“‘Get back,’” Murtry said with a lazy smile. “Just going to keep him in a holding cell for the next few years? Because I accused him of something?”
“If I have to,” Holden said. “Because I don’t believe for a second that you wouldn’t kill him.”
Murtry shrugged. “Okay. He’s your baggage, then. Just keep him off my planet.”
Basia looked stunned, his eyes focused on nothing in particular. The colonists began organizing a firefighting detail to put the blaze out. Murtry and his team stood and watched, not offering to help, a visible reminder of the threat they presented next to the violence of their handiwork.
Holden headed back into town, Basia and Amos in tow. He patted his pockets looking for his hand terminal before remembering he’d dropped it on the run out to the fight. He’d never find it in the dark, so he borrowed Amos’ and called the ship.
“Naomi,” he said once she’d picked up. “Bring the Roci down to the landing area. We’re going to need you to offload our heavier armor and some bigger firepower.”
“This doesn’t sound good,” she said.
“It’s not. Have you heard back from the UN or Fred yet?”
“Nothing yet. I take it this means RCE and the Ganymede folks aren’t in a big hurry to leave?”
“No,” Holden said with a heavy sigh. “No, they’d rather stay here and kill each other right up until the alien shit starts turning them into spare parts.”
“And you?” she said. She meant was he coming up the well too. It was the sane thing to do.
“Not yet,” he said. “If it escalates any more, maybe.”
“‘It’ the aliens or ‘it’ the people?”
“Right?”
“Alex has seen a few more power spikes, and there’s more movement, but it’s pretty far south of you. If it starts looking more interesting, I’ll let you know.”
“Thank you. Oh, and you’ll be picking up a passenger.”
“Que?”
“It’s complicated, but we’re putting him on the Roci because he isn’t safe down here anymore. I owe this guy, Naomi. He tried to save my life. Take good care of him.”
“Okay.”
“And honey?” Holden said, unable to keep the worry out of his voice. “When you get back up, keep a close eye on the Israel. I think things might be about to go all the way bad down here, and when they do, they may go bad up there too.”
“Ha!” Naomi said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. “Let ’em try.”
Chapter Nineteen: Havelock
The corridor stretched forty meters between the recycling tanks and the secondary machine shop with hatches inset every ten meters. Open lifts at either end led to environmental control fore and hydroponics aft. The age of the Israel showed not only in the design of the walls and the grating of the floor, but also in the green-gray finish of the ceramic. Harsh edges at the doorways marked where safety design had improved in the decades since the ship first flew out past the orbit of Mars. A white scar splashed across one wall where something drastic had happened in some previous era of the ship’s history and been patched like painting over graffiti. Havelock fought the urge to press himself into the corner nearest the doorway.
It was hard. His species had evolved in the gravity well of Earth, had grown and developed in it. His hindbrain told him that pressure meant safety. The angry whispers of the men in the hall set his heart tripping over faster, and the wall, centimeters from his back, seemed to pull at him like a magnet. It was an error waiting to happen. Lean in, push against the wall, and it would push back, sending him out into the open air of the corridor. And the firing lines. The second law of thermodynamics as applied to gunfights.
“Clear,” one of the engineers said, and Havelock was torn between pleasure and annoyance. Not clear, he thought. They hadn’t seen him, so they thought he wasn’t there. He held the gun at his leg, stayed still. Waited. Didn’t hug the wall.
The first man who floated by didn’t notice him until he’d already been shot. Havelock’s paint round bloomed orange against the man’s chest. The one behind him had already launched, his body sailing between one handhold and the next, unable to change his trajectory. Havelock hit him twice, once in the leg, then in the belly. In a real fight, there would be blood in the air now. Fine red droplets spinning into orbs and already coalescing and beginning to clot. The third man was still far enough down the corridor that Havelock didn’t have a clear line of sight. Half a dozen blue paint rounds hissed past him, splattering the ceramic bulkhead. Suppressing fire. Not a bad plan, but there was no one left to exploit it.
Havelock pulled gently at the handhold behind him to keep from drifting out, reloaded his pistol, and counted incoming rounds. The “dead” engineer floated in the corridor, a sour expression on his face. Havelock counted fifteen rounds, then there was a pause and the slick metallic sound of the pistol ejecting the paint round magazine. Havelock pulled a few centimeters forward, looking down the hall. The last man—Williams—hadn’t even taken cover while he fumbled to reload his gun. Havelock fired three times, hitting him only once. The accuracy on the pistols stank, but it was enough to make his point. The last engineer barked out an obscenity.
“All right,” Havelock said into his hand terminal. “That’s a wrap, guys. Let’s get the cleanup crew out, and meet back in the conference room in thirty.”
It was hard to judge the training sessions. On the one hand, they had been going for eight days now, and they were not ready for real action. The engineers weren’t soldiers. The three who’d had some training earlier in life were so out of practice that they were worse than the absolute beginners. At least the novices knew they didn’t know anything.
And on the other hand, they were getting better faster than Havelock had expected. With another week or ten days, they’d be at least as competent as a squad of rookies. Maybe more.
Security trainees were driven by any number of things—the need for a job, an idealistic view of helping people, sometimes just a narcissistic love of violence. The engineers weren’t like that. They were more focused, more driven, and there was a palpable sense of the team against the enemy. Murtry’s defeat of the terrorist cell downstairs left them at once excited and edgy, and Havelock didn’t see anything wrong with the bloodthirst, so long as it was channeled and controlled.
For the next half hour, the engineers and the security team—Havelock and two others from this skeleton crew—went through the corridors, holds, and locks cleaning up the mess from the exercise. The paint polymerized quickly, peeling off the walls and grates without flaking much or leaving fragments on the float that someone could breathe in. The engineers had also manufactured sets of personal vacuuming systems that filtered everything from tiny particles of the paint casing to volatile molecules out of the air. They laughed and joked and traded friendly insults as they worked, like junior belts cleaning a dojang. Havelock hadn’t intended the cleanup as a team-building exercise, but it worked well enough that he was starting to tell himself that he had.
The conference room where they had the orientation before the exercise and the postmortem afterward had been designed for the false gravity of thrust. An oblong table was bolted to the floor with crash couches around it that the engineers didn’t use. Havelock didn’t know how the decision had been made to ignore the table and rotate the consensus for up and down ninety degrees, but every meeting was like that now. The engineers and security floated against the walls or in the open air, the “floor” to their right, and Havelock took his place by the main doors.