They’d run out of ideas. And now they were reaching for the simple, direct, always available option of shooting everyone they disagreed with. She hated it.
Monica caught her eye from across the room and held up a small thermos of coffee in invitation. Anna waved her off with a smile.
“Are you insane?” Tilly asked. She was sitting on the floor next to her in a back corner of the offices, trying to stay out of everyone’s way. “That woman has the only decent coffee on this entire ship.” She waved at Monica, pointing at herself.
“I should have spent more time talking to Cortez,” Anna said. “The OPA captain might be intractable, but I could have reached Cortez with enough time.”
“Life is finite, dear, and Cortez is an ass**le. We’ll all be better off if someone puts a bullet in him before this is over.” Tilly accepted a pour of Monica’s coffee with a grateful smile. Monica set the thermos down and sat on the floor next to them.
“Hey, we—” she started, but Anna didn’t notice.
“You don’t mean that,” Anna said to Tilly, annoyance creeping into her voice. “Cortez isn’t a bad person. He’s frightened and unsure, and has made some bad choices, but at worst he’s misguided, not evil.”
“He doesn’t deserve your sympathy,” Tilly said, then tossed back the last of her coffee like she was angry with it.
“Who are we—” Monica started again.
“He does. He does deserve it,” Anna said. Watching the young men and women prepare for war, preparing to kill and be killed right in front of her, made her more angry with Tilly than she probably would have been otherwise. But she found herself very angry now. “That’s exactly the point. They all deserve our sympathy. If Bull’s right about Ashford, and he’s gone crazy with fear and humiliation and the trauma of seeing his crew killed, then he deserves our sympathy. That’s a terrible place to be. Cortez deserves our understanding, because he’s doing exactly the same thing we are. Trying to find the right thing to do in an impossible situation.”
“Oh,” Monica said. “Cortez. He’s the—”
“That’s a load of crap, Annie. That’s exactly how you know who the good guys and the bad guys are: by what they do when the chips are down.”
“This isn’t about good guys and bad guys,” Anna said. “Yes, we’ve picked sides now, because some of the actions they are about to take will have serious consequences for us, and we’re going to try to stop them. But what you’re doing is demonizing them, making them the enemy. The problem with that is that once we’ve stopped them and they can’t hurt us anymore, they’re still demons. Still the enemy.”
“Believe me,” Tilly said, “when I get out of here, it will be my mission in life to burn Cortez to the ground for this.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?”
“He won’t be on a ship trying to destroy the Ring anymore. He won’t be supporting Ashford anymore. All of the circumstances that made him your enemy will be gone. What’s the value in clinging to the hate?”
Tilly turned away and fumbled around in her pocket for her cigarettes. She smoked one aggressively, pointedly not looking at Anna.
“What’s the answer, then?” Monica asked after a few tense moments of silence.
“I don’t know,” Anna said, pulling her legs close and resting her chin on her knees. She tucked her back as far into the corner of the room as it would go, her body looking for a safe place with a small child’s insistence. But the hard green walls offered no comfort.
“So it’s all just academic, then,” Monica said. Tilly snorted in agreement, still not looking at Anna.
Anna pointed at the people getting ready in the room around them. “How many will be dead by the end of today?”
“There’s no way to know,” Monica said.
“We owe it to them to look for other answers. We’ve failed this time. We’ve run out of ideas, and now we’re reaching for the gun. But maybe next time, if we’ve thought about what led us here, maybe next time we find a different answer. Certainty doesn’t have a place in violence.”
For a while, they were silent. Tilly angrily chain-smoked. Monica typed furiously on her terminal. Anna watched the others get ready for war, and tried to match faces with names. Even if they won out today, there was a very good chance she’d be presiding over more than one funeral tomorrow.
Bull clunked over to them, his walking machine whining to a stop. He had deteriorated during the few hours they’d spent in the office. He was coughing less, but he’d begun using his inhaler a lot more often. Even the machine seemed ill now, its sounds harsher, its movements jerkier. As though the walker and Bull had merged into one being, and it was dying along with him.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Fine,” Anna said. She considered telling him he needed rest, then abandoned the idea. She didn’t need to lose another argument just then.
“So we’re getting pretty close to zero hour here,” Bull said, then stifled a wet-sounding cough. “You have everything you need?”
No, Anna thought. I need an answer that doesn’t include what you’re about to do.
“Yes,” she said instead. “Monica has been making notes for the broadcast. I’ve compiled a list of all the ships we have representatives from. We’re missing a few, but I’m hoping planetary allegiance will be enough to get their cooperation. Chris Williams, a junior officer from the Prince, has been a big help on that.”
“You?” Bull asked, jabbing a thick hand toward Monica.
“My team is ready to go,” she said. “I’m a bit worried about getting the full broadcast out before Ashford’s people stop us.”
Bull laughed. It was a wet, unpleasant sound. “Hold on.” He called out to Jim Holden, who was busy reassembling a stripped-down rifle of some sort and chatting with one of the Martian marines. Holden put the partly assembled rifle on a table and walked over.
“What’s up?”
“These people need reassurance that they’ll be protected long enough to finish their broadcast,” Bull said.
Holden blinked twice, once at Bull, once at the three women sitting cross-legged on the floor. Anna had to suppress a giggle. Holden was so comically earnest, she just wanted to give him a hug and pat him on the head.