Abaddon's Gate

The doors slid open, and the Belters launched themselves into the transition with the grace of men and women who’d spent their childhoods in low or null g. She and Cortez didn’t embarrass themselves, but they would never have the autonomic grace of a Belter on the float.

The command decks were beautiful. The soft indirect lighting took everyone’s shadows away. Melba launched herself after Ashford and the Belters, swimming through the air like a dolphin in the sea.

The command center itself was beautifully designed. A long, lozenge-shaped room with control boards set into ceramic desks. On one end of the lozenge, a door opened into the captain’s office, on the other, to the security station. The gimbaled crash couches looked less like functional necessities than the natural, beautiful outgrowth of the ship. Like an orchid. The walls were painted with angels and pastoral scenes. The effect was only slightly spoiled by the half dozen access panels that stood open, repairs from the sudden stop still uncompleted. Even the guts of the command center were beautiful in their way. Clarissa found herself wanting to go over and just look in to see if she could make sense of the design.

Three men floated at the control boards, all of them Belters. “Welcome back, Captain,” one of them said.

Ashford sailed through the empty air to the captain’s station. Three of the soldiers drifted out to take positions in the corridor, the others arraying themselves around the room, all with sightlines on the doors leading in. Anyone who tried to take the command center would have to walk through a hailstorm of bullets. Clarissa pulled herself over to the door of the security station, as much to get out of the way as anything, and Cortez followed her, his expression focused, serious, and a little agitated.

Ashford keyed in a series of commands, and his control panel shifted, growing brighter. His eyes tracked over the readouts and screens. Lit from below, he looked less like the man set to save all of humanity at the sacrifice of himself and his crew and more like a lower university science teacher trying to get his simulations to work they way they were meant to.

“Jojo?” he said, and the voice of the prison guard came from the control deck like the man was standing beside them.

“Here, Captain. We’ve got the engineering transition point locked down. Anyone wants to get in here, we’ll give ’em eight kinds of hell.”

“Good man,” Ashford said. “Do we have Chief Engineer Rosenberg?”

“Yes, sir. She’s making the modifications to the comm array now.”

“Still?”

“Still, sir.”

“Thank you,” he said, then tapped the display, his fingertips popping against the screen. “Sam. How long before the modifications are done?”

“Two hours,” she said.

“Why so long?”

“I’m going to have to override every safety device in the control path,” she said. “This thing we’re doing? There’s a lot of built-in design that was meant to keep it from happening.”

Ashford scowled.

“Two hours,” he said, and stabbed the co

The waiting began. Two hours later, the same woman explained that the targeting system had been shaken out of round by the catastrophe. It just meant a delay getting lock for most purposes, but since this was a one-shot application, she was realigning it. Three more hours. Then she was getting a short loop error that he had to track down. Two more hours.

Clarissa saw Ashford’s mood darken with every excuse, every hour that stretched past. She found the toilets tucked at the back of the security station and started wondering about getting a few tubes of food. If the only working commissary was in the drum, that might actually be a problem. Cortez had strapped himself into a crash couch and slept. The guards slowly became more and more restless. Clarissa spent an hour going from access panel to access panel, looking at the control boards and power relays that fed the bridge. It was surprising how many of them were the same as the ones she’d worked with on the Earth ships coming out. Cut an Earther or a Belter, they both bled the same blood. Crack an access panel on the Behemothand the Prince, and both ships had the same crappy brownout buffers.

She wondered how the Behemothfelt about being the Behemothand not the Nauvoo. She wondered how she felt about being Clarissa Mao and not Melba Koh. Would the ship feel the nobility of its sacrifice? Lost forever in the abyss, but with everyone else redeemed by her sacrifice. The symmetry seemed meaningful, but it might only have been the grinding combination of fear and uncertainty that made it seem that way.

Seven hours after they’d taken the bridge, Ashford stabbed at the control console again, waited a few seconds, and punched the console hard enough that the blow pushed him back into his couch. The sound of the violence startled Cortez awake and stopped the muttered conversation between the guards. Ashford ignored them all and tapped at the screen again. His fingertips sounded like hailstones striking rock.

The light from the screen flickered.

“Sir?”

“Where’s Sam Rosenberg?” Ashford snapped.

“Last I saw her, she was checking the backup power supply for the reactor bottle, sir. Should I find her?”

“Who’s acting as her second?”

“Anamarie Ruiz.”

“Get Sam and Anamarie up to command, please. If you have to take them under guard, that’s fine.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ashford closed the co

“Is there a problem, Captain?” Cortez asked. His voice was thick and a little bleary.

“Nothing I can’t handle,” Ashford replied.

It was almost another hour before Clarissa heard the doors from the external elevator shaft open. New voices came down the hall. The gabble of conversation tried to hide some deeper strain. Ashford tugged at his uniform.

Two women floated in the room. The first was a pretty woman with a heart-shaped face and grease-streaked red hair pulled back in a bun. It made her think of A

“Chief Rosenberg,” Ashford said.

“Sir,” the red-haired woman said. She didn’t sound like A

“We are on our fourth last-minute delay now. The more time we waste, the more likely it is that the rogue elements in the drum will cause trouble.”

“I’m doing my best, Captain. This isn’t the kind of thing we get to take a second shot at, though. We need to be thorough.”

“Two hours ago, you said we’d be ready to fire in two hours. Are we ready to fire now?”

“No, sir,” she said. “I looked up the specs, and the reactor’s safeties won’t allow an output the size we need. I’m fabricating some new breakers that won’t screw us up. And then we have to replace some cabling as well.”

“How long will that take?” Ashford asked. His voice was dry. Clarissa thought she heard danger in it, but the engineer didn’t react to it.

“Six hours, six and a half hours,” she said. “The fab printers only go so fast.”

Ashford nodded and turned to the second woman. Ruiz.

“Do you agree with that assessment?”

“All respect to Chief Rosenberg, I don’t,” Ruiz said. “I don’t see why we can’t use conductive foam instead.”

“How long would that take?”

“Two hours,” Ruiz said.

Ashford drew a pistol. Almost before the chief engineer’s eyes could widen, the gun fired. In the tight quarters, the sound itself was an assault. Sam’s head snapped back and her feet kicked forward. A bright red globe shivered in the air, smaller droplets flying out from it. Violent moons around a dead planet.

“Mister Ruiz,” Ashford said. “Please be ready to fire in two hours.”

For a moment, the woman was silent. She shook her head like she was trying to come back from a dream.