James Corey: Abaddon's Gate

“Miller showed up again?” she asked, leaning close to be heard over the noise.

“It’s a little unsettling how easily you see through me.”

“You’re pretty legible. And this wouldn’t be Miller’s first bathroom ambush. Did he make any more sense this time?”

“No,” Holden said. “He’s like talking to an electrical problem. Half the time I’m not sure he even knows I’m there.”

“It can’t really be Miller, can it?”

“If it’s the protomolecule wearing a Miller suit, I think that’s actually creepier.”

“Fair point,” Naomi said. “Did he say anything new, at least?”

“A little bit, maybe. He said something happened.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. He just said, ‘It happened,’ and blinked out.”

They sat together for a few minutes, a private silence within the riot, her fingers interlaced with his. She leaned over, kissing his right eyebrow, and then pulled him up off the chair.

“Come on,” she said.

“Where are we going?”

“I’m going to teach you how to play poker,” she said.

“I know how to play poker.”

“You think you do,” she said.

“Are you calling me a fish?”

She smiled and tugged at him.

Holden shook his head. “If you want to, let’s go back to the ship. We can get a few people together and have a private game. It doesn’t make sense to do it here. The house always wins.”

“We aren’t here to win,” Naomi said, and the seriousness in her voice made the words carry more than the obvious meaning. “We’re here to play.”

The news came two days later.

Holden was in the galley, eating takeout from one of the dockside restaurants: garlic sauce over rice, three kinds of legumes, and something so similar to chicken, it might as well have been the real thing. Amos and Naomi were overseeing the loading of nutrients and filters for the air recycling systems. Alex, in the pilot’s seat, was asleep. On the other ships Holden had served aboard, having the full crew back on ship before departure required it was almost unheard of, and they’d all spent a couple of nights in dockside hotels before they’d come home. But they were home now.

Holden ran through the local feeds on his hand terminal, sipping news and entertainment from throughout the system. A security flaw in the new Bandao Solice game meant that financial and personal information from six million people had been captured on a pirate server orbiting Titan. Martian military experts were calling for increased spending to address the losses suffered in the battle around Ganymede. On Earth, an African farming coalition was defying the ban on a nitrogen-fixing strain of bacteria. Protesters on both sides of the issue were taking to the streets in Cairo.

Holden was flipping back and forth, letting his mind float on the surface of the information, when a red band appeared on one of the newsfeeds. And then another. And then another. The image above the article chilled his blood. The Ring, they called it. The gigantic alien structure that had left Venus and traveled to a point a little less than 2 AU outside Uranus’ orbit, then stopped and assembled itself.

Holden read the news carefully as dread pulled at his gut. When he looked up, Naomi and Amos were in the doorway. Amos had his own hand terminal out. Holden saw the same red bands on that display.

“You seen this, Cap’n?” Amos asked.

“Yeah,” Holden said.

“Some mad bastard tried to shoot the Ring.”

“Yeah.”

Even with the distance between Ceres and the Ring, the vast empty ocean of space, the news that some idiot’s cheapjack ship had gone in one side of the alien structure and hadn’t come out the other should have only taken about five hours. It had happened two days before. That’s how long the various governments watching the Ring had been able to cover it up.

“This is it, isn’t it?” Naomi said. “This is what happened.”

Carlos c de Baca—Bull to his friends—didn’t like Captain Ashford. Never had.

The captain was one of those guys who’d sneer without moving his mouth. Before Ashford joined up with the OPA full-time, he’d gotten a degree in math from the Lunar Campus of Boston University, and he never let anyone forget it. It was like because he had a degree from an Earth university, he was better than other Belters. Not that he wouldn’t be happy to bad-mouth guys like Bull or Fred who really had grown up down the well. Ashford wasn’t one thing or another. The way he latched on to whatever seemed like it made him the big man—education, association with Earth, growing up in the Belt—made it hard not to tease him.

And Ashford was going to be in command of the mission.

“There’s a time element too,” Fred Johnson said.

Fred looked like crap. Too thin. Everyone looked too thin these days, but Fred’s dark skin had taken on an ashy overtone that left Bull thinking about things like autoimmune disorders or untreated cancer. Probably it was just stress, years, and malnutrition. Same thing that got everyone if nothing else did. Point of fact, Bull was looking a little gray around the temples too, and he didn’t like the crap LEDs that were supposed to mimic sunlight. That he was still darker than an eggshell had more to do with a nut-brown Mexican mother than anything ultraviolet.

He’d been out in the dark since he was twenty-two. He was over forty now. And Fred, his superior officer under two different governments, was older than he was.

The construction gantry sloped out ahead of them, the flexible walls shining like snake scales. There was a constant low-level whine, the vibrations of the construction equipment carried along the flesh of the station. The spin gravity here was a little less than the standard one-third g on Tycho Station proper, and Ashford was making a little show of speeding up and then slowing down for the Earthers. Bull slowed his own steps down just a little to make the man wait longer.

“Time element? What’s that look like, Colonel?” Ashford asked.

“Not as bad as it could be,” Fred said. “The Ring hasn’t made any apparent changes since the big one during the incident. No one else has gone through, and nothing’s come out. People have backed down from filling their pants to just high alert. Mars is approaching this as a strictly military and scientific issue. They’ve got half a dozen science vessels on high burn already.”

“How much escort?” Bull asked.

“One destroyer, three frigates,” Fred said. “Earth is moving slower, but larger. They’ve got elections coming up next year, and the secretary-general’s been catching hell about turning a blind eye to rogue corporate entities.”

“Wonder why,” Bull said dryly. Even Ashford smiled. Between Protogen and Mao-Kwikowski, the order and stability of the solar system had pretty much been dropped in a blender. Eros Station was gone, taken over by an alien technology and crashed into Venus. Ganymede was producing less than a quarter of its previous food output, leaving every population center in the outer planets relying on backup agricultural sources. The Earth-Mars alliance was the kind of quaint memory someone’s grandpa might talk about after too much beer. The good old days, before it all went to hell.

“He’s putting on a show,” Fred went on. “Media. Religious leaders. Poets. Artists. They’re hauling them all out to the Ring so that every feed he can reach is pointed away from him.”

“Typical,” Ashford said, then didn’t elaborate. Typical for a politician. Typical for an Earther. “What are we looking at out there?”