“You’re tired,” Bull said, his voice low enough not to carry to the others. “You been working too hard, and it got to you a little. Happens to everyone.”
“Bien.”
He put the torch in the boy’s hand and squeezed it there.
“This is a privilege,” Bull said. “Being out here, doing this bullshit, working our asses off for no one to give a shit? It’s a privilege. Next time you undermine Chief Engineer Rosenberg’s authority, I will ship your ass home with a note that says you couldn’t handle it.”
The boy muttered something Bull couldn’t make out. The flare from the other torches made the boy’s face dance white and brown and white again. Bull put a hand on his arm.
“Yes, sir,” Gareth said. Bull let go, and the boy pushed off to the wall, situating himself over the length of pipe that was waiting there for him. Sam appeared at Bull’s elbow, sliding down from the blind spot above and behind him.
“That worked,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t hurt that you’re an Earther.”
“Didn’t. How’s it all coming?”
“Apart,” Sam said. “But we’ll stick it back together with bubblegum if we have to.”
“Least no one was shooting at us.”
Sam’s laugh had some warmth in it.
“They wouldn’t have had to do it twice.”
The alert tone came from all their hand terminals at once, simultaneous with the ship address system. Bull felt his lips press thin.
“Well, that timing’s a little ominous,” Sam said before Captain Ashford’s voice rang out through the ship. The openness of the spaces and the different speakers made the words echo like the voice of God.
“This is your captain speaking. I have just received confirmation from the OPA central authority that the actions undertaken by the criminal James Holden were unauthorized by any part of the Outer Planets Alliance. His actions put not only this ship but the reputation and good standing of the alliance in threat. I have informed the central authority that we took swift and decisive action against Holden, and that he escaped from us only by retreating through the Ring.”
“Thanks for that, by the way,” Sam said.
“De nada.”
“I have requested and received,” Ashford continued, “the authority to continue action to address this insult as I deem fit. The evidence of our own sensors and of the Martian and Earth feeds to which we have access all show that the Rocinante has passed through the Ring in good condition and appears to have sustained no damage despite the physical anomalies on the other side.
“In light of that, I have made the decision to follow Holden through the Ring and take him and his crew into custody. I will be sending out specific instructions to all department heads outlining what preparations we will need to complete before we begin our burn, but I expect to be in pursuit within the next six hours. It is imperative for the pride, dignity, and honor of the OPA that this insult not go unanswered and that the hands that bring Holden to justice be ours.
“I want you all to know that I am honored to serve with such a valiant crew, and that together we will make history. Take these next hours, all of you, to rest and prepare. God bless each and every one of you, and the Outer Planets Alliance.”
With a resounding click from a hundred speakers, Ashford dropped the connection. The flashing white light of the welding torches was gone, and the bay was darker. Laughter warred against despair in Bull’s gut.
“Is he drunk, do you think?” Sam said.
“Worse. Embarrassed. He’s trying to save face,” Bull said.
“The Behemoth filled its diddies in front of God and everyone, so now we’re going to be the biggest badass in the system to make up for it?”
“Pretty much.”
“Gonna talk him out of it?”
“Gonna try.”
Sam scratched her cheek.
“Could be hard to back down after that little once-more-into-the-breach thing.”
“He won’t,” Bull said. “But I’ve got to try.”
The inner planets came out to the black with an understanding that they were soldiers sent to a foreign land. Bull remembered the feeling from when he’d first shipped out: the sense that his home was behind him. For the inners, the expansion out into the solar system had always had the military at its core.
The Belters didn’t have that. They were the natives here. The forces that had brought their ancestors out to the Belt had roots in trade, commerce, and the overwhelming promise of freedom. The OPA had begun its life more like a labor union than a nation. The difference was subtle but powerful, and it showed in strange ways.
If they had been in any of the Earth or Mars ships that floated now in the darkness near the Ring, Bull would have come from his thorough and profound dressing down by the captain to seek out XO Pa in a galley or mess hall. But this was the Behemoth, so he found her in a bar.
It was a small place with bulbs of alcohol, chocolate, coffee, and tea all set with temperature controls in the nipple, so the uniformly tepid drinks could come out anywhere from almost boiling to just this side of ice. The decor was cheap nightclub, with colored lights and cheap graphic films to hide the walls. Half a dozen people floated on handholds or tethers, and Pa was one of them.
His first thought as he pulled himself toward her was that she needed a haircut. With the false gravity of acceleration gone, her hair floated around her, too short to tie back but still long enough to interfere with her vision and creep into her mouth. His second thought was that she looked as tired as he was.
“Mister Baca,” Pa said.
“XO. You mind if I join you?”
“I was expecting you. You’ve been to see the captain?”
Bull wished he could sit down, not for any actual reason so much as the small physical punctuation it would have given their conversation.
“I have. He wasn’t happy to see me. Showed me the proposal you’d built up on how to remove me from my position.”
“It was a contingency plan,” she said.
“Yeah. So this idea where we take the Behemoth through the Ring? We can’t do that. We start any kind of serious burn, we’re going to have two navies on our butts. And we don’t know what’s on the other side except that it’s way more powerful than we are.”
“Do you want an alien civilization taking its ideas of humanity from Jim Holden?”
Ashford had said the same thing, word for word. It had been his most cogent argument, and now Bull knew where he’d borrowed it from. He’d had the long trip down in the lift to let his sleep-deprived brain come up with its counterargument.