Corey, James S. A - Expanse 03 - Abaddon's Gate by Corey James S. A

Author:Corey, James S. A [Corey, James S. A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2013-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Six: Bull

Voices. Light. A sense of wrongness deep in places he couldn’t identify. Bull tried to grit his teeth and found his jaw already clenched hard enough to ache. Someone cried out, but he didn’t know where from.

The light caught his attention. Simple white LED with a sanded backsplash to diffuse it. An emergency light. The kind that came on when power was down. It hurt to look at, but he did, using it to focus. If he could make that make sense, everything else would come. A chiming alarm kept tugging at his attention, coming from outside. In the corridor. Bull’s mind tried to slide that way, going into the corridor, out into the wide, formless chaos, and he pulled it back to the light. It was like trying to wake up except he was already awake.

Slowly, he recognized the alarm as something he’d hear in the medical bay. He was in the medical bay, strapped onto a bed. The tugging sensation at his arm was a forced IV. With a moment of nauseating vertigo, his perception of the world shifted—he wasn’t standing, he was lying down. Meaningless distinctions without gravity, but human brains couldn’t seem to help trying to assert direction on the directionless. His neck ached. His head ached. Something else felt wrong.

There were other people in the bay. Men and women on every bed, most with their eyes closed. A new alarm sounded, the woman in the bay across from him losing blood pressure. Crashing. Dying. He shouted, and a man in a nurse’s uniform came floating past. He adjusted something on her bed’s control board, then pushed off and away. Bull tried to grab him as he went by, but he couldn’t.

He’d been in his office. Serge had already gone for the night. A few minor incidents were piled up from the day, the constant friction of a large, poorly disciplined crew. Like everyone else, he’d been waiting to see whether Holden and the Martians came back out of the station. Or if something else would. The fear had made sleep unlikely. He started watching the presentation that the Rocinante had sent, James Holden looking surprisingly young and charming saying, This is what we’re calling the slow zone. He remembered noticing that everyone had accepted Holden’s name for the place, and wondered whether it was just that the man had gotten there first or if there was something about charisma that translated across the void.

And then he’d been here. Someone had attacked, then. A torpedo had gotten past their defenses or else sabotage. Maybe the whole damn ship was just coming apart.

There was a comm interface on the bed. He pulled it over, logged in, and used his security override to open its range to the full ship and not just the nurses’ station. He requested a connection to Sam, and a few heartbeats later she appeared on the screen. Her hair was floating around her head. Null g always made him think of drowned people.

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