Abaddon's Gate

“What do you think she’d say about your pessimism?” Clarissa asked.

Cortez looked up at her, his eyes wide with surprise and amusement. “My pessimism?”

Clarissa fought the sudden, powerful urge to apologize. “What else would you call it?”

“We’ve looked the devil in the eyes out here,” Cortez said. “I would call it realism.”

You didn’t look into the devil’s eyes, she thought. You saw a bunch of people die. You have no idea what real evil is. Her memory seemed to stutter, and for a moment, she was back on the Cerisier, Ren’s skull giving way under her palm. There’s a difference between tragedy and evil, and I am that difference.

“Captain! They’re taking fire at engineering!”

Cortez turned back toward the bridge and launched himself awkwardly through the air. Clarissa took a last look at A

“How many down?” Ashford demanded.

“No information, sir,” Jojo said. “I have a video feed.”

The monitor blinked to life. The engineering deck flickered, pixelated, and came back. A dozen of Ashford’s men were training guns at a pressure door that was stuck almost a third of the way closed. Ashford strained against his belts, trying to get closer to the image. Something—a tiny object or a video feed artifact—floated across the screen, and everything went white. When the image came back, Ashford said something obscene.

Armed people poured through the opening like sand falling through an hourglass. Clarissa recognized Jim Holden by the way he moved, the intimacy of long obsession making him as obvious as her own family would have been. And so the tall figure beside him had to be Naomi, whom Melba had almost killed. And then, near the end, the only one walking in the null-g environment, Carlos Baca. Bull. The head of security, and Ashford’s nemesis. He walked slowly across the deck, his real legs strapped together and his mechanical ones lumbering step by painful step. One of Ashford’s people tried to fire and was shot, his body twisting in the air in a way that reminded her of seeing a caterpillar cut in half. She realized that the sound she was hearing was Ashford cursing under his breath. He didn’t seem to stop for breath.

“Lock down the perimeter,” Ashford yelled. “Ruiz! Ruiz! We have to fire. We have to fire now!”

“I can’t,” the woman’s voice said. “We don’t have a co

“I don’t care if it’s stable, I have to fire now.”

“It’s not unstable, sir,” the woman said. “It’s not there.”

Ashford slammed his fist against the control panel and grimaced. She didn’t know if he’d broken his knuckles, but she wouldn’t have been surprised. For the next fifteen minutes, they watched the battle play out, the invading force sweeping through the engineering deck. Clarissa tried to keep tabs on where Holden and Naomi were, the way she might watch a dramatic show for one or two favorite minor actors.

“Redirect the suppression teams,” Ashford said.

“Yesc ahc”

Ashford turned toward Jojo. The guard’s face was pale. “I’m having trouble getting responses from the controls. I thinkc I think they’re locking us out.”

Ashford’s rage crested and then sank into a kind of deathly calm. He floated in his couch, his hands pressed together, the tips of both index fingers against his lower lip.

“Environmental controls aren’t responding,” Jojo said, his voice taking on the timbre of near panic. “They’re changing the atmosphere, sir.”

“Environmental suits,” Ashford said. “We’ll need environmental suits.”

Clarissa sighed and launched herself across the cabin to the open access panels.

“What are you doing?” Ashford shouted at her. She didn’t answer.

The internal structure of the Behemothwasn’t that different from any other bridge, though it did have more redundancy than she’d expected. If it had been left in its original form, it would have been robust, but the requirements of a battleship were more rigorous than the elegant generation ship had been, and some of the duplicate systems had been repurposed to accommodate the PDCs, gauss guns, and torpedoes. She turned a monitor on, watching the nitrogen levels rise in the bridge. Without the buildup of carbon dioxide, they wouldn’t even feel short of breath. Just a little light-headed, and then out. She wondered whether Holden would let them die that way. Probably Holden wouldn’t have. Bull, she wouldn’t bet on.

It didn’t matter. Ren had trained her well. She disabled remote access to their environmental systems with the deactivation of a single circuit.

“Sir! I have atmo control back!” Jojo shouted.

“Well, get us some goddamn air, then!” Ashford shouted.

Clarissa looked at her work with a sense of calm pride. It wasn’t pretty, and she wouldn’t have wanted to leave it that way for long, but she’d done what needed doing and it hadn’t shut down the system. That was pretty good, given the circumstances.

“How much have you got?” Ashford snapped.

“I’ve got mechanical, atmospherec everything local to command, sir.”

Like a thank-you would kill you, Clarissa thought as she floated back toward the door to the security station.

“Can we do it to them?” Ashford asked. “Can we shut off their air?”

“No,” Jojo said. “We’re just local. But at least we don’t need those suits.”

Ashford’s scowl changed its character without ever becoming a smile.

“Suits,” he said. “Jojo. Do we have access to the powered armor Pa took from those Martian marines?”

Jojo blinked, then nodded sharply. “Yes, sir.”

“I want you to find four people who’ll fit in them. Then I want you to go down to engineering and get me control of my ship.”

Jojo saluted, gri

“And Jojo? Anyonegets in your way, you kill them. Understand?”

“Five by five.”

The guard unstrapped and launched himself toward the hallway. She heard voices in the hall, people preparing for battle. We have to expect the cycle will go on, getting bigger and more dangerous until one side or the other is destroyed.Who said that? It seemed like something she’d just heard. Under local control the ventilation system had a slightly different rhythm, the exhalations from recyclers coming a few seconds closer together and lasting half as long. She wondered why that would be. It was the sort of thing Ren would have known. It was the sort of thing she only noticed now.

Ren. She tried to imagine him now. Tried to see herself the way he would see her. She was going to die. She was going to die and make everyone else safe by doing it. It wouldn’t bring him back to life, but it would make his dying mean something. And it would avenge him. In her mind’s eye, she still couldn’t see him smiling about it.

Half an hour later, the four people Jojo had selected came into the room awkwardly. The power of the suits made moving without crashing into things difficult. The cowling shone black and red, catching the light and diffusing it. She thought of massive beetles.

“We’ve got no ammunition, sir,” one of them said. Jojo. His voice was made artificially flat and crisp by the suit’s speakers.

“Then beat them to death,” Ashford said. “Your main objective is the reactor. If all you can get is enough for us to fire the laser, we still win. After that, I want Bull and his allies killed. Anyone who’s there that isn’t actively fighting alongside you, count as an enemy. If they aren’t for us, they’re against us.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sir!” one of the men at the controls said.

“What?”

“I think we have someone in the external elevator shaft, sir.”

“Assault force?”

“No, but they may be trapping it.”

Clarissa turned away.