Abaddon's Gate

Chapter Forty-Eight: Bull

They came out of the maintenance shaft like an explosion. Four black-and-red monsters in roughly human shape. Bull and the people he’d managed to gather opened fire as soon as they saw them. A dozen guns against a maelstrom.

“Don’t let them get to the reactor controls,” Bull shouted.

“Roger that,” one of the Earthers said. “Any idea how we stop them, sir?”

He didn’t have one. He unloaded his pistol’s clip with one hand, driving the mech backward across the deck with the other. One of the Martian marines cut across overhead, rifle blazing. Small white marks appeared on the breastplate of the nearest attacker, like a child’s thumbprints on a window. The man in powered armor reached the nearest workstation, ripped the crash couch out of the decking with one hand, and threw it like a massive baseball. The couch sang through the air and shattered against the bulkhead where it hit. If there had been anyone in its path, it would have been worse than a bullet.

Bull kept backing up. When his clip ran out, he gave his full attention to driving the mech. The last of the attackers out of the shaft tried to leap across the room, but the armor’s amplification made it more like a launch. The red-and-black blur careened off the far wall with a sound like a car wreck.

“And that,” Sergeant Verbinski said across the radio, “is why we spend six months training before they put us in those things.” He sounded amused. Good thing somebody was.

Fighting in null g complicated the tactics of a firefight, but the basic rule stayed the same. Hold territory, stay behind cover, have someone there to keep the other side busy when you had to move. The problem, Bull saw almost at once, was that they didn’t have anything that would damage their opponents. The best they could do was make loud noises and trust the people in the battle armor to give in to their reflexive caution. It wouldn’t win the war. Hell, it would barely postpone losing the battle.

“Naomi,” Bull said. “How’re you doing back there?”

“I can dump the core, power this whole bastard down. Just give me three more minutes,” she said. He could hear the focus and drive in her voice. The determination. It didn’t count for shit.

“That’s not going to happen,” he said.

“Just… just hold on.”

“They’re coming back that way now,” Bull said. “And there’s not a goddamn thing we can do to stop them.”

The four attackers bounced through engineering like grasshoppers, massive bodies crashing into walls and consoles, shearing off bits of the bulkhead where they scraped against it. At this point, their best hope was that the enemy force would beat itself to death against the walls. Bull pulled back toward the entryway to the drum, then took a position behind a crate and started firing at the enemy, trying to draw them toward him. If he could get the enemy out into the habitation drum, he might be able to close down the transition point and make the bastards dig back through. It might even give Naomi the minutes she needed.

The people in power armor didn’t seem to notice he was there. One caught a desk, the steel bending in the suit’s glove, and started pulling hand over hand toward the reactor controls.

“Can anybody stop that guy?” Bull asked. No one on the frequency answered. He sighed. “Naomi. You got to leave now.”

“Core’s out. I can drop the grid too. Just a few more minutes.”

“You don’t have them. Come out now, and I’ll try to get you back in when things cool down.”

“But—”

“You’re no good to anyone dead,” he said. The channel went quiet, and for a long moment he thought the Belter had been caught, been killed. Then she came sailing out of the hallway, leading with her chin, her good arm and hair streaming behind her like stabilizing fins. The nearest of the people in power suits grabbed at her, but she was already gone, and they were too timid to try jumping after her.

Bull saw another of the enemy struggling with something. A gun. The massive glove was too thick to fit through the weapon’s trigger guard. As Bull watched, the enemy snapped the guard off and settled the gun in its fist, like a child’s toy carried by a large man. Bull fired at it a few more times without much hope of doing damage.

Four Earthers shouted with one voice and launched themselves at the one with the gun. The attacker didn’t fire. Just swept one big metal arm through the air, scattering Bull’s people like they were sparrows.

His people were going to get killed—were getting killed—and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

“Okay kids,” he said. “Let’s pack up and go home. It’s getting too hot in here.”

“Bull!” Verbinski shouted. “Watch your six!”

Bull tried to swivel in the mech, but something hit him hard in the back. The magnetic feet creaked and lost their grip, and he was floating. The world all around began to shimmer gold and blue as his consciousness slipped away. He was aware distantly of a hand on his shoulder, slowing his fall, and he saw Naomi’s face. Something had scraped her cheek, and she had a long bubble of blood clinging to her skin. He tried to turn and failed. That was right. No spine. He should have remembered that.

“What?” he said.

“They cut us off from the drum,” Naomi said and turned him so that his mech’s feet could touch deck. The air was a debris field. Twists of metal and shattered ceramic, sprays of blood slowly coalescing and growing larger like planets forming out of dust. Electricity arced from the ruins of a control panel, and the shattered glass floated in the tiny play of lightning. Two of the people in power armor stood rooted by the passage to the transition point. One held a rifle by the barrel as a club, the other had pistols with the trigger guard snapped off in either hand. A third was flailing in the air just above the maintenance shaft that they’d arrived through, struggling to get purchase on something. The fourth was shuffling across the deck toward them, its movements deliberate and controlled to keep from kicking off into the air.

“Elevator shaft airlock,” Bull said. “Fall back.”

“Everyone,” Naomi said into her hand terminal. “We’re falling back to the elevator shaft on my go. Go!”

Naomi pulled him around, then attached herself to his back in rescue hold and jumped. The enemy’s guns opened fire. Bull caught a glimpse of a woman just as a bullet passed through her leg. Saw the grimace on her face and the blood fountaining out of her. I’m sorry, he thought.

The wall of the elevator shaft airlock loomed up, and Naomi pushed off from him, landing on the bulkhead with the grace of a woman born to zero g. Two more bodies came through the space, Martian marines, both of them. He recognized the man called Juarez and the woman named Cass. Naomi slapped the controls and the airlock doors began to collapse. Just as the opening seemed too narrow for a human form, two more came through. Sergeant Verbinski and a man from Bull’s side of the security force schism.

Bull’s head was swimming. He felt like he’d just run twenty miles in the hot New Mexican sun. He clapped his hands together less to command the attention of the people in the lock and more to bring himself back to awareness.

“That shaft’s in vacuum,” he said. “If that’s the way we’re going, we need to get suited up. Lockers are over there. Let’s see what we’ve got to work with.” A massive blow rang against the airlock door. Then another. “Might want to hurry,” he said.

“You aren’t going to fit,” Verbinski said. “Not with that contraption.”

“Yeah,” Bull said. “Okay.”

“Come on, big boy,” the sergeant said. “Let’s get you out of that.”

No, Bull wanted to say. I’m all right. But Juarez and the other marine were already shucking him out of his brace, then out of the mech that Sam had made for him. He was a cripple again. That wasn’t true. He’d been crippled ever since the catastrophe. Now he just had one fewer tool.

He’d worked with less.

The banging on the airlock door was getting louder, more intense. Along with the impact, there was something that sounded like tearing. He imagined the powered armor picking up handfuls of steel between massive fingers and pulling back, ripping at the skin of the ship. He clambered over to his mech, his body flowing out behind him, useless as a kite. He popped open the storage and took what was left of his pistol’s ammunition and his hand terminal. For a moment, he didn’t recognize the flat black package that he took out next. And then he did.

“If we’re not staying, we’d best leave,” Verbinski said.

“Let’s go,” Bull said, pushing the grenades into the pouch on the EVA suit’s thigh.

Naomi cycled the door to the shaft. The sounds of the attack grew fainter and farther away as the air leaked out, and then the shaft was open below them. A full kilometer’s fall to the trapped elevator, and then another past that to… what? Ashford? Certain death? Bull didn’t know anymore what he was running from. Or to.

One by one, they pushed off, pulling themselves through the vacuum. Verbinski and the security man, Naomi and the marine, then Bull and Juarez. Without discussing it, they’d all paired off with someone who wasn’t theirs. In Bull’s sagging mind, that seemed important.

“Juarez?” Verbinski said on the radio, and Bull was surprised to hear his voice.

“Sir.”

“If you get a good shot, you think you could crack the visors on those suits?”

“Your suit, maybe,” Juarez said. “I keep mine in pretty good condition.”

“Do your best,” Verbinski said.

Bull felt it when the enemy force breached the airlock. He couldn’t even say what it was exactly. Some little press of a shock wave, a whisper-thin breath of atmosphere. He looked down past his dead feet, and there was light at the bottom of the shaft where there shouldn’t have been. There were probably about a thousand safety measures slamming down in engineering right now. He hoped so. Far below, he saw a muzzle flash, but they were so far ahead, the bullet almost certainly hit the sides of the shaft and spent itself before it could reach them.

Juarez turned, his rifle steadied between his feet. The man’s face went calm and soft and the rifle flashed silently.

“Got one, Verb,” he said. And then, “Sergeant?”

Verbinski didn’t answer. He was still floating, skimming along the steel tracks that would guide the elevator, but his eyes were closed. His face was slack, and foam flecked his lips and nostrils. Bull hadn’t even known the man was injured.

“Sergeant!” Juarez yelled.

“He’s gone,” Cass said.

The rest of the trip to the elevator was a thing carved from nightmares. Bull’s body kept drifting wildly behind him, and his lungs felt full and wet. He’d stopped coughing, though. He didn’t know if that was a good thing. Just as they reached the elevator, a lucky shot from their pursuers took the security man in the back, blowing out his air supply. Bull watched the man die, but he didn’t hear it. The hatchway Corin had burned through the elevator’s base seemed too small to fit through, but he got one arm in and Naomi pulled him the rest of the way.

In the body of the elevator car, Juarez took a position firing down the hole at the pursuers. Bull didn’t know how much ammunition the marine had, but it had to be getting close to the end of his supply. Bull would have slouched against the wall if there had been any gravity. Instead he shifted his suit radio to the channel for Naomi.

“Give me a gun,” she said before he could speak. “Give me something.”

“You keep going,” he said. “Get to the top of the shaft.”

“But—”

“Maybe you can get the hatch open for them. Get into command.”

“You can’t access the controls from inside the shaft.”

“In this piece-of-shit boat, you never know,” Bull said. “Someone might have put a self-destruct button there. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“That’s your plan B?”

“I think we’re pretty much on plan Z at this point,” Bull said. “Anyway, you’re the engineer. There’s fuck-all you can do here. And I heard you with Holden before. You might as well get to see him again. Not like it costs us anything.”

He watched her face as she decided. Fear, despair, regret, calm, in that order. Impressive woman. He wished he’d had a chance to know her better. And if she was able to ship with Jim Holden and love him, maybe he wasn’t as bad as Bull thought either.

“Thank you,” she said, then turned and launched herself along the elevator shaft toward command and her lover. That was sweet, Bull thought. Juarez’s rifle flashed again and Bull shifted his radio frequencies to include the two marines.

“You two should go too. Head up top. See if you can storm the command.”

“You sure?” Cass said, her voice calm and professional. “We’ve got cover here. There won’t be a better place farther up.”

“Yeah, pretty sure,” Bull said.

“What about you?” Juarez asked.

“I’m staying here,” Bull said.

“Okay, bro,” Juarez said, then he and Cass were gone too. Bull thought about looking down through the shaft to see how close the enemy had come, but he didn’t. Too much energy, and if he got shot in the eye at this point… well, that would just be sad. The little box of the elevator was a monochrome non-color, lit only by the backsplash from his own suit light. He took as deep a breath as he could. It was pretty shallow. He drew the grenades out from his pocket, one in either hand, and carefully dialed them down to the shortest fuse.

So he was going to die here. Not what he would have picked, but what the hell. It probably beat going back and having his spine grown back wrong. He’d seen guys who lived their whole lives in a drug haze fighting the pain of a bad regrowth. He hadn’t really let himself think about that before. Now it was safe to.

He tried to decide whether he regretted dying, but the truth was he was too fucking tired to care. And he couldn’t breathe for crap. He was sorry he hadn’t killed Ashford, but that wasn’t new. He was sorry he couldn’t avenge Sam or find out if Pa was alive. Or whether Ashford would actually be able to destroy the Ring. If he was sad about anything, it was that everything that was in motion now would keep on being in motion without him, and he’d never know how it went. Never know if anything he’d done had made a difference.

His hand terminal blinked. A connection request from Monica Stuart. He wondered for a moment what she wanted with him, and then remembered that Ashford had stopped the drum. Things had to be for shit in there. He routed the request to his suit. No pictures, but the voice connection would be enough.

“Bull,” the woman said. “We’re being attacked up here. I think Anna’s dead. What the hell’s going on down there? How much longer?”

“Well, we lost engineering,” he said. He felt a pang about Anna, but it was just one of many at that point. “Pretty much everyone in the attack party’s dead now. Maybe five folks holed up in the elevator shaft, but the bad guys got the top and the bottom of that, so we’re kind of screwed there. Managed to dump the core, but the grid’s still up. It’ll be enough to fire the laser. Ashford’s guys are probably in engineering putting that back online, and I don’t see we’ve got any damn way to stop him.”

“Oh my God,” Monica breathed.

“Yeah, it kind of sucks.”

“What… what are you going to do about it?”

A beam of light shone through the hatch in the floor. Tiny bits of dust and particulate metal glimmered in it like it was swirling in water. He watched it with a half smile on his face. It meant the bad guys were almost there, but it was pretty to look at. He remembered that Monica was on the line. She’d asked him something.

“Yeah,” Bull said. “So that thing where we power down the ship and save everyone? We’re probably not going to do that.”

“You can’t give up,” she said. “Please. There has to be a way.”

Doesn’t have to be, he thought, but didn’t say. Anna thought there was a way. Where did that get her? But if there is, I hope one of you folks finds it.

“How bad is it in there?” he asked.

“It’s… it’s terrible. It’s like the catastrophe happened all over again.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” Bull said.

“We can’t go on,” Monica said. “Oh God, what are we going to do?”

The light got stronger. Brighter. He couldn’t see the dust motes anymore from the shine of the light.

“Monica?” Bull said. “Look, I’m sorry, but I kind of got to go now, okay? You folks just do your best. Hold it together in there, all right? And hey, if it all works out?”

“Yes?”

“Tell Fred Johnson he fucking owes me one.”

He dropped the connection, unplugged his hand terminal. He took a grenade in each hand, his thumbs on the release bars. A head poked up through the hatch, then back down fast. When no one shot at it, the head came back more slowly. Bull smiled and nodded at it, welcoming. The opaque cowling went clear, and he saw Casimir staring at him. Bull grinned. Well, that was a pleasure, at least. A little treat on the way out.

“Hey,” Bull said, even though the man couldn’t hear him. “Hold this for me.”

He tossed the two grenades, and watched the man’s expression as he understood what they were.