Abaddon's Gate (Expanse 3)

“Fuck no,” Bull said. “I think it is entirely possible to go so far into the red you can’t ever balance the books.”

“Sounds like the voice of experience. How far have you been?”

“Far enough to know there’s a too damn far.”

“And you’re comfortable being the judge of where that line is?”

Bull pulled on the frame of his walker, shifting his weight in the straps that held him. He looked wistfully at the office chair he could no longer use. Anna felt bad for him, broken at the worst possible time. Trying to keep his tiny world in order, and burning through the last reserves of his strength with reckless abandon. The bruised eyes and yellow skin suddenly seemed like a flashing battery indicator, warning that the power was almost gone. Anna felt a pang of guilt for adding to his burden.

“I don’t want to kill that girl,” he said, taking another sip of the terrible coffee. “In fact, I don’t give a shit about her one way or the other, as long as she’s locked up and isn’t a danger to my ship. The one you should talk to is Holden. He’s the one who’s gonna get the torches-and-pitchforks crowd wound up.”

“But the Martians…”

“Surrendered twenty hours ago.”

Anna blinked.

“They’ve been wanting to for days,” Bull said. “We just had to find a way to let ’em save face.”

“Save face?”

“They got a story they can tell where they don’t look weak. That’s all they needed. But if we didn’t find something, they’d have stuck to their posts until they all died. Nothing ever killed more people than being afraid to look like a sissy.”

“Holden’s coming here, then?”

“Already be on a shuttle escorted by four recon marines, which is another f**king headache for me. But how about this? I won’t talk about the girl until I have reason to. What Holden does, though, he just does.”

“Fine, then I’ll talk to him when he arrives,” Anna said.

“Good luck with that,” Bull said.

Chapter Thirty-Six: Holden

W

hen the Martians came for him—two men and two women, all in uniform and all armed—Holden’s isolation-drunk mind had spun out in a dozen directions at once. The captain had found room for him in the medical clinic and she wanted to grill him again about what happened on the station and they were going to throw him out an airlock and they’d had news that Naomi was dead and they’d had news that she wasn’t. It felt like every neuron he had from his brain down to his toes was on the edge of firing. It was all he could do not to launch himself off the cell’s wall and into the narrow corridor.

“The prisoner will please identify himself,” one of the men said.

“James Holden. I mean, it’s not like you have very many prisoners here, right? Because I’ve been trying to find someone to talk with for it feels like about a decade since I got here, and I’m pretty sure there isn’t so much as a dust mite in this place besides me.”

He bit his lips to stop talking. He’d been alone and scared for too long. He hadn’t understood how much it was affecting him. Even if he hadn’t been mentally ill when he came to the Hammurabi, he was going to be real soon now if nothing changed.

“Record shows prisoner identified himself as James Holden,” the man said. “Come along.”

The corridor outside the cells was so narrow that two guards ahead and two behind was effectively a wall. The low Martian gravity made their bodies more akin to Belters than to him, and all four of them hunched slightly, bending in over him. Holden had never felt so relieved to be in a tiny, cramped hallway in his life. But even the relief was pushed aside by his anxiety. The guards didn’t actually push him so much as start to move with an authority that suggested that he really should match them. The hatch was only five meters away, but after being in his cell, it seemed like a huge distance.

“Was there any word from the Roci?”

No one spoke.

“What’s… ah… what’s going on?”

“You’re being evacuated,” the man said.

“Evacuated?”

“Part of the surrender agreement.”

“Surrender agreement? You’re surrendering? Why are you surrendering?”

“We lost the politics,” one of the women behind him said.

If the skiff they loaded him onto wasn’t the same one that had taken him back from the station, it was close enough that he couldn’t tell the difference. There were only four soldiers this time, all of them in full combat armor. The rest of the spaces were taken up by men and women in standard naval uniform. Holden thought at first they were the wounded, but when he looked closer, none of them seemed to have anything worse than minor injuries. It was the exhaustion in their faces and bodies that made them seem broken. The acceleration burn wasn’t even announced. The thrust barely shifted the crash couches. All around him, the Martians slept or brooded. Holden scratched at the hard, flexible plastic restraints on his wrists and ankles, and no one told him to stop. Maybe that was a good sign.

He tried to do the math in his head. If the new top speed was about as fast as a launched grenade, then every hour, they’d travel… As tired as he was, he couldn’t make the numbers add up to anything. If he’d had his hand terminal, it would have been a few seconds’ work. Still, he couldn’t see asking to have it. And it didn’t matter.

He slept and woke and slept again. The proximity Klaxon woke him from a dream about making bread with someone who was his father Caesar and also Fred Johnson and trying to find the salt. It took him a moment to remember where he was.

The skiff was small enough that when the other ship’s crew banged against the airlock, Holden could hear it. From his seat, he couldn’t see the airlock open. The first thing he knew was a slightly different scent in the air. Something rich and oddly humid. And then four new people stepped into his view. They were Belters. A broad-faced woman, a thick man with a startling white beard, and two shaven-headed men so similar they might have been twins. The twins had the split circle of the OPA tattooed on their arms. All four wore sidearms.

The Behemoth, Holden thought. They’d surrendered to the Behemoth. That was weird.

One of the marines, still in battle armor, floated over to them. The Belters didn’t show any sign of fear. Holden gave them credit for that.

“I am Sergeant Alexander Verbinski,” the Martian said. “I have been ordered to hand over this skiff and her crew and company in accordance with the agreement of surrender.”