Anna couldn’t help but laugh. When Tilly raised an eyebrow, Anna explained, “We flew across the entire solar system, almost to the orbit of Neptune, a world so cold and distant from the sun we didn’t even know it was there until Bouvard noticed that something was bumping Uranus around.”
Tilly’s eyebrow crept higher. “Okay.”
“And when we get here, who knows how far from the sun and with billions of kilometers of empty space in every direction? We somehow manage to be hot and crowded.”
“Thank God the Belters thought to bring this rattletrap with them,” Tilly said, ducking to enter her tent. She flopped down into a folding chair and started rummaging in a plastic cooler next to it. “Can you imagine trying to stuff everyone onto the Prince? We’d be twelve to a bunk there. Lovely culture, these Belters.”
Anna pulled her cassock off and laid it over the edge of Tilly’s cot. Underneath she was wearing a white blouse and a knee-length skirt that was much less stifling. Tilly pulled a plastic bulb of lemonade out of the cooler and handed it to her, then poured herself a glass of something as clear as water that smelled like hospital cleanser. When Anna took the bulb she was surprised to find it cold. Small drops of condensation were already forming on its surface. She put the cool bottle against the back of her neck and felt a delightful chill run down her spine.
“How did you manage ice?”
“Dry ice,” Tilly said around a lit cigarette, then paused to down her first shot. “Apparently it’s easy for the people in atmosphere processing to make. Lots of carbon dioxide just lying around.”
If Tilly was spending a thousand dollars a bottle for the antiseptic she was drinking, Anna didn’t want to know what a steady supply of ice was costing her. They drank in companionable silence for a while, the cool lemonade doing wonders for Anna’s heat exhaustion. Tilly brought up the idea of finding something to eat, and they wandered out of her tent in search of a supply kiosk.
There were people walking through the crowded tent city carrying guns.
“This looks bad,” Tilly said. It did. These weren’t bored security officers with holstered sidearms. These were grim-faced Belter men and women with assault rifles and shotguns carried in white-knuckled grips. The group moving between the tents was at least a dozen strong, and they were looking for something. Or someone.
Anna tugged at Tilly’s sleeve. “Maybe we should try to get people to go back to the church tent to wait this out.”
“Annie, if the bullets start flying in here, even God can’t make that tent a safe place to hide. I want to know what’s going on.”
Anna reluctantly followed her in a path that paralleled the armed group, which moved with purpose, occasionally stopping to look in tents or quietly question people. Anna began to feel very frightened without being sure why.
“Oh,” Tilly said. “Here we go.”
Bull’s second-in-command—Serge was his name, Anna thought—rounded one of the larger tents trailing half a dozen security people behind him. They were all armed as well, though only with handguns. Even to Anna’s untrained eye, the difference between six people with pistols and twelve people with rifles was dramatic. Serge had a faint smile on his face as though he hadn’t noticed. Anna saw the muscular young woman from the security office standing behind him, though her face was a worried scowl. Oddly enough, seeing someone else look worried made Anna feel better.
“No guns in the drum, sa sa?” Serge said to the armed Belter group, though the volume of his voice made it clear he was speaking to the onlookers as well. “Drop ’em.”
“You have guns,” a Belter woman said with a sneer. She held a rifle at the ready.
“We’re the cops,” Serge said, placing one hand on the butt of his gun and grinning back at her.
“Not anymore,” she replied and in one quick movement shifted her rifle and shot him in the head. A tiny hole appeared in his forehead, and a cloud of pink mist sprayed into the air behind him. He sank slowly to the floor, an expression of vague puzzlement on his face.
Anna felt her gorge rise, and had to double over and pant to keep from vomiting. “Jesus Christ,” Tilly said in a strangled whisper. The speed with which the situation had gone from unsettling to terrifying took Anna’s breath away. I’ve just seen a man have his brains blown out. Even after the horrors of the slow zone catastrophe, it was the worst thing she’d ever seen. The security man hadn’t thought the woman would shoot him, hadn’t suspected the true nature of the threat, and the price he’d paid for it was everything.
At that thought, Anna threw up all over her shoes and then sank to her knees, gagging. Tilly dropped down next to her, not even noticing that the knees of her pants were in a pool of vomit. Tilly hugged her for a second then whispered, “We need to go.” Anna nodded back because she couldn’t open her mouth without fear of losing control again. A few dozen meters away, the Belters were disarming the security team and tying their arms behind their backs with plastic strips.
At least they weren’t shooting anyone else.
Tilly pulled her to her feet, and they hurried back to her tent, all thought of food forgotten. “Something very bad is happening on this ship,” Tilly said. Anna had to suppress a manic giggle. Given their current circumstances, things would have to be very bad indeed for Tilly to think the situation had gotten worse. Sure, they were all trapped in orbit around an alien space station that periodically changed the rules of physics and had killed a bunch of them, but now they’d decided to start shooting each other too.
Yes, very bad.
Hector Cortez came to Tilly’s tent about an hour after the shooting. Anna and Tilly had spent the time staying as close to the floor of the tent as possible, arranging Tilly’s few bits of furniture into barricades around them. It had the feeling of performing ritual magic. Nothing in the room would actually stop a bullet, but they arranged it anyway. A blanket fort to keep the monsters at bay.
Mercifully, there hadn’t been any further sounds of gunfire.
The few times they peeked out of the tent, they saw smaller groups of no more than two or three armed Belters patrolling the civilian spaces. Anna avoided meeting their eyes, and they ignored her.
When Cortez arrived, he cleared his throat loudly outside the tent, then asked if he could enter. They were both afraid to answer, but he came in anyway. Several people waited for him outside, though Anna couldn’t see who.