Abaddon's Gate

“I don’t—” A

“Kill. Her. Can you do that?”

“Kill? No. I can’t,” A

Naomi stared at her for a second longer, then just shrugged with her good hand. “Okay, then, come with me.”

They moved through the next hatch to the deck above. Most of the space was taken up by an airlock and storage lockers. Some of the lockers were large enough to hold vacuum suits and EVA packs. Others were smaller. Naomi opened one of the smaller lockers and pulled out a thick black handgun.

“I’ve never shot anyone either,” she said, pulling the slide back and loading a round. To A

“I understand,” A

“Good, because I can’t have you—” Naomi started, then her eyes rolled up in her head and her body went limp. The gun drifted away from her relaxed hand.

“No no no,” A

The air in the room began to smell different. Hot, and with the melted plastic odor her damaged taser had given off when it died. A spot of red appeared on the deck hatch, then shifted to yellow, then to white. The girl in the mech, coming for them.

The hatch above them, the one that led forward on the ship, was closed and flashing the lockdown message. Naomi hadn’t told her what the override code was. The airlock was on their level, but it was locked down too.

The deck hatch began to open in lurching increments. A

A

On the far side, metal shrieked. Something wet brushed against the back of A

A locker door slammed open off to her left. Then another one, closer. And then another. A

The door centimeters from A

“Open it,” Melba said. Her voice was low, rough, and bestial.

“No.”

“Open it.”

“Youc I can hear that you’re feeling upset,” A

Melba’s scream was unlike anything A

Something struck the metal door and A

The screaming was wild now, obscene where it wasn’t wordless, and inhuman as a hurricane. The thick metal of the door bent in, the hinges starting to shudder and bend with each new assault. A

The top hinge gave way, shattering.

And then, without warning, silence fell. A

Melba floated curled against the wall, her hands pressed to her belly and her body shuddering.

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Bull

The truth was, distance was always measured in time. It wasn’t the sort of thing Bull usually thought about, but his enforced physical stillness was doing strange things with his awareness. Even in the middle of the constant press of events, the calls and coordination, the scolding from his doctor, he felt some part of his mind coming loose. And strange ideas kept floating in, like the way that distance got measured in time.

Centuries before, a trip across the Atlantic Ocean could take months. There was a town near New Mexico named Wheeless where the story was some ancient travelers of the dust and caliche had a wagon break down and decided that it was easier to put down roots than go on. Technologies had come, each building on the ones before, and months became weeks and then hours. And outside the gravity well, where machines were freed from the tyra

The slow zone had changed that. Looking at a readout, the ships from Earth and Mars were clustered together like a handful of dried peas thrown in the same bowl. They were drifting now, coming together and spreading apart, taking their places in the captured ring around the eerie station. Compared to the volume of ring-bordered sphere, they seemed huddled close. But the distance between them and the Ring was time, and time meant death.

From the farthest of the ships to the Behemothwas two days’ travel in a shuttle, assuming that the maximum speed didn’t ratchet down again. The closest, he could have jumped to. The human universe had contracted, and was contracting more. With every co

The feed went to green, then blue, and then Monica Stuart was smiling professionally into the camera. She looked tired, sober, but human. A face people knew. One they could recognize and feel comfortable with.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “Welcome to the first broadcast of Radio Free Slow Zone, coming to you from our temporary offices here on board the OPA battleship Behemoth. I am a citizen of Earth and a civilian, but it’s my hope that this program can be of some use to all of us in this time of crisis. In addition to bringing whatever unclassified news and information we can, we will also be conducting interviews with the command crews of the ships, civilian leaders on the Thomas Prince, and live musical performances.