James Corey - Abaddon's Gate

Holden’s face seemed to be saying they hadn’t.

Anna was watching them file out the door, again trying to memorize faces and names, trying not to think about why. Monica grabbed her and started pulling her toward the makeshift film studio.

“Time to start working,” she said. She deposited Anna just outside the camera view and stepped in front of the unadorned green wall they used as a backdrop.

“Welcome,” she said, her face and voice shifting into cheery video host mode. “I’m Monica Stuart in the offices of Radio Free Slow Zone. I’ve got some exciting guests today, including Doctor Anna Volovodov, and a number of UN and Martian military officers. But even more exciting, today we’re bringing you the most important broadcast we’ve ever done.

“Today, we’ll tell you how to go home.”

Bull felt the time moving past like it was something physical, like he was falling through it and couldn’t catch himself. Anamarie Ruiz had an hour left before she had to decide whether to do what Ashford wanted or get killed. If she didn’t have to choose, she wouldn’t choose wrong, and every minute that he wasn’t in the engineering deck took them closer to where they couldn’t get back.

They’d left the colonial administration offices in a small convoy. Six electric carts with twenty-five people, including Jim Holden and three-quarters of his crew, the four Martian marines, an even dozen of the Behemoth ’s crew who’d stayed loyal to Pa, and five Earth soldiers whom Corin had found in the drum and brought along. They had some riot armor that hadn’t been taken out of the armory before Ashford’s forces occupied it. They had an ugly collection of slug-throwing pistols and shotguns loaded with ballistic gel rounds; a mix of weapons designed to subdue without permanent injury and those meant to assure the enemy’s death. The four Martian marines had the four best guns they’d been able to scrounge up, but there were too few of both. The whole thing stank of improvisation.

He couldn’t sit down, so he’d taken the canopy off the electric cart and wedged his mech in the back. He sailed through the hot, close air of the drum like a figurehead on the prow of some doomed pirate ship. Corin was at the wheel, hunched over it like she could make it go faster by the raw act of will. The Martian sergeant Verbinski who’d brought Jim Holden to the Behemoth in restraints sat at her side looking focused and bemused at the same time.

They passed through the main corridors heading south. The tires made a loud ripping sound against the decking. High above, the long, thin strip of blinding white illuminated the curve of the drum. The southern transfer point loomed ahead of them like a ceramic steel cliff face.

People parted before them, making a path. Bull watched them as he passed. Anger and fear and curiosity. These were his people. They hadn’t all been to start with, but he’d brought them here to the Behemoth . He’d made the ship important and the OPA’s role in the exploration beyond the Ring central. Earthers and Martians and Belters. The ones who’d lived. As the faces turned toward him, watching the convoy pass like flowers back on Earth tracking the arc of the sun, he wondered what Fred Johnson would have thought of all this. It was a clusterfuck from start to finish, no question about that. He hoped that when it came time to settle up accounts, he’d done more good than harm.

“We’re a pretty compromised force,” Verbinski said, craning his neck back and up to look at Bull. “How many people you think we’re going up against?”

“Not sure,” Bull said. “Probably a little more than we got, but they’re divided between engineering and command.”

“They as banged up as we are?”

Bull glanced over his shoulder. The truth was at least half of the people he was about to take into battle were already injured. There were people with pressure casts holding their arms together, with sutures keeping their skin closed. In normal circumstances, half his force would still be in the infirmary. Hell, he didn’t have any damn business going into a fire zone either, except that he wasn’t going to stay back and send people into a meat grinder he wouldn’t step into himself.

“Just about,” Bull said.

“You know, if I still had that recon armor you took off of us, I could just go get this done. Not even me and my squad. Just me.”

“Yeah. I know that.”

“Kind of makes you wish you’d trusted me a little bit, doesn’t it?”

“Kind of does,” Bull said.

There were two ways to reach the transfer point. The elevator was big enough to fit half the force into a box small enough that when the doors opened at the top, a single grenade would incapacitate nearly all of them. The alternative was a wide, sloping ramp that rose from the floor of the drum and spun up in a tight spiral to the axis. Its curve was going into the drum’s spin, so the faster they drove up it, the more the cart tires would push down into the floor. That wouldn’t matter down here, but when they reached the top where the fighting would essentially be in free fall, every bit of stability and control they could glean would matter.

The first shots came down from the axis, spraying bits of the ceramic roadway up in front of the lead cart. Bull tried to bend his head back far enough to see whether the attack was coming from the transfer point itself or a barricade closer in.

“Juarez!” Verbinski shouted. “Cover us.”

“Yes, sir,” a voice called from one of the back carts. Bull swiveled the mech enough to look over his shoulder. On the third cart back, one of the Martian marines was lying on his back, a long scoped rifle pointing up. He looked like he was napping until the rifle fired once. Bull tried to look up again, but the mech prevented him. He took out his hand terminal and used its camera like a mirror. High above them, a body was floating in the null-g zone, a pink cloud of blood forming around its waist.

“One less,” Verbinski said.

The firing continued as they took the ramp at speed. The semi-adhesive ripping of the tires against the deck changed its tone as less and less weight pressed against them. Bull felt his body growing lighter in its brace. The edge of the ramp was a cliff now, looking down almost a third of a kilometer to the floor of the drum below. Ashford’s men were above them, but not so far now that Bull couldn’t see the metal barricades they’d welded to the walls and deck. He was painfully aware of being the highest target. His neck itched.

Two heads popped up from behind the barricades. The muzzle flashes were like sparks. The Martian’s rifle barked behind him, and one of the attackers slumped down, the other retreating.

“Okay,” Bull said. “This is as close as we get without cover.”

Corin spun the cart nose in to the wall and slipped out, taking cover with Verbinski behind it while the next cart came ahead mirroring her. They were in microgravity here. Maybe a tenth of a g. Maybe less. Bull had to turn the magnets on in his mech’s feet to keep from floating away. By the time he’d gotten off the cart, the fighting was already far ahead of him. He drove the mech forward, marching up past the improvised barricades of the carts. The closest of them was less than ten meters from the first of Ashford’s barricades, and Jim Holden, Corin, and one of the Earthers were already pressed against the enemy’s cover, ducking to the side, firing, and falling back. The smell of spent gunpowder soured the air.

“Where’s Naomi?” Bull shouted. He didn’t have a clear idea whether any of the technical staff in there besides Ruiz were still loyal to Pa, and if they got their only real engineer killed before they made it into engineering, he was going to be pissed. Something detonated behind the barrier and two bodies pinwheeled out into the empty air. The light was behind them, and he couldn’t tell if they were his people or Ashford’s. At the last of the carts, he stopped. The battle was well ahead of him now, almost at the transfer point itself. That was good. It meant they were winning.