“All correct, then,” Diogo said. “Buona morte.”
“Buona morte,” Miller said, and shut off his radio. The universe was silent. The stars below him shifted slowly but perceptibly as the station he hung from spun. One of those lights was the Rocinante. Two others were the ships Holden had been sent out to stall. Miller couldn’t pick them out. Julie floated beside him, her dark hair floating in the vacuum, the stars shining through her. She looked peaceful.
If you had it to do again, she said. If you could do it all over from the beginning?
“I wouldn’t,” he said.
He watched the OPA transport ship start up its engines, glowing gold and white, and pull away until it was a star again. A small one. And then lost. Miller turned and considered the dark, empty moonscape and the permanent night.
He just needed to be with her for another few hours, and they would both be safe. They would all be safe. It was enough. Miller found himself smiling and weeping, the tears tracking up from his eyes and into his hair.
It’s going to be fine, Julie said.
“I know,” Miller said.
He stood silently for almost an hour, then turned and made his slow, precarious way back to the sacrificed ship, down the airlock, and into the dim belly. There was enough residual atmosphere that he didn’t need to sleep in his suit. He stripped naked, chose an acceleration couch, and curled up on the hard blue gel. Not twenty meters away, five fusion devices powerful enough to outshine the sun waited for a signal. Above him, everything that had once been human in Eros Station changed and re-formed, pouring from one shape to another like Hieronymous Bosch made real. And still almost a day away, the Nauvoo, the hammer of God, hurtled toward him.
Miller set his suit to play some old pop tunes he’d enjoyed when he was young and let himself be sung to sleep. When he dreamed, he dreamed he’d found a tunnel at the back of his old hole on Ceres that meant he would at last, at last, be free.
His last breakfast was a hard kibble bar and a handful of chocolate scrounged from a forgotten survival pack. He ate it with tepid recycled water that tasted of iron and rot. The signals from Eros were almost drowned by the oscillating frequencies blasting out from the station above him, but Miller made out enough to know where things stood.
Holden had won, much as Miller had expected him to. The OPA was responding to a thousand angry accusations from Earth and Mars and, in the true and permanent style, factions within the OPA itself. It was too late. The Nauvoo was due in hours now. The end was coming.
Miller put on his suit for the last time, turned out the lights, and crawled back up the airlock. For a long moment, the exterior release didn’t respond, the safety lights glowing red, and he had a stab of fear that he would spend his last moments there, trapped in a tube like a torpedo ready to fire. But he cycled the lock’s power, and it opened.
The Eros feed was wordless now, with only a soft murmuring like water over stone. Miller walked out across the wide mouth of the docking bays. The sky above him turned, and the Nauvoo rose from the horizon like sun. His splayed hand held at full arm’s length wasn’t big enough to cover the glow of its engines. He hung by his boots, watching the ship approach. The phantom Julie watched with him.
If he’d done the math right, the Nauvoo’s impact site would be at the center of Eros’ major axis. Miller would be able to see it when it happened, and the giddy excitement in his chest reminded him of being young. It would be a show. Oh, it would be something to see. He considered recording it. His suit would be able to make a simple visual file and stream the data out in real time. But no. This was his moment. His and Julie’s. The rest of humanity could guess what it had been like if they cared.
The massive glow of the Nauvoo filled a quarter of the sky now, and the full circle of it was free of the horizon. The Eros feed’s soft murmur shifted to something more clearly synthetic: a rising, spiraling sound that reminded him for no particular reason of the green sweeping radar screens of ancient films. There were voices at the back of it, but he couldn’t make out the words or even the language.
The great torch of the Nauvoo was a full half of the sky, the stars around it blotted out by the light of full burn. Miller’s suit chirped a radiation warning and he shut it off.
A manned Nauvoo would never have sustained a burn like that; even in the best couch, the thrust gravity would have pulped bones. He tried to guess how fast the ship would be going when it hit.
Fast enough. That was all that mattered. Fast enough.
There, in the center of the fiery bloom, Miller saw a dark spot, no more than the dot of a pencil’s tip. The ship itself. He took a deep breath. When he closed his eyes, the light pressed red through his lids. When he opened them again, the Nauvoo had length. Shape. It was a needle, an arrow, a missile. A fist rising from the depths. For the first time in memory, Miller felt awe.
Eros shouted.
“DON’T YOU FUCKING TOUCH ME!”
Slowly, the bloom of engine fire changed from a circle to an oval to a great feathery plume, the Nauvoo itself showing silver in rough profile. Miller gaped.
The Nauvoo had missed. It had turned. It was right now, right now, speeding past Eros and not into it. But he hadn’t seen any kind of maneuvering rockets fire. And how would you turn something that big, moving that quickly, so abruptly that it would veer off between one breath and the next without also tearing the ship apart? The acceleration g alone…
Miller looked at the stars as if there was some answer written in them. And to his surprise, there was. The sweep of the Milky Way, the infinite scattering of stars were still there. But the angles had changed. The rotation of Eros had shifted. Its relation to the plane of the ecliptic.
For the Nauvoo to change course at the last minute without falling apart would have been impossible. And so it hadn’t happened. Eros was roughly six hundred cubic kilometers. Before Protogen, it had housed the second-largest active port in the Belt.
And without so much as overcoming the grip of Miller’s magnetic boots, Eros Station had dodged.
Chapter Forty-Nine: Holden
Holy shit,” said Amos in a flat voice.
“Jim,” Naomi said to Holden’s back, but he waved her off and opened a channel to Alex in the cockpit.
“Alex, did we just see what my sensors say we saw?”
“Yeah, Cap,” the pilot replied. “Radar and scopes are both sayin’ Eros jumped two hundred klicks spinward in a little less than a minute.”
“Holy shit,” Amos repeated in exactly the same emotionless tone. The metallic bang of deck hatches opening and closing echoed through the ship, signaling Amos’ approach up the crew ladder.
Holden shook off the flush of irritation he felt at Amos’ leaving his post. He’d deal with that later. He needed to be sure that the Rocinante and her crew hadn’t just experienced a group hallucination.
“Naomi, give me comms,” he said.
Naomi turned around in her chair to face him, her face ashen.
“How can you be so calm?” she asked.
“Panic won’t help. We need to know what’s going on before we can plan intelligently. Please transfer the comms to me.”
“Holy shit,” Amos said as he climbed into the ops deck. The deck hatch shut with a punctuating bang.
“I don’t remember ordering you to leave your post, sailor,” Holden said.
“Plan intelligently,” Naomi said like they were words in a foreign language that she almost understood. “Plan intelligently.”
Amos threw himself at a chair hard enough that the cushioning gel grabbed him and kept him from bouncing off.
“Eros is really fucking big,” Amos said.
“Plan intelligently,” Naomi repeated, speaking to herself now.
“I mean, really fucking big,” Amos said. “Do you know how much energy it took to spin that rock up? I mean, it took years to do that shit.”
Holden put his headset on to drown Amos and Naomi out, and called up Alex again.
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“Alex, is Eros still changing velocity?”
“No, Cap. Just sitting there like a rock.”
“Okay,” Holden said. “Amos and Naomi are vapor locked. How are you doing?”
“Not taking my hands off the stick while that bastard is anywhere in my space, that’s for damn sure.”
Thank God for military training, Holden thought.
“Good, keep us at a constant distance of five thousand klicks until I say otherwise. Let me know if it moves again, even an inch.”
“Roger that, Cap,” said Alex.
Holden took off his headset and turned to face the rest of the crew. Amos was looking at the ceiling, ticking points off with his fingers, his eyes unfocused.
“-don’t really remember the mass of Eros off the top of my head… ” he was saying to no one in particular.
“About seven thousand trillion kilos,” Naomi replied. “Give or take. And the heat signature’s up about two degrees.”
“Jesus,” the mechanic said. “I can’t do that math in my head. That much mass coming up two degrees like that?”
“A lot,” Holden said. “So let’s move on-”
“About ten exajoules,” Naomi said. “That’s just off the top of my head, but I’m not off by an order of magnitude or anything.”
Amos whistled.
“Ten exajoules is like, what, a two-gigaton fusion bomb?”
“It’s about a hundred kilos converted directly to energy,” Naomi said. Her voice began to steady. “Which, of course, we couldn’t do. But at least whatever they did wasn’t magic.”
Holden’s mind grabbed on to her words with an almost physical sensation. Naomi was, in fact, about the smartest person he knew. She had just spoken directly to the half-articulated fear he’d been harboring since Eros had jumped sideways: that this was magic, that the protomolecule didn’t have to obey the laws of physics. Because if that was true, humans didn’t stand a chance.
“Explain,” he said.
“Well,” she replied, tapping on her keypad. “Heating Eros up didn’t move it. So I assume that means it was waste heat from whatever it was they actually did.”
“And that means?”
“That entropy still exists. That they can’t convert mass to energy with perfect efficiency. That their machines or processes or whatever they use to move seven thousand trillion tons of rock wastes some energy. About a two-gigaton bomb’s worth of it.”
“Ah.”
“You couldn’t move Eros two hundred kilometers with a two-gigaton bomb,” Amos said with a snort.
“No, you couldn’t,” Naomi replied. “This is just the leftovers. Heat by-product. Their efficiency is still off the charts, but it isn’t perfect. Which means the laws of physics still hold. Which means it isn’t magic.”
“Might as well be,” Amos said.
Naomi looked at Holden.
“So, we-” he started when Alex interrupted over the shipwide comm.
“Cap, Eros is movin’ again.”
“Follow it, get me a course and speed as soon as you can,” Holden said, turning back to his console. “Amos, get back down to engineering. If you leave it again without a direct order, I’ll have the XO beat you to death with a pipe wrench.”
The only reply was the hiss of the deck hatch opening and the bang as it closed behind the descending mechanic.
“Alex,” Holden said, staring at the data stream the Rocinante was feeding him about Eros. “Tell me something.”
“Sunward is all we know for sure,” Alex replied, his voice still calm and professional. When Holden had been in the military, he’d been officer track right from the start. He’d never been to military pilot school, but he knew that years of training had compartmentalized Alex’s brain into two halves: piloting problems and, secondarily, everything else. Matching Eros and getting a course for it was the former. Extra-solar space aliens trying to destroy humanity wasn’t a piloting issue and could be safely ignored until he left the cockpit. He might have a nervous breakdown afterward, but until then, Alex would keep doing his job.
“Drop back to fifty thousand klicks and maintain a constant distance,” Holden told him.
“Huh,” said Alex. “Maintainin’ a constant distance might be tough, Cap. Eros just disappeared off the radar.”
Holden felt his throat go tight.
“Say again?”
“Eros just disappeared off the radar,” Alex was saying, but Holden was already punching up the sensor suite to check for himself. His telescopes showed the rock still moving on its new course toward the sun. Thermal imaging showed it as slightly warmer than space. The weird feed of voices and madness that had been leaking out of the station was still detectable, if faint. But radar said there was nothing there.
Magic, a small voice at the back of his mind said again.
No, not magic. Humans had stealth ships too. It was just a matter of absorbing the radar’s energy rather than reflecting it. But suddenly, keeping the asteroid in visual range became all the more important. Eros had shown that it could move fast and maneuver wildly, and it was now invisible to radar. It was entirely possible that a mountain-sized rock could disappear completely.
Gravity began to pile up as the Roci chased Eros toward the sun.
“Naomi?”
She looked up at him. The fear was still in her eyes, but she was holding it together. For now.
“Jim?”
“The comm? Could you…?”
The chagrin on her face was the most reassuring thing he’d seen in hours. She shifted control to his station, and he opened a connection request.
“UNN corvette, this is the Rocinante, please respond.”
“Go ahead, Rocinante,” the other ship said after half a minute of static.
“Calling to confirm our sensor data,” Holden said, then transmitted the data regarding Eros’ movement. “You guys seeing the same thing?”
Another delay, this one longer.
“Roger that, Rocinante.”
“I know we were just about to shoot each other and all, but I think we’re a little past that now,” Holden said. “Anyway, we’re chasing the rock. If we lose sight of it, we might never find it again. Want to come with? Might be nice to have some backup if it decides to shoot at us or something.”
Another delay, this one almost two minutes long; then a different voice came on the line. Older, female, and totally lacking the arrogance and anger of the young male voice he’d been dealing with so far.
“Rocinante, this is Captain McBride of the UNN Escort Vessel Ravi.” Ah, thought Holden. I’ve been talking to the first officer all along. The captain finally took the horn. That might be a good sign. “I’ve sent word to fleet command, but it’s a twenty-three minute lag right now, and that rock’s putting on speed. You have a plan?”
“Not really, Ravi. Just follow and gather intel until we find an opportunity to do something that makes a difference. But if you came along, maybe none of your people will shoot at us accidentally while we figure it out.”
There was a long pause. Holden knew that the captain of the Ravi was weighing the chance that he was telling the truth against the threat he’d made against their science vessel. What if he was in on whatever was happening? He’d be wondering the same thing in their position.
“Look,” he said. “I’ve told you my name. James Holden. I served as a lieutenant in the UNN. My records should be on file. It’ll show a dishonorable discharge, but they’ll also show that my family lives in Montana. I don’t want that rock to hit Earth any more than you do.”
The silence on the other end continued for another few minutes.
“Captain,” she said, “I believe my superiors would want me to keep an eye on you. We’ll be coming along for the ride while the brains figure this out.”
Holden let out a long, noisy exhale.
“Thanks for that, McBride. Keep trying to get your people on the line. I’m going to make a few calls myself. Two corvettes are
not going to fix this problem.”
“Roger that,” the Ravi replied, then killed the connection.
“I’ve opened a connection with Tycho,” Naomi said.
Holden leaned back in his chair, the mounting gravity of their acceleration pressing against him. A watery lump was gathering low in his gut, the loose knot telling him that he had no idea what he was doing, that all the best plans had failed, and that the end was near. The brief hope he’d felt was already starting to slip away.
How can you be so calm?
I think I’m watching the end of the human race, Holden thought. I’m calling Fred so that it isn’t my fault when no one has an idea how to stop it. Of course I’m not calm.
I’m just spreading the guilt.
“How fast?” Fred Johnson asked incredulously.
“Four g’s now and climbing,” Holden replied, his voice thick as his throat compressed. “Oh, and it’s invisible to radar now.”
“Four g. Do you know how heavy Eros is?”
“There’s, uh, been some discussion,” Holden said, only the acceleration keeping his impatience from showing in his voice. “The question is, now what? The Nauvoo missed. Our plans are shot to shit.”
There was another perceptible increase in pressure as Alex sped the ship up to keep up with Eros. A little while longer and speech wouldn’t be possible.
“It’s definitely headed for Earth?” Fred asked.
“Alex and Naomi are ninety percent or so. Hard to be totally accurate when we can only use visual data. But I trust them. I’d go to where there are thirty billion new hosts too.”
Thirty billion new hosts. Eight of whom were his parents. He imagined Father Tom as a bundle of tubes oozing brown goo. Mother Elise as a rib cage dragging itself across the floor with one skeletal arm. And with that much biomass, what could it do then? Move Earth? Turn out the sun?
“Have to warn them,” Holden said, trying not to strangle on his own tongue as he spoke.
“You don’t think they know?”
“They see a threat. They may not see the end of all native life in the solar system,” Holden said. “You wanted a reason to sit at the table? How about this one: Come together or die.”
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