Verbinski and his squad were in an alcove near the supply shop. One of the marines had been shot in the elbow. His forearm was a complication of bone and meat, but he was laughing and talking while the others dressed the wound. Bull wondered how much they’d doped him. He caught Verbinski’s gaze and nodded him closer.
“You and your people,” Bull said when they were out of earshot. “You did good work back there.”
“Thank you,” Verbinski said. The pride showed right through the humble. “We do what we can. If we’d had our suits, now—”
“Thing is,” Bull said. “Those grenades? How many of them you still have on you?”
“Half a dozen,” Verbinski said.
“Yeah.” Bull sighed. “Nothing personal, but I’m going to need to confiscate those.”
Verbinski looked shocked for a moment. Then he laughed.
“Always the hardass,” he said.
Chapter Forty-Six: Clarissa
“W
hat’s going on, Jojo?”
“I think we’ve got a problem, sir. Take a look.”
Monica Stuart appeared on the monitors, her professionally calm face like a being from a different reality.
“Today,” she said, her hands folded in her lap and a twinkle in her eye, “we’ll tell you how to go home.”
“What. The. Fuck!” Ashford shouted, dashing his hand across the display. “What is this?”
“They’re making a new broadcast, sir,” the security man said. Clarissa watched Ashford turn and stare at him, watched the man shrivel under the weight of his gaze.
“Exclusive to Radio Free Slow Zone,” Monica said, “we have reason to believe that if we in the united human fleet can reduce our energy output low enough to no longer appear threatening—”
“Shut her down,” Ashford said. “Call everyone that’s still in the drum and shut that feed off. Get me Ruiz. I want power cut to that whole section if we have to.”
“Is this something we need to concern ourselves with?” Cortez asked. His voice had an overtone of whining. “What they do or say can’t matter now, can it?”
“This is my ship!” Ashford shouted. “I’m in control.”
“Once we’ve destroyed the Ring, though—”
Clarissa put a hand on Cortez’s shoulder and shook her head once.
“He’s the father,” she said. “The ship is his house.”
“Thank you,” Ashford said to her, but with his eyes still on Cortez. “I’m glad that someone here understands how this works.”
“Suppression team is dispatched,” Jojo said. “You want me to pull from the guard units too?”
“Whatever it takes,” Ashford said. “I want you to get it done.”
On the screen, the view shifted, and Anna’s face filled the screen. Her hair was pulled back, and someone had given her makeup in a way that made her look like everyone else in broadcast. Clarissa felt a strange tug in her chest, resentment and alarm. Get out of there, she thought at the screen. God’s not going to stop bullets for you.
“The idea,” Anna said, “is that the station has identified us as an ongoing threat. Its actions toward us have been based in a kind of fear. Or, that’s wrong. A caution. We are as unknown and unpredictable to it as it is to us. And so we have reason to believe that if we appear to be less threatening, it may relax its constraints.”
The camera cut back to Monica Stuart, nodding and looking sober. All the physical cues that would indicate Anna was a serious woman with important opinions.
“And what is your plan, exactly?” Monica asked.
Anna’s laughter bubbled. “I wouldn’t call the plan mine. What we’re thinking is that if we power down the reactors in all the ships and reduce energy being used, the station can be induced to… well, to see us less as a threat and more as a curiosity. I mean, see this all from its perspective. A gate opened, and whatever it had been expecting to come through, instead there came a ship running ballistic at tremendous speed. Then a flotilla of new ships behind that, and armed soldiers who went aboard the station itself with weapons firing. If something came to us that way, we’d call it an invasion.”
“And so by giving some indication that we aren’t escalating the attack… ?”
“We give whatever we’re dealing with here the opportunity to not escalate against us,” Anna said. “We’ve been thinking of the protomolecule and all the things that came from it as—”
The screen went dark. Ashford scowled at his control boards, calling up and dismissing information with hard, percussive taps. Cortez floated beside Clarissa, frowning. Humiliated. He had engineered Ashford’s escape and reconquest of the Behemoth, and she could see in the older man’s eyes that it wasn’t what he’d expected it to be. She wondered if her own father had that same expression in his cell back on Earth, or wherever it was they’d put him.
“Ruiz,” Ashford snapped. “Report. What’s our status?”
“I still have half an hour, sir,” the woman said through the connection.
“I didn’t ask how much time you had left,” the captain said. “I asked for a report.”
“The conductant is in place and curing,” the woman said. “It looks like it’ll be done on time. I’ve found a place in the breaker system that Sam… that Sam put in a power cutout.”
“You’ve replaced that?”
“I did, but I don’t know if there are others. She could have sabotaged the whole circuit.”
“Well,” Ashford said. “You have half an hour to check it.”
“That’s what I’m doing. Sir.”
Ashford tapped the control panel again. Clarissa found herself wishing he’d put the newsfeed back on. She wanted to know what Anna was saying, even if it was only as a way to pass the time. The air on the bridge wasn’t as hot and close as it had been in the drum, but the coolness wasn’t comforting. If anything, it seemed to underscore the time they’d been waiting. Her belly was beginning to complain with hunger, and she had to imagine that the others were feeling the same. They were holding the bridge of the largest spacecraft humanity had ever built, trapped in the starless dark by an alien power they barely began to comprehend, but they were still constrained by the petty needs of flesh, and their collective blood sugar was getting pretty low. She wondered what it said about her that she’d watched a women shot to death not two hours before and all she could think about now was lunch. She wondered what Anna would have thought.