Even though his mouth was set, Cortez’s pale blue eyes smiled at her. He didn’t look like her father at all. His face was too doughy, his jaw was too wide. He was all sincerity where her father always had a sense of laughing at the world from behind a mask. But at that moment, she saw Jules-Pierre Mao in him.
“The people we killed,” she said. “If we do this, all of them will have died for a reason too.”
“For the noblest of reasons,” Cortez agreed.
“We have to get going,” Ashford said, and Cortez stepped back from the doorway, folding his hands together. Ashford turned to her. His too-large head and thin Belter’s frame made him seem like something from a bad dream. “Last chance,” he said.
“I’ll go,” Clarissa said.
Ashford’s eyebrows rose and he glanced from her to Cortez and back. A slow smile stretched his lips.
“You’re sure?” he asked, but the pleasure in his voice made it clear he wasn’t really looking for her thoughts or justifications.
“I’ll make sure no one stops you,” she said.
Ashford looked at Cortez for a moment, and his expression showed that he was impressed. He saluted her, and—awkwardly—she saluted back.
She felt a moment’s disorientation stepping out of her cell that didn’t come from a change in gravity or Coriolis. It was the first free step she’d taken since the Rocinante. Ashford walked ahead of her, his two guards talking about action groups and locking down the Behemoth. Engineering and command weren’t in the rotating drum, and so they would take control of the transfer points at the far north and south of the drum and the exterior elevator that passed between them. How to maintain calm in the drum until they could lock it all down, who was tracking the enemy, who was already a loyalist and who would need persuasion. Clarissa didn’t pay much attention. She was more aware of Cortez walking at her side and the sense of having left some kind of burden behind in the cell. She was going to die, and it was going to make all the things she’d done wrong before make sense. Every child born on Earth or Mars or the stations of the Belt would be safe from the protomolecule because of what they were about to do. And Soledad and Bob and Stanni, her father and her mother and her siblings, they would all know she was dead. Everyone who’d known and loved Ren would be able to sleep a little better knowing that his killer had come to justice. Even she’d sleep better, if she got any sleep.
“And she has combat implants,” Ashford was saying as he pointed his fist back toward her. One of the guards looked back toward her. The one with off-colored eyes and the scar on his chin. Jojo.
“You sure she’s one of us, Captain?”
“The enemy of my enemy, Jojo,” Ashford said.
“I will vouch for her,” Cortez said.
You shouldn’t, Clarissa thought, but didn’t say.
“Claro,” Jojo said with a Belter gesture equivalent to a shrug. “She’s on command deck with tu alles tu.”
“That’ll be fine,” Ashford said.
The hall opened into a larger corridor. White LEDs left the walls looking pale and antiseptic. A dozen people armed with slug throwers, men and women both, sat in electric carts or stood beside them. Clarissa wanted the air itself to smell different, but it didn’t. It was all just plastic and heat. Captain Ashford and three armed men jostled in the cart just ahead.
“It will take some time before the ship is fully secured,” Cortez said. “We’ll have to gather what allies we can. Suppress the resistance. Once we assemble everything we need and get off the drum, they won’t be able to stop us.” He sounded like he was trying to talk himself into believing something. “Don’t be afraid. This has all happened for a reason. If we have faith, there is nothing to fear.”
“I’m not afraid,” Clarissa said. Cortez looked over at her, a smile in his eyes. When he met her gaze the smile faltered a little. He looked away.
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Bull
B
ull tried not to cough. The doctor listened to his breath, moved the stethoscope a few inches, listened some more. He couldn’t tell if the little silver disk was cold. He couldn’t feel it. He coughed up a hard knob of mucus and accepted a bit of tissue from the doctor to spit it into. She tapped a few notes into her hand terminal. The light from its screen showed how tired she looked.
“Well, you’re clearing a little,” the doctor said. “Your white count is still through the roof, though.”
“And the spine?”
“Your spine is a mess, and it’s getting worse. By which I mean it’s getting harder to make it better.”
“That’s a sacrifice.”
“When’s it going to be enough?” she asked.
“Depends on what you mean by ‘it,’” Bull said.
“You wanted to get everyone together. They’re together.”
“Still got crews on half the ships.”
“Skeleton crews,” the doctor said. “I know how many people you have on this ship. I treat them. You wanted to bring everyone together. They’re together. Is that enough?”
“Be nice to make sure everyone doesn’t just start shooting at each other,” Bull said.
The doctor lifted her hands, exasperated. “So as soon as humans aren’t humans anymore, then you’ll let me do my job.”
Bull laughed, which was a mistake. His cough was deeper now, rattling in the caverns of his chest, but it wasn’t violent. Before he could really work up a good gut-wrencher, he’d need abdominal muscles that fired. The doctor handed him another tissue. He used it.
“We get everything under control,” he said, “you can knock me out, all right?”
“Is that going to happen?” she asked. It was the thing everyone wanted to know, whether they came right out and said it or not. The truth was, he didn’t like the plan. Part of that was because it came from Jim Holden, part was that it came from the protomolecule, and part was that he badly wanted it to be true. The fallback was that he’d start evacuating who he could with the shuttles he had, except that shuttles weren’t built for long-haul work. It wasn’t viable.
They had to start making food. Generating soil to fill the interior of the drum. Growing crops under the false strip of sun that ran along the Behemoth’s axis. And getting the goddamned heat under control. He had to see to it that they made it, whatever that meant. Medical comas could last a pretty long time when ships slower than a decent fastball made a voyage across emptiness wider than Earth’s oceans.