The access panel was open, the guts of the ship exposed. She grabbed the edge of the panel gently, slowing herself. Blood welled up from her palm where the metal cut into her. She didn’t feel it as pain. Just a kind of warmth. A message from her body that she could ignore. The brownout buffer sat behind an array control board. She slid her hand down to it, her fingers caressing the pale formed ceramic. The fault indicator glowed green. She took a breath, gripped the buffer, pushed it down, turned and then pulled. The unit came loose in her hand.
A gun went off. A scar appeared on the wall before her, bits of metal spinning out from it. They were shooting at her. Or near her. It didn’t matter. She flipped the unit end for end and reseated it. The buffer’s indicator blinked red for a moment, then green. Just the way Ren had showed her. Terrible design, she thought with a grin and held down the buffer’s reset. Two more guns fired, the sound pushing against her eardrums like a blow. Time stuttered. She didn’t know how long she’d been holding the reset, if she’d slipped it off and back on. She thought it should have gone by now, but time was so unreliable. The world stuttered again. She was crashing.
The buffer’s readout went red. Clarissa smiled and relaxed. She saw the cascading failure as if she were the ship itself. One bad readout causing the next causing the next, the levels of failure rapid and incremental. The nervous system of the Behemoth sensing a danger it couldn’t define. Doing what it could to be safe, or at least to be sure it didn’t get worse.
Failing closed.
She turned. Ashford stood on his couch, holding the restraint straps in one hand and pressing his feet into the gel. His mouth was a square gape of rage. Two of his people had shifted to face her as well, their guns trained on her, their faces almost blank.
Behind them all, far across the bridge, Cortez was framed by the security office doorway. His face was a mask of distress and surprise. He wasn’t, she thought, a man who dealt well with the unexpected. Must be hard for him. She hadn’t noticed before how much he looked like her own father. Something about the shape of their jaws, maybe. Or in their eyes.
The lights flickered. She felt her body starting to shudder. It was over. For her, for all of them. The first twitch of the collapse pulled at her back like a cramp. A rising nausea came to her. She didn’t care.
I did it, Ren, she thought. You showed me how, and I did it. I think I just saved everyone. We did.
Ashford caught his pistol out of the air and swung toward her. She heard his screaming like it was meat ripping. Behind him, Cortez was shouting, launching himself through the space. There was a contact taser in the old man’s hand, and the grief on the old man’s face was gratifying. It was good to know that on some level, he cared what happened to her. The lights flared once and went out as Ashford brought the barrel to bear on her. The emergency lighting didn’t kick in.
Everything was darkness, and then, for a moment, light.
And then darkness.
Chapter Fifty-Two: Holden
H
olden ejected his spent magazine and reached for a new one. His fingers hit only an empty space where he expected it to be. He hadn’t been managing his ammo well. He’d wanted to keep at least one magazine in reserve. Corin was firing around him with her rifle. She had spare pistol ammo on her belt. Without asking, he started pulling magazines off her belt and putting them in his. She fired off a few more shots and waited for him to finish. It was that sort of fight.
Cass was leaning around the corner firing. Answering bullets hit everyplace on her side of the corridor except where she was. Holden was about to shout at her to get back into cover when the lights went out.
It wasn’t just the lights. So many things about his physical situation changed all at once that his hindbrain couldn’t keep up. It told him to be nauseated just in case he’d been poisoned. It was working with fifty-million-year-old response algorithms.
Holden collapsed to his knees with the nausea, the sudden appearance of gravity being one of the many changes. His knees banged against the floor because he was no longer wearing a heavy environment suit. Which also meant he could smell the air. It had a vaguely swampy, sulfurous odor. His inner ear didn’t report any Coriolis, so they weren’t spinning. There were no engine sounds, so the Behemoth wasn’t under thrust.
Holden fumbled at the ground around him. It felt like dirt. Damp soil, small rocks. Something that felt like ground-cover plants.
“Oh, hey, sorry,” a voice said. Miller’s. The light level came up with no visible source. Holden was kneeling naked on a wide plain of something that looked like a mix of moss and grass. It was as dark as a moonlit night, but no moons or stars shone overhead. In the distance, something like a forest was visible. Beyond that, mountains. Miller stood a few meters away, looking up at the sky, still wearing his old gray suit and goofy hat. His hands were in his pockets, his jacket rumpling around them.
“Where?” Holden started.
“This planet was in the catalog. Most Earth-like one I could find. Thought it’d be calming.”
“Am I here?”
Miller laughed. Something in the timbre of his voice had changed since the last time Holden had spoken to him. He sounded serene, whole. Vast. “Kid, I’m not even here. But we needed a place to talk, and this seemed nicer than a white void. I’ve got processing power to spare now.”
Holden stood up, embarrassed to be naked even in a simulation, but without any way of changing it. But if this was a simulation, then that brought up other issues.
“Am I still in a gunfight?”
Miller turned, not quite facing him. “Hmmm?”
“I was in a gunfight before you grabbed me. If this is just a sim running in my brain, then does that mean I’m still in that gunfight? Am I floating in the air with my eyes rolled back or something?”
Miller looked chagrined.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Maybe. Look. Don’t worry about it. This won’t take long.”
Holden walked over to stand next to him, to look him in the eyes. Miller gave him his sad basset hound smile. His eyes glowed a bright electric blue.
“We did it, though? We got under the power threshold?”
“Did. And I talked the station into thinking you were essentially dirt and rocks.”
“Does that mean we saved the Earth?”
“Well,” Miller replied with a small Belter shrug of the hands. “We also saved the Earth. Never was the big plan, but it’s a nice bonus.”