James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

A second clank came, deeper than the first. Naomi’s eyes widened at the same moment Holden felt his gut tighten. It wasn’t a good sound.

“Alex? What was that?”

“I think we got us a little problem, folks.”

“I’m all right,” Bobbie said, and the way she said it made it clear that it was a live issue.

Naomi turned to her monitor, lips pressed thin and tight. “What’ve we got, Alex?”

“Booby trap,” Alex said. “Looks like some kind of magnetic lock from their end. Froze up the works. And Bobbie—”

“I’m stuck between their outer lock and ours,” Bobbie said. “I’m fine. I’m just going to bust my way through and—”

“No,” Naomi said as Holden’s attention flicked to the alert still flashing on his own monitor. “If it’s really bound, you could break both locks. Just sit tight, and let me see what we can do to get you unstuck.”

“Hey,” Holden said. “Anyone know why we just lost a sensor array?” Another alert popped up on his screen. Raw alarm started sounding in his head. “Or that PDC?”

The others were silent for a moment, and then for what felt like hours and was probably five or six seconds, there was only the tap of fingertips on control panels and the chirp of the Rocinante reporting back to queries. Even before he had confirmation, he was sure of the answer. The external camera swept the Roci ’s skin. The Azure Dragon , hugged against her, felt like a parasite more than a prisoner. And then a flicker of sparks and a flash of safety yellow. Holden shifted the camera. Three spiderlike construction mechs squatted midway down the Roci ’s side, welding torches lit and clawing at the hull.

“They’re stripping us,” Holden said.

When Alex spoke, his false politeness didn’t cover his rage. “I can put on a little burn if you want. Drop them into our drive plume and be done—”

“You’ll fold the airlocks together,” Holden said, cutting him off. “It’ll crush Bobbie to death.”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “All right. So that’s a bad idea.”

Holden took control of a PDC and tried to shift its arc far enough down to catch one of the mechs, but they were too close in. A fresh alert popped up. A hardened power conduit was throwing off errors. They were digging deeper into the hull. It wouldn’t be long before they could do some real damage. And if they managed to burrow their way between the hulls …

“What happens if Bobbie breaks the docking tube?” Holden snapped.

“Best case, we can’t use it until we get it repaired,” Naomi said. “Worst, they rigged their coupling with a secondary trap that kills Bobbie and spills out our air.”

“It’s all right,” Bobbie said. “I can take the risk. Just give me a second to position—”

“No,” Holden said. “No, wait. We can find a way out. No one dies. We’ve got time.”

But they didn’t have much. A welding torch flared again. When Amos spoke, his voice sounded wrong. Too small, too close. “You know, Cap, we’ve got another airlock. Cargo bay’s right down here by the machine shop.”

The penny dropped. Amos sounded different because he was already wearing a vac suit. He was talking through a helmet mic.

“What are you thinking, Amos?”

“Nothing real subtle. Figure we hop outside, kill a few assholes that need killing, patch stuff up when we’re done with the first part.”

Naomi caught his eye and nodded once. Years together and an uncountable list of crises weathered made a kind of telepathy between them. Naomi would stay and get Bobbie safely out of the trap. Holden would go out with Amos and keep the enemy at bay.

“All right,” Holden said, reaching for his restraints. “Prep a suit. I’m on my way down.”

“I’ll leave you one,” Amos said, “but I think we’ll get a head start without you.”

“Wait,” Holden said. “We?”

“We’re cycling out now,” Clarissa Mao said. “Wish us luck.”

Chapter Seven: Clarissa

Her second year in prison, Clarissa had agreed to participate in a poetry course that the prison chaplain had put together. She hadn’t had much hope for anything to come out of it, but it was half an hour every week she could sit in a gray-green room with steel chairs bolted to the floor and half a dozen of her fellow inmates and do something that wasn’t watching censored entertainment feeds or sleeping.

It had been a disaster from the start.

Of the men and women who came there each week, only she and the chaplain had been to university. Two of the women were so dosed with antipsychotics that they were barely present at all. One of the men—a serial rapist who’d killed his stepdaughters by torturing them with a chemical stun spray until they stopped breathing—was so taken with a section of Pope’s Essay on Man that he’d compose hour-long epics in rhyming couplets that didn’t quite scan. His favorite subjects were the injustice of a legal system that didn’t allow enough for character and his own sexual prowess. And there was a round-faced boy who seemed too young to have done anything deserving a life in the hole who wrote sonnets about gardens and sunlight that were more painful than any of the rest, though for different reasons.

Clarissa’s own contributions had been minimal at first. She’d tried some free verse about the possibility of redemption, but she’d read Carlos Pinnani and Anneke Swinehart and HD at her literature tutor’s insistence, so she knew her work wasn’t good. Worse, she knew why it wasn’t good: She didn’t really believe her thesis. On the few occasions she considered shifting to a different subject—fathers, regret, grief—it seemed less like catharsis and more like strict reportage. Her life had been squandered, and whether she said it in pentameter or not didn’t seem to matter much.

She quit because of the nightmares. She didn’t talk about those to anyone, but the medics knew. She might be able to keep the exact content of the dreams to herself, but the medical monitor logged her heartbeats and the activity in the various parts of her brain. The poetry made them come more often and more vividly. Usually, they were of her digging through something repulsive—shit or rotting meat or something—trying to reach someone buried in it before they ran out of air. When she stopped attending, they faded back. Once a week, say, instead of nightly.

Which wasn’t to say that the course hadn’t borne fruit. Three weeks after she’d told the chaplain that she didn’t want to be part of his little study anymore, she’d woken up in the middle of the night fully rested and alert and calm with a sentence in her head as clear as if she’d just heard it spoken. I have killed, but I am not a killer because a killer is a monster, and monsters aren’t afraid. She’d never spoken the words aloud. Never written them down. They’d become her words of power, a private prayer too sacred to give form. She went back to them when she needed them.

I have killed, but I am not a killer …

“We’re cycling out now,” she said, her mouth dry and sticky, her heart fluttering in her chest.

… because a killer is a monster …

“Wish us luck.”

… and monsters aren’t afraid. She cut the transmission, hoisted the recoilless rifle, and nodded to Amos. His grin, half hidden by the curve of his helmet, was boyish and calm. The outer door of the airlock slid soundlessly open on an abyss filled with starlight. Amos took the edge of the airlock, hauling himself forward and then ducking back in case someone was there waiting to shoot. When no one did, he grabbed a handhold and swung himself out, spinning so that the suit’s mag boots would land on the ship’s skin. She followed less gracefully. And less certain of herself.