“Well, it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” Tilly said once the service was over. She had the twitchy look she got when she wanted a cigarette, but Anna had asked her not to smoke in the meeting tent and she’d agreed. “Though, admittedly, my tolerance for lovey togetherness is low.”
“That’s very flattering,” Anna whispered, then paused to shake hands with a Belter woman who tearfully thanked her for organizing the meeting. Tilly gave the woman her most insincere smile but managed not to roll her eyes.
“I need a drink,” Tilly said once the woman had left. “Come with. I’ll buy you a lemonade.”
“They closed the bar. Rationing.”
Tilly laughed. “I have a supplier. The guy running the rationing sold me a bottle of their best Ganymede hooch for the low price of a thousand dollars. He tossed in the lemonade for free.”
“A thousand—”
“One of two things will happen,” Tilly said, taking out a cigarette and putting it in her mouth but leaving it unlit. “We’ll get out of here, back into the solar system where I’m rich and a thousand bucks doesn’t matter, or we won’t get out and nothing will matter.”
Anna nodded because she didn’t know what else to say. As much as she’d come to enjoy and rely on Tilly’s friendship, she was occasionally reminded how utterly different their worlds were. If she and Nono had an extra thousand UN dollars lying around, it would have immediately gone into Nami’s college fund. Tilly had never in her life had to sacrifice a luxury to get a necessity. If there was any actual mixing in the congregation, it was that. The one thing the Belters and inner planet naval people had in common was that none of them would be drinking thousand-dollar alcohol that night, but Tilly would.
God might not care about financial standing, but He was the only one.
“I admit, lemonade sounds nice,” Anna said, fanning her face with her hand terminal. The Behemoth’s big habitat drum was built to house a lot more people than it currently held, but they’d stripped a lot of the environmental systems out of it when they converted it to a warship. It was starting to seem like they were reaching the atmosphere processing limits. Or maybe just the air conditioning. The temperature was generally higher now than a girl raised in Russia and most recently living on one of Jupiter’s icy moons enjoyed.
After one more tour of the tent to say goodbye to the last lingering remnants of her congregation, Anna followed Tilly out. It wasn’t much cooler outside the tent, but the spin of the drum and the air recycling system did combine to create a gentle breeze. Tilly looked over her flushed red face and sweat-plastered hair with a critical eye and said, “Don’t worry, everyone who’s coming over is here. I heard Cortez talking to some OPA bigwig a couple days ago. This is as hot as it’s going to be. And as soon as they find a way to cool us down that doesn’t involve venting our atmosphere into space, they’ll do it.”
Anna couldn’t help but laugh. When Tilly raised an eyebrow, Anna explained, “We flew across the entire solar system, almost to the orbit of Neptune, a world so cold and distant from the sun we didn’t even know it was there until Bouvard noticed that something was bumping Uranus around.”
Tilly’s eyebrow crept higher. “Okay.”
“And when we get here, who knows how far from the sun and with billions of kilometers of empty space in every direction? We somehow manage to be hot and crowded.”
“Thank God the Belters thought to bring this rattletrap with them,” Tilly said, ducking to enter her tent. She flopped down into a folding chair and started rummaging in a plastic cooler next to it. “Can you imagine trying to stuff everyone onto the Prince? We’d be twelve to a bunk there. Lovely culture, these Belters.”
Anna pulled her cassock off and laid it over the edge of Tilly’s cot. Underneath she was wearing a white blouse and a knee-length skirt that was much less stifling. Tilly pulled a plastic bulb of lemonade out of the cooler and handed it to her, then poured herself a glass of something as clear as water that smelled like hospital cleanser. When Anna took the bulb she was surprised to find it cold. Small drops of condensation were already forming on its surface. She put the cool bottle against the back of her neck and felt a delightful chill run down her spine.
“How did you manage ice?”
“Dry ice,” Tilly said around a lit cigarette, then paused to down her first shot. “Apparently it’s easy for the people in atmosphere processing to make. Lots of carbon dioxide just lying around.”
If Tilly was spending a thousand dollars a bottle for the antiseptic she was drinking, Anna didn’t want to know what a steady supply of ice was costing her. They drank in companionable silence for a while, the cool lemonade doing wonders for Anna’s heat exhaustion. Tilly brought up the idea of finding something to eat, and they wandered out of her tent in search of a supply kiosk.
There were people walking through the crowded tent city carrying guns.
“This looks bad,” Tilly said. It did. These weren’t bored security officers with holstered sidearms. These were grim-faced Belter men and women with assault rifles and shotguns carried in white-knuckled grips. The group moving between the tents was at least a dozen strong, and they were looking for something. Or someone.
Anna tugged at Tilly’s sleeve. “Maybe we should try to get people to go back to the church tent to wait this out.”
“Annie, if the bullets start flying in here, even God can’t make that tent a safe place to hide. I want to know what’s going on.”
Anna reluctantly followed her in a path that paralleled the armed group, which moved with purpose, occasionally stopping to look in tents or quietly question people. Anna began to feel very frightened without being sure why.
“Oh,” Tilly said. “Here we go.”
Bull’s second-in-command—Serge was his name, Anna thought—rounded one of the larger tents trailing half a dozen security people behind him. They were all armed as well, though only with handguns. Even to Anna’s untrained eye, the difference between six people with pistols and twelve people with rifles was dramatic. Serge had a faint smile on his face as though he hadn’t noticed. Anna saw the muscular young woman from the security office standing behind him, though her face was a worried scowl. Oddly enough, seeing someone else look worried made Anna feel better.
“No guns in the drum, sa sa?” Serge said to the armed Belter group, though the volume of his voice made it clear he was speaking to the onlookers as well. “Drop ’em.”
“You have guns,” a Belter woman said with a sneer. She held a rifle at the ready.
“We’re the cops,” Serge said, placing one hand on the butt of his gun and grinning back at her.
“Not anymore,” she replied and in one quick movement shifted her rifle and shot him in the head. A tiny hole appeared in his forehead, and a cloud of pink mist sprayed into the air behind him. He sank slowly to the floor, an expression of vague puzzlement on his face.
Anna felt her gorge rise, and had to double over and pant to keep from vomiting. “Jesus Christ,” Tilly said in a strangled whisper. The speed with which the situation had gone from unsettling to terrifying took Anna’s breath away. I’ve just seen a man have his brains blown out. Even after the horrors of the slow zone catastrophe, it was the worst thing she’d ever seen. The security man hadn’t thought the woman would shoot him, hadn’t suspected the true nature of the threat, and the price he’d paid for it was everything.