Expanse 03 - Abaddon’s Gate (6 page)

“I’m not mad at you for coming here,” Nono said. “This was our dream. Coming to places like this. But when you asked for the transfer out here, you were three months pregnant.”

“I was so unlikely to be chosen,” Anna said, and she could hear the defensiveness in her own voice.

Nono nodded. “But you
were
chosen. And this thing for the UN. Flying out to the Ring as part of the secretary-general’s advisory group. And our baby not even two.”

“I think two hundred people signed up for the same slot,” Anna said.

“They chose you. They want you to go.”

“It was so unlikely—” Anna started.

“They always choose you,” Nono interrupted. “Because you are very special. Everyone can see it. I can see it. I saw it the first time I met you, giving your speech at the faith conference in Uganda. So nervous you dropped your notes, but I could’ve heard a pin drop in that auditorium. You couldn’t help but shine.”

“I stole you from your country,” Anna said. It was what she always said when Nono brought up how they met. “The Ugandan church could have used a young minister like you.”

“I stole you,” Nono said, like she always said, only this time it had a disconcertingly pro forma feel. As though it were an annoying ritual to be rushed through. “But you always say this. ‘There were so many others. I was so unlikely to be picked.’”

“It’s true.”

“It’s the excuse you use. You’ve always been one to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.”

“I won’t go,” Anna said, pushing her hand against her eyes and the tears that threatened there. Her elbow banged into the salad bowl, nearly knocking it off the table. “I haven’t said yes to them. I’ll tell them it was a mistake.”

“Annushka,” Nono said, squeezing her hand. “You
will
go. But I am taking Nami back to Moscow with me. She can meet her grandparents. Grow up in real gravity.”

Anna felt a white-hot spike of fear shoot through her stomach. “You’re leaving me?”

Nono’s smile was a mix of exasperation and love.

“No.
You’re
leaving
us
. For a little while. And when you come back, we will be waiting for you in Moscow. Your family. I will find us a nice place to live there, and Nami and I will make it a home. A place where we can be happy. But we will not go with you.”

“Why?” was all Anna could think to say.

Nono got up and took two plates out of the cupboard, then dished up dinner and put it on the table. As she spooned Waldorf salad onto her plate she said, “I’m very afraid of that thing. The thing from Venus. I’m afraid of what it will mean for everything we care about. Humanity, God, our place in His universe. I’m afraid of what it will do, of course, but much more afraid of what it
means
.”

“I am too,” Anna said. It was the truth. In fact, it was part of the reason she’d asked to join the expedition when she heard it was being assembled. That same fear Nono was talking about. Anna wanted to look it in the eye. Give God a chance to help her understand it. Only then could she help anyone else with it.

“So go find the answers,” Nono said. “Your family will be waiting for you when you get back.”

“Thank you,” Anna said, a little awed by what Nono was offering her.

“I think,” Nono said around a mouthful of mushrooms and rice, “that maybe they will need people like you out there.”

“Like me?”

“People who don’t ask permission.”

“
I
t’s not in the budget,” Michio Pa, executive officer of the
Behemoth
, said. If she’d been an Earther, she would have been a small woman, but a lifetime in microgravity had changed her the way it did all of them. Her arms, legs, and spine were all slightly elongated—not thin exactly. Just put together differently. Her head was larger than it would have been, and walking in the mild one-third-g thrust gravity, she stood as tall as Bull but still seemed perversely childlike. It made him feel shorter than he was.

“We might need to adjust that,” he said. “When they put in the rail gun, they were treating it like we had standard bulkheads and supports. Thing is, the Mormons were really trying to cut back on mass. They used a lot of ceramics and silicates where the metals usually go. Directional stuff. We fire a round right now, we could shear the skin off.”

Pa walked down the long, curving corridor. The ceiling arched above her, white and easily twice as high as required, an aesthetic gesture by designers who hadn’t known they were building a warship. Her stride a little wider than his, moving a little more comfortably in the low g and making him trot slightly to keep up. It was one of a thousand small ways Belters reminded earthborn men and women that they didn’t belong here. The XO shook her head.

“We came out here with an operational plan,” she said. “If we start rewriting it every time we find an adjustment we’d like to make, we might as well not have bothered.”

Privately, Bull thought the same thing, but with a different inflection. If he’d been XO, the operational plan would have been called a suggested guideline and only opened when he wanted a good laugh. Pa probably knew that. They reached the transit ramp, a softly sloping curve that led from the command and control levels at the head of the
Behemoth
down to the massive drum of her body. From Pa’s domain to his.

“Look,” Pa said, her mouth twitching into a conciliatory smile, “I’ll make note of it for the refit, but I’m not going to start reallocating until I have an idea of the big picture. I mean, if I start pulling resources out of environmental control to cover this, and next week we find something that needs doing there, I’ll just be pushing it back, right?”

Bull looked down the ramp. Soft lights recessed in the walls filled the air with a shadowless glow like a cheesy vision of heaven. Pa put her hand on his shoulder. She probably meant it to be sympathetic, but it felt like condescension.

“Yeah, okay,” he said.

“It’ll be all right, chief,” she said, giving his trapezius a little squeeze. He nodded and walked down the ramp to the transfer platform. Her footsteps vanished behind him, submerging in the hum of air recyclers. Bull fought the urge to spit.

The
Behemoth
, back when she’d been the
Nauvoo
, had been built with a different life in mind. Most ships built for travel between the planets were like massive buildings, one floor above another with the thrust of the Epstein drive at the bottom providing the feeling of weight for whole voyages apart from a few hours in the middle when the ship flipped around to change from acceleration to slowing down. But Epstein or not, no ship could afford the power requirements or the heat generated by accelerating forever. Plus, Einstein had a thing or two to say about trying to move mass at relativistic speeds. The
Nauvoo
had been a generation ship, its journey measured in light-years rather than light-minutes. The percentage of its life span it could afford to spend under thrust was tiny by comparison. The command and control at the top of the ship and the main engines and the associated parts of engineering at the bottom could almost have belonged to a standard craft connected by a pair of kilometers-long shafts, one for a keel elevator to move people and another that gave access to the skin of the drum.

Everything else was built to spin.

For the centuries out to Tau Ceti, the body of the
Nauvoo
was meant to turn. Ten levels of environmental engineering, crew quarters, temples, schools, wastewater treatment, machine shops, and forges, and at the center, the vast interior. It would have been a piece of Earth curved back on itself. Soil and farmland and the illusion of open air with a central core of fusion-driven light and heat as gentle and warm as a summer day.

All the rooms and corridors in the body section—the vast majority of the ship—were built with that long, slow, endless season in mind. The brief periods of acceleration and deceleration at the journey’s ends hardly mattered. Except that they were all the ship had now. Those places that should have been floors were all walls, and would be forever. The vast reinforced decks meant to carry a tiny world’s worth of soil were the sides of a nearly unusable well. Someone slipping from the connection where the command and control levels met the great chamber could fall for nearly two full kilometers. Water systems built to take advantage of spin gravity and Coriolis stood on their sides, useless. The
Nauvoo
had been a marvel of human optimism and engineering, a statement of faith in the twinned powers of God and rigorous engineering. The
Behemoth
was a salvage job with mass accelerators strapped to her side that would do more damage to herself than to an enemy.

And Bull wasn’t even allowed to fix the problems he knew about.

He passed through the transfer station and down toward his office. The rooms and corridors here were all built aslant, waiting for the spin gravity that would never come. Stretches of bare metal and exposed ducting spoke of the rush to finish it, and then to salvage and remake it. Just walking past them left Bull depressed.

Samara Rosenberg, longtime repair honcho on Tycho Station and now chief engineer on the
Behemoth
, was waiting in the anteroom, talking with Bull’s new deputy. Serge, his name was, and Bull wasn’t sure what he thought of the man. Serge had been part of the OPA before that was a safe thing to be. He had the traditional split circle insignia tattooed on his neck and wore it proudly. But like the rest of the security force, he’d been recruited by Michio Pa, and Bull didn’t know exactly how things stood. He didn’t trust the man yet, and distrust kept him from thinking all that well of him.

Sam, on the other hand, he liked.

“Hey, Bull,” she said as he dropped onto the foam-core couch. “Did you get a chance to talk to the XO?”

“We talked,” Bull said.

“What’s the plan?” Sam said, folding her arms in a way that meant she already knew.

Bull ran a hand through his hair. When he’d been younger, his hair had been soft. Now it was like he could feel each strand individually against his fingertips. He pulled out his hand terminal and scrolled through. There were five reports waiting, three routine security reports and two occasionals—an injury report and a larceny complaint. Nothing that couldn’t wait.

“Hey, Serge,” Bull said. “You hold the fort here for an hour?”

“Anything you want, chief,” Serge said with a grin. It was probably just paranoia that left Bull hearing contempt in the words.

“All right, then. Come on, Sam. I’ll buy you a drink.”

In a Coalition ship, back when there’d been an Earth-Mars Coalition, there would have been a commissary. In the OPA, there was a bar and a couple mom-and-pop restaurants along with a bare-bones keep-you-alive supply of prepack meals that anyone could get for the asking. The bar was in a wide space that might have been meant for a gymnasium or a ball court, big enough for a hundred people but Bull hadn’t seen it with more than a couple dozen. The lighting had been swapped out for blue-and-white LEDs set behind sand-textured plastic. The tables were flat black and magnetized to hold the bulbs of beer and liquor to them. Nothing was served in glasses.

“Che-che!” the bartender called as Bull and Sam stepped through the door. “Moergen! Alles-mesa, you.”

“Meh-ya,” Sam replied, as comfortable with the mishmash Belter patois as Bull was with Spanish or English. It was her native tongue.

“What’re you having?” Bull asked as he slid into one of the booths. He liked the ones where he could see the door. It was an old habit.

“I’m on duty,” she said, sitting across from him.

Bull leaned forward, catching the barkeep’s eye, and held up two fingers.

“Lemonades,” he said.

“Sa sa!” the barkeep replied, lifting a fist in the equivalent of a nod. Bull sat back and looked at Sam. She was a pretty enough woman. Cute, with pixie-cut hair and a quick smile. There had been about a minute when they’d first met that Bull had seriously considered whether he found her attractive. But if he’d seen the same calculus in her, they’d gotten past it.

“Didn’t go so good?” Sam asked.

“No.”

Sam lifted her eyebrows and leaned her elbows against the tabletop. He sketched out Pa’s objections and rationale, and Sam’s expression shifted slowly into a fatalistic amusement.

“Waiting for the refit’s all well and good,” she said when he was done, “but if we try and test-fire that bad boy, it’s going to make an awfully big owie.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Not a hundred percent,” she said. “High eighties, though.”

Bull sighed out a tired obscenity as the barkeep brought the bulbs of lemonade. They were about the size of Bull’s balled fists, citrus yellow with ∏ποдоовощ малыша потехи printed on the side in bright red script.

“Maybe I should talk to her,” Sam said. “If it came straight from me…”

“It came straight from you, probably it would work,” he said, “and they get to tell me no on everything from now on. ‘Bull asked for it? Well, if it was important, he’d have sent the Belter.’ Right?”

“You really think it’s about you not getting born up here?”

“Yeah.”

“Well… you’re probably right,” Sam said. “Sorry about that.”

“Comes with the territory,” Bull said, pretending that it didn’t bother him.

Sam plucked her lemonade off the table and took a long, thoughtful drink. The bulb clicked when the magnet readhered to the tabletop. “I’ve got nothing against inners. Worked with a lot of you guys, and didn’t run into a higher percentage of assholes than when I’m dealing with Belters. But I have to get that rail gun’s mounts reinforced. If there’s a way to do that without undercutting you, I’m all for it.”

“But if it’s that or mess up the ship,” Bull said, nodding. “Gimme a little time. I’ll think of something.”

“Start when you want to shoot someone and count back eighteen days,” Sam said. “That’s my deadline. Even if everyone’s sober and working balls-out, my crew can’t get it done faster than that.”

“I’ll think of something,” Bull said.

 

 

The larceny complaint turned out to be from a repair and maintenance crew who couldn’t agree how to store their tools. The injury report was a kid who got caught between a stretch of deck plating and someone driving a salvage mech. The cartilage in the kid’s knee had gotten ground into about a dozen different bits of custard; the medic said a good clean bone break would have been better. The injured man would be fine, but he was off active duty for at least a month while all his pieces got glued back together.

The security reports were boilerplate, which either meant that things were going well or that the problems were getting glossed over, but probably they were going well. The trip out to the Ring was a shakedown cruise, and that always meant there’d be a little honeymoon period when the crew were all figuratively standing shoulder to shoulder and taking on the work. Everyone expected there’d be problems, so there was a grace period when morale didn’t start heading down.

Chief security officer on an OPA ship was a half-assed kind of position, one part cop, one part efficiency expert, and pretty much all den mother to a crew of a thousand people with their own agendas and petty power struggles and opinions on how he should be doing his job better. A good security chief kept bullshit off the captain’s plate as a full-time job.

The worst part, though, was that all Bull’s formal duties were focused inward, on the ship. Right now, a flotilla of Earth ships was burning out into the deep night. A matching force of Martian war vessels—the remnants of the navy that had survived two let’s-not-call-them-wars—was burning out on a converging path. The
Behemoth
was lumbering along too with a head start that came from being farther from the sun and the hobble of low-g acceleration to keep her slow. And all of it was focused on the Ring.

Reports would be filling Captain Ashford’s queue, and as his XO, Pa would be reading them too. Bull had whatever scraps they let him have or else the same mix of pabulum and panic that filled the newsfeeds. Ashford and Pa would be in conference for most of their shifts, working over strategies and options and playing through scenarios for how things might go down when they reached the Ring. Bull was going to worry about all the trivial stuff so that they didn’t have to.