Abaddon's Gate

Chapter Eleven: Melba

Stanni stood just behind Melba’s left shoulder, looking at the display. His palm rubbed against the slick fabric of his work trousers like he was trying to sooth a cramped quadriceps. Melba had learned to read it as a sign the man was nervous. The narrow architecture of the Cerisier put him so close to her, she could feel the subtle warmth of his body against the back of her neck. In any other context, being this close to a man would have meant they were sharing an intimate moment. Here, it meant nothing. She didn’t even find it annoying.

“Mira,” Stanni said, flapping his hand. “La. Right there.”

The monitor was old, a constant green pixel burning in the lower left corner where some steady glitch had been irreparable and not worth replacing. The definition was still better than a hand terminal. To the untrained eye, the power demand profile for the UNN Thomas Prince could have been the readout of an EEG or a seismological reading or the visual representation of a bhangra recording. But over the course of weeks—months now—Melba’s eye wasn’t untrained.

“I see it,” she said, putting her finger on the spike. “And we can’t tell where it came from?”

“Fucks me,” Stanni said, rubbing his thigh. “I’m seeing it, but I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

Melba ran her tongue against the back of her teeth, concentrating, trying to remember what the tutorials had shown about tracking power spikes. In an odd way, her inexperience had shifted into an asset for the team. Stanni and Ren, Bob and Soledad all had more hands-on experience than she did, but she’d only just learned the basics. Sometimes she would know some simple thing that all of them had known once, and only she hadn’t forgotten. Her analysis was slower, but it didn’t skip steps, because she didn’t know which steps could be skipped.

“Did it start at the deceleration flip?” she asked.

Stanni grunted like a man struck by a sudden pain.

“They hit null g and one of the regulators reset,” he said. “Least it’s nothing serious. Embarrassing to blow up all they preachers y sa. We’ll need to get back over there and check them, though.”

Melba nodded and made a mental note to read through what that process required. All she’d known was the truism repeated in three of her tutorials that when a ship cut thrust halfway through a journey, flipped, and began accelerating in the opposite direction it was a time for especial care.

“I’ll put it on the rotation,” she said, and pulled up her team’s schedule. There was a slot in ten days when there would be enough time to revisit the big ship. She blocked out the time, marked it, and posted it to the full group. All of it felt easy and natural, like the sort of thing she had been doing her whole life. Which in a sense, she had.

The flotilla was coming to the last leg of its journey. They had passed the orbit of Uranus weeks ago, and the sun was a bright star in an overwhelming abyss of night sky. All the plumes of fire were pointed toward the Ring now, bleeding off their velocity with every passing minute. Even though it was the standard pattern for Epstein drive ships, Melba couldn’t quite shake the feeling that they were all trying to flee from their destination and being pulled in against their will.

Unless they were discussing work, the only conversation—in the mess hall, on the exercise machines, on the shuttles to and from the ships they maintained—was about the Ring. The Martian science ships and their escort were already there, peering through the void. There had been no official reports given, so instead rumors sprang up like weeds. Every beam of light that passed through the Ring and hit something bounced back, just like in normal space. But a few troubling constants varied as you got close to it. The microwave background from inside the Ring was older than the big bang. People said if you listened carefully to the static from the other side of the Ring, you could hear the voices of the dead of Eros, or of the damned. Melba heard the dread in other people’s voices, saw Soledad crossing herself when she thought no one was looking, felt the oppressive weight of the object. She understood their growing fear not because she felt it herself but because her own private crisis point was coming.

The OPA’s monstrous battleship was on course to arrive soon, almost at the same time as the Earth flotilla. It wasn’t a matter of days yet, but it would be soon. The Rocinante had already passed the slower Behemoth. She and Holden were rising up out of the sun’s domain, and soon their paths would converge. Then there would be the attack, and the public humiliation of James Holden, and with it, his death. And after that…

It was strange to think of an afterward. The more she imagined it, the more she could see herself relaxing back into Melba’s life. There was no reason not to. Clarissa Mao had nothing, commanded nothing, was nothing. Melba Koh had work, at least. A history. It was a pretty thought, made prettier by being impossible. She would go home, become Clarissa again, and do whatever else she could to restore her family’s name. Honor required it. If she’d stayed, it would have meant being like Julie.

Growing up, Clarissa had admired and resented her older sister. Julie the pretty one. The smart one. The champion yacht racer. Julie who could make Father laugh. Julie who could do no wrong. Petyr was younger than Clarissa and so would always be less. The twins Michael and Anthea had always been a world unto themselves, sharing jokes and comments that only they understood, and so seemed at times more like long-term guests of the family than part of it. Julie was the oldest, the one Clarissa longed to be. The one to beat. Clarissa hadn’t been the only one to see Julie that way. Their mother felt it too. It was the thing that made Clarissa and her mother most alike.

And then something happened. Julie had walked away from them all, cut her hair, dropped out of school, and disappeared up into the darkness. She remembered her father hearing the news over dinner. They’d been having kaju murgh kari in the informal dining room that overlooked the park. She’d just come back from her riding lesson and still smelled a little of horse. Petyr had been talking about mathematics again, boring everyone, when her mother looked up from her plate with a smile and announced that Julie had written a letter to say she’d quit the family. Clarissa’s mouth had dropped open. It was like saying that the sun had decided to become a politician or that four had decided to be eight. It wasn’t quite incomprehensible, but it lived on the edge.

Her father had laughed. He’d said it was a phase. Julie’d gone to live like the common people and sow a few wild oats, and once she’d had her fill, she’d come home. But she’d seen in his eyes that he didn’t believe it. His perfect girl was gone. She’d rejected not only him, but the family. Their name. Forever after, cashews and curry had tasted like victory.

And so Melba would have to be folded up when she was done here. Put back in a box and buried or burned. Clarissa could go live with one of her siblings. Petyr had his own ship now. She could work on it as an electrochemical engineer, she thought with a smile. Or, in the worst case, stay with Mother. If she told them what she’d done, how she’d saved the family name, then Clarissa could start to rebuild the company. Remake their empire in her own name. Possibly even free her father from imprisonment and exile.

The thought left her feeling both hopeful and tired.

A loud clang and the distant sound of laughter brought her back to herself. She reviewed the maintenance schedule for the next ten-day cycle—maintenance on the electrical systems of three of the minor warships and a physical inventory of the electrical cards—marked the ship’s time, and shut down her terminal. The mess hall was half full when she got there, members of half a dozen other teams eating together and talking and watching the newsfeeds about the Ring, about themselves going to meet it. Soledad was sitting by herself, gaze fixed on her hand terminal while she ate a green-brown paste that looked like feces but smelled like the finest-cooked beef in the world. Melba told herself to think of it as pâté, and then it wasn’t so bad.

Melba got herself a plate and a bulb of lemon water and slid in across from Soledad. The other woman’s eyes flicked up with a small but genuine smile.

“Hoy, boss,” she said. “How’s it go?”

“Everything’s copacetic.” Melba smiled. She smiled more than Clarissa did. That was an interesting thought. “What did I miss?”

“Report from Mars. Data, this time. The ship that went through? Not on the drift.”

“Really?” Melba said. After they’d picked up the faint transmission from the little cobbled-together ship that had started all this, the assumption had been that it had been crippled by something that lived on the other side of the Ring. That it was floating free. “It’s under power?”

“Maybe,” Soledad said. “Data shows it’s moving, and a lot slower than it went in. And the probes they sent in? One of them got grabbed too. Normal burn, and then boom, stopped. The signal’s all fucked up, but it looks like the same course that the ship’s on. Like they’re being… taken to the same place. Or something.”

“Weird,” Melba said. “But I guess weird is kind of what we expect. After Eros.”

“My dad was on Eros,” Soledad said, and Melba felt a strange tightening in her throat. “He worked one of the casinos. Security to make sure no one hacked the games, right? Been there fifteen years. Said he was going to retire there, get a little hole up where he didn’t weigh so much and just live off his retirement.”

“I’m sorry.”

Soledad shrugged.

“Everyone dies,” she said gruffly, then wiped the back of her hand against her eyes and turned back to the screen.

“My sister was there,” Melba said. It was truth, and more than truth. “My sister was one of the first ones it took.”

“Shit,” Soledad said, looking up at her now, terminal forgotten.

“Yeah.”

The two were quiet for a long moment. At another table, a Belter man no more than twenty barked his knees against the edge of the table and started cursing squat little Earth designers, to the amusement of his friends.

“You think they’re still there?” Soledad said softly, nodding at her terminal. “There were those voices. The transmissions that came off Eros. You know. After. It was people, right?”

“They’re dead,” Melba said. “Everyone on Eros died.”

“Changed, anyway,” Soledad said. “Some guy said it took the patterns off them, right? Their bodies. Their brains. I think about maybe they never really died. Just got remade, you know? What if their brains never stopped working and just got…”

She shrugged, looking for a word, but Melba knew what she meant. Change, even profound change, wasn’t the same as death. She was proof enough of that.

“Does it matter?”

“What if their souls never got loose?” Soledad said, with real pain in her voice. “What if it caught them all, right? Your sister. My dad. What if they aren’t dead, and Ring’s got all their souls still?”

There are no souls, Melba thought with a touch of pity. We are bags of meat with a little electricity running through them. No ghosts, no spirits, no souls. The only thing that survives is the story people tell about you. The only thing that matters is your name. It was the kind of thing Clarissa would think. The kind of thing her father would have said. She didn’t say it aloud.

“Maybe that’s why Earth’s bringing all those priests,” Soledad said and took a scoop of her food. “To put them all to rest.”

“Someone should,” Melba agreed, and then she turned to her meal.

Her hand terminal chimed: Ren requesting a private conversation. Melba frowned and accepted the connection.

“What’s up?” she said.

His voice, when it came, was strained.

“I got something I was wondering if you could look at. An anomaly.”

“On my way,” Melba said. She dropped the connection and downed her remaining meat paste in two huge swallows, then dropped the plate into the recycler on her way out. Ren was at a workstation in one of the storage bays. It was one of the new spaces he could work in that had a ceiling high enough that he wouldn’t have to hunch. Around him, blue plastic crates stood fixed to the floor or one another with powerful electromagnets. Her footsteps were the only sound.

“What’ve you got?” she asked.

He stood back and nodded at the monitor.

“Air filter data from the Seung Un,” he said.

Her blood went cold.

“Why?” she said too sharply, too quickly.

“It’s catching a lot of outliers. Raised a flag. I’m looking at the profile, and it’s all high-energy ganga. Nitroethenes y sa.”

She hadn’t thought of this. She’d known that the ships did passive gas monitoring, but it had never occurred to her that stray molecules of her explosive would get caught in the filters, or that anyone would check. Ren took her silence as confusion.

“Built a profile,” he said. “Ninety percent fit with a moldable explosive.”

“So they’ve got explosives on board,” Melba said. “It’s a warship. Explosives is what they do, right?” Despair and embarrassment warred in her chest. She’d screwed up. She just wanted Ren to be quiet, to not say the things he was saying. That he was going to say.

“This is more like what they’d use for mining and excavation,” he said. “You inspected that deck. You remember seeing anything funny? Might have been hard to see. This stuff’s putty until it hits air.”

“You think it’s a bomb?” she said.

Ren shrugged.

“Inners hauling full load of gekke. A guy tried to light himself on fire. Hunger strike lady. The one coyo did that thing with the camera.”

“That wasn’t political,” she said. “He’s a performance artist.”

“All I mean, we put together a lot of different kinds of people think a lot of different kinds of things. Doesn’t bring out the best in people. I was a kid, I watched me eltern end a marriage over whether the madhi was going to be a Belter. And everybody know everybody back down the well’s watching. That kind of attention changes people, and it don’t make them better. Maybe someone’s planning to make a statement, si no?”

“Did you alert their security?” she asked.

“Check with you first. But something like this, shikata ga nai. We got to.”

I have to kill him, she thought like someone whispering in her ear. She saw how to do it. Get him to look at his screen, hunch over it just a little. Enough to bare the back of his neck. Then she would press her tongue against the roof of her mouth, the rough of the tastebuds tickling her palate a little, and the strength would come. She’d break him here and then… take him back to her quarters. She could clear out her locker, fit him in. And there was packing sealant that would keep the smell of the body from getting out. She’d file a report, say he was missing. She could act as confused as anyone. By the time she gave up the room and they found him, Melba would already be gone. Even if they worked out that she’d also planted the bomb, they’d just assume she was one of Holden’s agents.

Ren was looking at her, his brown eyes mild, his carrot-orange hair back in a wiry ponytail that left the skin of his neck exposed. She thought of him explaining about the brownout buffers. The gentleness in his expression. The kindness.

I’m sorry, she thought. This isn’t my fault. I have to.

“Let’s check the data again,” she said, angling her body toward the monitor. “Show me where the anomalies are.”

He nodded, turning with her. Like everything on the Cerisier, the controls were built for someone a little shorter than Ren. He had to bend a little to reach them. A thickness rose up at the back of her neck, filled her throat. Dread felt like drowning. Ren’s ponytail shifted, pulled to the side. There was a mole, brown and ovoid, just where his spine met his skull, like a target.

“So I’m looking on this report here,” he said, tapping the screen.

Melba pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth. What about Soledad? She’d been there when Ren called her. She knew Melba had gone to see him. She might have to kill her too. Where would she put that body? There would have to be an accident. Something plausible. She couldn’t let them stop her. She was so close.

“It’s not going up, though,” he said. “Steady levels.”

She circled her tongue counterclockwise once, then paused. She felt light-headed. Short of breath. One of the artificial glands leaking out, maybe, in preparation for the flood. Ren was speaking, but she couldn’t hear him. The sounds of her own breath and the blood in her ears was too loud.

I have to kill him. Her fingers were jittering. Her heart raced. He turned to her, blew a breath out his nostrils. He wasn’t a person. He was just a sack of meat with a little electricity. She could do this. For her father. For her family. It needed to be done.

When Ren spoke, his voice seemed to come from a distance.

“Was denkt tu? You want to make the call, you want me to?”

Her mind moved too quickly and too slowly. He was asking if they should alert the Seung Un about the bomb. That was what he meant.

“Ren?” she said. Her voice sounded small, querulous. It was the voice of someone much younger than she was. Someone who was very frightened, or very sad. Concern bloomed in his expression, drew his brows together.

“Hey? You all right, boss?”

She touched the screen with the tip of her finger.

“Look again,” she said softly. “Look close.”

He turned, bending toward the data as if there were something there to discover. She looked at his bent neck like she might have looked at a statue in a museum: an object. Nothing more. She circled her tongue against the roof of her mouth twice, and calm descended on her.

His neck popped when it broke, the cartilaginous disks ripping free, the bundle of nerves and connective tissue that his life had run through coming apart. She kept striking the base of his skull until she felt the bone give way beneath her palm, and then it was time to move the body. Quickly. Before anyone walked in on them. Before the crash came.

Fortunately, there was only a little blood.