Abaddon's Gate

The broadcast studio was a sheet of formed green plastic that someone had pried off the floor and set on edge. The lights were jerry-rigged and stuck to whatever surfaces came to hand. Bull recognized most of the faces, though he didn’t know many of them. Monica Stuart, of course. Her production team was down to an Earther woman named Okju and a dark-ski

Bull considered the space from a tactical point of view. It wouldn’t be hard to block off accessways. The little half walls provided a lot of cover, and they were solid enough to stop most slug throwers. An hour or two with some structural steel and a couple welders and the place could be almost defensible. He hoped it wouldn’t need to be. Except that he hoped it would.

“We went black as soon as the fighting started,” Monica said. “Thought it would be better not to go off half-cocked.”

“Good plan,” Bull said, and his hand terminal chimed. He held up a finger and fumbled to accept the co

“How bad?”

“I’ve got about thirty people, sir,” Corin said. “Armed and armored. We control the commissary and most of the civilians. Once Ashford got control of the transition points, he mostly fell back.”

“Pa?”

“Alive,” Corin said. “Pretty beat up, but alive.”

“We’ll call that a win.”

“We lost Serge,” Corin said, her voice flat and calm. That was it, then. Bull felt I’m sorrycoming by reflex and pushed it back. Later. He could offer sympathy later. Right now, he only had room for strong.

“All right,” he said. “Bring whoever you can spare to the colonial administrative offices. And weapons. All the weapons we’ve got, bring them here.”

“New headquarters?”

“Security station in exile,” Bull said, and Corin almost smiled. There was no joy in it, but maybe a little amusement. Good enough for now. She saluted, and he returned the gesture as best he could before dropping the co

“So this is a coup,” Monica said.

“Counter-countercoup, technically,” Bull said. “Here’s what I need you to do. I want you reporting on what’s going on here. Broadcast. The Behemoth, the other ships in the fleet. Hell, tell the station if you think it’ll listen. Captain Ashford was relieved for mental health reasons. The trauma was too much for him. He and a few people who are still personally loyal to him have holed up in command, and the security team of the Behemothis going to extract him.”

“And is any of that true?”

“Maybe half,” Bull said.

Behind Monica’s back, the wide-set Earther woman named Okju looked up and then away.

“I’m not a propagandist,” Monica said.

“Ashford’s going to get us all killed,” Bull said. “Maybe everyone back home too, if he does what he’s thinking. The catastrophe? Everything we’ve been through here? These were the kid gloves. He’s trying to start a real fight.”

It was strange how saying the words himself made them seem real in a way that hearing from Holden hadn’t. He still wasn’t sure whether he believed it was true, even. But right now, it needed to be, and so it was. Monica’s eyes went a little rounder and bright red splotches appeared on her cheeks.

“When this is over,” she said, “I want the full story. Exclusive. Everything that’s really going on. Why it came down the way it did. In-depth interviews with all the players.”

“Can’t speak for anyone but myself right now,” Bull said. “But that’s a fair deal by me. Also, I need you to talk the other ships in the fleet into shutting down their reactors and power grids, pulling the batteries out of every device they can find that’s got them.”

“Because?”

“We’re trying to get the lockdown on the ships taken off,” he said. “Let us go home. And if we can’t stop Ashford, getting off lockdown is the only chance we’ve got to keep the station from retaliating against the folks on the other side of the Ring.”

And because if the insults and provocations, the false threats and misdirections all failed, that would be enough. If Ashford could see the other plan coming together, if he could see hisheroic gesture, hisgrand sacrifice being taken away, he would come. He’d do whatever he could to shut down the studio, and every gun that came here was one less that would be at engineering or command.

Monica looked nonplussed.

“And how am I going to convince them to do that, exactly?”

“I have an idea about that,” Bull said. “I know this priest lady who’s got people from damn near every ship out here coming to her services. I’m thinking we recruit her.”

Even, he didn’t say, if it puts her in the firing line.

Chapter Forty-Two: Clarissa

The end came. All the ru

It felt almost like relief.

“I’ve been thinking about your father,” Cortez said as the lift rose toward the transition point, spin gravity ebbing away and the growing Coriolis making everything feel a little bit off. Like a dream or the begi

He tried to turn the protomolecule into a weapon and sell it to the highest bidder, Clarissa thought. The thought should have stung, but it didn’t. It was just a fact. Iron atoms formed in stars; a Daimo-Koch power relay had one fewer input than the standard models; her father had tried to militarize the protomolecule. He hadn’t known what it was. No one had. That didn’t keep them from playing with it. Seeing what they could do. She had the sudden visual memory of a video she’d seen of a drunken soldier handing his assault rifle to a chimp. What had happened next was either hilarious or tragic, depending on her mood. Her father hadn’t been that different from the chimp. Just on a bigger scale.

“I’m sorry I didn’t have the chance to know him better,” Cortez said.

Ashford and seven of his men were on the lift with them. The captain stood at the front, hands clasped behind his back. Most of his men were Belters too. Long frames, large heads. Ren had had that look too. Like they were all part of the same family. Ashford’s soldiers had sidearms and bulletproof vests. She didn’t. And yet she kept catching them glancing over at her. They still thought of her as Melba. She was the terrorist and murderer with the combat modifications. That she looked like a normal young woman only added to the sense that she was eerie. This was why Ashford had wanted her so badly. She was an adornment. A trophy to show how strong he was and paper over his failure to hold his own ship before.

She wished that one of them would smile at her. The more they acted like she was Melba, the more she felt that version of herself coming back, seeping up into her cognition like ink soaking through paper.

“There was one time your brother Petyr came to the United Nations buildings when I was visiting there.”

“That would have been Michael,” she said. “Petyr hates the UN.”

“Does he?” Cortez said with a gentle laugh. “My mistake.”

The lift reached the axis of the drum, slowing gently so that they could all steady themselves with the handrails and not be launched up into the ceiling. Behind them, a series of vast conduits and transformers powered the long, linear sun of the drum. Before she’d come out to the Ring, she’d never seriously thought about balancing power loads and environmental control systems. That kind of thing had been for other people. Lesser people. Now, with all she’d learned, the scale of the Behemoth’s design was awing. She wished the others could have seen it. Soledad and Bob and Sta