Abaddon's Gate (Expanse 3)

“This belong to anyone?” he asked.

The two techs looked at each other.

“No, sir,” the woman said, pulling her jumpsuit a little more closed. “Most of these are just empty.”

“Okay, then,” Bull said. He thumbed in his override code and pulled the door open. The duffel bag inside was green and gray, the kind of thing he’d have put his clothes in when he went to work out. He ran a finger along the seal. About a hundred vials of yellow-white powder, a little more grainy than powdered milk. He closed the bag, put it on his shoulder.

“Is there a problem?” the male tech asked. His voice was tentative, but not scared. Curious, more. Excited. Well, God loved rubberneckers, and so did Bull.

“Myerson-Freud just stopped selling pixie dust on the side,” Bull said. “Should go tell all your friends, eh?”

The techs looked at each other, eyebrows raised, as Bull headed out. Back at the kelp tank, he dropped the bag, then pointed to Alexi and to the catwalk beside him, the same motions he’d used before. This time Alexi’s face went grim. Bull waited while the tech slogged through the deep water and pulled himself up.

“What’s the problem?” Alexi said. “What’s in the bag?”

Bull shook his head slowly, and only once. The chagrin on Alexi’s face was like a confession. Not that Bull had needed one.

“Hey, ese,” Bull said. “Just want you to know, I’m sorry about this.”

He punched Alexi in the nose. Cartilage and bone gave way under his knuckle and a bright red fountain of blood spilled slowly past the tech’s startled mouth.

“Put him on the back of the cart,” Bull said. “Where folks can see him.”

Serge and Corin exchanged a look that was a lot like the pair in the locker room.

“We heading to the brig, boss?” Serge asked, and his tone of voice meant he already knew the answer.

“We have a brig?” Bull asked as he scooped up the duffel bag.

“Pretty don’t.”

“Then we’re not going there.”

Bull had planned the route to pass through all the most populated public areas between the innermost areas of the ship and its skin. Word was already going around, and there were spectators all along the way. Alexi was making a high keening sound when he wasn’t shouting or begging or demanding to see the captain. Bull had the sudden, visceral memory of seeing a pig carried to the slaughter when he’d been younger. He didn’t know when it had happened; the memory was just there, floating unconnected from the rest of his life.

It took almost half an hour to reach the airlock. A crowd had gathered, a small sea of faces, most of them on wide heads and thin bodies. The Belters watching the Earther kill one of their own. Bull ignored them. He keyed in his passcode, opened the inner door of the lock, walked back to the cart, and hefted Alexi with one arm. In the low gravity it should have been easy, but Bull felt himself getting winded before he got back to the lock. It didn’t help that Alexi was thrashing. Bull pushed him in, closed the inner door, put in the override code, and opened the exterior door without evacuating the air first. The pop rang through the metal deck like a distant bell. The monitor showed that the lock was empty. Bull closed the exterior door. While the lock refilled, he walked back to the cart. He stood on the back of the cart where Alexi had been, the duffel bag over his head in both hands. Blood stained his sleeve and his left knee.

“This is pixie dust, right?” he said to the crowd. He didn’t use his terminal to amplify his voice. He didn’t need to. “I’m gonna leave this in the airlock for sixteen hours, then I’m spacing it. Any other dust comes in to join it before then, well, it just happened. No big deal. Any of this goes away, and that’s a problem. So everybody go tell everybody. And the next pendejo signs on shift high comes and talks to me.”

He walked back to the airlock slowly, letting everyone see him. He opened the inner door, slung the bag through, and turned away, leaving the door open behind him. Climbing back behind the wheel of the cart, he could feel the tension in the crowd, and it didn’t bother him at all. Other things did. What he’d just done was the easy part. What came next was harder, because he had less control over it.

“You want to set a guard on that, boss?” Serge asked.

“Think we need to?” Bull asked. He didn’t expect an answer, and he didn’t get one. The cart lurched forward, the spectators parting before it like a herd of antelope before a lion. Bull aimed them back toward the ramps that would take him to the security offices.

“Hardcore,” Corin said. She made it sound like a good thing.

Religious art decorated the captain’s office. Angels in blue and gold held the parabolas of the archways that rose overhead to meet at the image of a calm and bearded God. A beneficent Christ looked down from the wall behind Ashford’s desk, Caucasian features calm and serene. He didn’t look anything like the bloody, bent, crucified man Bull was familiar with. Arrayed at the Savior’s side were images of plenty: wheat, corn, goats, cows, and stars. Captain Ashford paced back and forth by Jesus’ knees, his face dark with blood and fury. Michio Pa was seated in the other guest chair, carefully not looking at Ashford or at Bull. Whatever the situation was with the Martian science ships and their military escort, with the massive Earth flotilla, it was forgotten for the moment.

Bull didn’t let the anxiety show in his face.

“This is unacceptable, Mister Baca.”

“Why do you think that, sir?”

Ashford stopped, put his wide hands on the desk, and leaned forward. Bull looked into his bloodshot eyes and wondered whether the captain was getting enough sleep.

“You killed a member of my crew,” Ashford said. “You did it with clear premeditation. You did it in front of a hundred witnesses.”

“Shit, you want witnesses, there’s surveillance footage,” Bull said. It wasn’t the right thing to do.

“You are relieved of duty, Mister Baca. And confined to quarters until we return to Tycho Station, where you will stand trial for murder.”

“He was selling drugs to the crew.”

“Then he should have been arrested!”

Bull took a deep breath, exhaling slowly through his nose.

“You think we’re more running a warship or a space station, sir?” he asked. Ashford’s brow furrowed, and he shook his head. To Bull’s right, Pa shifted in her seat. When neither of them spoke, Bull went on. “Reason I ask is if I’m a cop, then yeah, I should have taken him to the brig, if we had a brig. He should have gotten a lawyer. We could have done that whole thing. Me? I don’t think this is a station. I think it’s a battleship. I’m here to maintain military discipline in a potential combat zone. Not Earth navy discipline. Not Martian navy discipline. OPA discipline. The Belter way.”