“Yeah,” he said sourly. “I know where we’re going. May be a little dangerous getting there. Ashford’s people are all through the drum.”
“Not as many as there were when we started,” Amos said. Bull didn’t ask what he meant.
“Lead on,” Holden said. “We’ll follow you.”
Bull tapped his fingers on the joysticks. Embarrassment and shame clawed their way up his guts. A shadow of confusion crossed Holden’s face. Bull felt a stab of disgust with himself. He was about to put a bunch of civilians in danger in order to draw Ashford’s attention, he was going to do it of his own free will, and he was ashamed of the things that he didn’t actually have any control over. He didn’t know what that said about him, but he figured it couldn’t be good.
Radio Free Slow Zone was in what had once been the colonial administrative offices. The narrow office spaces had been designed into the walls and bulkheads of the original ship, back when it had been the Nauvoo, and the amount of work it would have taken to strip the cubicles back until the space could be used for something else had never been worth the effort. Bull had given it to Monica Stuart and her crew because it was a cheap favor. Something he didn’t need—the old offices—for something he did: a familiar face and reassuring voice to help make the Behemoth into the gathering place for the full and fractured fleet.
The broadcast studio was a sheet of formed green plastic that someone had pried off the floor and set on edge. The lights were jerry-rigged and stuck to whatever surfaces came to hand. Bull recognized most of the faces, though he didn’t know many of them. Monica Stuart, of course. Her production team was down to an Earther woman named Okju and a dark-skinned Martian called Clip. Holden had called his crew there, but they hadn’t arrived yet.
Bull considered the space from a tactical point of view. It wouldn’t be hard to block off accessways. The little half walls provided a lot of cover, and they were solid enough to stop most slug throwers. An hour or two with some structural steel and a couple welders and the place could be almost defensible. He hoped it wouldn’t need to be. Except that he hoped it would.
“We went black as soon as the fighting started,” Monica said. “Thought it would be better not to go off half-cocked.”
“Good plan,” Bull said, and his hand terminal chimed. He held up a finger and fumbled to accept the connection. Corin’s face flickered to life. She looked pale. Shell-shocked. He knew the expression.
“How bad?”
“I’ve got about thirty people, sir,” Corin said. “Armed and armored. We control the commissary and most of the civilians. Once Ashford got control of the transition points, he mostly fell back.”
“Pa?”
“Alive,” Corin said. “Pretty beat up, but alive.”
“We’ll call that a win.”
“We lost Serge,” Corin said, her voice flat and calm. That was it, then. Bull felt I’m sorry coming by reflex and pushed it back. Later. He could offer sympathy later. Right now, he only had room for strong.
“All right,” he said. “Bring whoever you can spare to the colonial administrative offices. And weapons. All the weapons we’ve got, bring them here.”
“New headquarters?”
“Security station in exile,” Bull said, and Corin almost smiled. There was no joy in it, but maybe a little amusement. Good enough for now. She saluted, and he returned the gesture as best he could before dropping the connection.
“So this is a coup,” Monica said.
“Counter-countercoup, technically,” Bull said. “Here’s what I need you to do. I want you reporting on what’s going on here. Broadcast. The Behemoth, the other ships in the fleet. Hell, tell the station if you think it’ll listen. Captain Ashford was relieved for mental health reasons. The trauma was too much for him. He and a few people who are still personally loyal to him have holed up in command, and the security team of the Behemoth is going to extract him.”
“And is any of that true?”
“Maybe half,” Bull said.
Behind Monica’s back, the wide-set Earther woman named Okju looked up and then away.
“I’m not a propagandist,” Monica said.
“Ashford’s going to get us all killed,” Bull said. “Maybe everyone back home too, if he does what he’s thinking. The catastrophe? Everything we’ve been through here? These were the kid gloves. He’s trying to start a real fight.”
It was strange how saying the words himself made them seem real in a way that hearing from Holden hadn’t. He still wasn’t sure whether he believed it was true, even. But right now, it needed to be, and so it was. Monica’s eyes went a little rounder and bright red splotches appeared on her cheeks.
“When this is over,” she said, “I want the full story. Exclusive. Everything that’s really going on. Why it came down the way it did. In-depth interviews with all the players.”
“Can’t speak for anyone but myself right now,” Bull said. “But that’s a fair deal by me. Also, I need you to talk the other ships in the fleet into shutting down their reactors and power grids, pulling the batteries out of every device they can find that’s got them.”
“Because?”
“We’re trying to get the lockdown on the ships taken off,” he said. “Let us go home. And if we can’t stop Ashford, getting off lockdown is the only chance we’ve got to keep the station from retaliating against the folks on the other side of the Ring.”
And because if the insults and provocations, the false threats and misdirections all failed, that would be enough. If Ashford could see the other plan coming together, if he could see his heroic gesture, his grand sacrifice being taken away, he would come. He’d do whatever he could to shut down the studio, and every gun that came here was one less that would be at engineering or command.
Monica looked nonplussed.
“And how am I going to convince them to do that, exactly?”
“I have an idea about that,” Bull said. “I know this priest lady who’s got people from damn near every ship out here coming to her services. I’m thinking we recruit her.”
Even, he didn’t say, if it puts her in the firing line.
Chapter Forty-Two: Clarissa
T
he end came. All the running around stopped, and a kind of calm descended on Ashford. On Cortez. All of them. The order went out to secure the transition points. No one was passing into or out of the drum. Not now. Not ever again.