In the body of the elevator car, Juarez took a position firing down the hole at the pursuers. Bull didn’t know how much ammunition the marine had, but it had to be getting close to the end of his supply. Bull would have slouched against the wall if there had been any gravity. Instead he shifted his suit radio to the channel for Naomi.
“Give me a gun,” she said before he could speak. “Give me something.”
“You keep going,” he said. “Get to the top of the shaft.”
“But—”
“Maybe you can get the hatch open for them. Get into command.”
“You can’t access the controls from inside the shaft.”
“In this piece-of-shit boat, you never know,” Bull said. “Someone might have put a self-destruct button there. Wouldn’t surprise me.”
“That’s your plan B?”
“I think we’re pretty much on plan Z at this point,” Bull said. “Anyway, you’re the engineer. There’s f**k-all you can do here. And I heard you with Holden before. You might as well get to see him again. Not like it costs us anything.”
He watched her face as she decided. Fear, despair, regret, calm, in that order. Impressive woman. He wished he’d had a chance to know her better. And if she was able to ship with Jim Holden and love him, maybe he wasn’t as bad as Bull thought either.
“Thank you,” she said, then turned and launched herself along the elevator shaft toward command and her lover. That was sweet, Bull thought. Juarez’s rifle flashed again and Bull shifted his radio frequencies to include the two marines.
“You two should go too. Head up top. See if you can storm the command.”
“You sure?” Cass said, her voice calm and professional. “We’ve got cover here. There won’t be a better place farther up.”
“Yeah, pretty sure,” Bull said.
“What about you?” Juarez asked.
“I’m staying here,” Bull said.
“Okay, bro,” Juarez said, then he and Cass were gone too. Bull thought about looking down through the shaft to see how close the enemy had come, but he didn’t. Too much energy, and if he got shot in the eye at this point… well, that would just be sad. The little box of the elevator was a monochrome non-color, lit only by the backsplash from his own suit light. He took as deep a breath as he could. It was pretty shallow. He drew the grenades out from his pocket, one in either hand, and carefully dialed them down to the shortest fuse.
So he was going to die here. Not what he would have picked, but what the hell. It probably beat going back and having his spine grown back wrong. He’d seen guys who lived their whole lives in a drug haze fighting the pain of a bad regrowth. He hadn’t really let himself think about that before. Now it was safe to.
He tried to decide whether he regretted dying, but the truth was he was too f**king tired to care. And he couldn’t breathe for crap. He was sorry he hadn’t killed Ashford, but that wasn’t new. He was sorry he couldn’t avenge Sam or find out if Pa was alive. Or whether Ashford would actually be able to destroy the Ring. If he was sad about anything, it was that everything that was in motion now would keep on being in motion without him, and he’d never know how it went. Never know if anything he’d done had made a difference.
His hand terminal blinked. A connection request from Monica Stuart. He wondered for a moment what she wanted with him, and then remembered that Ashford had stopped the drum. Things had to be for shit in there. He routed the request to his suit. No pictures, but the voice connection would be enough.
“Bull,” the woman said. “We’re being attacked up here. I think Anna’s dead. What the hell’s going on down there? How much longer?”
“Well, we lost engineering,” he said. He felt a pang about Anna, but it was just one of many at that point. “Pretty much everyone in the attack party’s dead now. Maybe five folks holed up in the elevator shaft, but the bad guys got the top and the bottom of that, so we’re kind of screwed there. Managed to dump the core, but the grid’s still up. It’ll be enough to fire the laser. Ashford’s guys are probably in engineering putting that back online, and I don’t see we’ve got any damn way to stop him.”
“Oh my God,” Monica breathed.
“Yeah, it kind of sucks.”
“What… what are you going to do about it?”
A beam of light shone through the hatch in the floor. Tiny bits of dust and particulate metal glimmered in it like it was swirling in water. He watched it with a half smile on his face. It meant the bad guys were almost there, but it was pretty to look at. He remembered that Monica was on the line. She’d asked him something.
“Yeah,” Bull said. “So that thing where we power down the ship and save everyone? We’re probably not going to do that.”
“You can’t give up,” she said. “Please. There has to be a way.”
Doesn’t have to be, he thought, but didn’t say. Anna thought there was a way. Where did that get her? But if there is, I hope one of you folks finds it.
“How bad is it in there?” he asked.
“It’s… it’s terrible. It’s like the catastrophe happened all over again.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” Bull said.
“We can’t go on,” Monica said. “Oh God, what are we going to do?”
The light got stronger. Brighter. He couldn’t see the dust motes anymore from the shine of the light.
“Monica?” Bull said. “Look, I’m sorry, but I kind of got to go now, okay? You folks just do your best. Hold it together in there, all right? And hey, if it all works out?”
“Yes?”
“Tell Fred Johnson he f**king owes me one.”
He dropped the connection, unplugged his hand terminal. He took a grenade in each hand, his thumbs on the release bars. A head poked up through the hatch, then back down fast. When no one shot at it, the head came back more slowly. Bull smiled and nodded at it, welcoming. The opaque cowling went clear, and he saw Casimir staring at him. Bull grinned. Well, that was a pleasure, at least. A little treat on the way out.
“Hey,” Bull said, even though the man couldn’t hear him. “Hold this for me.”
He tossed the two grenades, and watched the man’s expression as he understood what they were.
Chapter Forty-Nine: Anna
A
nna returned to consciousness floating in a tangled knot with Okju the camera operator, two office chairs, and a potted ficus plant. Someone was setting off firecrackers in long strings. Someone else was shouting. Anna’s vision was blurry, and she blinked and shook her head to clear it. Which turned out to be a mistake, as shaking her head sent a spike of pain up her spine that nearly knocked her unconscious again.