“Ships?” Ashford said.
“Maybe.”
“How many?”
“Over a hundred, under a hundred thousand. Probably.”
Bull leaned forward, his elbows on the table. Ashford and Pa were looking around the table at the graying faces. They’d known before, because they weren’t going to wait for a staff meeting to get their information. Now they were judging the reactions. So he’d give them a reaction. Control the fall.
“Be weirder if there wasn’t anything there. If it was an attack fleet, they’d have attacked by now.”
“Yeah,” Ruiz said, latching on to the words.
Ashford opened the floor for questions. How many probes had Mars fired through? How long would it take something going at six hundred meters per second to reach one of the structures? Had they tried sending small probes in? Had there been any contact from the protomolecule itself, the stolen voices of humans, the way there had been with Eros? Chan did his best to be reassuring without actually having anything more that he could say. Bull assumed there was a deeper report that Ashford and Pa were getting, and he wondered what was in it. Being kept out chafed.
“All right. This is all interesting, but it’s not our focus,” Ashford said, bringing the Q-and-A session to a halt. “We’re not here to send probes through the Ring. We’re not here to start a fight. We’re just making sure that whatever the inner planets do, we’re at the table. If something comes out of the Ring, we’ll worry about it then.”
“Yes, sir,” Bull said, throwing his own weight behind Ashford’s. It wasn’t like there was another strategy. Better that the crew see them all unified. People were watching how this all came down, and not just the crew.
“Mister Pa?” Ashford said. The XO nodded and glanced at Bull. Instinct dropped a weight in his gut.
“There have been some irregularities in the ship’s accounting structure,” Pa said. “Chief Engineer Rosenberg?”
Sam nodded, surprise on her face. “XO?” she said.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to restrict you to quarters and revoke your access privileges until this is all clarified. Chief Watanabe will relieve you. Mister Baca, you’ll see to it.”
The room was just as silent, but the meaning behind it was different now. Sam’s eyes were wide with disbelief and rising fury.
“Excuse me?” she said. Pa met her gaze coolly, and Bull understood all of it in an instant.
“Records show you’ve been drawing resources from work and materials budgets that weren’t appropriate,” Pa said, “and until the matter is resolved—”
“If this is about the tech support thing, that’s on me,” Bull said. “I authorized that. It’s got nothing to do with Sam.”
“I’m conducting a full audit, Mister Baca. If I find you’ve been drawing resources inappropriately, I’ll take the actions I deem appropriate. As your executive officer, I am informing you that Samara Rosenberg is to be confined to quarters and her access to ship’s systems blocked. Do you have any questions about that?”
She’d waited until they’d made the trip, until they’d gotten where they were going, and now it was time to establish that she was in control. To get back at him for the drug dealer he’d spaced and punish Sam for being his ally. Would have been stupid to do until their shakedown run was over. But now it was.
Bull laced his fingers together. The refusal was on the back of his tongue, waiting. It would have been insubordination, and it would have been easy as breathing out. There were years—decades even—when he’d have done it, and taken the consequences as a badge of honor. It had been his call, and standing by while Sam was punished for it was more than dishonorable, it was disloyal. Pa knew that. Anyone who’d read his service records would know it. If it had just been his mission, his career on the line, he’d have done it, but Fred Johnson had asked him to make this work. So there was only one play to make.
“No questions,” he said, rising from his chair. “Sam. You should come with me now.”
The others were silent as he led her out of the conference room. They all looked stunned and confused, except Ashford and Pa. Pa wore a poker face, and Ashford had a little shadow of smugness in the corners of his mouth. Sam’s breath shook. Outrage and adrenaline left her skin pale. He helped her into the side seat of his security cart, then got behind the controls. They lurched into motion, four small engines whirring and whining. They were almost at the elevators when Sam laughed. A short, mirthless sound as much like a cry of pain as anything.
“Holy shit,” Sam said.
Bull couldn’t think of anything to say that would pull the punch, so he only nodded and took the cart into the wide elevator car. Sam wept, but there was nothing that looked like sorrow in her expression. He guessed that she’d never suffered that kind of disciplinary humiliation before. Or if she had, it hadn’t been often enough to build up a callus. The dishonor of letting her take the hit was like he’d swallowed something before he’d chewed it enough, and now it wouldn’t go down.
Back at the security office, Serge was at the main desk. The man’s eyebrows rose as Bull came in the room.
“Hoy, bossman,” the duty officer said. A hardcore OPA bruiser named Jojo. “Que pasa?”
“Nothing good. What did I miss?”
“Complaint from a carnicería down by engineering about a missing goat. Got a note from one of the Earth ships lost one of their crew, wondering if we’d come up with an extra. A couple coyos got shit-faced and we locked ’em in quarters, told ’em we’d sic the Bull on ’em.”
“How’d they take that?”
“We had them mop up after.”
Bull chuckled before he sighed.
“So. I’ve got Samara Rosenberg in the cart outside,” he said. “XO wants her confined to quarters for unauthorized use of resources.”
“I want a pony in a wetsuit.” Jojo grinned.
“XO gave an order,” Bull said. “I want you to take her to her quarters. I’ll get her access pulled. We’ll need to set a guard while we’re at it. She’s pissed.”
Jojo scratched at his neck. “We’re doing it?”
“Yeah.”
Jojo’s face closed. Bull nodded toward the door. Jojo left, and Bull took his place at the desk, identifying himself to the system and starting the process of locking Sam out of her own ship. While the security system ran its check against each of the Behemoth’s subsystems, he leaned on his elbows and watched.