“What happened?” Tilly asked, and gripped a handhold on the wall like she meant to stay a while. Anna grabbed on to the nearest thing she could find, which turned out to be a rack of weapons.
The security officer looked Tilly up and down once, and seemed to come to the conclusion that giving her what she wanted was the easiest solution. “Hell if I know. We decelerated to a dead stop in just a shade under five seconds. The damage and injuries are all high-g trauma. Whatever grabbed us only grabbed the skin of the ship and didn’t give a shit about the stuff inside.”
“So the slow zone changed?” Tilly was asking. Anna looked over the guns in the rack, her emotions more under control, but her mind was still racing. The rack was full of pistols of various kinds. Big blocky ones with large barrels and fat magazines. Smaller ones that looked like the kind you saw on cop shows. And in a special rack all their own, tasers like the one she’d had on Europa. Well, not really like it. These were military models. Gray and sleek and efficient-looking, with a much bigger power pack than hers. In spite of their non-lethal purpose, they managed to appear dangerous. Her old taser at home had looked like a small hair dryer.
“Don’t touch those,” the security officer said. Anna hadn’t even realized she was reaching for one until he said it.
“That could mean a damn lot of casualties,” Tilly said. Anna had the feeling she was reentering the conversation after having missed a lot of it.
“Hundreds on the Prince,” the security officer said. “And we weren’t going anywhere near the old speed limit. Some of the ships were. We get no broadcasts from those now.”
Anna looked at the various terminals working in the office around her. Damage reports and security feeds and orders. Anna couldn’t understand much of them. They used a lot of acronyms and numbers for things. Military jargon. One small monitor was displaying pictures of people. Anna recognized James Holden in one, then another version of him with a patchy beard. Wanted posters? But she didn’t recognize any of the other people until the sculpture of the girl that Naomi, Holden’s second-in-command, had blamed for the attack.
“Maybe it was the space girl,” Anna said before she’d realized she was going to. She still felt stoned, and suppressed an urge to giggle.
The security officer and Tilly were both staring at her.
Anna pointed at the screen. “Julie Mao, the girl from Eros. The one the Rocinante blamed. Maybe she did this.”
Both the security officer and Tilly turned to look at the screen. A few seconds later the image of Julie the space girl disappeared and was replaced by someone Anna didn’t recognize.
“Someone’s going to get James Holden in an interrogation room for a few hours, and then we’ll have a much better idea of where to put the blame.”
Tilly just laughed.
“Is that who they blamed?” she said when she’d finished. “That isn’t Julie Mao. And there’s no way Claire’s out here.”
“Claire?” Anna and the officer said at the same time.
“That’s Claire. Clarissa Mao. Julie’s little sister. She’s living on Luna with her mother, last I heard. But that’s definitely not Julie.”
“Are you sure?” Anna said. “Because the executive officer from the Rocinante said—”
“I dandled both those girls on my knee back in the day. The Maos used to be regular guests at our house in Baja. Brought the kids out during the summers to swim and eat fish tacos. And that one is Claire, not Julie.”
“Oh,” said Anna as her drug-enhanced mind ran out the entire plot. The angry girl she’d seen in the galley, the explosion of the UN ship, the ridiculous message from Holden’s ship, followed by the protestations of innocence. “It was her. She blew up the ship.”
“Which ship?” the officer asked.
“The UN ship that blew up. The one that made the Belter ship shoot at Holden. And then we all went through the Ring and she’s here! She’s on this ship right now! I saw her in the galley and I knew there was something wrong with her. She scared me but I should have said something but I didn’t because why would I?”
Tilly and the security man were both staring at her. She could feel her mind running away with her, and her mouth seemed to be working all on its own. They were looking at her like she’d gone insane.
“She’s here,” Anna said, clamping her mouth shut with an effort.
“Claire?” Tilly asked with a frown.
“I saw her in the galley. She threatened me. She was on this ship.”
The security man scowled and tapped something on his terminal, swore, then tapped something else. “I’ll be a sonofabitch. Shipwide face recognition says we’ve got a match in hangar B right now.”
“You have to go arrest her,” Anna shouted.
“Hangar B is a designated emergency area,” the officer said. “She’s probably there with the other survivors and broken in five different places. If it’s even her. Shitty reproduction like that makes for a lot of false positives.”
“You have software that could have found her at any time?” Tilly asked in disbelief. “You didn’t check?”
“Ma’am, we don’t ask ‘how high’ when James f**king Holden says jump,” the officer growled back.
“There’s an airlock in there,” Anna said, stabbing her hand at the display. “She could leave. She could go anywhere.”
“Like where?” the officer replied.
As if on cue, a green airlock cycling alarm appeared on the display.
“We have to go get her,” Anna said, pulling on Tilly’s arm.
“You have to go to the officers’ mess,” the security man said. “I’ll send people to pick her up for questioning as soon as we stop bleeding. Don’t worry about it. We’ve got plenty enough to sort out now. That one’ll wait.”
“But—”
A young man floated into the room. The left half of his face was covered in blood.
“Need the EMTs to six-alpha, sir. We’ve got ten civvies.”
“I’ll see who I can pry free,” the officer said. “Do we know anything about the condition of the injured?”
“Bones sticking out, but they’re not dead.”
Anna pulled Tilly into the corridor.
“We can’t wait. She’s dangerous. She’s already killed people when she blew up the other ship.”