However many of them were left, they were on their own.
The station’s grip was pulling them into rough orbit around the glowing blue structure, and no amount of burn was able to affect their paths one way or the other. They couldn’t speed up and they couldn’t stop. No one was under thrust, and it was making the medical crisis worse as zero g complicated the injuries. The Behemoth’s power grid, already weakened and patched after the torpedo launch debacle, had suffered a cascading shipwide failure. Sam’s team was trekking through the ship, resetting the tripped safeties, adding new patches to the mess. One of the Earth ships had come close to losing core containment and gone through an automatic shutdown that left it running off batteries, another was battling an environmental systems breakdown with the air recylers. The Martian navy ships might be fine or they might be in ruins, but the Martian commander wasn’t sharing.
If it had been a battle, it would have been a humbling defeat. It hadn’t even been an attack.
“Then what would you call it?” Pa asked from the screen of his hand terminal. She and Ashford had both survived. Ashford was riding roughshod over the recovery efforts, trying—Bull thought—to micromanage the crisis out of existence. That left Pa at the helm to coordinate with all the other ships. She was better suited for it anyway. There was a chance, at least, that she would listen.
“If I were doing it, I’d call it progressive restraint,” Bull said. “That asshole who shot the Ring came through doing something fierce and he got locked down. There’s rules about how fast you can go. Then Holden and those marines go to the station, something happens. Whatever’s running the station gets its jock in a twist, and things lock down harder. I don’t know the mechanism of how they do it, but the logic’s basic training stuff. It’s allowing us as much freedom as it can, but the more we screw it up, the tighter the choke.”
“Okay,” Pa said, running a hand through her hair. She looked tired. “I can see that. So as long as it doesn’t feel threatened, maybe things don’t get worse.”
“But if someone gets pissed,” Bull said. “I don’t know. Some Martian pendejo just lost all his friends or something? He decides to arm a nuke, walk it to the station, and set it off, maybe things get a lot worse.”
“All right.”
“We’ve got to get everyone acting together,” Bull said. “Earth, Mars, us. Everyone. Because if this was me, I’d escalate from a restraint, to a coercive restraint, to shooting someone. We don’t want to get this thing to follow the same—”
“I said all right, Mister Baca!” Pa shouted. “That means I understood your point. You can stop making it. Because the one thing I don’tneed right now is another self-righteous male telling me how high the stakes are and that I’d better not fuck things up. I gotit. Thankyou.”
Bull blinked, opened his mouth, and closed it again. On his screen, Pa pinched the bridge of her nose. He heard echoes of Ashford in her frustration.
“Sorry, XO,” he said. “You’re right. I was out of line.”
“Don’t worry about it, Mister Baca,” she said, each syllable pulling a weight behind it. “If you have any concrete, specific recommendations, my door is always open.”
“I appreciate that,” Bull said. “So the captainc ?”
“Captain Ashford’s doing his best to keep the ship in condition and responsive. He feels that letting the crew see him will improve morale.”
And how’s that going, Bull didn’t ask. Didn’t have to. Pa could see him restraining himself.
“Believe it or not, we are all on the same team,” she said.
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
Her expression clouded and she leaned in toward her screen, a gesture of intimacy totally artificial in the floating world of zero g and video connections and still impossible to entirely escape.
“I heard about your condition. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” he said.
“If I ordered you to accept the medical coma?”
He laughed. Even that felt wrong. Truncated.
“I’ll go when I’m ready,” he said, only realizing after the fact that the phrase could mean two different things. “We get out of the woods, the docs can take over.”
“All right, then,” she said and her terminal chimed. She cursed quietly. “I have to go. I’ll touch base with you later.”
“You got it,” Bull said and let the connection drop.
The wise thing would have been to sleep. He’d been awake for fourteen hours, checking in with the security staff who were still alive, remaking a duty roster, doing all the things he could do from the medical bay that would make the ship work. Fourteen hours wasn’t all that long a shift in the middle of a crisis, except that he’d been crippled.
Crippled.
With a sick feeling, he walked his fingertips down his throat, to his chest, and to the invisible line where the skin stopped feeling like his own and turned into something else. Meat. His mind skittered off the thought. He’d been hurt before and gotten back from it. He’d damn near died four or five different times. Something always happened that got him back on his feet. He always got lucky. This time would be the same. Somehow, somehow he’d get back. Have another story to tell and no one to tell it to.
He knew he was lying to himself, but what else could he do? Apart from stand aside. And maybe he should. Let Pa take care of it. Give Ashford his shot. No one would give him any shit if he took the medical coma. Not even Fred. Hell, Fred would probably have told him to do it. Ordered him.
Bull closed his eyes. He’d sleep or he wouldn’t. Or he’d drift into some half-lucid place that wasn’t either. One of the doctors was weeping in the corridor, a slow, autonomic sound, more like being sick than expressing sorrow. Someone coughed wetly. Pneumonia was the worst danger now. Null g messed with the sensors that triggered the kinds of coughing that actually cleared lungs until it was too late. After that, strokes and embolisms as the blood that gravity should have helped to drain pooled and clotted instead. On all the other ships, it was the same. Survivable injuries made deadly just by floating. If they could just get under thrust. Get some gravityc
We’re all on the same team, Pa said in his half drowse, and Bull was suddenly completely awake. He scooped up his hand terminal, but Ashford and Pa were both refusing connections. It was the middle of their night. He considered putting through an emergency override, but didn’t. Not yet. First, he tried Sam.
“Bull?” she said. Her skin looked grayish, and there were lines at the corners of her mouth that hadn’t been there before. Her one blood-red eye seemed like an omen.
“Hey, Sam. Look, we need to get all the other crews from all the other ships onto the Behemoth. Bring everyone together so no one does anything stupid.”
“You want a pony too?”
“Sure,” Bull said. “Thing is, we got to give them a reason to come here. Something they need and they can’t get anyplace else.”
“Sounds great,” Sam said, shaking her head. “Maybe I’m not at my cognitive best here, sweetie, but are you asking me for something?”
“They’ve all got casualties. They all need gravity. I’m asking you how long it would take you to spin up the drum.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Melba
The darkness was beautiful and surreal. The ships of the flotilla, drawn together by the uncanny power of the station, hugged closer to each other than they ever would have under human control. The only lights came from the occasional exterior maintenance array and the eerie glow of the station. It was like walking through a graveyard in the moonlight. The ring of ships and debris glittered in a rising arc before her and behind, as if any direction she chose would lead up from where she was now.