James Corey - Abaddon's Gate

“I see it,” she said, putting her finger on the spike. “And we can’t tell where it came from?”

“Fucks me,” Stanni said, rubbing his thigh. “I’m seeing it, but I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

Melba ran her tongue against the back of her teeth, concentrating, trying to remember what the tutorials had shown about tracking power spikes. In an odd way, her inexperience had shifted into an asset for the team. Stanni and Ren, Bob and Soledad all had more hands-on experience than she did, but she’d only just learned the basics. Sometimes she would know some simple thing that all of them had known once, and only she hadn’t forgotten. Her analysis was slower, but it didn’t skip steps, because she didn’t know which steps could be skipped.

“Did it start at the deceleration flip?” she asked.

Stanni grunted like a man struck by a sudden pain.

“They hit null g and one of the regulators reset,” he said. “Least it’s nothing serious. Embarrassing to blow up all they preachers y sa. We’ll need to get back over there and check them, though.”

Melba nodded and made a mental note to read through what that process required. All she’d known was the truism repeated in three of her tutorials that when a ship cut thrust halfway through a journey, flipped, and began accelerating in the opposite direction it was a time for especial care.

“I’ll put it on the rotation,” she said, and pulled up her team’s schedule. There was a slot in ten days when there would be enough time to revisit the big ship. She blocked out the time, marked it, and posted it to the full group. All of it felt easy and natural, like the sort of thing she had been doing her whole life. Which in a sense, she had.

The flotilla was coming to the last leg of its journey. They had passed the orbit of Uranus weeks ago, and the sun was a bright star in an overwhelming abyss of night sky. All the plumes of fire were pointed toward the Ring now, bleeding off their velocity with every passing minute. Even though it was the standard pattern for Epstein drive ships, Melba couldn’t quite shake the feeling that they were all trying to flee from their destination and being pulled in against their will.

Unless they were discussing work, the only conversation—in the mess hall, on the exercise machines, on the shuttles to and from the ships they maintained—was about the Ring. The Martian science ships and their escort were already there, peering through the void. There had been no official reports given, so instead rumors sprang up like weeds. Every beam of light that passed through the Ring and hit something bounced back, just like in normal space. But a few troubling constants varied as you got close to it. The microwave background from inside the Ring was older than the big bang. People said if you listened carefully to the static from the other side of the Ring, you could hear the voices of the dead of Eros, or of the damned. Melba heard the dread in other people’s voices, saw Soledad crossing herself when she thought no one was looking, felt the oppressive weight of the object. She understood their growing fear not because she felt it herself but because her own private crisis point was coming.

The OPA’s monstrous battleship was on course to arrive soon, almost at the same time as the Earth flotilla. It wasn’t a matter of days yet, but it would be soon. The Rocinante had already passed the slower Behemoth . She and Holden were rising up out of the sun’s domain, and soon their paths would converge. Then there would be the attack, and the public humiliation of James Holden, and with it, his death. And after that…

It was strange to think of an afterward. The more she imagined it, the more she could see herself relaxing back into Melba’s life. There was no reason not to. Clarissa Mao had nothing, commanded nothing, was nothing. Melba Koh had work, at least. A history. It was a pretty thought, made prettier by being impossible. She would go home, become Clarissa again, and do whatever else she could to restore her family’s name. Honor required it. If she’d stayed, it would have meant being like Julie.

Growing up, Clarissa had admired and resented her older sister. Julie the pretty one. The smart one. The champion yacht racer. Julie who could make Father laugh. Julie who could do no wrong. Petyr was younger than Clarissa and so would always be less. The twins Michael and Anthea had always been a world unto themselves, sharing jokes and comments that only they understood, and so seemed at times more like long-term guests of the family than part of it. Julie was the oldest, the one Clarissa longed to be. The one to beat. Clarissa hadn’t been the only one to see Julie that way. Their mother felt it too. It was the thing that made Clarissa and her mother most alike.

And then something happened. Julie had walked away from them all, cut her hair, dropped out of school, and disappeared up into the darkness. She remembered her father hearing the news over dinner. They’d been having kaju murgh kari in the informal dining room that overlooked the park. She’d just come back from her riding lesson and still smelled a little of horse. Petyr had been talking about mathematics again, boring everyone, when her mother looked up from her plate with a smile and announced that Julie had written a letter to say she’d quit the family. Clarissa’s mouth had dropped open. It was like saying that the sun had decided to become a politician or that four had decided to be eight. It wasn’t quite incomprehensible, but it lived on the edge.

Her father had laughed. He’d said it was a phase. Julie’d gone to live like the common people and sow a few wild oats, and once she’d had her fill, she’d come home. But she’d seen in his eyes that he didn’t believe it. His perfect girl was gone. She’d rejected not only him, but the family. Their name. Forever after, cashews and curry had tasted like victory.

And so Melba would have to be folded up when she was done here. Put back in a box and buried or burned. Clarissa could go live with one of her siblings. Petyr had his own ship now. She could work on it as an electrochemical engineer, she thought with a smile. Or, in the worst case, stay with Mother. If she told them what she’d done, how she’d saved the family name, then Clarissa could start to rebuild the company. Remake their empire in her own name. Possibly even free her father from imprisonment and exile.

The thought left her feeling both hopeful and tired.

A loud clang and the distant sound of laughter brought her back to herself. She reviewed the maintenance schedule for the next ten-day cycle—maintenance on the electrical systems of three of the minor warships and a physical inventory of the electrical cards—marked the ship’s time, and shut down her terminal. The mess hall was half full when she got there, members of half a dozen other teams eating together and talking and watching the newsfeeds about the Ring, about themselves going to meet it. Soledad was sitting by herself, gaze fixed on her hand terminal while she ate a green-brown paste that looked like feces but smelled like the finest-cooked beef in the world. Melba told herself to think of it as pâté, and then it wasn’t so bad.

Melba got herself a plate and a bulb of lemon water and slid in across from Soledad. The other woman’s eyes flicked up with a small but genuine smile.

“Hoy, boss,” she said. “How’s it go?”

“Everything’s copacetic.” Melba smiled. She smiled more than Clarissa did. That was an interesting thought. “What did I miss?”

“Report from Mars. Data, this time. The ship that went through? Not on the drift.”

“Really?” Melba said. After they’d picked up the faint transmission from the little cobbled-together ship that had started all this, the assumption had been that it had been crippled by something that lived on the other side of the Ring. That it was floating free. “It’s under power?”