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“Oh,” Monica said. “Cortez. He’s the—”
“That’s a load of crap, A
“This isn’t about good guys and bad guys,” A
“Believe me,” Tilly said, “when I get out of here, it will be my mission in life to burn Cortez to the ground for this.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?”
“He won’t be on a ship trying to destroy the Ring anymore. He won’t be supporting Ashford anymore. All of the circumstances that made him your enemy will be gone. What’s the value in clinging to the hate?”
Tilly turned away and fumbled around in her pocket for her cigarettes. She smoked one aggressively, pointedly not looking at A
“What’s the answer, then?” Monica asked after a few tense moments of silence.
“I don’t know,” A
“So it’s all just academic, then,” Monica said. Tilly snorted in agreement, still not looking at A
A
“There’s no way to know,” Monica said.
“We owe it to them to look for other answers. We’ve failed this time. We’ve run out of ideas, and now we’re reaching for the gun. But maybe next time, if we’ve thought about what led us here, maybe next time we find a different answer. Certainty doesn’t have a place in violence.”
For a while, they were silent. Tilly angrily chain-smoked. Monica typed furiously on her terminal. A
Bull clunked over to them, his walking machine whining to a stop. He had deteriorated during the few hours they’d spent in the office. He was coughing less, but he’d begun using his inhaler a lot more often. Even the machine seemed ill now, its sounds harsher, its movements jerkier. As though the walker and Bull had merged into one being, and it was dying along with him.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Fine,” A
“So we’re getting pretty close to zero hour here,” Bull said, then stifled a wet-sounding cough. “You have everything you need?”
No, A
“Yes,” she said instead. “Monica has been making notes for the broadcast. I’ve compiled a list of all the ships we have representatives from. We’re missing a few, but I’m hoping planetary allegiance will be enough to get their cooperation. Chris Williams, a junior officer from the Prince, has been a big help on that.”
“You?” Bull asked, jabbing a thick hand toward Monica.
“My team is ready to go,” she said. “I’m a bit worried about getting the full broadcast out before Ashford’s people stop us.”
Bull laughed. It was a wet, unpleasant sound. “Hold on.” He called out to Jim Holden, who was busy reassembling a stripped-down rifle of some sort and chatting with one of the Martian marines. Holden put the partly assembled rifle on a table and walked over.
“What’s up?”
“These people need reassurance that they’ll be protected long enough to finish their broadcast,” Bull said.
Holden blinked twice, once at Bull, once at the three women sitting cross-legged on the floor. A
“Amos will make sure you’re not interrupted,” he finally said.
“Right,” Bull said. “Tell them why that’s reassuring.”
“Oh. Well, when Amos is angry he’s the meanest, scariest person I’ve ever met, and he’d walk across a sea of corpses he personally created to help a friend. And one of his good friends just got murdered by the people who are going to be trying to take this office.”
“I heard about that,” A
“Yes,” Holden said. “And the last people in the galaxy I’d want to be are the ones that are going to try and break in here to stop you. Amos doesn’t process grief well. It usually turns into anger or violence for him. I have a feeling he’s about to process the shit out of it on some Ashford loyalists.”
“Killing people won’t make him feel better,” A
“Actually,” Holden said with a half smile, “I think it might for him, but Amos is a special case. You’d be right about most anyone else.”
A
She imagined trying to explain their current situation to Nono. I’ve fallen in with killers, you see, but it’s okay because they are the right killers. The good guy killers. They don’t shoot i
Monica was asking Holden something. When he started to answer, A
She pulled an unused chair over next to Amos and sat down. “Red,” he said, giving her a tiny nod.
“I’m sorry.” She put her hand on his arm. He stared down at it as though he couldn’t figure out what it was.
“Okay,” he said, not asking the obvious question. Not pretending not to understand. A
“Thank you for doing this.”
Amos shifted in his chair to face her. “You don’t need to—”
“In a few hours, we might all be dead,” she said. “I want you to know that I know what you’re doing, and I know why, and I don’t care about any of that. Thank you for helping us.”
“God damn, Red,” Amos said, putting his hand on hers. “You must be hell on wheels as a preacher. You’re making me feel the best and worst I’ve felt in a while at the same time.”
“That’s all I wanted to say,” A
Before she could leave, Amos grabbed her hand in an almost painfully tight grip. “No one’s go
There was no boast in it. It was a simple statement of fact. She gave him a smile and pulled her hand away. Good-hearted unrepentant killers were not something she’d had to fit into her worldview before this, and she wasn’t sure how it would work. But now she’d have to try.
“All right, people, listen up,” Bull yelled out over the noise. The room fell silent. “It’s zero hour. Let’s get the action teams divided up and ready to go.”
A shadow fell across A