James Corey - Abaddon's Gate

No one spoke.

“What’s… ah… what’s going on?”

“You’re being evacuated,” the man said.

“Evacuated?”

“Part of the surrender agreement.”

“Surrender agreement? You’re surrendering? Why are you surrendering?”

“We lost the politics,” one of the women behind him said.

If the skiff they loaded him onto wasn’t the same one that had taken him back from the station, it was close enough that he couldn’t tell the difference. There were only four soldiers this time, all of them in full combat armor. The rest of the spaces were taken up by men and women in standard naval uniform. Holden thought at first they were the wounded, but when he looked closer, none of them seemed to have anything worse than minor injuries. It was the exhaustion in their faces and bodies that made them seem broken. The acceleration burn wasn’t even announced. The thrust barely shifted the crash couches. All around him, the Martians slept or brooded. Holden scratched at the hard, flexible plastic restraints on his wrists and ankles, and no one told him to stop. Maybe that was a good sign.

He tried to do the math in his head. If the new top speed was about as fast as a launched grenade, then every hour, they’d travel… As tired as he was, he couldn’t make the numbers add up to anything. If he’d had his hand terminal, it would have been a few seconds’ work. Still, he couldn’t see asking to have it. And it didn’t matter.

He slept and woke and slept again. The proximity Klaxon woke him from a dream about making bread with someone who was his father Caesar and also Fred Johnson and trying to find the salt. It took him a moment to remember where he was.

The skiff was small enough that when the other ship’s crew banged against the airlock, Holden could hear it. From his seat, he couldn’t see the airlock open. The first thing he knew was a slightly different scent in the air. Something rich and oddly humid. And then four new people stepped into his view. They were Belters. A broad-faced woman, a thick man with a startling white beard, and two shaven-headed men so similar they might have been twins. The twins had the split circle of the OPA tattooed on their arms. All four wore sidearms.

The Behemoth , Holden thought. They’d surrendered to the Behemoth . That was weird.

One of the marines, still in battle armor, floated over to them. The Belters didn’t show any sign of fear. Holden gave them credit for that.

“I am Sergeant Alexander Verbinski,” the Martian said. “I have been ordered to hand over this skiff and her crew and company in accordance with the agreement of surrender.”

The woman and white-bearded man looked at each other. Holden thought he could see the question— You gonna tell them they can’t take their suits in? —pass between them. The woman shrugged.

“Bien alles,” she said. “Welcome aboard. Bring them through in sixpacks and we’ll get you sorted, sa sa?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Verbinski said.

“Corin,” one of the twins said. The woman turned to see him gesture toward Holden with his chin. “Pa con esá parlan, si?”

The woman’s nod was curt.

“We’ll take Holden out now,” she said.

“Your show,” the marine said. Holden thought from his tone he’d have been as happy to shoot him. That might have been paranoia, though.

The Belters escorted him through the airlock and a long Mylar tube to the engineering deck of the Behemoth . A dozen people were waiting with hand terminals at the ready, prepared for the slow, slogging administrative work of dealing with a defeated enemy. Holden got to skip the line, and he wasn’t sure it was an honor.

The woman floating near the massive doors at the transition point where the engineering section met the drum looked too young for her captain’s insignia. Her hair, pulled back in a severe bun, reminded him of a teacher he’d had once when he’d still been on Earth.

“Captain Pa,” the security woman—Corin, one of the twins had called her—said. “You wanted to talk with this one.”

“Captain Holden,” Captain Pa said with a nod. “Welcome aboard the Behemoth . I’m giving you liberty of the ship, but I want you to understand that there are some conditions.”

Holden blinked. He’d expected another brig at least. Freedom of the ship was pretty much the same as freedom period. It wasn’t like there were a lot of places he could go.

“Ah. All right,” he said.

“You are to make yourself available for debriefing whenever you are called upon. No exceptions. You are not to discuss what happened or didn’t happen on the station with anyone besides myself or the security chief.”

“I know how to shut it off,” Holden said.

The younger captain’s expression shifted.

“You what?”

“I know how to get the protomolecule to take us all off of lockdown,” he said, and went on to explain all of what he’d told Captain Jakande again—seeing Miller, the plan to lull the station into a lower alert level so that the dead man could shut it down—fighting to sound calm, rational, and sane as he did it. He didn’t go so far as the massive civilization-destroying invasion that had wiped out the protomolecule’s creators. It all sounded bad enough without that.

Pa listened carefully, her face a mask. She wasn’t someone he’d want to play poker against. He had the powerful, painful memory of Naomi telling him that she’d teach him how to play poker, and his throat closed.

The security man with the white beard floated up, two angry-looking Martians matching vector behind him.

“Captain?” the Belter said, barely restrained rage in his voice.

“Just a minute, Mister Gutmansdottir,” she said, then turned back to Holden. She had to be overwhelmed, but it was only a tightness in her jaw, if it was even that much. “I’ll… take that under advisement, but for the immediate future—”

“My crew?”

“They’re in the civilian medical bay,” Pa said, and the white-bearded man cleared his throat in a way that meant he hadn’t needed to. “There are directions posted. If you’ll excuse me.”

“Captain, there’s a load of contraband among the new prisoners,” Gutmansdottir said, hitting the last word hard. “Thought you’d want to address that before it got to Bull.”

Pa took a deep breath and pushed off after her security man. A few seconds later, Holden realized he hadn’t been dismissed so much as forgotten. Fallen down the list of things that the young captain had to do right now , and so fuck him. He moved out past the transition point and to the platforms where the axis of the little world spun. There was a long ramp for carts, and he shuffled down it, the spin slowly shifting from pure Coriolis to the sensation of weight. He could feel in his knees how long he’d been on the float and hoped that the medical bays weren’t too far away.

If they’d been on the far side of the system, though, he’d have grabbed an EVA suit, as much spare air as he could haul, and started out, though. The idea that he was breathing the same air as Naomi and Alex and Amos was like a drug.

Only Captain Pa hadn’t actually said that. All she’d said was that his crew was there. The “remaining” might have been implied. He tried to jog, but got winded after only a couple of minutes and had to pause to catch his breath.

The great body of the drum stretched out before him, a world wrapped into a tube. The long strip of the false sun glowed white above him, now that there was a clear “above,” and reached out across two kilometers to a swirling ramp at the other end, the mirror of the one he was on. Thin clouds drifted in tori around the unbearable brightness. The air clung to him, the heat pressing at his skin, but he could imagine the bare metal of the drum’s surface covered in green, the air sweet with the scent of apple blossoms, the cycle of evaporation and condensation cooling it all. Or if not, at least making it into a long, permanent summer afternoon.