James Corey - Abaddon's Gate

“Sorry, Cap,” he said. “Got a little too far ahead there.”

Holden leaned against the corridor wall, legs barely able to support him even in the light gravity. “No apologies. Nice save.” He nodded toward the shoulder that Amos continued to rub with a pained look. “Thought that was broken.”

Amos snorted. “It didn’t fall off. Plenty left in here for a couple of idiots like this.” He bent down and stripped the two fallen men of their weapons and ammunition. A nurse walked up behind Holden, a plastic case in her hands and a question on her face.

“Nothing to see here,” Holden said. “We’ll be gone in a minute.”

She pointed at a nearby door. “Supply closet. No one will notice them in there for a while.” Then she turned and went back the way she came.

“You have a fan,” Naomi said from the bed.

“Not everyone in the OPA hates us,” Holden replied, moving around the gurney to help Amos drag the unconscious men into the closet. “We did good work for them for over a year. People know that.”

Amos handed Holden a compact black pistol and a pair of extra magazines. Holden tucked the gun into the waistband of his pants and pulled his shirt down over it. Amos did the same with a second gun, then put the two shotguns onto the gurney next to Naomi and covered them with the sheet.

“We don’t want to get in a gunfight,” Holden warned Amos as they began moving again.

“Yeah,” Amos said. “But if we’re in one anyway, it’ll be nice to have guns.”

The hospital exit was a short distance down the right-hand hallway, and suddenly they were outside. Or as outside as you could get in the Behemoth ’s massive habitation drum. From outside, the hospital structure looked cheap and hastily assembled. A football-field-sized shanty made of epoxied carbon and fiberglass. A few hundred meters away, the edge of a city of tents spread out like acne on the drum’s smooth skin.

“That way,” Naomi said, pointing toward a more permanent-looking steel structure. Holden pushed the gurney, and Amos walked a few meters ahead, smiling and nodding at anyone who looked at them. Something in Amos’ face making them scurry away and not look back.

As they approached the squat metal structure, a door opened in the side and Sam’s pixie face appeared, waving a hand at them impatiently. A few minutes and some twisty corridors later, they were in a small, empty metal-walled room. Amos immediately dropped to the floor, laying his left arm and back flat against it.

“Ow,” he said.

“You hurt?” Sam asked, locking the door behind them with a small metal keycard, and then tossing the card to Naomi.

“Everyone’s hurt,” Holden said. “So what the hell is going on?”

Sam blew her lips out and ran one greasy hand through her red hair. The streaks of black already in it told Holden she’d been doing a lot of that. “Ashford retook the ship. He’s got some sort of coalition of bigwigs from the UN Navy, the Martians, and some of the important civilians.”

“Okay,” Holden said, realizing that his lack of context made most of that sentence pretty meaningless, but not wanting to waste time with explanations. “So the people roaming the halls with guns are Ashford’s?”

“Yep. He’s taking out anyone who helped Bull or Pa with the original mutiny, or, y’know, anyone he thinks is a threat.”

“From the way they tried to shoot us, we’re on that list,” Naomi said.

“Definitely.” Sam nodded. “I haven’t been able to track down Pa, but Bull called me, so I know he’s okay.”

“Sam,” Holden said, patting the air in a calming gesture. “Keep in mind I have no idea who these people are or why they are important, and we don’t have time for a who’s who. Just tell us the important bits.”

Sam started to object, then shrugged and briefly explained the plan to use the comm laser. “If I do what he’s asking me to do, we’ll be able to get a pulse out of it that’ll be hotter than a star for about three-quarters of a second. It will melt that entire side of the ship in the process.”

“Does he know that?” Naomi asked, incredulity in her voice.

“He doesn’t care. Whether it works on the Ring or not, we have to stop him. There are thousands of people on this ship right now, and they’ll all die if he gets his way.”

Holden sank down onto the edge of the gurney with a long exhale. “Oh, we’re the least of the problem,” he said. “This is suddenly much, much bigger than that.”

Sam cocked her head at him, frowning a question.

“I’ve seen what this station does to threats,” Holden said. “Miller showed me, when I was there. All this slow zone stuff is non-lethal deterrent as far as it’s concerned. If that big blue ball out there decides us monkeys are an actual threat, it will autoclave our solar system.”

“Who’s Miller?” Sam asked.

“Dead guy,” Amos said.

“And he was on the station?”

“Apparently,” Amos said with a lopsided shrug.

“Jim?” Naomi said, putting her hand on his arm. This was the first she’d heard him speak of his experiences on the station, and he felt a pang of guilt for not telling her before.

“Something was attacking them, the protomolecule masters or whatever they were. Their defense was causing the star in any… infected solar system to go supernova. That station has the power to blow up stars, Naomi.

“If Ashford does this, it will kill every human there is. Everyone.”

There was a long silence. Amos had stopped rubbing his arm and grunting. Naomi stared up at him from the bed, eyes wide, the fear on her face mirroring his own.

“Well,” Sam finally said. “Good thing I’m not gonna let him, then, isn’t it?”

“Say again?” Amos said from the floor.

“I didn’t know about this other thing with ghosts and aliens,” Sam said in a tone of voice that made it clear she wasn’t totally buying Holden’s story. “But I’ve been sabotaging the laser upgrades. Delaying the process while I build in short points. Weaknesses that will blow every time he tries to fire it. It should be easy enough to explain away because of course the system was never designed for this, and the ship is a flying hunk of cobbled-together junk at this point anyway.”

“How long can you get us?”

“Day. Maybe a day and a half.”

“I think I love you,” Alex said, the words coming out in a pain- and medication-induced mumble.

“We all do, Sam,” Holden said to cover for him. “That’s brilliant, but there aren’t very many of us, and it’s a big, complicated ship. The question is how we get control of it.”

“Bull,” she replied. “That’s why I called you. Bull’s kind of messed up right now and he needs help and I don’t know anyone else on this ship I trust.” This last part she directed at Naomi.

“We’ll do whatever we can,” Naomi replied, holding up her hand. Sam crossed the room and took it. “Anything you need, Sammy. Tell us where Bull is, and I’ll send my boys to go collect him.”

Amos pushed himself up off the floor with a grunt and moved to the gurney. “Yeah, whatever you need, Sam. We owe you about a million at this point, and this Ashford guy sounds like an asshole.”

Sam gave a relieved smile and squeezed Naomi’s fingers. “I really appreciate it. But be careful. Ashford loyalists are everywhere, and they’ve already killed some people. If you run into any more of them, there’ll be trouble.”

Amos pulled one of the shotguns out from under the sheet and laid it casually across his shoulder.

“Man can hope.”

The storage cells were too large to be a prison. They were warehouses for the supplies to start again after a hundred ecological collapses. Seed vaults and soil and enough compressed hydrogen and oxygen to recreate the shallow ocean of a generation ship. Bull drove his mech across the vast open space, as wide and tall and airy as a cathedral, but without a single image of God. It was a temple dedicated to utility and engineering, the beauty of function and the grandeur of the experiment that would have launched humanity at the distant stars.