James Corey - Abaddon's Gate

“I don’t see—”

“The devil is here,” Cortez said. He shook his head at Anna’s protesting frown. “Not some cartoon demon. I’m not a fool. But the devil has always lived in men when they reach too far, when they fail to ask if they should do something just because they can do it. We have— I have fallen into his trap. And worse, we have blazed the trail to him. History will not remember us kindly for what we have done.”

Anna knew quite a few members of the Latter-day Saints church. They agreed with the Methodists on a few minor things like not drinking alcohol, which gave them a sense of solidarity at interfaith conventions. They disagreed on some important things, like the nature of God and His plan for the universe, which didn’t seem to matter as much as Anna would have thought. They tended to be happy, family-oriented, and unassuming.

Standing in the belly of the Behemoth , Anna would never have guessed they would build something like the massive generation ship. It was so big, so extravagant. It was like a rebellious shout at the emptiness of space. The universe is too big for our ship to move through it in a reasonable time? Fine, we’ll stuff all the bits of the universe we need inside of our ship and then go at our own pace . The inner walls of the rotating drum curved up in the distance, Coriolis effect masquerading as mass, metal ribbing and plates pretending to be substrate, just waiting for soil and plants and farm animals. Through the center of the drum, half a kilometer over Anna’s head, a narrow thread of bright yellow light shone down on them all. The sun, stretched into a line in the sky. The entire idea of it was arrogant and defiant and grandiose.

Anna loved it.

As she walked across a wide empty plain of steel that should have been covered in topsoil and crops, she thought that this audaciousness was exactly what humanity had lost somewhere in the last couple of centuries. When ancient maritime explorers had climbed into their creaking wooden ships and tried to find ways to cross the great oceans of Earth, had their voyage been any less dangerous than the one the Mormons had been planning to attempt? The end point any less mysterious? But in both cases, they’d been driven to find out what was on the other side of the long trip. Driven by a need to see shores no one else had ever seen before. Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she’ll be haunted by what might be behind it.

A few people liked to paint this drive as a weakness. A failing of the species. Humanity as the virus. The creature that never stops filling up its available living space. Hector seemed to be moving over to that view, based on their last conversation. But Anna rejected that idea. If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they’d all still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another’s fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She’d looked up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She’d tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity, that had put her there.

Looking at the tiny world spinning around her, she knew one day it would give them the stars as well.

The refugee camp was a network of tents and prefabricated temporary structures set on the inner face of the drum, the long thin line of sun-bright light pressing down onto them all like a spring afternoon on Earth. It took her almost half an hour to find Chris Williams’ tent. The liaison from the Thomas Prince let her know that the young naval officer had survived the catastrophe, but had suffered terrible injuries in the process. Anna wanted to find him, and maybe through him the rest of the little congregation she’d formed during the trip out.

A few questions of helpful refugees later, and she found his tent. There was no way to knock or buzz, so she just scratched at the tent flap and said, “Chris? You in there?”

“That you, Pastor? Come on in.”

The liaison hadn’t been specific in her descriptions of Chris’ injuries, so Anna braced herself for the worst when she entered. The young lieutenant was lying in a military-style cot, propped up by a number of pillows. He had a small terminal on his lap that he set aside as she came in. His left arm and left leg both ended at the middle joint.

“Oh, Chris, I’m—”

“If your next word is ‘sorry,’” he said, “I’m going to hop over there and kick your ass.”

Anna started laughing even as the tears filled her eyes. “I am sorry, but now I’m sorry for being sorry.” She sat by the edge of his cot and took his right hand. “How are you, Chris?”

“With a few obvious exceptions”—he waved his shortened left arm around—“I came through the disaster better than most. I didn’t even have a bad bruise.”

“I don’t know how the navy health plan works,” Anna started, but Chris waved her off.

“Full regrowth therapy. We ever get out of here and back to civilization, and a few painful and itchy months later I’ll have bright pink replacements.”

“Well, that’s good,” Anna said. She’d been about to offer to pay for his treatment, not knowing how she’d actually do that. She felt a moment of relief and shame. “Have you heard from anyone else who was in our group? I haven’t had time to find them yet.”

“Yeah,” Chris said with a chuckle, “I heard. You’ve been doing commando raids while I’ve been laid up. If I’d known they trained you guys to take down souped-up terrorists, I’d have paid more attention in church as a kid.”

“I ran away from her until she had a seizure, and then I taped her to a chair. Not very heroic.”

“I’m getting a medal for falling into a pressure hatch, sacrificing an arm and a leg to keep seven sailors from being trapped in a compromised part of the ship. I was unconscious at the time, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Heroism is a label most people get for doing shit they’d never do if they were really thinking about it.”

Anna laughed at that. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that exact thing recently.” Chris relaxed back into his pile of pillows and nodded for her to continue.

“Labels, I mean. People are calling the aliens evil, because they hurt us. And without context, how do we know?”

“Yeah,” Chris said. “I lose a couple limbs getting drunk and falling into a harvesting combine, I’m an idiot. I lose the same limbs because I happened to be standing next to the right door when the ship was damaged, I’m a hero.”

“Maybe it’s as simple as that. I don’t know. I feel like something really important is about to happen, and we’re all making up our minds ahead of time what it will be.”

Chris absentmindedly scratched at the stump of his left leg, then grimaced. “Like?”

“We came through the Ring to stop James Holden from talking to the aliens first. But this is the same man that helped send Eros to Venus instead of letting it destroy the Earth. Why did we assume he’d do a bad job of being the first human the aliens met? And now something has slapped us down, taken all our guns away, but not killed us. That should mean something. Certainly anything this powerful could kill us as easily as it declawed us. But it didn’t. Instead of trying to figure out what it means, we’re hurting so we call it evil. I feel like we’re children who’ve been punished and we think it’s because our parents are mean.”

“They stopped our ships to… what? Pacify us?” Chris asked.