In the head, Cortez washed his face and hands with the towelettes and then fed them into the recycler. Clarissa mentally followed them down to the churn and through the guts of the ship. She knew how it would work on the Cerisier or the Prince. Here, she could only speculate.
You’re trying to distract yourself, a small part of herself said. The thought came in words, just like that. Not from outside, not from someone else. A part of her talking to the rest. You’re trying to distract yourself.
From what? she wondered.
“Thank you,” Cortez said. His smile looked more familiar now. More like the man she saw on screens. “I knew that there would be some resistance to doing the right thing here. But I wasn’t ready for it. Spiritually, I wasn’t ready for it. Surprised me.”
“It’ll do that,” Clarissa said.
Cortez nodded. He was about her father’s age. She tried to imagine Jules-Pierre Mao floating in the little space, weeping over a dead engineer. She couldn’t. She couldn’t imagine him here at all, couldn’t picture what he looked like exactly. All of her impressions were of his power, his wit, his overwhelming importance. The physical details were beside the point. Cortez looked at himself in the mirror, set his own expression.
He’s about to die, she thought. He’s about to condemn himself and everyone on this ship to dying beyond help, here in the darkness, because he thinks it is the right and noble thing to do. Was that what Ashford was doing too? She wished now that she’d talked to him more when they’d been prisoners together. Gotten to understand him and who he was. Why he was willing to die for this. And more than that, why he was willing to kill. Maybe it was altruism and nobility. Maybe it was fear. Or grief. As long as he did what needed doing, it didn’t matter why, but she found she was curious. She knew why she was here, at least. To redeem herself. To die for a reason, and make amends.
You’re trying to distract yourself.
“—don’t you think?” Cortez said. His smile was gentle and rueful, and she didn’t have any idea what he’d been saying.
“I guess,” she said and pushed back from the doorframe to give him room. Cortez pulled himself by handholds, trying to keep his body oriented with head toward the ceiling and feet toward the floor, even though crawling along the walls was probably safer and more efficient. It was something people who lived with weight did by instinct. Clarissa only noticed it because she wasn’t doing it. The room was just the room, no up or down, anything a floor or a wall or a ceiling. She expected a wave of vertigo that didn’t come.
“You know it doesn’t matter,” she said.
Cortez smiled at her, tilting his head in a question.
“If we’re all sacrifices, it doesn’t matter when we go,” Clarissa said. “She went a little before us. We’ll go a little later. It doesn’t even matter if we all go willingly to the altar, right? All that matters is that we break the Ring so everyone on the other side is safe.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Cortez said. “Thank you for reminding me.”
An alert sounded in the next room, and Clarissa turned toward it. Ashford had undone his straps and was floating above his control panel, his face stony with rage.
“What’s going on, Jojo?”
“I think we’ve got a problem, sir…”
Chapter Forty-Three: Holden
E
verything about the former colonial administrative offices made Holden sad. The drab, institutional green walls, the cluster of cubicles in the central workspace, the lack of windows or architectural flourishes. The Mormons had been planning to run the human race’s first extrasolar colony from a place that would have been equally at home as an accounting office. It felt anticlimactic. Hello, welcome to your centuries-long voyage to build a human settlement around another star! Here’s your cubicle.
The space had been repurposed in a way that at least gave it a lived-in feel. A cobbled-together radio occupied one entire closet, just off the main broadcasting set. The size saying more about the slapdash construction than about the broadcasting power. The current fleet was in a small enough space to pick up a decent handheld set. A touch screen on one wall acted as a whiteboard for the office, lists of potential interviews and news stories listed along with contact names and potential public interest. Holden was oddly flattered to see his name next to the note Hot, find a way to get this.
Now the room buzzed with activity. Bull’s people were trickling in a few at a time. Most of them brought duffel bags full of weapons or ammunition. A few brought tools in formed plastic cases with wheels on the bottom. They were preparing to armor the former office space into a mini-fortress. Holden leaned against an unused desk and tried to stay out of everyone’s way.
“Hey,” Monica said, appearing at his side out of nowhere. She nodded her head at the board. “When I heard you were back from the station, I was hoping I could get an interview from you. Guess I missed my chance, though.”
“Why?”
“Next to this end-of-the-world shit, you’ve slipped a couple notches in the broadcast schedule.”
Holden nodded, then shrugged. “I’ve been famous before. It’s not so great.”
Monica sat on the desk next to him and handed him a drinking bulb. When Holden tasted it, it turned out to be excellent coffee. He closed his eyes for a moment, sighing with pleasure. “Okay, now I’m just a little in love with you.”
“Don’t tease a girl,” she replied. “Will this work? This plan of Bull’s?”
“Am I on the record?”
Someone started welding a sheet of metal to the wall, forcing them both to throw up their hands to block the light. The air smelled like sulfur and hot steel.
“Always,” Monica said. “Will it?”
“Maybe. There’s a reason military ships are scuttled the second someone takes engineering. If you don’t own that ground, you don’t own the ship.”
Monica smiled as if that all made sense to her. Holden wondered how much actually did. She wasn’t a wartime reporter. She was a documentary producer who’d wound up in the wrong place at the right time. He finished off the last of his coffee with a pang of regret and waited to see if she had anything else to ask. If he was nice, maybe she’d find him a refill.
“And this Sam person can do that?” she said.
“Sam’s been keeping the Roci in the air for almost three years now. She was one of Tycho’s best and brightest. Yeah, if she’s got your engine room and she doesn’t like you, you’re screwed.”