“Have we shut those bitches up yet?” Ashford snapped.
“The suppression teams are arriving at the colonial administrative offices, sir,” Jojo said. And then, a moment later, “They’re encountering some resistance.”
Ashford smiled.
“Do we have targeting?” he asked.
“Sir?” one of the other guards said.
“Are the comm laser’s targeting systems online?”
“Um. Yes. They’re responsive.”
“Well, while they mop up downstairs, let’s line up our shot, shall we?”
“Yes, sir.”
Clarissa kept hold of a handle on the wall absently, watching the captain and his men coordinating. It was hard for her to remember how small the Ring was, and how vast the distances they’d traveled to be here. She had to admire the precision and care that they would need to destroy it. The beauty of it was almost surgical. Behind her, the security station popped and clicked. Among the alerts, she heard the murmur of a familiar voice, lifted in fear. She looked around. No one was paying any attention to her, so she pushed herself gently back.
The security station monitor was still on the newsfeed. Monica Stuart looked ashen under her makeup, her jaw set and her lips thin. Anna, beside her, was squeezing the tip of one thumb over and over anxiously. Another man was propped between them in a medical gurney.
“—anything we can to cooperate,” the earnest man was saying into the camera.
“Thank you, Lieutenant Williams,” Monica Stuart said. “I hate to add a complicating note to all this, but I’ve just been informed that armed men have arrive outside the studio and we are apparently under attack at the moment.” She laughed nervously, which Clarissa thought was probably newsfeed anchor code for, Oh my God, I’m going to die on the air. Anna’s voice came in a moment before the cameras cut to her.
“This is an extreme situation,” Anna said, “but I think something like this is probably going on in every ship that’s listening to us right now. We’re at the point where we, as a community, have to make a choice. And we’re scared and grieving and traumatized. None of us is sure what the right thing to do would be. And—”
In the background, the unmistakable popping of slug throwers interrupted Anna for a moment. Her face paled, but she only cleared her throat and went on.
“And violence is a response to that fear. I hope very much that we can come together, though, and—”
“She’ll go down talking,” Cortez said. Clarissa hadn’t heard him come in behind her, hadn’t sensed him approaching. “I have a tremendous respect for that woman.”
“But you think she’s wrong.”
“I think her optimism is misplaced,” Cortez said.
“—if we do escalate our attacks on the station and the Ring,” Anna said, “we have to expect that the cycle will go on, getting bigger and more dangerous until one side or the other is destroyed, and I wish—”
“What do you think she’d say about your pessimism?” Clarissa asked.
Cortez looked up at her, his eyes wide with surprise and amusement. “My pessimism?”
Clarissa fought the sudden, powerful urge to apologize. “What else would you call it?”
“We’ve looked the devil in the eyes out here,” Cortez said. “I would call it realism.”
You didn’t look into the devil’s eyes, she thought. You saw a bunch of people die. You have no idea what real evil is. Her memory seemed to stutter, and for a moment, she was back on the Cerisier, Ren’s skull giving way under her palm. There’s a difference between tragedy and evil, and I am that difference.
“Captain! They’re taking fire at engineering!”
Cortez turned back toward the bridge and launched himself awkwardly through the air. Clarissa took a last look at Anna on the screen, leaning forward and pressing the air with her hands as if she could push calm and sanity through the camera and into the eyes of anyone watching. Then she followed Cortez.
“How many down?” Ashford demanded.
“No information, sir,” Jojo said. “I have a video feed.”
The monitor blinked to life. The engineering deck flickered, pixelated, and came back. A dozen of Ashford’s men were training guns at a pressure door that was stuck almost a third of the way closed. Ashford strained against his belts, trying to get closer to the image. Something—a tiny object or a video feed artifact—floated across the screen, and everything went white. When the image came back, Ashford said something obscene.
Armed people poured through the opening like sand falling through an hourglass. Clarissa recognized Jim Holden by the way he moved, the intimacy of long obsession making him as obvious as her own family would have been. And so the tall figure beside him had to be Naomi, whom Melba had almost killed. And then, near the end, the only one walking in the null-g environment, Carlos Baca. Bull. The head of security, and Ashford’s nemesis. He walked slowly across the deck, his real legs strapped together and his mechanical ones lumbering step by painful step. One of Ashford’s people tried to fire and was shot, his body twisting in the air in a way that reminded her of seeing a caterpillar cut in half. She realized that the sound she was hearing was Ashford cursing under his breath. He didn’t seem to stop for breath.
“Lock down the perimeter,” Ashford yelled. “Ruiz! Ruiz! We have to fire. We have to fire now!”
“I can’t,” the woman’s voice said. “We don’t have a connection.”
“I don’t care if it’s stable, I have to fire now.”
“It’s not unstable, sir,” the woman said. “It’s not there.”
Ashford slammed his fist against the control panel and grimaced. She didn’t know if he’d broken his knuckles, but she wouldn’t have been surprised. For the next fifteen minutes, they watched the battle play out, the invading force sweeping through the engineering deck. Clarissa tried to keep tabs on where Holden and Naomi were, the way she might watch a dramatic show for one or two favorite minor actors.
“Redirect the suppression teams,” Ashford said.
“Yes… ah…”
Ashford turned toward Jojo. The guard’s face was pale. “I’m having trouble getting responses from the controls. I think… I think they’re locking us out.”
Ashford’s rage crested and then sank into a kind of deathly calm. He floated in his couch, his hands pressed together, the tips of both index fingers against his lower lip.