James Corey - Abaddon's Gate

Serge looked deeply unhappy at this task. “Some help, maybe?”

“Take as many as you want, but if you don’t need them it’s only gonna piss the marines off, and if you do, they won’t actually help.”

Serge paused, mouth open, then closed it with a snap and left. Bull noticed Anna for the first time and said, “What can I do for you, Preacher?”

“Anna, please. I came to talk about Clarissa Mao,” she said.

“If you’re not her lawyer or her union representative—”

“I’m her priest. What happens to her now?”

Bull sighed again. “She confessed to blowing up a ship. Nothing much good comes after that.”

“People say you spaced a man for selling drugs. They say you’re hard. Cold.”

“Do they?” Bull said. Anna couldn’t tell if the surprise in his voice was genuine or mocking.

“Please don’t kill her,” she said, leaning closer and looking him in the eye. “Don’t you let anyone else kill her either.”

“Why not?” The way he said it wasn’t a challenge or a threat. It was as if he just didn’t know that answer, and sort of wondered. Anna swallowed her dread.

“I can’t help her if she’s dead.”

“No offense, but that’s not really my concern.”

“I thought you were the law and order here.”

“I’m aiming for order, mostly.”

“She deserves a trial, and if everyone knows what you know about her, she won’t get one. They’ll riot. They’ll kill her. At least help me get her a trial.”

The large man sighed. “So are you looking for a trial, or just a way to stall for time?”

“Stall for time,” Anna said.

Bull nodded, weighing something in his mind, then gestured for her to precede him into his office. After she sat down next to his battered desk, he clumped around the small space making a pot of coffee. It seemed an extravagance considering the newly implemented water rationing, but then Anna remembered Bull was now the second most powerful person in the slow zone. The privileges of rank.

She didn’t want coffee, but accepted the offered cup to allow Bull a moment of generosity. Generosity now might lead to more later, when she was asking for something she really wanted.

“When Holden starts telling people who actually sabotaged the Seung Un —and he’s Jim Holden, so he will—the UN people are going to ask for Clarissa. And if they give me enough that I can get everyone here, together, and safe until we can get out of this trap, I’m going to give her to them. Not off the ship, but in here.”

“What will they do?” Anna took a companionable sip of her coffee. It burned her tongue and tasted like acid.

“Probably, they’ll put together a tribunal of flag officers, have a short trial, and throw her in a recycler. I’d say space her, normally, but that seems wasteful considering our predicament. Supplies sent from home will take as long to fly through the slow zone to us as they’ll take to get to the Ring.”

His voice was flat, emotionless. He was discussing logistics, not a young woman’s life. Anna suppressed a shudder and said, “Mister Baca, do you believe in God?”

To his credit, he tried not to roll his eyes. He almost succeeded.

“I believe in whatever gets you through the night.”

“Don’t be flip,” Anna said, and was gratified when Bull straightened a little in his walker. In her experience, most strong-willed men had equally strong-willed mothers, and she knew how to hit some of the same buttons.

“Look,” Bull said, trying to reclaim the initiative. Anna spoke over the top of him.

“Forget God for a moment,” she said. “Do you believe in the concept of forgiveness? In the possibility of redemption? In the value of every human life, no matter how tainted or corrupted?”

“Fuck no,” Bull said. “I think it is entirely possible to go so far into the red you can’t ever balance the books.”

“Sounds like the voice of experience. How far have you been?”

“Far enough to know there’s a too damn far.”

“And you’re comfortable being the judge of where that line is?”

Bull pulled on the frame of his walker, shifting his weight in the straps that held him. He looked wistfully at the office chair he could no longer use. Anna felt bad for him, broken at the worst possible time. Trying to keep his tiny world in order, and burning through the last reserves of his strength with reckless abandon. The bruised eyes and yellow skin suddenly seemed like a flashing battery indicator, warning that the power was almost gone. Anna felt a pang of guilt for adding to his burden.

“I don’t want to kill that girl,” he said, taking another sip of the terrible coffee. “In fact, I don’t give a shit about her one way or the other, as long as she’s locked up and isn’t a danger to my ship. The one you should talk to is Holden. He’s the one who’s gonna get the torches-and-pitchforks crowd wound up.”

“But the Martians…”

“Surrendered twenty hours ago.”

Anna blinked.

“They’ve been wanting to for days,” Bull said. “We just had to find a way to let ’em save face.”

“Save face?”

“They got a story they can tell where they don’t look weak. That’s all they needed. But if we didn’t find something, they’d have stuck to their posts until they all died. Nothing ever killed more people than being afraid to look like a sissy.”

“Holden’s coming here, then?”

“Already be on a shuttle escorted by four recon marines, which is another fucking headache for me. But how about this? I won’t talk about the girl until I have reason to. What Holden does, though, he just does.”

“Fine, then I’ll talk to him when he arrives,” Anna said.

“Good luck with that,” Bull said.

When the Martians came for him—two men and two women, all in uniform and all armed—Holden’s isolation-drunk mind had spun out in a dozen directions at once. The captain had found room for him in the medical clinic and she wanted to grill him again about what happened on the station and they were going to throw him out an airlock and they’d had news that Naomi was dead and they’d had news that she wasn’t. It felt like every neuron he had from his brain down to his toes was on the edge of firing. It was all he could do not to launch himself off the cell’s wall and into the narrow corridor.

“The prisoner will please identify himself,” one of the men said.

“James Holden. I mean, it’s not like you have very many prisoners here, right? Because I’ve been trying to find someone to talk with for it feels like about a decade since I got here, and I’m pretty sure there isn’t so much as a dust mite in this place besides me.”

He bit his lips to stop talking. He’d been alone and scared for too long. He hadn’t understood how much it was affecting him. Even if he hadn’t been mentally ill when he came to the Hammurabi , he was going to be real soon now if nothing changed.

“Record shows prisoner identified himself as James Holden,” the man said. “Come along.”

The corridor outside the cells was so narrow that two guards ahead and two behind was effectively a wall. The low Martian gravity made their bodies more akin to Belters than to him, and all four of them hunched slightly, bending in over him. Holden had never felt so relieved to be in a tiny, cramped hallway in his life. But even the relief was pushed aside by his anxiety. The guards didn’t actually push him so much as start to move with an authority that suggested that he really should match them. The hatch was only five meters away, but after being in his cell, it seemed like a huge distance.

“Was there any word from the Roci ?”