James Corey - Abaddon's Gate

“Maybe,” Soledad said. “Data shows it’s moving, and a lot slower than it went in. And the probes they sent in? One of them got grabbed too. Normal burn, and then boom, stopped. The signal’s all fucked up, but it looks like the same course that the ship’s on. Like they’re being… taken to the same place. Or something.”

“Weird,” Melba said. “But I guess weird is kind of what we expect. After Eros.”

“My dad was on Eros,” Soledad said, and Melba felt a strange tightening in her throat. “He worked one of the casinos. Security to make sure no one hacked the games, right? Been there fifteen years. Said he was going to retire there, get a little hole up where he didn’t weigh so much and just live off his retirement.”

“I’m sorry.”

Soledad shrugged.

“Everyone dies,” she said gruffly, then wiped the back of her hand against her eyes and turned back to the screen.

“My sister was there,” Melba said. It was truth, and more than truth. “My sister was one of the first ones it took.”

“Shit,” Soledad said, looking up at her now, terminal forgotten.

“Yeah.”

The two were quiet for a long moment. At another table, a Belter man no more than twenty barked his knees against the edge of the table and started cursing squat little Earth designers, to the amusement of his friends.

“You think they’re still there?” Soledad said softly, nodding at her terminal. “There were those voices. The transmissions that came off Eros. You know. After. It was people, right?”

“They’re dead,” Melba said. “Everyone on Eros died.”

“Changed, anyway,” Soledad said. “Some guy said it took the patterns off them, right? Their bodies. Their brains. I think about maybe they never really died. Just got remade , you know? What if their brains never stopped working and just got…”

She shrugged, looking for a word, but Melba knew what she meant. Change, even profound change, wasn’t the same as death. She was proof enough of that.

“Does it matter?”

“What if their souls never got loose?” Soledad said, with real pain in her voice. “What if it caught them all, right? Your sister. My dad. What if they aren’t dead, and Ring’s got all their souls still?”

There are no souls , Melba thought with a touch of pity. We are bags of meat with a little electricity running through them. No ghosts, no spirits, no souls. The only thing that survives is the story people tell about you. The only thing that matters is your name . It was the kind of thing Clarissa would think. The kind of thing her father would have said. She didn’t say it aloud.

“Maybe that’s why Earth’s bringing all those priests,” Soledad said and took a scoop of her food. “To put them all to rest.”

“Someone should,” Melba agreed, and then she turned to her meal.

Her hand terminal chimed: Ren requesting a private conversation. Melba frowned and accepted the connection.

“What’s up?” she said.

His voice, when it came, was strained.

“I got something I was wondering if you could look at. An anomaly.”

“On my way,” Melba said. She dropped the connection and downed her remaining meat paste in two huge swallows, then dropped the plate into the recycler on her way out. Ren was at a workstation in one of the storage bays. It was one of the new spaces he could work in that had a ceiling high enough that he wouldn’t have to hunch. Around him, blue plastic crates stood fixed to the floor or one another with powerful electromagnets. Her footsteps were the only sound.

“What’ve you got?” she asked.

He stood back and nodded at the monitor.

“Air filter data from the Seung Un ,” he said.

Her blood went cold.

“Why?” she said too sharply, too quickly.

“It’s catching a lot of outliers. Raised a flag. I’m looking at the profile, and it’s all high-energy ganga. Nitroethenes y sa.”

She hadn’t thought of this. She’d known that the ships did passive gas monitoring, but it had never occurred to her that stray molecules of her explosive would get caught in the filters, or that anyone would check. Ren took her silence as confusion.

“Built a profile,” he said. “Ninety percent fit with a moldable explosive.”

“So they’ve got explosives on board,” Melba said. “It’s a warship. Explosives is what they do, right?” Despair and embarrassment warred in her chest. She’d screwed up. She just wanted Ren to be quiet, to not say the things he was saying. That he was going to say.

“This is more like what they’d use for mining and excavation,” he said. “You inspected that deck. You remember seeing anything funny? Might have been hard to see. This stuff’s putty until it hits air.”

“You think it’s a bomb?” she said.

Ren shrugged.

“Inners hauling full load of gekke. A guy tried to light himself on fire. Hunger strike lady. The one coyo did that thing with the camera.”

“That wasn’t political,” she said. “He’s a performance artist.”

“All I mean, we put together a lot of different kinds of people think a lot of different kinds of things. Doesn’t bring out the best in people. I was a kid, I watched me eltern end a marriage over whether the madhi was going to be a Belter. And everybody know everybody back down the well’s watching. That kind of attention changes people, and it don’t make them better. Maybe someone’s planning to make a statement, si no?”

“Did you alert their security?” she asked.

“Check with you first. But something like this, shikata ga nai. We got to.”

I have to kill him , she thought like someone whispering in her ear. She saw how to do it. Get him to look at his screen, hunch over it just a little. Enough to bare the back of his neck. Then she would press her tongue against the roof of her mouth, the rough of the tastebuds tickling her palate a little, and the strength would come. She’d break him here and then… take him back to her quarters. She could clear out her locker, fit him in. And there was packing sealant that would keep the smell of the body from getting out. She’d file a report, say he was missing. She could act as confused as anyone. By the time she gave up the room and they found him, Melba would already be gone. Even if they worked out that she’d also planted the bomb, they’d just assume she was one of Holden’s agents.

Ren was looking at her, his brown eyes mild, his carrot-orange hair back in a wiry ponytail that left the skin of his neck exposed. She thought of him explaining about the brownout buffers. The gentleness in his expression. The kindness.

I’m sorry , she thought. This isn’t my fault. I have to .

“Let’s check the data again,” she said, angling her body toward the monitor. “Show me where the anomalies are.”

He nodded, turning with her. Like everything on the Cerisier , the controls were built for someone a little shorter than Ren. He had to bend a little to reach them. A thickness rose up at the back of her neck, filled her throat. Dread felt like drowning. Ren’s ponytail shifted, pulled to the side. There was a mole, brown and ovoid, just where his spine met his skull, like a target.

“So I’m looking on this report here,” he said, tapping the screen.

Melba pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth. What about Soledad? She’d been there when Ren called her. She knew Melba had gone to see him. She might have to kill her too. Where would she put that body? There would have to be an accident. Something plausible. She couldn’t let them stop her. She was so close.

“It’s not going up, though,” he said. “Steady levels.”