress and surprise. He wasn’t, she thought, a man who dealt well with the unexpected. Must be hard for him. She hadn’t noticed before how much he looked like her own father. Something about the shape of their jaws, maybe. Or in their eyes.
The lights flickered. She felt her body starting to shudder. It was over. For her, for all of them. The first twitch of the collapse pulled at her back like a cramp. A rising nausea came to her. She didn’t care.
I did it, Ren, she thought. You showed me how, and I did it. I think I just saved everyone.We did.
Ashford caught his pistol out of the air and swung toward her. She heard his screaming like it was meat ripping. Behind him, Cortez was shouting, launching himself through the space. There was a contact taser in the old man’s hand, and the grief on the old man’s face was gratifying. It was good to know that on some level, he cared what happened to her. The lights flared once and went out as Ashford brought the barrel to bear on her. The emergency lighting didn’t kick in.
Everything was darkness, and then, for a moment, light.
And then darkness.
Chapter Fifty-Two: Holden
Holden ejected his spent magazine and reached for a new one. His fingers hit only an empty space where he expected it to be. He hadn’t been managing his ammo well. He’d wanted to keep at least one magazine in reserve. Corin was firing around him with her rifle. She had spare pistol ammo on her belt. Without asking, he started pulling magazines off her belt and putting them in his. She fired off a few more shots and waited for him to finish. It was that sort of fight.
Cass was leaning around the corner firing. Answering bullets hit everyplace on her side of the corridor except where she was. Holden was about to shout at her to get back into cover when the lights went out.
It wasn’t just the lights. So many things about his physical situation changed all at once that his hindbrain couldn’t keep up. It told him to be nauseated just in case he’d been poisoned. It was working with fifty-million-year-old response algorithms.
Holden collapsed to his knees with the nausea, the sudden appearance of gravity being one of the many changes. His knees banged against the floor because he was no longer wearing a heavy environment suit. Which also meant he could smell the air. It had a vaguely swampy, sulfurous odor. His inner ear didn’t report any Coriolis, so they weren’t spinning. There were no engine sounds, so the Behemothwasn’t under thrust.
Holden fumbled at the ground around him. It felt like dirt. Damp soil, small rocks. Something that felt like ground-cover plants.
“Oh, hey, sorry,” a voice said. Miller’s. The light level came up with no visible source. Holden was kneeling naked on a wide plain of something that looked like a mix of moss and grass. It was as dark as a moonlit night, but no moons or stars shone overhead. In the distance, something like a forest was visible. Beyond that, mountains. Miller stood a few meters away, looking up at the sky, still wearing his old gray suit and goofy hat. His hands were in his pockets, his jacket rumpling around them.
“Where?” Holden started.
“This planet was in the catalog. Most Earth-like one I could find. Thought it’d be calming.”
“Am I here?”
Miller laughed. Something in the timbre of his voice had changed since the last time Holden had spoken to him. He sounded serene, whole. Vast. “Kid, I’mnot even here. But we needed a place to talk, and this seemed nicer than a white void. I’ve got processing power to spare now.”
Holden stood up, embarrassed to be naked even in a simulation, but without any way of changing it. But if this wasa simulation, then that brought up other issues.
“Am I still in a gunfight?”
Miller turned, not quite facing him. “Hmmm?”
“I was in a gunfight before you grabbed me. If this is just a sim running in my brain, then does that mean I’m still in that gunfight? Am I floating in the air with my eyes rolled back or something?”
Miller looked chagrined.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Maybe. Look. Don’t worry about it. This won’t take long.”
Holden walked over to stand next to him, to look him in the eyes. Miller gave him his sad basset hound smile. His eyes glowed a bright electric blue.
“We did it, though? We got under the power threshold?”
“Did. And I talked the station into thinking you were essentially dirt and rocks.”
“Does that mean we saved the Earth?”
“Well,” Miller replied with a small Belter shrug of the hands. “We alsosaved the Earth. Never was the big plan, but it’s a nice bonus.”
“Good that you care.”
“Oh,” Miller said with that same vaguely frightening laugh. “I really don’t. I mean, I remember being human. The simulation is good. But I remember caring without really caring, if you know what I mean.”
“Okay.”
“Oh, hey, look at this,” Miller said, pointing at the black sky. Instantly the sky was filled with glowing blue Rings. The thousand-plus gates of the slow zone, orbiting around them like Alex’s dandelion seeds, seen from the center of the flower. “Shazam!” Miller said. As one, the gates shifted in color and became mirrors reflecting thousands of other solar systems. Holden could actually see the alien stars, and the worlds whirring in orbit around them. He assumed that meant Miller was taking a little artistic license with his simulation.
There was a croaking sound at his feet, and Holden looked down to see something that looked like a long-limbed frog, with grayish skin and no visible eyes. Its mouth was full of sharp-looking little teeth, and Holden became very aware of his bare toes just a few dozen centimeters from it. Without looking down, Miller kicked the frog thing away with his shoe. It blurred away across the field on its too-long limbs.
“The gates are all open out there?”
Miller gave him a quizzical look.
“You know,” Holden continued. “In reality?”
“What’s reality?” Miller said, looking back up at the swirling gates and the night sky.
“The place where I live?”
“Yeah, fine. The gates are all open.”
“And are there invading fleets of monsters pouring through to kill us all?”
“Not yet,” Miller said. “Which is kind of interesting in its own way.”
“I was joking.”
“I wasn’t,” Miller said. “It was a calculated risk. But it looks clear for now.”
“We can go through those gates, though. We can go there.”
“Can,” Miller said. “And knowing you, you will.”
For a moment, Holden forgot about Ashford, the Behemoth, the deaths and the violence and the thousand other things that had distracted him from where they really were. What they were really doing.
What it all meant.
He would live to see humanity’s spread to the stars. He and Naomi, their children, their children’s children. Thousands of worlds, no procreation restrictions. A new golden age for the species. And the Nauvoohad made it happen, in a way. Fred could tell the Mormons. Maybe they’d stop suing him now.
“Wow,” he said.
“Yeah, well let’s not get too happy,” Miller said. “I keep warning you. Doors and corners, kid. That’s where they get you. Humans are too fucking stupid to listen. Well, you’ll learn your lessons soon enough, and it’s not my job to nursemaid the species through the next steps.”
Holden scuffed at the ground cover with his toe. When it was scraped, a clear fluid that smelled like honey seeped out. This world was in the station’s catalog, Miller had said. I could live here someday.The thought was astounding.
The sky shifted, and now all the ships that had been trapped around the station were visible. They drifted slowly away from each other. “You let them go?”
“I didn’t. Station’s off lockdown,” Miller said. “And I’ve killed the security system permanently. No need for it. Just an accident waiting to happen when one of you monkeys sticks a finger where it doesn’t belong. Is this Ashford cocksucker really thinking he can hurt the gates?”
“And there are worlds like this on the other side of all those gates?”
“Some of them, maybe. Who knows?” Miller turned to face Holden again, his blue eyes eerie and full of secrets. “Someone fought a war here, kid. One that spanned this galaxy and maybe more. My team lost, and they’re all gone now. A couple billion years gone. Who knows what’s waiting on the other side of those doors?”
“We’ll find out, I guess,” Holden replied, putting on a bold front but frightened in spite of himself.
“Doors and corners,” Miller said again. Something in his voice told Holden it was the last warning.
They looked up at the sky, watching the ships slowly drift away from them. Holden waited to see the first missiles fly, but it didn’t happen. Everyone was playing nice. Maybe what had happened on the Behemothhad changed people. Maybe they’d take that change back to where they came from, infect others with it. It was a lot to hope for, but Holden was an unapologetic optimist. Give people the information they need. Trust them to do the right thing. He didn’t know any other way to play it.
Or maybe the ships moving was just Miller playing with his simulation, and humanity hadn’t learned a thing.
“So,” Holden said after a few minutes of quiet sky watching. “Thanks for the visit. I guess I’d better be getting back to my gunfight.”
“Not done with you,” Miller said. The tone was light, but the words were ominous.
“Okay.”
“I wasn’t built to fix shit humanity broke,” Miller said. “I didn’t come here to open gates for you and get the lockdown to let you go. That’s incidental. The thing that made me just builds roads. And now it’s using me to find out what happened to the galaxy-spanning civilization that wanted the road.”
“Why does that matter now, if they’re all gone?”
“It doesn’t,” Miller said with a weary shrug. “Not a bit. If you set the nav computer on the Rocito take you somewhere, and then fall over dead a second later, can the Rocidecide it doesn’t matter anymore and just not go?”
“No,” Holden said, understanding and finding a sadness for this Miller construct he wouldn’t have guessed was possible.
“We were supposed to connect with the network. We’re just trying to do that, doesn’t matter that the network’s gone. What came up off of Venus is dumb, kid. Just knows how to do one thing. It doesn’t know how to investigate. But I do. And it had me. So I’m going to investigate even though none of the answers will mean fuck-all to the universe at large.”
“I understand,” Holden said. “Good luck, Miller, I—”
“I said I’m not done with you.”
Holden took a step back, suddenly very frightened about where this might be going. “What does that mean?”
“It means, kid, that I’ll need a ride.”
Holden was floating in free fall in an environment suit in absolute darkness. People were yelling. There was the sound of a gunshot, then silence, then an electric pop and a groan.
“Stop!” someone yelled. Holden couldn’t place the voice. “Everyone stop shooting!”
Because someone was saying it with authority in their voice, people did. Holden fumbled with the controls on his wrist, and his suit’s light came on. The rest of his team quickly followed his example. Corin and Cass were still unhurt. Holden wondered how long in actual time his jaunt into the simulation had taken.
“My name is Hector Cortez,” the stop-firing voice said. “What’s happening out there? Does anyone know?”
“It’s over,” Holden yelled back, then let his body relax into a dead man’s float in the corridor. He was so tired that it was a struggle to not just go to sleep right where he was. “It’s all over. You can turn everything back on.”
Lights started coming on in the bridge as people took out hand terminals or emergency flashlights.
“Call Ruiz,” Cortez said. “Have her send a team up here to fix whatever Clarissa did. We need to get the ship’s power back. People will be panicking in the habitation drum right now. And get a medical team up here.”
Holden wondered where Ashford was and why this Cortez guy was in charge. But he was saying all the right things, so Holden let it go. He pushed his way into the bridge, ready to help where he could, but keeping his hand near his pistol. Cass and Naomi traded places with Juarez, so Naomi could help with the repairs.
Clarissa, formerly Melba, was floating near an open access panel, blood seeping out of a gunshot wound. Cortez was pressing an emergency bandage to it. Ashford floated across the room, his mouth slack and his muscles twitching. Holden wondered if the captain was dead and then didn’t care.
“Naomi. Call down to the radio offices. See if they’ve got working comms. Find out about Anna and Monica and Amos. Try to raise the Rocinext. I really really want to get the hell out of here.”
She nodded and started trying to make connections.
“Will she live?” Holden asked the white-haired man tending to her.
“I think so,” he replied. “She did this,” he added, waving a hand around to indicate the lack of lights and power.
“Huh,” Holden said. “I guess I’m glad we didn’t space her.”
Chapter Fifty-Three: Clarissa
She woke up in stages, aware of the discomfort before she knew what hurt. Aware that something was wrong before she could even begin to put together some kind of story, some frame that gave the loose, rattling toolbox of sensations any kind of meaning. Even when the most abstract parts of herself returned—her name, where she was—Clarissa was mostly aware that she was compromised. That something was wrong with her.
The room was dirty, the air a few degrees too hot. She lay in the thin, sweat-stinking bed, an IV drip hanging above her. The significance of that took a long time to come to her. The bag hung there. She wasn’t floating. There was gravity. She didn’t know if it was spin or thrust, or even the calm pull of mass against mass that being on a planet brought. She didn’t have the context to know. Only that it was nice to have weight again. It meant that something had gone right. Something was working.
When she closed her eyes, she dreamed that she had killed Ren, that she’d hidden him inside her own body and so she had to keep anyone from taking an imaging scan for fear they’d find him in her. It was a pleasure to wake up and remember that everyone already knew.
Sometimes Tilly came, sat by her bed. She looked like she’d been crying. Clarissa wanted to ask what was wrong, but she didn’t have the strength. Sometimes Anna was there. The doctor who checked on her was a beautiful old woman with eyes that had seen everything. Cortez never came. Sleeping and waking lost their edges. Healing and being ill too. It was difficult if not impossible to draw a line between them.
She woke once to voices, to the hated voice, to Holden. He was standing at the foot of her bed, his arms crossed on his chest. Naomi was next to him, and then the others. The pale one who looked like a truck driver, the brown one who looked like a schoolteacher. Amos and Alex. The crew of the Rocinante. The people she hadn’t managed to kill. She was glad to see them.
“There is absolutely no way,” Holden said.
“Look at her,” Anna said. Clarissa craned her neck to see the woman standing behind her. The priest looked older. Worn out. Or maybe distilled. Cooked down to something like her essence. She was beautiful too. Beautiful and terrible and uncompromising in her compassion. It was in her face. It made her hard to look at. “She’ll be killed.”
Alex, the schoolteacher, raised his hand.
“You mean she’ll be tried in a court of law, with a lawyer, for killin’ a bunch of folks that we all pretty much know she killed.”
I did, Clarissa thought. It’s true. Above her, Anna pressed her hands together.
“I mean that’s what I want to happen,” Anna said. “A trial. Lawyers. Justice. But I need someone to get her safely from here to the courts on Luna. With the evacuation starting, you have the only independent ship in the slow zone. You are the only crew that I trust to get her out safely.”
Naomi looked over at Holden. Clarissa couldn’t read the woman’s expression.
“I’m not taking her on my ship,” Holden said. “She tried to kill us. She almost didkill Naomi.”
“She also saved you both,” Anna said. “And everybody else.”
“I’m not sure being a decent human that one time means I owe her something,” Holden said.
“I’m not saying it does,” Anna said. “But if we don’t treat her with the same sense of justice that we’d ask for ourselves—”
“Look, Red,” Amos said. “Everybody in this room except maybe you and the captain has a flexible sense of morality. None of us got clean hands. That’s not the point.”
“This is a tactical thing,” Alex agreed.
“It is?” Holden said.
“It is,” Naomi said. “Pretend that she’s not a danger in and of herself. Taking her on board, even just to transport her to a safe place, puts us at risk from three different legal systems, and our situation is alreadyc ‘tenuous’ is a nice word.”
Clarissa reached up, took Anna’s shirt between her fingers, tugging like a child at her mother.
“It’s okay,” she croaked. “I understand. It’s all right.”
“How much?” Anna asked. And then, off their blank looks, “If it’s just risk versus return, how much would it take to be worth it to you?”
“More than you have,” Holden said, but there was an apology in his tone. He didn’t want to disappoint Anna and he didn’t want to do what she said. No way for him to win.
“What if I bought the Rocinante?” Anna said.
“It’s not for sale,” Holden said.
“Not from you. I know about your legal troubles. What if I bought the Rocinantefrom Mars. Gave you the rights to it, free and clear.”
“You’re going to buy a warship?” Alex said. “Do churches get to do that?”
“Sure,” Holden said, “do that, and I’ll smuggle her out.”
Anna held up a finger, then pulled her hand terminal out of her pocket. Clarissa could see her hands were trembling. She tapped at the screen, and a few seconds later a familiar voice came from the box.
“Annie,” Tilly Fagan said. “Where are you? I’m having cocktails with half a dozen very important people and they’re boring me to tears. The least you can do is come up and let them fawn over you for a while.”
“Tilly,” Anna said. “You remember that really expensive favor you owe me? I know what it is.”
“I’m all ears,” Tilly said.
“I need you to buy the Rocinantefrom Mars and give it to Captain Holden.” Tilly was silent. Clarissa could practically see the woman’s eyebrows rising. “It’s the only way to take care of Clarissa.”
Tilly’s exhalation could have been a sigh or laughter.
“Sure, what the hell. I’ll tell Robert to do it. He will. It’ll be less than I’d get in a divorce. Anything else, dear? Shall I change the Earth’s orbit for you while I’m at it?”
“No,” Anna said. “That’s plenty.”
“You’re damn right it is. Get up here soon. Really, everyone’s swooning over you, and it’ll be much more amusing for me to watch them try to squeeze up next to you in person.”
“I will,” Anna said. She put her hand terminal back in her pocket and took Clarissa’s hand in her own. Her fingers were warm. “Well?”
Holden’s face had gone pale. He looked from Clarissa to Anna and back and blew out a long breath.
“Um,” he said. “Wow. Okay. We may not be going home right away, though. Is that cool?”
Clarissa held out her hand, astounded by its weight. It took them all a moment to understand what she was doing. Then Holden—the man she’d moved heaven and earth to humiliate and murder—took her hand.
“Pleased to meet you,” she croaked.
They installed a medical restraint cuff to her ankle set to sedate her on a signal from any of the crew, or if it detected any of the products of her artificial glands, or if she left the crew decks of the ship. It was three kilos of formed yellow plastic that clung to her leg like a barnacle. The transfer came during the memorial service. Captain Michio Pa, her face still bandaged from the fighting, spoke in glowing terms about Carlos Baca and Samantha Rosenberg and a dozen other names and commended their ashes to the void. Then each of the commanders of the other ships in the flotilla took their turns, standing before the cameras on the decks of their own ships, speaking a few words, moving on. No one mentioned Ashford, locked away and sedated. No one mentioned her.
It was the last ceremony before the exodus. Before the return. Clarissa watched it on her hand terminal when she wasn’t looking at the screen that showed the shuttle’s exterior view. The alien station was inert now. It didn’t glow, didn’t react, didn’t read to the sensors as anything more than a huge slug of mixed metals and carbonate structures floating in a starless void.
“They’re not all going back, you know,” Alex said. “The Martian team is plannin’ to stay here, run surveys on all the gates. See what’s on the other side.”
“I didn’t know that,” Clarissa said.
“Yeah. This right now,” the pilot said, gesturing toward the screen where a UN captain was speaking earnestly into the camera, her eyes hard as marbles and her jaw set against the sorrow of listing the names of the dead. “This is the still point. Before, this was all fear. After this, it’ll all be greed. But thisc” He sighed. “Well, it’s a nice moment, anyway.”
“It is,” Clarissa said.
“So, just to check, are you still plannin’ to kill the captain? Because, you know, if you are it seems like you at least owe us a warning.”
“I’m not,” she said.
“And if you were?”
“I’d still say I wasn’t. But I’m not.”
“Fair enough.”
“Okay, Alex,” Holden said from the back. “Are we there yet?”
“Just about to knock,” Alex said. He tapped on the control panel, and on the screen the Rocinante’s exterior lights came on. The ship glowed gold and silver in the blackness, like seeing a whole city from above. “Okay, folks. We’re home.”
Clarissa’s bunk was larger than her quarters in the Cerisier, smaller than the one from the Prince. She wasn’t sharing it with anyone, though. It was hers as much as anything was.
All she had for clothing was a jumpsuit with the name Tachiimprinted in the weave. All her toiletries were the standard ship issue. Nothing was hers. Nothing was her. She kept to her room, going out to the galley and the head when she needed to. It wasn’t fear, exactly, so much as the sense of wanting to stay out of the way. It wasn’t her ship, it was theirs. She wasn’t one of them, and she didn’t deserve to be. She was a paid passenger, and not a fare they’d even wanted. The awareness of that weighed on her.
Over time, the bunk began to feel more like her cell on the Behemoththan anything else. That was enough to drive her out a little. Only a little, though. She’d seen the galley before in simulations, when she’d been planning how to destroy it, where to place her override. It looked different in person. Not smaller or larger, exactly, but different. The crew moved through the space going from one place to another, passing through in the way she couldn’t. They ate their meals and had their meetings, ignoring her like she was a ghost. Like she’d already lost her place in the world.
“Well,” Holden said, his voice grim, “we have a major problem. We’re out of coffee.”
