“That’s not good,” Holden said. “We shouldn’t do that.”
“I had an aftermarket override in place. No one changes my environmental settings without my say-so,” Clarissa said, as calmly as if she didn’t mean, My paranoia just saved our lives. “I’d like to know what’s going on, though.”
“Engineering, the machine shop, and the reactor are all locked down,” Naomi said, scrolling through system screens faster than Holden could follow. “I think I’ve got the drive shut down, but I can’t—”
But Holden was already pulling himself out of the room. Amos hauled himself flat against the wall of the corridor as he flew past, then followed along behind him. Through the galley, to the lift, then down one level. His heart was tripping over, the pulse tapping at his eardrums, but it was just adrenaline. Just fear. There wasn’t anything wrong with the air.
He hoped that was true.
The brig wasn’t really a brig so much as one of the crew cabins that had been set aside, the door controls isolated from the system and disabled on the inside. Over the years, nearly a dozen prisoners had spent days or weeks or months in it. Now the door stood halfway open, the control panel flickering and throwing error codes. Holden pulled himself toward it cautiously—doors and corners were where they got you—but when he reached it, he was already sure what he’d find.
The cabin stood empty apart from bits of floating debris. Anti-spalling cloth floated in ribbons. Bits of fluff from the mattress, like February snowflakes that never fell. Bright lines showed where the storage drawer had been pried off its runners and a length of the guide pulled free. A wall screen floated beside the bunk, and the exposed electronics showed where the door locks had been shorted out.
The governor of Freehold was nowhere to be seen.
“Well,” Amos said. “That’s new.”
Chapter Seven: Bobbie
There was a certain luxury to the thrust gravity of steady acceleration. Hooking your nethers to a vacuum toilet was one of the indignities space travel occasionally forced you into. On the float, with nothing to pull your waste away, it was that or have pee globes sharing your living space. Being able to just sit on a toilet in the crew head and relax for a moment while you did your business was something to appreciate. The fact that it felt like a luxury was also probably not very dignified, if you looked at it too closely.
Bobbie was just reaching behind her for the cleaning-pad dispenser mounted on the bulkhead when the gravity went off with no warning. The momentum of her twisting torso sent her floating off the toilet seat and into the air, pants still around her knees. Thankfully, the Roci immediately fired up the vacuum system on the toilet and spared her having to dodge floating waste.
While she tumbled through the air tugging at her waistband, she yelled, “Roci, get me the bridge!”
“Yo,” Alex replied almost immediately. “Where are you—”
“Not even a fucking warning light? I’m down in the head, taking a leak, and suddenly I’m trying to pull my pants up on the float!”
“Wasn’t my plan,” Alex said. “Looks like … Ah. Hold on.”
The system link picked up Naomi’s voice coming through a different channel. Alex? Everything all right?
“I was about to ask you,” Alex said. “We have a change of plan? Naomi? Um, Bobbie? I think we may have a situation.”
All it took was the tone of Alex’s voice. Bobbie planted one foot against a bulkhead, hooked a handhold with the other, and yanked up her pants.
“Copy that,” she said, the flat, emotionless tones of the old Marine taking over. “On the move.”
She found Holden and Amos floating just inside the door of their makeshift brig when she arrived. They were examining a wall screen that someone had pried out of the wall. The prisoner wasn’t there.
“How long has he been out?” Bobbie asked as she came to a stop with one hand on the doorframe.
“Roci started throwing errors from this door almost an hour ago,” Amos said with a grimace. “This is on me, Cap. Shoulda been paying attention, but I was—”
“Forget it,” Holden said. “Let’s just keep him from doing any more damage.”
“He’s down in engineering, if he was able to kill the drive and spin the ship,” Bobbie said.
“That’s where he is,” Holden said. “Naomi’s working to keep him from making too big a mess, but she’s working remotely, and this guy has demonstrated surprising technical skills.”
“Options?” Bobbie asked. The tactical situation wasn’t optimal. If the prisoner was locked in engineering and had also managed to seal off the machine shop above it, then they’d need to cut or breach two doors just to get to him. Even with Naomi hacking the control systems, physical proximity to the reactor gave Houston options she just didn’t have. And Bobbie didn’t like him having.
Holden drummed his fingers on his leg for a moment, the movement imparting an almost imperceptible spin to him as he floated.
“If he feels like he has no way out, he might blow the reactor out of spite,” Holden said, mirroring Bobbie’s own thoughts. “So a standard breach has to be last choice. Amos, you’re in charge of that. Have Clarissa help you hotwire the door sensor to the machine shop so you can cut it without Houston knowing. Then put a mining charge on the door to engineering and wait for my signal.”
“Got it,” Amos said and pushed off down the corridor. He already had his terminal out, and was saying, “Peaches? Meet me at the machine shop hatch …”
“If I’m not breaching, then—” Bobbie started, but Holden cut her off with a shake of his head.
“I want you using the aft maintenance hatch. You can come in from behind. Keep us from doing a very risky breach.”
“Okay,” Bobbie said, stretching the word out. “But, that access is unusable with the drive on.”
“Naomi will make sure it stays off.”
“And if she doesn’t.”
“You’ll get cooked,” Holden said with a nod. “But we’re playing against the clock here. We don’t know how long we’ve got until Houston decides dying in a fireball is more romantic than jail.”
“Betsy won’t fit into that tight maintenance crawl.”
“No, she won’t,” Holden agreed. “Pretty sure you can still kick this guy’s ass, though.”
“Not in doubt.”
“Then gear up, Marine. You’re going outside.”
Bobbie wasn’t really much of a ship mechanic, but she knew how to turn a wrench or draw a straight bead with a welding torch. Over her last couple decades of making the Rocinante her home she’d spent a fair amount of time outside the ship. Sometimes with Amos, who called her Babs for a reason only he understood, and who often assumed she knew what she was doing even when she didn’t. Sometimes with Clarissa, who occasionally slipped and called her Roberta, and who explained every procedure in the exhaustive detail you’d use with someone who knew nothing.
And, almost without her knowing it, they’d become her family. She still had brothers and nieces and nephews back on Mars related to her by blood, but she rarely spoke to them. Even then it was always in a recorded message fired across space on the end of a laser. Instead, she had Amos, the gruff big brother who’d let her fuck up on a repair job and just laugh at her, but then fix it later and never mention it again. And she had Clarissa, the annoying know-it-all little sister who wrapped herself in rules and procedure lists and formality like a shell around her fragile center.
And then Holden and Naomi, who couldn’t help but become the parents of the ship. Alex, the best friend she’d ever had, and the person she’d realized recently she had every intention of growing old with, in spite of never having seen him naked. It was an odd group of people to fall in love with, to adopt as your own kin and tribe, but there it was, and she wasn’t ever going back.
And now Payne Houston was threatening them.
“You fucked up, man,” she said to herself as she drifted to a stop over the reactor-bay emergency-access panel. “You just fucked all the way up.”
“Repeat?” Alex said quietly in her ear. Bobbie realized she’d left the channel open and the volume low as she’d made the climb down from the crew airlock to the rear of the ship.
“Nothing,” she said, turning the volume back up. “I’m in position.”
“Patching you back into the master channel,” Alex replied, and then suddenly there were half a dozen voices breathing in her ear.
“Sound off,” Holden said.
“We got through the machine shop door okay, and Peaches says no alerts were triggered. Breaching charge is ready. Just call it.” Amos’ voice, calm and faintly amused. He could have been reporting football scores.
“I’ve got the Roci in diagnostic mode, so she’s asking me to verify any orders coming from the engineering console,” Naomi’s voice said. “But that can’t last. Pretty soon he can just start breaking things the old-fashioned way.”
“Draper here. I’m outside the emergency-access hatch.”