Abaddon's Gate

A

Tilly stopped at a printed deck map on the wall. It was right next to a black and unresponsive network panel. Of course military ships would have both, A

“Security station.” Tilly tapped on a spot on the map, then yanked A

“Get 35C open first,” the older man said to the two young men floating to his left. He pointed at something on a map. “There were a dozen civvies in there.”

“EMT?” one of the young men asked.

“Don’t have them to spare, and that galley doesn’t have crash couches. Everyone in there is pasta sauce, but the El Tee says look anyway.”

“Roger that,” the young man replied, and he and his partner pushed out of the room past A

“You two do a corridor sweep,” the older man said to the other two young sailors in the room. “Tags if you can find them, pictures and swabs if you can’t. Everything sent to OPCOM on red two one, got me?”

“Aye-aye,” one of them said, and they floated out of the room.

“The man in 295 needs help,” A

He tapped something onto his desk terminal and said, “Okay, he’s in the queue. EMTs will get there as soon as they can. We’re setting up a temporary emergency area in the officers’ mess. I suggest you two ladies get there double time.”

“What happened?” Tilly asked, and gripped a handhold on the wall like she meant to stay a while. A

The security officer looked Tilly up and down once, and seemed to come to the conclusion that giving her what she wanted was the easiest solution. “Hell if I know. We decelerated to a dead stop in just a shade under five seconds. The damage and injuries are all high-g trauma. Whatever grabbed us only grabbed the skin of the ship and didn’t give a shit about the stuff inside.”

“So the slow zone changed?” Tilly was asking. A

“Don’t touch those,” the security officer said. A

“That could mean a damn lot of casualties,” Tilly said. A

“Hundreds on the Prince,” the security officer said. “And we weren’t going anywhere near the old speed limit. Some of the ships were. We get no broadcasts from those now.”

A

“Maybe it was the space girl,” A

The security officer and Tilly were both staring at her.

A

Both the security officer and Tilly turned to look at the screen. A few seconds later the image of Julie the space girl disappeared and was replaced by someone A

“Someone’s going to get James Holden in an interrogation room for a few hours, and then we’ll have a much better idea of where to put the blame.”

Tilly just laughed.

“Is that who they blamed?” she said when she’d finished. “That isn’t Julie Mao. And there’s no way Claire’s out here.”

“Claire?” A

“That’s Claire. Clarissa Mao. Julie’s little sister. She’s living on Luna with her mother, last I heard. But that’s definitely not Julie.”

“Are you sure?” A

“I dandled both those girls on my knee back in the day. The Maos used to be regular guests at our house in Baja. Brought the kids out during the summers to swim and eat fish tacos. And that one is Claire, not Julie.”

“Oh,” said A

“Which ship?” the officer asked.

“The UN ship that blew up. The one that made the Belter ship shoot at Holden. And then we all went through the Ring and she’s here! She’s on this ship right now! I saw her in the galley and I knewthere was something wrong with her. She scared me but I should have said something but I didn’t because why would I?”

Tilly and the security man were both staring at her. She could feel her mind ru

“She’s here,” A

“Claire?” Tilly asked with a frown.

“I saw her in the galley. She threatened me. She was on this ship.”

The security man scowled and tapped something on his terminal, swore, then tapped something else. “I’ll be a sonofabitch. Shipwide face recognition says we’ve got a match in hangar B right now.”

“You have to go arrest her,” A

“Hangar B is a designated emergency area,” the officer said. “She’s probably there with the other survivors and broken in five different places. If it’s even her. Shitty reproduction like that makes for a lot of false positives.”

“You have software that could have found her at any time?” Tilly asked in disbelief. “You didn’t check?”

“Ma’am, we don’t ask ‘how high’ when James fucking Holden says jump,” the officer growled back.

“There’s an airlock in there,” A

“Like where?” the officer replied.

As if on cue, a green airlock cycling alarm appeared on the display.

“We have to go get her,” A

“You have to go to the officers’ mess,” the security man said. “I’ll send people to pick her up for questioning as soon as we stop bleeding. Don’t worry about it. We’ve got plenty enough to sort out now. That one’ll wait.”