Abaddon's Gate

Chapter Fifty-Three: Clarissa

She woke up in stages, aware of the discomfort before she knew what hurt. Aware that something was wrong before she could even begin to put together some kind of story, some frame that gave the loose, rattling toolbox of sensations any kind of meaning. Even when the most abstract parts of herself returned—her name, where she was—Clarissa was mostly aware that she was compromised. That something was wrong with her.

The room was dirty, the air a few degrees too hot. She lay in the thin, sweat-stinking bed, an IV drip hanging above her. The significance of that took a long time to come to her. The bag hung there. She wasn’t floating. There was gravity. She didn’t know if it was spin or thrust, or even the calm pull of mass against mass that being on a planet brought. She didn’t have the context to know. Only that it was nice to have weight again. It meant that something had gone right. Something was working.

When she closed her eyes, she dreamed that she had killed Ren, that she’d hidden him inside her own body and so she had to keep anyone from taking an imaging scan for fear they’d find him in her. It was a pleasure to wake up and remember that everyone already knew.

Sometimes Tilly came, sat by her bed. She looked like she’d been crying. Clarissa wanted to ask what was wrong, but she didn’t have the strength. Sometimes Anna was there. The doctor who checked on her was a beautiful old woman with eyes that had seen everything. Cortez never came. Sleeping and waking lost their edges. Healing and being ill too. It was difficult if not impossible to draw a line between them.

She woke once to voices, to the hated voice, to Holden. He was standing at the foot of her bed, his arms crossed on his chest. Naomi was next to him, and then the others. The pale one who looked like a truck driver, the brown one who looked like a schoolteacher. Amos and Alex. The crew of the Rocinante. The people she hadn’t managed to kill. She was glad to see them.

“There is absolutely no way,” Holden said.

“Look at her,” Anna said. Clarissa craned her neck to see the woman standing behind her. The priest looked older. Worn out. Or maybe distilled. Cooked down to something like her essence. She was beautiful too. Beautiful and terrible and uncompromising in her compassion. It was in her face. It made her hard to look at. “She’ll be killed.”

Alex, the schoolteacher, raised his hand.

“You mean she’ll be tried in a court of law, with a lawyer, for killin’ a bunch of folks that we all pretty much know she killed.”

I did, Clarissa thought. It’s true. Above her, Anna pressed her hands together.

“I mean that’s what I want to happen,” Anna said. “A trial. Lawyers. Justice. But I need someone to get her safely from here to the courts on Luna. With the evacuation starting, you have the only independent ship in the slow zone. You are the only crew that I trust to get her out safely.”

Naomi looked over at Holden. Clarissa couldn’t read the woman’s expression.

“I’m not taking her on my ship,” Holden said. “She tried to kill us. She almost did kill Naomi.”

“She also saved you both,” Anna said. “And everybody else.”

“I’m not sure being a decent human that one time means I owe her something,” Holden said.

“I’m not saying it does,” Anna said. “But if we don’t treat her with the same sense of justice that we’d ask for ourselves—”

“Look, Red,” Amos said. “Everybody in this room except maybe you and the captain has a flexible sense of morality. None of us got clean hands. That’s not the point.”

“This is a tactical thing,” Alex agreed.

“It is?” Holden said.

“It is,” Naomi said. “Pretend that she’s not a danger in and of herself. Taking her on board, even just to transport her to a safe place, puts us at risk from three different legal systems, and our situation is already… ‘tenuous’ is a nice word.”

Clarissa reached up, took Anna’s shirt between her fingers, tugging like a child at her mother.

“It’s okay,” she croaked. “I understand. It’s all right.”

“How much?” Anna asked. And then, off their blank looks, “If it’s just risk versus return, how much would it take to be worth it to you?”

“More than you have,” Holden said, but there was an apology in his tone. He didn’t want to disappoint Anna and he didn’t want to do what she said. No way for him to win.

“What if I bought the Rocinante?” Anna said.

“It’s not for sale,” Holden said.

“Not from you. I know about your legal troubles. What if I bought the Rocinante from Mars. Gave you the rights to it, free and clear.”

“You’re going to buy a warship?” Alex said. “Do churches get to do that?”

“Sure,” Holden said, “do that, and I’ll smuggle her out.”

Anna held up a finger, then pulled her hand terminal out of her pocket. Clarissa could see her hands were trembling. She tapped at the screen, and a few seconds later a familiar voice came from the box.

“Annie,” Tilly Fagan said. “Where are you? I’m having cocktails with half a dozen very important people and they’re boring me to tears. The least you can do is come up and let them fawn over you for a while.”

“Tilly,” Anna said. “You remember that really expensive favor you owe me? I know what it is.”

“I’m all ears,” Tilly said.

“I need you to buy the Rocinante from Mars and give it to Captain Holden.” Tilly was silent. Clarissa could practically see the woman’s eyebrows rising. “It’s the only way to take care of Clarissa.”

Tilly’s exhalation could have been a sigh or laughter.

“Sure, what the hell. I’ll tell Robert to do it. He will. It’ll be less than I’d get in a divorce. Anything else, dear? Shall I change the Earth’s orbit for you while I’m at it?”

“No,” Anna said. “That’s plenty.”

“You’re damn right it is. Get up here soon. Really, everyone’s swooning over you, and it’ll be much more amusing for me to watch them try to squeeze up next to you in person.”

“I will,” Anna said. She put her hand terminal back in her pocket and took Clarissa’s hand in her own. Her fingers were warm. “Well?”

Holden’s face had gone pale. He looked from Clarissa to Anna and back and blew out a long breath.

“Um,” he said. “Wow. Okay. We may not be going home right away, though. Is that cool?”

Clarissa held out her hand, astounded by its weight. It took them all a moment to understand what she was doing. Then Holden—the man she’d moved heaven and earth to humiliate and murder—took her hand.

“Pleased to meet you,” she croaked.

They installed a medical restraint cuff to her ankle set to sedate her on a signal from any of the crew, or if it detected any of the products of her artificial glands, or if she left the crew decks of the ship. It was three kilos of formed yellow plastic that clung to her leg like a barnacle. The transfer came during the memorial service. Captain Michio Pa, her face still bandaged from the fighting, spoke in glowing terms about Carlos Baca and Samantha Rosenberg and a dozen other names and commended their ashes to the void. Then each of the commanders of the other ships in the flotilla took their turns, standing before the cameras on the decks of their own ships, speaking a few words, moving on. No one mentioned Ashford, locked away and sedated. No one mentioned her.

It was the last ceremony before the exodus. Before the return. Clarissa watched it on her hand terminal when she wasn’t looking at the screen that showed the shuttle’s exterior view. The alien station was inert now. It didn’t glow, didn’t react, didn’t read to the sensors as anything more than a huge slug of mixed metals and carbonate structures floating in a starless void.

“They’re not all going back, you know,” Alex said. “The Martian team is plannin’ to stay here, run surveys on all the gates. See what’s on the other side.”

“I didn’t know that,” Clarissa said.

“Yeah. This right now,” the pilot said, gesturing toward the screen where a UN captain was speaking earnestly into the camera, her eyes hard as marbles and her jaw set against the sorrow of listing the names of the dead. “This is the still point. Before, this was all fear. After this, it’ll all be greed. But this…” He sighed. “Well, it’s a nice moment, anyway.”

“It is,” Clarissa said.

“So, just to check, are you still plannin’ to kill the captain? Because, you know, if you are it seems like you at least owe us a warning.”

“I’m not,” she said.

“And if you were?”

“I’d still say I wasn’t. But I’m not.”

“Fair enough.”

“Okay, Alex,” Holden said from the back. “Are we there yet?”

“Just about to knock,” Alex said. He tapped on the control panel, and on the screen the Rocinante’s exterior lights came on. The ship glowed gold and silver in the blackness, like seeing a whole city from above. “Okay, folks. We’re home.”

Clarissa’s bunk was larger than her quarters in the Cerisier, smaller than the one from the Prince. She wasn’t sharing it with anyone, though. It was hers as much as anything was.

All she had for clothing was a jumpsuit with the name Tachi imprinted in the weave. All her toiletries were the standard ship issue. Nothing was hers. Nothing was her. She kept to her room, going out to the galley and the head when she needed to. It wasn’t fear, exactly, so much as the sense of wanting to stay out of the way. It wasn’t her ship, it was theirs. She wasn’t one of them, and she didn’t deserve to be. She was a paid passenger, and not a fare they’d even wanted. The awareness of that weighed on her.

Over time, the bunk began to feel more like her cell on the Behemoth than anything else. That was enough to drive her out a little. Only a little, though. She’d seen the galley before in simulations, when she’d been planning how to destroy it, where to place her override. It looked different in person. Not smaller or larger, exactly, but different. The crew moved through the space going from one place to another, passing through in the way she couldn’t. They ate their meals and had their meetings, ignoring her like she was a ghost. Like she’d already lost her place in the world.

“Well,” Holden said, his voice grim, “we have a major problem. We’re out of coffee.”

“We still got beer,” Amos said.

“Yes,” Holden said. “But beer is not coffee. I’ve put in a request with the Behemoth, but I haven’t heard back, and I can’t see going into the vast and unknown void without coffee.”

Alex looked over at Clarissa and grinned.

“The captain doesn’t like the fake coffee the Roci makes,” he said. “Gives him gas.”

Clarissa didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure she was supposed to.

“It does not,” Holden said. “That was one time.”

“More than once, Cap’n,” Amos said. “And no offense, but it does smell like a squirrel crawled up your ass and died there.”

“Okay,” Holden said, “you’ve got no room to complain. As I recall, I was the one who cleaned your bunk after that experiment with vodka goulash.”

“He’s got a point,” Alex said. “That was damn nasty.”

“I just about shat out my intestinal lining, that’s true,” Amos said, his expression philosophical, “but I’d still put that against the captain’s coffee farts.”

Alex made a fake gagging noise, and Amos buzzed his lips against his palm, making a rude sound. Naomi looked from one to the other like she didn’t know whether to laugh or smack them.

“I don’t get gas,” Holden said. “I just like the taste of real coffee better.”

Naomi put her hand on Clarissa’s forearm and leaned close. Her smile was gentle and unexpected.

“Have I mentioned how nice it is to have another woman on the ship?” she asked.

It was a joke. Clarissa understood that. But it was a joke that included her, and her tears surprised her.

“I appreciate your saying all that about Bull,” a man’s voice said. Clarissa, moving through the ship, didn’t recognize it. An unfamiliar voice in a spaceship caught the attention like a strange sound in her bedroom. She paused. “He was a friend for a lot of years, and… and I’ll miss him.”

She shifted, angled back toward the other crew cabins. Holden’s door was open, and he sat in his crash couch, looking up at his monitor. Instead of the tactical display of the ships, the stations, the Rings, a man’s face dominated the screen. She recognized Fred Johnson, traitor to Earth and head of the Outer Planets Alliance. The Butcher of Anderson Station. He looked old, his hair almost all gone to white, and his eyes the yellow color of old ivory.

“I asked a lot from him,” the recording went on. “He gave a lot back to me. It… it got me thinking. I have a bad habit, Captain, of asking more than people can give sometimes. Of demanding more than I can fairly expect. I’m wondering if I might have done something like that with you.”

“Gee, you think?” Holden said to the screen, though as far as she could see he wasn’t recording.

“If I did, I apologize. Just between us. One commander to another. I regret some of the decisions I’ve made. I figure you can relate to that in your own way.

“I’ve decided to keep the Behemoth in place. We’re sending out soil and supplies to start farming on the drum. It does mean the OPA’s military fleet just lost its big kahuna. But it looks like we’ve got a thousand planets opening up for exploration, and having the only gas station on the turnpike is too sweet a position to walk away from. If you and your crew want to help out with the effort, escort some ships from Ganymede out to the Ring, there might be a few contracts in it for you. So that’s the official part. Talk about it with the others, and let me know what decisions you come to.”

Fred Johnson nodded once to the camera, and the screen fell to the blue emptiness and split circle of the OPA’s default. Holden looked over his shoulder. She saw him see her.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

They were silent for a moment. She didn’t know what to say. She wanted to apologize too, to walk down the path Fred Johnson had just showed her, but she couldn’t quite.

She waited to see whether Holden would reach out to her. When he didn’t she pulled herself back down toward the crew quarters. Her stomach felt tight and uncomfortable.

They weren’t friends. They wouldn’t be, because some things couldn’t be made right.

She’d have to be okay with that.

Amos smelled of solvent and sweat. Of all the crew, he was the one most like the people she knew. Soladad and Stanni. And Ren. He came into the galley with a welding rig on, the mask pushed up over his forehead. He smiled when he saw her.

“You did a number on the place,” Amos said. She knew that if the occasion arose, he would be perfectly willing to kill her. But until that moment, he’d be jovial and casual. That counted for more than she’d expected. “I mean, you had a salvage mech. Those are pretty much built for peeling steel.”

“I didn’t at the end,” she said. “It ran out of power. The locker in the airlock was all me.”

“Really?” he said

“Yeah.”

“Well,” he said, pulling a bulb of the fake coffee from the machine and drifting over to the table. “That was pretty impressive, then.”

She imagined him working, the mask down to hide his face, the sparks, the flickering of his great hunched shadow. Hephaestus, the smith of the Gods, laboring in his underworld. It was the kind of association Clarissa Mao would make. Melba Koh would only have thought about the temperature of the arc, the composition of the plates he was fusing together. She could have both of those thoughts, but neither were really hers.

She was on the float now. Later, when the ship was under way and thrust gravity pinned her to the deck, she’d still be on the float. Her world had been constructed around stories about who she was. Jules-Pierre’s daughter, Julie Mao’s sister, the crew lead on the Cerisier, instrument of her father’s vengeance. Now she was no one. She was a piece of baggage on her old enemy’s ship going from one prison to another, and she didn’t even resent it. The last time she’d felt this nameless, she’d probably been in an amniotic sac.

“What was the problem?”

“Hmm?”

“You said I really did a number on something. What’s the problem?”

“Deck hatch between the machine shop and here gets stuck. Ever since you crumpled it up. Binds about half open.”

“Did you check the retracting arm?”

Amos turned to her, frowning. She shrugged.

“Sometimes these door actuators put on an uneven load when they start to burn out. We probably swapped out four or five of them on the trip out here.”

“Yeah?”

“Just a thought,” she said. And then a moment later, “When we get back to Luna, they’re going to kill me, aren’t they?”

“If you’re lucky, yeah. UN still has the death penalty on the books, but they don’t use it much. I figure you’ll be living in a tiny cell for the rest of your life. If it was me, I’d prefer a bullet.”

“How long until we get there?”

“About five weeks.”

They were silent for a moment.

“I’ll miss this place,” she said.

Amos shrugged.

“Actuator arm, huh? Worth checking. You want to help me take a look?”

“I can’t,” she said, gesturing at the clamp on her leg.

“Shit, I can reprogram that. Least enough to get you down to the machine shop. We’ll grab you a tool belt, Peaches. Let’s crack that thing open.”

An hour later, she was running her hand over the frame of the door, looking for the telltale scrape of binding sites. This was me, she thought. I broke it.

“What’cha think, Peaches?” Amos asked from behind her.

“Feels good to fix something,” she said.