James Corey - Abaddon's Gate

“This is really going to piss them off if the missile keeps coming,” Amos said. Then, almost meditatively, “I don’t even know what a point defense cannon does at a range like this.”

As if in answer, the cruiser hit them with a targeting laser. Then all of the other Martian ships did as well, adding a few dozen more alarms to the cacophony.

“Shit,” Alex said, and the gravity came back like a boulder rolled onto Holden’s chest. None of the Martian ships fired, but the original missile shot back into view on the scope. The Martians were guiding it in, now that the Behemoth seemed to be out of action. Holden marveled that he’d lived just long enough to finally see real Martian-OPA cooperation. It wasn’t as gratifying as he’d hoped.

Martian ships whipped past on both sides as the Rocinante accelerated through the main cluster of their fleet. Holden could imagine the targeting arrays and point defense cannons swiveling to track them as they went by. Once past them, there was nothing but the Ring and infinite star-speckled black all around it.

The plan came to mind with the sick, sinking feeling of something horrible he’d always known and tried to forget. The missile was coming, and even if they avoided it, there would be others. He couldn’t dodge forever. He couldn’t surrender. For all he knew, his weapons might start firing at any second. For a moment, the ops deck seemed to go still, time slowing the way it did when something catastrophic was happening. He was intensely aware of Naomi, pressed back in her couch. Monica and Okju, their eyes wide with fear and thrust. Clip, his hand pressed awkwardly into the gel by his side. Cohen’s slack jaw and pale face.

“Huh,” Holden gurgled to himself, the g forces crushing his throat when he vocalized. He signaled Alex to cut thrust, and the gravity dropped away again.

“The Ring,” Holden said. “Aim for the Ring. Go.”

The gravity came back with a slap, and Holden rotated his chair to his workstation and brought up the navigational console. Watching the rapidly approaching orange dot out of the corner of his eye, he built a navigational package for Alex that would take them at high speed to the Ring, then spin them for a massive and almost suicidally dangerous deceleration burn just before they went in. He could slide them in under the velocity cap that had stopped the Y Que and all the fast-moving probes since. With any luck, the missile would be caught by whatever was on the other side, and the Roci , going slower, wouldn’t. The ship warned him that such high-g forces had a 3 percent chance to kill one of the crew members even during a short burn.

The missile would kill them all.

Holden sent the nav package to Alex, half expecting him to refuse. Hoping. Instead, the Roci accelerated for an endless twenty-seven minutes, followed by a nauseating zero-g spin that lasted less than four seconds, and a deceleration burn that lasted four and a half minutes and knocked every single person on the ship unconscious.

“Wake up,” Miller said in the darkness.

The ship was in free fall. Holden began coughing furiously as his lungs attempted to find their normal shape again after the punishing deceleration burn. Miller floated beside him. No one else seemed to be awake yet. Naomi wasn’t moving at all. Holden watched her until he could see the gentle rise and fall of her rib cage. She was alive.

“Doors and corners,” Miller said. His voice was soft and rough. “I tell you check your doors and corners, and you blow into the middle of the room with your dick hanging out. Lucky sonofabitch. Give you this, though, you’re consistent.”

Something about the way he spoke seemed saner than usual. More controlled. As if guessing his thoughts, the detective turned to look at him. Smiled.

“Are you here?” Holden asked. His mind was still fuzzy, his brain abused by thrust and oxygen loss. “Are you real?”

“You’re not thinking straight. Take your time. Catch up. There’s no hurry.”

Holden pulled up the exterior cameras and blew out one long exhale that almost ended in a sob. The OPA missile was floating outside the ship, just over a hundred meters from the nose of the Roci . The torpedo’s drive was still firing, its tail a furious white torch stretching nearly a kilometer behind it. But the missile hung in space, motionless.

Holden didn’t know if the missile had been that close when they went through. He suspected not. More likely, they’d just wound up that close once they’d both stopped moving. Even so, the sight of the massive weapon, engine burning as it still fought to reach him, made a shiver go down his spine and his balls creep up into his belly. Ten meters closer and they’d have been in proximity. It would have detonated.

As he watched, the missile was slowly pulled away, dragged off to who knew where by whatever power set the speed limit on this side of the Ring.

“We made it,” he said. “We’re through.”

“Yeah,” Miller said.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it? This is why you did it.”

“You’re giving me too much credit.”

Amos and Naomi both groaned as they started to wake. The documentary crew was motionless. They might even be dead. Holden couldn’t tell without unstrapping, and his body wouldn’t allow that yet. Miller leaned close to the screen, squinting at it like he was searching for something. Holden pulled up the sensor data. A host of information flooded in. Numerous objects, clustered within a million kilometers, close as seeds in a pod. And past them, nothing. Not even starlight.

“What are they?” Holden asked. “What’s out there?”

Miller glanced down at the display. His face was expressionless.

“ Nothing ,” the dead man said. And then, “It scares the shit out of me.”

“The hell are we?” Serge said, floating gently by the security desk. “Security or fucking babysitters?”

“We’re whatever gets the job done,” Bull said, but he couldn’t put much force behind the words.

It was thirty hours since the Behemoth had gone dark, and he had slept for six of them. Serge, Casimir, Jojo, and Corin had been trading off duty at the desk, coordinating the recovery. The rest of the security staff had been in ad hoc teams, putting down two little panic riots, coordinating the physical resources to free a dozen people trapped in storage bays where the air recycler hadn’t booted back up, arresting a couple of mech jockeys who’d taken the chaos as opportunity to settle a personal score.

The lights were on all across the ship now. The damage control systems, woken from their coma, were working double time to catch up. The crews were exhausted and frightened and on edge, and James fucking Holden had escaped through the Ring into whatever was on the other side. The security office smelled like old sweat and the bean curd masala that Casimir had brought in yesterday. For the first day, there had been an unconscious effort to keep a consistent physical orientation—feet toward the floor, head toward the ceiling. Now they all floated in whatever direction they happened to fall into. It seemed almost natural to the Belters. Bull still suffered the occasional bout of vertigo.

“Amen alles amen,” Serge said with a laugh. “Lube for the machine, us.”

“Least fun I’ve ever had with lube,” Corin said. Bull noted that when Corin got tired, she got raunchy. In his experience, everyone dealt with pushing too hard differently. Some got angry and irritable, some got sad. At a guess, it was all loss of inhibition. Wear down the façade with too much work or fear or both, and whoever was waiting underneath came out.