“I’ll go,” Naomi repeated. “My arm is for shit, but I can walk. If someone can help me once we get there, I can take out the bridge and shut down the reactor.”
“No,” Holden said again.
“Yeah, me too,” Alex added. He was sitting on the edge of the gurney facing away from them. He’d been shaking like he was crying, but hadn’t made a sound. His voice sounded dry, like fallen leaves rustling in the wind. Brittle and empty. “I guess I have to go too.”
“Alex, you don’t—” Naomi started, but he kept talking over the top of her.
“Nobody pulled the Roci’s batteries off-line when we left, so if we’re shutting everything down, she’ll need someone to do it.”
Bull nodded. Holden wanted to smack him for agreeing with any of this.
“And that’ll be me,” Alex said. “I can tag along as far as engineering, grab an EVA pack there, and use the aft airlock to get out.”
Amos moved over behind Bull, his face still flat, emotionless, but his hands in fists. “Alex is going?”
“New plan,” Bull said loud enough for everyone to hear. People stopped whatever they were doing and moved over to listen. More must have arrived, because there were almost fifty in the office now. At the back of the room stood a small knot of people in military uniforms. Anna the redheaded preacher was with them. She was holding hands with an aggressively thin woman who alternated smoking and tapping her front teeth with her pinky fingernail. Bull spotted them at the same time Holden did, and waved them forward.
“Anna, come on up here,” he said. “Most everyone is here now, so this is how it’s going to go down.”
The room got quiet. Anna made her way up to Bull and waited. Her skinny friend came with her, staring at the crowd around the preacher with the suspicious eyes of a bodyguard.
“In”—Bull stopped to look at a nearby wall panel with a clock on it—“thirty minutes, I will take a team made up of security personnel and the crew of the Rocinanteto the southern drum access point. We will retake that access point and gain entrance into the engineering level. Once we control engineering, Monica and her team will begin a broadcast explaining to the rest of the fleet about the need to kill the power. Preacher, that’s where you and your people come in.”
Anna turned and smiled at her group, a motley collection of people in the uniforms of a variety of services and planetary allegiances. Most of them injured in one way or another. Some quite badly.
“The target for the shutdown is 1900 hours local, about two and a half hours from now. We need them to keep it down for two hours. That’s our window. We need the Behemothdown during that two hours.”
“We’ll make it happen,” Naomi said.
“But when our broadcast starts, Ashford will probably try to take this location. Amos and the remainder of my team, along with any volunteers from among the rest of you, will hold this position as long as possible. The more bad guys you can tie up here, the fewer we’ll have trying to take engineering back from us. But I need you to hold. If we can’t keep Anna and her people on the air long enough to get everyone on board with our shutdown plan, this thing ends before it starts.”
“We’ll hold,” Amos said. No one disagreed.
“Once we control engineering, we’ll send a team forward to put restraints on the hopefully unconscious people on the bridge and we’ll own the ship. The lights go out, the aliens let us go, and we get the fuck out of this miserable stretch of space once and for all. How’s that sound?”
Bull raised his voice with the final question, looking for a cheer from the group, and the group obliged. People began to drift back toward their various tasks. Holden squeezed Naomi’s uninjured shoulder and moved over to Anna. She looked lost. Along the way he grabbed Amos by the arm.
“Anna,” Holden said. “Do you remember Amos?”
She smiled and nodded. “Hello, Amos.”
“How you doing, Red?”
“Amos will be here to protect you and the others,” Holden continued. “If you need anything, you let him know. I feel safe in saying nothing will get in here to stop you from doing your job as long as he’s alive.”
“That’s the truth,” Amos said. “Ma’am.”
“Hey, guys,” someone called out from the doorway. “Look what followed me home. Can I keep them?”
Holden patted Anna on the arm and gave Amos a meaningful look. Protect this one with your life.Amos nodded back. He looked vaguely offended.
He left them together and caught up with Bull heading for the door. The security officer Corin, Bull’s new second-in-command, was leaning next to the door with a shit-eating grin.
“Come on in, boys,” she said, and four Martians with military haircuts came into the room. They stood on the balls of their feet, slowly looking over every inch of the room. Holden had known someone who always entered a room that way. Bobbie. He found himself wishing she were here. The man in the lead was powerfully familiar.
“Sergeant Verbinski,” Bull said to one of them. “This is a surprise.”
Holden hadn’t recognized the man without his armor. He looked big.
“Sir,” Verbinski said. “I heard you’re about to start a fight to get us all out of here.”
“Yeah,” Bull said. “I am.”
“Sounds like a noble cause,” Verbinski replied. “Need four grunts with nothing else to do?”
“Yeah,” Bull said with a growing smile. “I really do.”
Chapter Forty-Four: Anna
They’d failed.
Anna watched the busy men and women in the radio offices as they strapped on body armor, loaded weapons, hung grenades from their belts, and she felt only sadness and despair.
A history professor at university had once told her, Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas. It’s attractive because it’s simple, it’s direct, it’s almost always available as an option. When you can’t think of a good rebuttal for your opponent’s argument, you can always punch them in the face.
They’d run out of ideas. And now they were reaching for the simple, direct, always available option of shooting everyone they disagreed with. She hated it.
Monica caught her eye from across the room and held up a small thermos of coffee in invitation. Anna waved her off with a smile.
“Are you insane?” Tilly asked. She was sitting on the floor next to her in a back corner of the offices, trying to stay out of everyone’s way. “That woman has the only decent coffee on this entire ship.” She waved at Monica, pointing at herself.
“I should have spent more time talking to Cortez,” Anna said. “The OPA captain might be intractable, but I could have reached Cortez with enough time.”
“Life is finite, dear, and Cortez is an asshole. We’ll all be better off if someone puts a bullet in him before this is over.” Tilly accepted a pour of Monica’s coffee with a grateful smile. Monica set the thermos down and sat on the floor next to them.
“Hey, we—” she started, but Anna didn’t notice.
“You don’t mean that,” Anna said to Tilly, annoyance creeping into her voice. “Cortez isn’t a bad person. He’s frightened and unsure, and has made some bad choices, but at worst he’s misguided, not evil.”
“He doesn’t deserve your sympathy,” Tilly said, then tossed back the last of her coffee like she was angry with it.
“Who are we—” Monica started again.
“He does. He does deserve it,” Anna said. Watching the young men and women prepare for war, preparing to kill and be killed right in front of her, made her more angry with Tilly than she probably would have been otherwise. But she found herself very angry now. “That’s exactly the point. They alldeserve our sympathy. If Bull’s right about Ashford, and he’s gone crazy with fear and humiliation and the trauma of seeing his crew killed, then he deserves our sympathy. That’s a terrible place to be. Cortez deserves our understanding, because he’s doing exactly the same thing we are. Trying to find the right thing to do in an impossible situation.”