James Corey - Abaddon's Gate

Anna drifted up high enough to push the comm panel on the wall without using her shoulder. It was dead. All the lights were the ones she’d been told came on in emergency power failures. Nothing else seemed to be working.

“Help me,” the man said again. His voice was weaker and filled with even more of a liquid rasp. Anna recognized him as Alonzo Guzman, a famous poet from the UN’s South American region. A favorite of the secretary-general, someone had told her.

“I will,” Anna said, not even trying to stop the tears that suddenly blinded her. She wiped her eyes on her shoulder and said, “Let me find someone. I’ve hurt my arms, but I’ll find someone.”

The man began weeping softly. Anna pushed back into the corridor with her toes, drifting past the carnage to find someone who wasn’t hurt.

This was the part the millennialists never put in their paintings.

They loved scenes of righteous Godly vengeance on sinful mankind. They loved to show God’s chosen people safe from harm, watching with happy faces as they were proved right to the world. But they never showed the aftermath. They never showed weeping humans, crushed and dying in pools of their own fluids. Young men smashed into piles of red flesh. A young woman cut in half because she was passing through a hatchway when catastrophe hit.

This was Armageddon. This is what it looked like. Blood and torn flesh and cries for help.

Anna reached an intersection of corridors and ran out of strength. Her body hurt too badly to continue. And in all four directions, the corridor floors and walls were covered with the aftermath of violent death. It was too much. Anna drifted in the empty space for a few minutes, and then she gently floated to the wall and stuck to it. Movement. The ship was moving now. Very slow, but enough to push her to the wall. She pushed away from it and floated again. Not still accelerating, then.

She recognized that her interest in the relative movements of the ship was just her mind trying to find a distraction from the scene around her, and started crying again. The idea that she might never come home from this trip crashed in on her. For the first time since coming to the Ring, she saw a future in which she never held Nami again. Never smelled her hair. Never kissed Nono, or climbed into a warm bed beside her and held her close. The pain of those things being ripped away from her was worse than anything physical she’d suffered. She didn’t wipe away the tears that came, and they blinded her. That was fine. There was nothing here she wanted to see.

When something grabbed her from behind and spun her around, she tensed, waiting for some new horror to reveal itself.

It was Tilly.

“Oh, thank God,” the woman said, hugging Anna tight enough to send new waves of pain through her shoulders. “I went to your room and there was blood on the walls and you weren’t there and someone was dead right outside your door…”

Unable to hug back, Anna just put her cheek against Tilly’s for a moment. Tilly pushed her out to arm’s length, but didn’t let go. “Are you okay?” She was looking at the gash on Anna’s chin.

“My face is fine. Just a little cut. But my arms are hurt. I can barely move them. We need to get help. Alonzo Guzman’s in his room, and he’s hurt. Really hurt. Do you know what happened?”

“I haven’t met anyone yet who knows,” Tilly said, rotating Anna first one way, then the other, looking her over critically. “Move your hands. Okay. Bend your elbows.” She felt Anna’s shoulders. “They’re not dislocated.”

“I think they were for a second,” Anna said after the gasp of pain Tilly’s touch brought. “And everything else hurts. But we have to hurry.”

Tilly nodded and pulled a red-and-white backpack off one shoulder. When she opened it, it was filled with dozens of plastic packages with tiny black text on them. Tilly pulled a few out, read them, put them back. After several tries, she stripped the packaging off of three small injection ampules.

“What is that?” Anna said, but Tilly just jabbed her with all three in answer.

Anna felt a rush of euphoria wash over her. Her shoulders stopped hurting. Everything stopped hurting. Even her fear about never seeing her family again seemed a distant and minor problem.

“I was sleeping when it happened,” Tilly said, tossing the empty ampules into the first aid pack. “But I woke up feeling like a forklift had run over me. I think my ribs were popped out of place. I could barely breathe. So I dug up this pack from the emergency closet in my room.”

“I didn’t think to look there,” Anna said, surprised she hadn’t. She had a vague memory of being disoriented by pain, but now she felt great . Better than ever before. And sharp. Hyper-aware. Stupid not to think of the emergency supplies. This being, after all, an emergency. She wanted to slap herself on the forehead for being so stupid. Tilly was holding her arms again. Why was she doing that? They had work to do. They had to find the medics and send them after the poet.

“Hey, kiddo,” Tilly said, “takes a second for that first rush to ease down a bit. I spent a full minute trying to resuscitate a pile of red paste before I realized how wired I was.”

“What is this?” Anna asked, moving her head from side to side, which made the edges of Tilly’s face blurry.

Tilly shrugged. “Military-grade amphetamines and painkillers, I’m guessing. I gave you an anti-inflammatory too. Because what the hell.”

“Are you a doctor?” Anna asked, marveling at how smart Tilly was.

“No, but I can read the directions on the package.”

“Okay.” Anna nodded, her face serious. “Okay.”

“Let’s go find someone who knows what’s going on,” Tilly said, pulling Anna down the corridor with her.

“And after, I need to find my people,” Anna said, letting herself be pulled.

“I may have given you too much. Nono and Nami are at home, in Moscow.”

“No, my people . My congregation. Chris and that other guy and the marine. She’s angry, but I think I can talk to her. I need to find them.”

“Yeah,” Tilly said. “May have overdosed you a bit. But we’ll find them. Let’s find help first.”

Anna thought of the poet and felt her tears threatening to return. If she was sad, maybe the initial rush of the drugs was wearing off a little. She found herself regretting that for a moment.

Tilly stopped at a printed deck map on the wall. It was right next to a black and unresponsive network panel. Of course military ships would have both, Anna thought. They were built with the expectation that things would stop working when the ship got shot. That thought made Anna sad too. Some distant part of her consciousness recognized the drug-fueled emotional roller coaster she was on, but was powerless to do anything about. She started weeping again.

“Security station.” Tilly tapped on a spot on the map, then yanked Anna down the corridor after her. They made two turns and wound up at a small room filled with people, guns, and computers that seemed to still be working. A middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair and a grim expression on his face pointedly ignored them. The other four people in the room were younger, but equally uninterested in their arrival.

“Get 35C open first,” the older man said to the two young men floating to his left. He pointed at something on a map. “There were a dozen civvies in there.”

“EMT?” one of the young men asked.

“Don’t have them to spare, and that galley doesn’t have crash couches. Everyone in there is pasta sauce, but the El Tee says look anyway.”

“Roger that,” the young man replied, and he and his partner pushed out of the room past Anna and Tilly, barely glancing at them as they went.