Amos nodded thoughtfully. Anna waited for the words of encouragement.
“Yeah,” he finally said. “That’ll be a bitch. My job’s a lot easier. Good luck.”
Somehow, the honesty in not even trying to sugarcoat it cracked the last of Anna’s fear, and she found herself laughing. Before she could reconsider, she grabbed Amos around the middle and gave him a squeeze.
“Again,” she said, letting him go after a few seconds, “thank you. I was being a big scaredy-cat. You’re a good person, Amos.”
“Nah, I’m not. I just hang with good company. Get going, Red. I gotta get my game face on.”
The assault team was heading for the door, and Anna moved to the wall to let them by. Holden stopped next to Amos and said, “Be here when I get back, big man.”
Amos shook his hand and slapped him on the back once. Holden’s face was filled with worry. Anna had a sudden vision of her future, sending Nami off to school one day, being terrified that she wouldn’t be there to look after her and having to let her go anyway.
“Keep Naomi and Alex safe,” Amos said, pushing Holden toward the door. From Anna’s position, she could see the worry lines on Holden’s face only deepen at that. He was going to have to let them go too. Even if they all survived the assault on engineering, Alex would be leaving the ship to fly to the Rocinante, and Naomi would be left behind to keep the power shut down while Holden continued on toward the bridge. Anna knew the little crew had been together for several years now. She wondered if they’d ever had to split up and fight like this before.
Holden’s face seemed to be saying they hadn’t.
Anna was watching them file out the door, again trying to memorize faces and names, trying not to think about why. Monica grabbed her and started pulling her toward the makeshift film studio.
“Time to start working,” she said. She deposited Anna just outside the camera view and stepped in front of the unadorned green wall they used as a backdrop.
“Welcome,” she said, her face and voice shifting into cheery video host mode. “I’m Monica Stuart in the offices of Radio Free Slow Zone. I’ve got some exciting guests today, including Doctor Anna Volovodov, and a number of UN and Martian military officers. But even more exciting, today we’re bringing you the most important broadcast we’ve ever done.
“Today, we’ll tell you how to go home.”
Chapter Forty-Five: Bull
B
ull felt the time moving past like it was something physical, like he was falling through it and couldn’t catch himself. Anamarie Ruiz had an hour left before she had to decide whether to do what Ashford wanted or get killed. If she didn’t have to choose, she wouldn’t choose wrong, and every minute that he wasn’t in the engineering deck took them closer to where they couldn’t get back.
They’d left the colonial administration offices in a small convoy. Six electric carts with twenty-five people, including Jim Holden and three-quarters of his crew, the four Martian marines, an even dozen of the Behemoth’s crew who’d stayed loyal to Pa, and five Earth soldiers whom Corin had found in the drum and brought along. They had some riot armor that hadn’t been taken out of the armory before Ashford’s forces occupied it. They had an ugly collection of slug-throwing pistols and shotguns loaded with ballistic gel rounds; a mix of weapons designed to subdue without permanent injury and those meant to assure the enemy’s death. The four Martian marines had the four best guns they’d been able to scrounge up, but there were too few of both. The whole thing stank of improvisation.
He couldn’t sit down, so he’d taken the canopy off the electric cart and wedged his mech in the back. He sailed through the hot, close air of the drum like a figurehead on the prow of some doomed pirate ship. Corin was at the wheel, hunched over it like she could make it go faster by the raw act of will. The Martian sergeant Verbinski who’d brought Jim Holden to the Behemoth in restraints sat at her side looking focused and bemused at the same time.
They passed through the main corridors heading south. The tires made a loud ripping sound against the decking. High above, the long, thin strip of blinding white illuminated the curve of the drum. The southern transfer point loomed ahead of them like a ceramic steel cliff face.
People parted before them, making a path. Bull watched them as he passed. Anger and fear and curiosity. These were his people. They hadn’t all been to start with, but he’d brought them here to the Behemoth. He’d made the ship important and the OPA’s role in the exploration beyond the Ring central. Earthers and Martians and Belters. The ones who’d lived. As the faces turned toward him, watching the convoy pass like flowers back on Earth tracking the arc of the sun, he wondered what Fred Johnson would have thought of all this. It was a clusterfuck from start to finish, no question about that. He hoped that when it came time to settle up accounts, he’d done more good than harm.
“We’re a pretty compromised force,” Verbinski said, craning his neck back and up to look at Bull. “How many people you think we’re going up against?”
“Not sure,” Bull said. “Probably a little more than we got, but they’re divided between engineering and command.”
“They as banged up as we are?”
Bull glanced over his shoulder. The truth was at least half of the people he was about to take into battle were already injured. There were people with pressure casts holding their arms together, with sutures keeping their skin closed. In normal circumstances, half his force would still be in the infirmary. Hell, he didn’t have any damn business going into a fire zone either, except that he wasn’t going to stay back and send people into a meat grinder he wouldn’t step into himself.
“Just about,” Bull said.
“You know, if I still had that recon armor you took off of us, I could just go get this done. Not even me and my squad. Just me.”
“Yeah. I know that.”
“Kind of makes you wish you’d trusted me a little bit, doesn’t it?”
“Kind of does,” Bull said.
There were two ways to reach the transfer point. The elevator was big enough to fit half the force into a box small enough that when the doors opened at the top, a single grenade would incapacitate nearly all of them. The alternative was a wide, sloping ramp that rose from the floor of the drum and spun up in a tight spiral to the axis. Its curve was going into the drum’s spin, so the faster they drove up it, the more the cart tires would push down into the floor. That wouldn’t matter down here, but when they reached the top where the fighting would essentially be in free fall, every bit of stability and control they could glean would matter.