“Environmental controls aren’t responding,” Jojo said, his voice taking on the timbre of near panic. “They’re changing the atmosphere, sir.”
“Environmental suits,” Ashford said. “We’ll need environmental suits.”
Clarissa sighed and launched herself across the cabin to the open access panels.
“What are you doing?” Ashford shouted at her. She didn’t answer.
The internal structure of the Behemoth wasn’t that different from any other bridge, though it did have more redundancy than she’d expected. If it had been left in its original form, it would have been robust, but the requirements of a battleship were more rigorous than the elegant generation ship had been, and some of the duplicate systems had been repurposed to accommodate the PDCs, gauss guns, and torpedoes. She turned a monitor on, watching the nitrogen levels rise in the bridge. Without the buildup of carbon dioxide, they wouldn’t even feel short of breath. Just a little light-headed, and then out. She wondered whether Holden would let them die that way. Probably Holden wouldn’t have. Bull, she wouldn’t bet on.
It didn’t matter. Ren had trained her well. She disabled remote access to their environmental systems with the deactivation of a single circuit.
“Sir! I have atmo control back!” Jojo shouted.
“Well, get us some goddamn air, then!” Ashford shouted.
Clarissa looked at her work with a sense of calm pride. It wasn’t pretty, and she wouldn’t have wanted to leave it that way for long, but she’d done what needed doing and it hadn’t shut down the system. That was pretty good, given the circumstances.
“How much have you got?” Ashford snapped.
“I’ve got mechanical, atmosphere… everything local to command, sir.”
Like a thank-you would kill you, Clarissa thought as she floated back toward the door to the security station.
“Can we do it to them?” Ashford asked. “Can we shut off their air?”
“No,” Jojo said. “We’re just local. But at least we don’t need those suits.”
Ashford’s scowl changed its character without ever becoming a smile.
“Suits,” he said. “Jojo. Do we have access to the powered armor Pa took from those Martian marines?”
Jojo blinked, then nodded sharply. “Yes, sir.”
“I want you to find four people who’ll fit in them. Then I want you to go down to engineering and get me control of my ship.”
Jojo saluted, grinning. “Yes, sir.”
“And Jojo? Anyone gets in your way, you kill them. Understand?”
“Five by five.”
The guard unstrapped and launched himself toward the hallway. She heard voices in the hall, people preparing for battle. We have to expect the cycle will go on, getting bigger and more dangerous until one side or the other is destroyed. Who said that? It seemed like something she’d just heard. Under local control the ventilation system had a slightly different rhythm, the exhalations from recyclers coming a few seconds closer together and lasting half as long. She wondered why that would be. It was the sort of thing Ren would have known. It was the sort of thing she only noticed now.
Ren. She tried to imagine him now. Tried to see herself the way he would see her. She was going to die. She was going to die and make everyone else safe by doing it. It wouldn’t bring him back to life, but it would make his dying mean something. And it would avenge him. In her mind’s eye, she still couldn’t see him smiling about it.
Half an hour later, the four people Jojo had selected came into the room awkwardly. The power of the suits made moving without crashing into things difficult. The cowling shone black and red, catching the light and diffusing it. She thought of massive beetles.
“We’ve got no ammunition, sir,” one of them said. Jojo. His voice was made artificially flat and crisp by the suit’s speakers.
“Then beat them to death,” Ashford said. “Your main objective is the reactor. If all you can get is enough for us to fire the laser, we still win. After that, I want Bull and his allies killed. Anyone who’s there that isn’t actively fighting alongside you, count as an enemy. If they aren’t for us, they’re against us.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir!” one of the men at the controls said.
“What?”
“I think we have someone in the external elevator shaft, sir.”
“Assault force?”
“No, but they may be trapping it.”
Clarissa turned away.
In the security station, the newsfeed was still spooling. Women’s voices punctuated by occasional gunfire. Ashford’s men hadn’t taken the station yet. She wondered whether he’d let his men gun down Monica Stuart and Anna on a live feed where everyone could see it. Then she wondered how he’d prevent it from happening even if he wanted to. It wasn’t like there would be any consequences. If they won and blew the Ring, they’d all die here one way or another. A few premature deaths along the way should be neither here nor there. When what came next didn’t matter, anybody could do anything. Nothing had consequences.
Except that everyone always dies. You’re distracting yourself from something.
Cortez floated in the security booth itself. His face lit from below by the monitor. He looked over as she approached, his smile gentle and calm.
“Ashford’s sending men down to retake engineering,” she said.
“Good. That’s very good.”
“—on the Corvusier,” a brown-skinned woman was saying. “You know me. You can trust me. All we’re asking is that you shut down the reactor for a few hours and pull the batteries from the emergency backups. Power down the systems, so we can get out of here.”
“They value their own lives so much,” Cortez said. “They don’t think about the price their survival brings with it. The price for everybody.”
“They don’t,” Clarissa agreed, but something sat poorly with the words. Something itched. “Do you believe in redemption?”
“Of course I do,” Cortez said. “Everything in my life has taught me that there is nothing that fully removes us from the possibility of God’s grace, though sometimes the sacrifices we must make are painfully high.”
“—if we can just come together,” Anna said on the screen, leaning in toward the camera. A lock of red hair had come out of place and fell over her left eye. “Together, we can solve this.”