Now it was Pa’s turn to smile. She looked tired. She looked old.
“You didn’t make any decisions for me,” she said. “If I’m paying for my sins, at least give me that they’re mine.”
Her gaze jumped up from the terminal’s camera toward something off the screen. Her lips pressed thin and the connection dropped. Bull had to fight not to request another connection, just so he could know what happened. But there wasn’t time. He had to hurry. He tried connections to Ruiz in infrastructure and Chen without getting replies. He wondered how many supporters Ashford had gotten from the upper ranks of the staff. He cursed himself for having let Ashford pass under his radar. But he’d been so busy…
He tried Sam, and almost as soon as he put in the request, she was there.
“We got a problem,” he said. “Ashford’s trying to take back the ship. He’s got security already.”
“And engineering,” Sam said.
Bull licked his lips.
“Where are you, Sam?”
“Right now? Funny you should ask. Engineering. Ashford left about five minutes ago. Had a little wish list of things he’d like me to do and about two dozen fellas with guns and scowls. That man’s lost his shit, Bull. Seriously. He used to be a prick, but… He wants me to take out the Ring. Your comm laser trick? He wants it overclocked.”
“You got to be kidding me.”
“Not.”
“He’s looking to nuke the way home?”
“Calls it saving humanity from the alien threat,” Sam said sweetly. Her eyes were hard.
“All right,” Bull said, even though nothing about this was all right.
“And he’s not at all happy with you. Are you someplace safe?”
Bull looked up and down the corridor. There wasn’t cover. And even if there was, he was one man in a modified lifting mech and no spinal cord past the middle of his back.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think I am.”
“Might want to get moving.”
“I’ve got no place safe to go,” Bull said.
Someone on the other end of the connection shouted and Sam looked up at them.
“I’m trying to scramble up all the technicians I can,” she shouted back. “Things have been a tiny bit disorganized. Had a little trouble with the rules of physics changing on us. Maybe you noticed.”
The first voice shouted again. Bull couldn’t hear the words, but he knew the timbre of the voice. Garza. The guy who’d always gotten bulbs of coffee for whoever was stuck in the security office. Garza was one of theirs. Bull wished he’d gotten to know the man better. Especially after the catastrophe, he should have been checking in with his staff more. He should have seen this all coming.
This was his fault. All of this was his fault.
Sam looked back down at the screen. At him.
“Okay, sweetie,” she said. “You should get scarce. Head for the second level, section M. There’s a bunch of empty storage there. The door codes are all on default. Straight zeros.”
“Why are they on default?”
“Because there’s nothing in them, bossypants, and changing the locks on all the empties never made the top of my to-do list. Is this really the time?”
“Sorry,” Bull said.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Both of us under a little stress right now. Just get your head down before someone knocks it off. And Pa—”
“Pa knows. She’s heading for safety too.”
“All right, then. I’ll try to get you some help.”
“No,” Bull said. “You don’t know who you can trust.”
“Yes, I do,” Sam said. “Let’s don’t argue in front of the children.”
A voice brought him back to the corridor, the medical center. Not the groans of the wounded, not the professional calm of the nurses. Someone was excited and aggressive. Angry. Someone answered in a lower voice, and the first one came back with Do I look like I care? It was trouble, and despite everything, his first impulse was to turn toward it. His job was to get in the middle of things, to make sure that no one got hurt, and if anyone did, it was him. Him first, then the bad guys.
“I got to go,” he said, and dropped the connection. It only took a second to stow his hand terminal and get his palms back on the mech’s controls. Long enough for him to fight back his instincts. He shifted the mech to head down the corridor, away from the voices. They were Ashford’s people. Ashford and whoever was backing him. If he got caught now, he wouldn’t be any use to anybody. Chances were they’d just kill him. Might not even get as far as the airlock first. The mech’s legs moved slowly. Even full-out, it didn’t go more than a modest walk. The voices behind him shifted. Something crashed. He heard his doctor shouting now and waited for the report of gunfire. If they started shooting, he’d have to go back. The mech inched toward the farther door, toward the exit and what passed for safety. Bull pressed the joystick forward so hard his fingers ached, as if the force would make the machine understand the danger.
The voices got louder, coming close. Bull shifted the mech so that it was walking along the wall. If someone came around the corner behind him, it would give him an extra fraction of a second before he was seen. The thick metal legs slid forward, shifted weight, shifted again.
The doorway was six feet away. Four. Three. He let go of the controls and reached out for the door a little too soon and had to inch the mech forward before he tried again. He was sweating, and he hoped it was only fear. If something in his guts had given way, he wouldn’t have known. Probably it was just fear.
The door opened, and he slammed the little joystick forward again. The mech took him through, and he closed the door behind him. He didn’t have time to wait or think. He angled the mech down another hall toward the internal lifts and the long trip to second level, section M.
The great interior halls and passageways of the Behemoth had never seemed less like home. As he descended, the spin gravity grew almost imperceptibly stronger. His numb flesh sat a little heavier in its harness. He was going to have to get someone to change out his piss bag soon unless he could figure out some way to get his arms inside the mech’s frame, but his elbows only bent one direction, so that seemed unlikely. And if his spine didn’t grow back, if they didn’t get the Behemoth and everyone else back out of the trap the protomolecule had caught them in, he’d live like this until he died.