Don’t think about it, he told himself. Too far ahead. Don’t think about it. Just do your job.
He didn’t take one of the main internal lifts. Chances were too good that Ashford’s men would be watching for that. Instead, he found one of the long, spiraling maintenance passages and set the mech to walking on its own. If it drifted too near one wall or the other, he could correct it, but it gave him a few seconds. He pulled out the hand terminal. He was shaking and his skin looked gray under the brown.
Serge answered almost immediately.
“Ganne nacht, boss,” the tattooed Belter said. “Was wondering when you were going to check in.”
“Ashford,” Bull said.
“On top of it,” Serge said. “Looks like he’s got about a third of our boys and a bunch of crazy-ass coyos from other ships. Right now they got the transition points off the drum north to command and south to engineering, the security office and the armory, y some little wolf packs going through the drum stirring up trouble.”
“How well armed?”
“Nicht so bien sa moi,” Serge said, grinning. “They savvy they got us locked out of the communications too, but I got back door open.”
“You what?”
“Always ready for merde mal, me. Bust me down later,” Serge said. “I’m putting together squads, clean up the drum. We’ll get this all smashed flat by bedtime.”
“You have to be careful with these guys, Serge.”
“Will, boss. Know what we’re doing. Know the ship better than anyone. You get safe, let us take care.”
Bull swallowed. Giving over control ached.
“Okay.”
“We been trying to get the captain, us,” Serge said.
“I warned her. She may be refusing connections until she knows more who she can trust,” Bull said. He didn’t add, Or they may have found her.
“Check,” Serge said, and Bull heard in the man’s voice that he’d had the same thought. “When we track Ashford?”
“We don’t have permission to kill him,” Bull said.
“A finger slips, think we can get forgiveness?”
“Probably.”
Serge grinned. “Got to go, boss. Just when es se cerrado, and they make you XO, keep me in mind for your chair, no?”
“Screw that,” Bull said. “When this shit’s done, you can be XO.”
“Hold you to, boss,” Serge said, and the connection went dead.
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Anna
T
he first sermon Anna had delivered in front of a congregation, fresh out of seminary and filled with zeal, was seventeen pages of single-spaced notes. It had been a lengthy dissection of the first chapter of Malachi, focusing on the prophet’s exhortation not to deliver substandard sacrifices to God, and how that related to modern worship. It had been detailed, backed by all of the evidence and argument Anna’s studious nature and seven years of graduate school could bring to bear. By the end of it, Anna was pretty sure not one member of the audience was still awake.
She’d learned some important lessons from that. There was a place for detailed Bible scholarship. There was even a place for it in front of the congregation. But it wasn’t what people came to church for. Learning a bit more about God was part of feeling closer and more connected to Him, and the closeness was what mattered. So Anna’s sermons now tended to be just a page or two of notes, and a lot more speaking from the heart. She’d delivered her message on “mixed” churches in God’s eyes without looking at the notes once, and it seemed to go over very well. After she concluded with a short prayer and began the sacrament, Belters and Martians and Earthers got into line together in companionable silence. A few shook hands or clapped each other on the back. Anna felt like it might be the most important message she’d ever delivered.
“Well, it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” Tilly said once the service was over. She had the twitchy look she got when she wanted a cigarette, but Anna had asked her not to smoke in the meeting tent and she’d agreed. “Though, admittedly, my tolerance for lovey togetherness is low.”
“That’s very flattering,” Anna whispered, then paused to shake hands with a Belter woman who tearfully thanked her for organizing the meeting. Tilly gave the woman her most insincere smile but managed not to roll her eyes.
“I need a drink,” Tilly said once the woman had left. “Come with. I’ll buy you a lemonade.”
“They closed the bar. Rationing.”
Tilly laughed. “I have a supplier. The guy running the rationing sold me a bottle of their best Ganymede hooch for the low price of a thousand dollars. He tossed in the lemonade for free.”
“A thousand—”
“One of two things will happen,” Tilly said, taking out a cigarette and putting it in her mouth but leaving it unlit. “We’ll get out of here, back into the solar system where I’m rich and a thousand bucks doesn’t matter, or we won’t get out and nothing will matter.”
Anna nodded because she didn’t know what else to say. As much as she’d come to enjoy and rely on Tilly’s friendship, she was occasionally reminded how utterly different their worlds were. If she and Nono had an extra thousand UN dollars lying around, it would have immediately gone into Nami’s college fund. Tilly had never in her life had to sacrifice a luxury to get a necessity. If there was any actual mixing in the congregation, it was that. The one thing the Belters and inner planet naval people had in common was that none of them would be drinking thousand-dollar alcohol that night, but Tilly would.
God might not care about financial standing, but He was the only one.
“I admit, lemonade sounds nice,” Anna said, fanning her face with her hand terminal. The Behemoth’s big habitat drum was built to house a lot more people than it currently held, but they’d stripped a lot of the environmental systems out of it when they converted it to a warship. It was starting to seem like they were reaching the atmosphere processing limits. Or maybe just the air conditioning. The temperature was generally higher now than a girl raised in Russia and most recently living on one of Jupiter’s icy moons enjoyed.
After one more tour of the tent to say goodbye to the last lingering remnants of her congregation, Anna followed Tilly out. It wasn’t much cooler outside the tent, but the spin of the drum and the air recycling system did combine to create a gentle breeze. Tilly looked over her flushed red face and sweat-plastered hair with a critical eye and said, “Don’t worry, everyone who’s coming over is here. I heard Cortez talking to some OPA bigwig a couple days ago. This is as hot as it’s going to be. And as soon as they find a way to cool us down that doesn’t involve venting our atmosphere into space, they’ll do it.”