It felt almost like relief.
“I’ve been thinking about your father,” Cortez said as the lift rose toward the transition point, spin gravity ebbing away and the growing Coriolis making everything feel a little bit off. Like a dream or the beginning of an unexpected illness. “He was a very clever man. Brilliant, some would say, and very private in his way.”
He tried to turn the protomolecule into a weapon and sell it to the highest bidder, Clarissa thought. The thought should have stung, but it didn’t. It was just a fact. Iron atoms formed in stars; a Daimo-Koch power relay had one fewer input than the standard models; her father had tried to militarize the protomolecule. He hadn’t known what it was. No one had. That didn’t keep them from playing with it. Seeing what they could do. She had the sudden visual memory of a video she’d seen of a drunken soldier handing his assault rifle to a chimp. What had happened next was either hilarious or tragic, depending on her mood. Her father hadn’t been that different from the chimp. Just on a bigger scale.
“I’m sorry I didn’t have the chance to know him better,” Cortez said.
Ashford and seven of his men were on the lift with them. The captain stood at the front, hands clasped behind his back. Most of his men were Belters too. Long frames, large heads. Ren had had that look too. Like they were all part of the same family. Ashford’s soldiers had sidearms and bulletproof vests. She didn’t. And yet she kept catching them glancing over at her. They still thought of her as Melba. She was the terrorist and murderer with the combat modifications. That she looked like a normal young woman only added to the sense that she was eerie. This was why Ashford had wanted her so badly. She was an adornment. A trophy to show how strong he was and paper over his failure to hold his own ship before.
She wished that one of them would smile at her. The more they acted like she was Melba, the more she felt that version of herself coming back, seeping up into her cognition like ink soaking through paper.
“There was one time your brother Petyr came to the United Nations buildings when I was visiting there.”
“That would have been Michael,” she said. “Petyr hates the UN.”
“Does he?” Cortez said with a gentle laugh. “My mistake.”
The lift reached the axis of the drum, slowing gently so that they could all steady themselves with the handrails and not be launched up into the ceiling. Behind them, a series of vast conduits and transformers powered the long, linear sun of the drum. Before she’d come out to the Ring, she’d never seriously thought about balancing power loads and environmental control systems. That kind of thing had been for other people. Lesser people. Now, with all she’d learned, the scale of the Behemoth’s design was awing. She wished the others could have seen it. Soledad and Bob and Stanni. And Ren.
The doors slid open, and the Belters launched themselves into the transition with the grace of men and women who’d spent their childhoods in low or null g. She and Cortez didn’t embarrass themselves, but they would never have the autonomic grace of a Belter on the float.
The command decks were beautiful. The soft indirect lighting took everyone’s shadows away. Melba launched herself after Ashford and the Belters, swimming through the air like a dolphin in the sea.
The command center itself was beautifully designed. A long, lozenge-shaped room with control boards set into ceramic desks. On one end of the lozenge, a door opened into the captain’s office, on the other, to the security station. The gimbaled crash couches looked less like functional necessities than the natural, beautiful outgrowth of the ship. Like an orchid. The walls were painted with angels and pastoral scenes. The effect was only slightly spoiled by the half dozen access panels that stood open, repairs from the sudden stop still uncompleted. Even the guts of the command center were beautiful in their way. Clarissa found herself wanting to go over and just look in to see if she could make sense of the design.
Three men floated at the control boards, all of them Belters. “Welcome back, Captain,” one of them said.
Ashford sailed through the empty air to the captain’s station. Three of the soldiers drifted out to take positions in the corridor, the others arraying themselves around the room, all with sightlines on the doors leading in. Anyone who tried to take the command center would have to walk through a hailstorm of bullets. Clarissa pulled herself over to the door of the security station, as much to get out of the way as anything, and Cortez followed her, his expression focused, serious, and a little agitated.
Ashford keyed in a series of commands, and his control panel shifted, growing brighter. His eyes tracked over the readouts and screens. Lit from below, he looked less like the man set to save all of humanity at the sacrifice of himself and his crew and more like a lower university science teacher trying to get his simulations to work they way they were meant to.
“Jojo?” he said, and the voice of the prison guard came from the control deck like the man was standing beside them.
“Here, Captain. We’ve got the engineering transition point locked down. Anyone wants to get in here, we’ll give ’em eight kinds of hell.”
“Good man,” Ashford said. “Do we have Chief Engineer Rosenberg?”
“Yes, sir. She’s making the modifications to the comm array now.”
“Still?”
“Still, sir.”
“Thank you,” he said, then tapped the display, his fingertips popping against the screen. “Sam. How long before the modifications are done?”
“Two hours,” she said.
“Why so long?”
“I’m going to have to override every safety device in the control path,” she said. “This thing we’re doing? There’s a lot of built-in design that was meant to keep it from happening.”
Ashford scowled.
“Two hours,” he said, and stabbed the connection closed.
The waiting began. Two hours later, the same woman explained that the targeting system had been shaken out of round by the catastrophe. It just meant a delay getting lock for most purposes, but since this was a one-shot application, she was realigning it. Three more hours. Then she was getting a short loop error that he had to track down. Two more hours.
Clarissa saw Ashford’s mood darken with every excuse, every hour that stretched past. She found the toilets tucked at the back of the security station and started wondering about getting a few tubes of food. If the only working commissary was in the drum, that might actually be a problem. Cortez had strapped himself into a crash couch and slept. The guards slowly became more and more restless. Clarissa spent an hour going from access panel to access panel, looking at the control boards and power relays that fed the bridge. It was surprising how many of them were the same as the ones she’d worked with on the Earth ships coming out. Cut an Earther or a Belter, they both bled the same blood. Crack an access panel on the Behemoth and the Prince, and both ships had the same crappy brownout buffers.