Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate (36 page)

Until he got Holden, they were going to be at a disadvantage. The man was a professional symbol, and creating calm when there was no reason for it was all about symbols. Captain Jakande wouldn’t bend, because if she did, she’d be court-martialed when they got back. If they got back. Bull didn’t like it, but he understood it. If they’d been anywhere but the slow zone, they’d all have been rattling sabers and baring teeth. Instead, all they could do was talk…

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.

T
he 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. An… 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 Un
blew 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 also… 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
am
scared 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
Rocinante
and 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 to… 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 family
and
I wanted my father to be proud of me
and
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’?
Fuck
that. 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.”