James Corey - Abaddon's Gate

Instead, he recorded a private video for Fred Johnson, and all he said in it was, “After this, you owe me one.”

With an hour to go before they passed through, Bull put the whole ship on battle-ready status. Everyone in their couches, one per. No sharing. All tools and personal items secured, all carts in their stations and locked down, the bulkheads closed between major sections so that if something happened, they’d only lose air one deck at a time. He got a few complaints, but they were mostly just grousing.

They made the transit slowly, the thrust gravity hardly more than a tendency for things to drift toward the floor. Bull couldn’t say whether that was a technical decision on Sam’s part meant to keep them from moving too quickly in the uncanny reduced speed beyond the ring, or Ashford giving the Earth and Mars ships the time to catch up so that they’d all be passing through at more or less the same time. Only if it was that, it wouldn’t have been Ashford. That kind of diplomatic thinking was Pa.

Probably it was just that the main drive couldn’t go slow enough, and this was as fast as the maneuvering thrusters could move them.

Bull wasn’t that worried about the Earth forces. They’d been the ones to broker the deal, and they had civilians on board. Mars, on the other hand, might call itself a science mission, but its escort was explicitly military, and until Earth stepped in they’d been willing to poke holes in the Behemoth until the air ran out.

Too many people with too many agendas, and everyone was worried that the other guy would shoot them in the back. Of all the ways to go and meet the God-like alien whatever-they-were that built the protomolecule, this was the stupidest, the most dangerous, and—for Bull’s money—the most human.

The transit actually took a measurable amount of time, the great bulk of the Behemoth sulking through the Ring in a few seconds. An eerie fluting groan passed through the ship, and Bull, in his crash couch at the security office waiting for the next disaster, felt the gooseflesh on his arms and neck. He flipped through the security monitors like a dad walking through the house to see if the windows were all locked, all the kids safely in their beds. Memories of the Eros feed tugged at the back of his mind: black whorls of filament covering the corridors; the bodies of the innocent and the guilty alike warping, falling apart, and becoming something else without actually dying in between; the blue firefly glow that no one had yet explained. With every new monitor, he expected to see the Behemoth in that same light, and every time he didn’t, his dread moved on to the one still to come.

He moved to the external sensor feed. The luminous blue object in the center of a sphere of anomalies that the computers interpreted as being approximately the same size as the Ring. Gates to God knew where.

“I don’t know what the hell we’re doing here,” he said under his breath.

“A-chatté-men, brother,” Serge said, pale-faced, from his desk.

A connect request popped on Bull’s hand terminal, the alert-red of senior staff. With dread growing at the back of his throat, Bull accepted it. Sam appeared on the screen.

“Hey,” she said. “This whole act-like-we’re-in-a-battle thing where we aren’t supposed to get out of our crash couches? I’d really appreciate it if you could ease up enough to let us make sure the ship isn’t falling apart.”

“You getting alerts?”

“No,” Sam admitted. “But we just sailed the Behemoth into a region of space with different, y’know, laws of physics and stuff? Makes me want to take a peek.”

“We got eight ships coming in right behind us,” Bull said. “Hold tight until we see how that shakes down.”

Sam smiled in a way that expressed her annoyance with him perfectly.

“You can get the teensiest bit paternalistic sometimes, Bull. You know that?”

A new alert popped up by Sam’s face. A high-priority message was coming into the comm array. From the Rocinante .

“Sam, I got something here. I’ll get back to you.”

“I’ll be sitting here in my couch doing nothing,” she said.

He flipped over to the incoming message. It was a broadcast. A Belter woman, with black hair pulled back from her face in a style that gave Bull the impression she’d been welding something before she’d begun the broadcast and would be again as soon as she was finished, looked into the camera.

“. . . Nagata, executive officer of the Rocinante . I want to make it very clear that the previous broadcast claiming our ownership of the Ring was a fake. Our communications array was hijacked, and we were locked out of it. The saboteur on board has confessed, and I am including a datafile at the end of this transmission with all the evidence we have about the real perpetrator of these crimes. I am also including a short documentary presentation on what we’ve discovered in the time we’ve been here that Monica Stuart and her team produced. I want to reiterate here, Captain Holden had no mandate from anyone to claim the Ring, he had no intention of doing so, and none of us had any participation in or knowledge of the bomb on the Seung Un or on any other ship. We were here solely as transport and support for a documentary team, and pose no intentional threat whatsoever to any other vessel.”

Serge grunted, unconvinced. “You think they fragged him?”

“Keep Jim Holden from grabbing the camera? Fragged him or tied him up,” Bull said. It was a joke, but there was something in it. Why wasn’t the Rocinante ’s captain the one making the announcement?

“We will not surrender our ship,” the Belter said, “but we will invite inspectors aboard to verify what we’ve reported, with the following conditions. First, the inspectors will have to comply with basic safety—”

Five more communication alerts popped up, all from different ships. All broadcast. If they were flying into the teeth of a vast and malefic alien intelligence, by God, they we’re going to go down squabbling.

“—unacceptable. We demand the immediate surrender of the Tachi and all accompanying—”

“—what confirmation you can provide that—”

“—James Holden at once for interrogation. If your claims are verified, we will—”

“—Message repeats. Please confirm and clarify EVA activity, Rocinante . Who’ve you got out there, and where are they going?”

Bull pulled up the sensor array and began a careful sweep of the area around Holden’s ship. It took him half a minute to find it. A single EVA suit, burning away from the ship and heading for the blue-glowing structure in the center of the sphere. He said something obscene. Five minutes later, the XO of the Rocinante spoke again to confirm Bull’s worst suspicions.

“This is Naomi Nagata,” she said, “executive officer and acting captain of the Rocinante . Captain Holden is not presently available to take questions, meet with any representatives, or surrender himself into anybody’s custody. He is…” She looked down. Bull couldn’t tell if it was fear or embarrassment or a little of both. The Belter took a deep breath and continued, “He is conducting an EVA approach of the base at the middle of the slow zone. We have reason to believe he was… called there.”

Bull’s laughter pulled Serge’s attention. Serge lifted his hand, the physical Belter idiom for asking a question. Bull shook his head.

“Just trying to think of a way we could be doing this worse,” he said.

Ashford insisted that they meet in person, so even though Bull had ordered that all crew members not performing essential functions remain in their couches, he himself floated to the lift and headed to the bridge.