“Guys, seriously, you couldn’t have given me five more minutes?”

Chapter Twenty-Six: Bull

V

oices. Light. A sense of wrongness deep in places he couldn’t identify. Bull tried to grit his teeth and found his jaw already clenched hard enough to ache. Someone cried out, but he didn’t know where from.

The light caught his attention. Simple white LED with a sanded backsplash to diffuse it. An emergency light. The kind that came on when power was down. It hurt to look at, but he did, using it to focus. If he could make that make sense, everything else would come. A chiming alarm kept tugging at his attention, coming from outside. In the corridor. Bull’s mind tried to slide that way, going into the corridor, out into the wide, formless chaos, and he pulled it back to the light. It was like trying to wake up except he was already awake.

Slowly, he recognized the alarm as something he’d hear in the medical bay. He was in the medical bay, strapped onto a bed. The tugging sensation at his arm was a forced IV. With a moment of nauseating vertigo, his perception of the world shifted—he wasn’t standing, he was lying down. Meaningless distinctions without gravity, but human brains couldn’t seem to help trying to assert direction on the directionless. His neck ached. His head ached. Something else felt wrong.

There were other people in the bay. Men and women on every bed, most with their eyes closed. A new alarm sounded, the woman in the bay across from him losing blood pressure. Crashing. Dying. He shouted, and a man in a nurse’s uniform came floating past. He adjusted something on her bed’s control board, then pushed off and away. Bull tried to grab him as he went by, but he couldn’t.

He’d been in his office. Serge had already gone for the night. A few minor incidents were piled up from the day, the constant friction of a large, poorly disciplined crew. Like everyone else, he’d been waiting to see whether Holden and the Martians came back out of the station. Or if something else would. The fear had made sleep unlikely. He started watching the presentation that the Rocinante had sent, James Holden looking surprisingly young and charming saying, This is what we’re calling the slow zone. He remembered noticing that everyone had accepted Holden’s name for the place, and wondered whether it was just that the man had gotten there first or if there was something about charisma that translated across the void.

And then he’d been here. Someone had attacked, then. A torpedo had gotten past their defenses or else sabotage. Maybe the whole damn ship was just coming apart.

There was a comm interface on the bed. He pulled it over, logged in, and used his security override to open its range to the full ship and not just the nurses’ station. He requested a connection to Sam, and a few heartbeats later she appeared on the screen. Her hair was floating around her head. Null g always made him think of drowned people. The sclera of her left eye was the bright red of fresh blood.

“Bull,” she said with a grin that looked like relief. “Jesus Christ with a side of chips, but I never thought I’d be glad to hear from you.”

“Need a status report.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I better come by for this one. You in your office?”

“Medical bay,” Bull said.

“Be there in a jiff,” she said.

“Sam. What happened?”

“You remember that ass**le who shot the Ring and got turned into a thin paste when his ship hit the slow zone? Same thing.”

“We went too fast?” Bull said.

“We didn’t. Something changed the rules on us. I’ve got a couple techs doing some quick-and-dirty tests to figure out what the new top speed is, but we’re captured and floating into that big ring of ships. Along with everybody else.”

“The whole flotilla?”

“Everybody and their sisters,” Sam said. A sense of grim despair undercut the lightness of her words. “No one’s under their own power now except the shuttles that were inside the bays when it happened, and no one’s willing to send them going too fast either. The Behemoth was probably going the slowest when it happened. Other ships, it’s worse.”

How bad floated in his mind, but something about the words refused to be asked. His mind skated over them, flickering. The deep sense of wrongness welled up in him.

“First convenience,” he said.

“On my way,” Sam said, and the connection dropped. He wanted to sag back into a pillow, wanted to feel the comforting hand of gravity pressing him down. He wanted the New Mexican sun streaming in through a glass window and the open air and blue sky. None of it was there. None of it ever would be.

Rest when you’re dead, he thought, and thumbed the comm terminal on again. Ashford and Pa weren’t accepting connections, but they both took messages. He was in the process of connecting to the security office when a doctor came by and started talking with him. Mihn Sterling, her name was. Bennie Cortland-Mapu’s second. He listened to her with half his attention. A third of the crew had been in their rest cycle, safely in their crash couches. The other two-thirds—him included—had slammed into walls or decks, the hand terminals they’d been looking at accelerating into projectiles. Something about network regrowth and zero gravity and spinal fluid. Bull wondered where Pa was. If she was dead and Ashford alive, it would be a problem.

Disaster recovery could only go two ways. Either everyone pulled together and people lived, or they kept on with their tribal differences and fear, and more people died.

He had to find a way to coordinate with Earth and Mars. Everyone was going to be stressed for medical supplies. If he was going to make this work, he had to bring people together. He needed to see if Monica Stuart and her team—or anyway the part of her team that wasn’t going to be charged with sabotage and executed—were still alive. If he could start putting out his own broadcasts, something along the lines of what she’d done with Holden…

The doctor was getting agitated about something. He didn’t notice when Sam came into the room; she was just floating there. Her left leg was in an improvised splint of nylon tape and packing foam. Bull put his palm out to the doctor, motioning for silence, and turned his attention to Sam.

“You’ve got the report?” he asked.

“I do,” Sam said. “And you can have it as soon as you start listening to what she’s saying.”

“What?”

Sam pointed to Doctor Sterling.

“You have to listen to her, Bull. You have to hear what she’s saying. It’s important.”




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