James Corey - Abaddon's Gate

“I got paid to stick that rig on the ship,” Cohen said, moving out of the defensive circle and floating a half meter closer to Holden. Pulling himself out of the group, so that if anything happened, they wouldn’t get hurt. Holden respected him for that. “I had no idea what it would do. I figured someone was spying on your comms, is all. When that broadcast went out and the missiles started flying, I was just as surprised as you guys. And my ass was just as much on the line.”

“Motherfucker,” Amos said again, this time without the heat. Holden knew him well enough to know that angry Amos was not nearly as dangerous as cold Amos. “I was thinking I’d have a tough time spacing a blind guy, but turns out I’m gonna be just fine with it.”

“Not yet,” Holden said, waving Amos off. “Who paid you to do this. Lie to me and I let Amos have his way.”

Cohen held up both hands in surrender. “Hey, you got me, boss. I know my ass is hanging by a thread right now. I got no reason not to come clean.”

“Then do.”

“I only met her once,” Cohen continued. “Young woman. Nice voice. Had lots of money. Asked me to plant this thing. I said, ‘Sure, get me on that ship and I plant whatever you want.’ Next thing I know Monica’s got a gig doing this doc about you and the Ring. Damned if I know how she swung that.”

“Son of a bitch,” Monica said, clearly as surprised by this revelation as anyone else. That actually made Holden feel a little better.

“Who was this young woman with all the money?” Holden asked. Amos hadn’t moved, but he wasn’t pointing the gun at anyone anymore. Cohen’s tone didn’t have a hint of deception in it. He sounded like a man who knew that his life hung on every word.

“Never got a name, but I can sculpt her pretty easy.”

“Do that,” Holden said, then watched as Cohen plugged his modeling software into the big monitor. Over the next several minutes, the image of a woman slowly formed. It was all one color, of course, and the hair was a sculpted lump, not individual strands. But when Cohen had finished, Holden had no doubt about who it was. She was changed, but not so much that he couldn’t recognize the dead girl.

Julie Mao.

The ship was quiet. Monica and her two camera operators had been confined to the crew decks again, and last time Holden had checked they were together in the galley, not talking. Cohen’s betrayal had taken them by surprise as well, and they were still working through it. Cohen himself was in the airlock. It was the closest thing they had to a brig. Holden had to assume the man was quietly panicking.

Alex was back in the cockpit. After Amos had thrown Cohen into the airlock he’d disappeared back down to his machine shop to brood. Holden had let him go. Of them all, Amos took betrayal the hardest. Holden knew that Cohen’s life was hanging on whether Amos could get past it or not. If he decided to take action, Holden wouldn’t be able to stop him, and didn’t even know if he’d want to try.

So he and Naomi sat alone together on the ops deck as she made the last few adjustments to get the comm array back up and running. With Cohen’s device disabled, they’d been able to reboot it without being hijacked.

Naomi was waiting for him to speak. He could feel the tension in her shoulders from across the room. But he had no idea what to say. For a year, Miller had been a confused phantasm that appeared randomly and spouted nonsense. Now everything Miller had said over the last year took on the weight of dark portents. Prophetic riddles whose meaning must be teased out or risk catastrophe. And Miller wasn’t the only ghost haunting Holden.

Julie Mao had joined the game.

Somehow, while Miller had followed Holden around the solar system, the protomolecule had been using Julie, working on its own secret plans. Julie had arranged for the Martian lawsuit that stripped him of safe ports and employment. She’d arranged to have a documentary crew placed on his ship to send him to the Ring. And now it appeared she’d engineered an elaborate betrayal that forced him to actually go through the Ring to stay alive. The ghost Julie didn’t resemble his Miller at all. It was working with very specific purpose. It had access to money and powerful connections. The only thing it had in common with Miller was that it seemed to be focused on him. And if this was all true, then everything it had done had been with a single purpose in mind.

To bring him here. To force him to go through the Ring.

A shiver crawled its way up his spine, sending all the hairs on his arms and neck standing straight up. He turned on the closest workstation and brought up the external telescopes. Nothing at all in this starless void except a lot of inactive rings and the massive blue ball at its center. As he watched, the missile that had chased them through the gate drifted into view and joined the slowly circling ring of flotsam that orbited the station.

Everything comes to me, eventually , the station seemed to be saying.

“I have to go there,” he said out loud even as the thought popped into his head.

“Where?” Naomi asked, turning away from her work on the comm. The relief he could see on her face now that he’d finally said something wouldn’t last long. He felt a pang of guilt for that.

“The station. Or whatever it is. I have to go there.”

“No you don’t,” she said.

“Everything that’s happened over the last year has been to bring me here, now.” Holden rubbed his face with both hands, itching his eyes and hiding from Naomi’s scrutiny at the same time. “And that thing is the only place in here. There’s nothing else. No other open gates, no planets, no other ships. Nothing.”

“Jim,” Naomi said, a warning in her voice. “This thing where you always have to be the guy who goes…”

“I’ll never know why the protomolecule is talking to me until I get there, face-to-face.”

“Eros, Ganymede, the Agatha King ,” Naomi continued. “You always think you have to go.”

Holden stopped rubbing his face and looked at her. She stared back, beautiful and angry and sad. He felt his throat threaten to close up, so he said, “Am I wrong? Tell me I’m wrong and we’ll think of something else. Tell me how all of what’s happened means something else and I’m just not seeing it.”

“No,” she said again, meaning something else this time.

“Okay.” He sighed. “Okay then.”

“It’s getting old being the one who stays behind.”

“You’re not staying behind,” Holden said. “You’re keeping the crew alive while I do something really stupid. It’s why we’re an awesome team. You’re the captain now.”

“That’s a shit job and you know it.”

In the last hours before they shot the Ring, a kind of calm descended on the Behemoth . In the halls and galleries, people talked, but their voices were controlled, quiet, brittle. The independent feeds, always a problem, were pretty subdued. The complaints coming to the security desk fell to nothing. Bull kept an eye on the places people could get liquored up and stupid, but there were no flare-ups. The traffic going through the comm laser back toward Tycho Station and all points sunward spiked to six times its usual bandwidth. A lot of people on the ship wanted to say something to someone—a kid, a sister, a dad, a lover—before they passed through the signal-warping circumference and into whatever was on the other side.

Bull had thought about doing it too. He’d logged into the family group feed for the first time in months, and let the minutiae of the extended Baca family wash over him. One cousin was engaged, another one was divorcing, and they were trading notes and worldviews. His aunt on Earth was having trouble with her hip, but since she was on basic, she was on a waiting list to get a doctor to look at it. His brother had dropped a note to say that he’d gotten a job on Luna, but he didn’t say what it was or anything about it. Bull listened to the voices of the family he never saw except on a screen, the lives that didn’t intersect his own. The love he felt for them surprised him, and kept him from putting his own report in among them. It would only scare them, and they wouldn’t understand it. He could already hear his cousins telling him to jump ship, get on something that wasn’t going through. By the time the message got there, he’d already have gone anyway.