The Dragon’s Path

by Abraham Daniel

  The thought made him smile. You belong with me, his own private Julie had said. It was true, and now that he was here, he felt perfectly certain that he wasn’t going to leave. He’d been a cop for too long, and the idea of trying to reconnect to humanity again filled him with the presentiment of exhaustion. He was here to do the last part of his job. And then he was done.

  “Oi! Pampaw!”

  “I’m coming,” Miller said. “Hold your damn horses. It’s not like the station’s going anyplace.”

  “A rainbow is a circle you can’t see. Can’t see. Can’t see,” Eros said in a child’s singsong voice. Miller turned down the volume of his feed.

  The rocky surface of the station had no particular purchase for the suits and control waldoes. Two other ships had made polar landings where there was no spin gravity to fight against, but the Coriolis would leave everyone with a subliminal nausea. Miller’s team had to keep to the exposed metal plates of the dock, clinging like flies looking down into the starlit abyss.

  Engineering the placement of the fusion bombs wasn’t trivial work. If the bombs didn’t pump enough energy into the station, the surface might cool enough to give someone another chance to put a science team on it before the penumbra of the sun swallowed it and whatever parts of the Nauvoo were still clinging to it. Even with the best minds of Tycho, there was still the chance that the detonations wouldn’t sync up. If the pressure waves traveling through the rock amplified in ways they hadn’t anticipated, the station could crack open like an egg, spreading the protomolecule through the wide, empty track of the solar system like scattering a handful of dust. But the difference between success and disaster might be literally a question of meters.

  Miller crawled up the airlock and out to the station surface. The first wave of technicians were setting up resonance seismographs, the glow of the work lights and readouts the brightest thing in the universe. Miller set his boots on a wide swath of a ceramic steel alloy and let the spin stretch the kinks out of his back. After days in the acceleration couch, the freedom felt euphoric. One of the techs raised her hands, the physical Belter idiom that called for attention. Miller upped the suit volume.

  “… insectes rampant sur ma peau… ”

  With a stab of impatience, he switched from the Eros feed to the team channel.

  “Got to move,” a woman’s voice said. “Too much splashback here. We have to get to the other side of the docks.”

  “These go on for almost two kilometers,” Miller said.

  “Is,” she agreed. “We can unmoor and move the ship under power or we can tow it. We’ve got enough lead line.”

  “Which one’s fastest? We don’t have a lot of spare time here.”

  “Towing.”

  “Tow it, then,” Miller said.

  Slowly, the ship rose, twenty small, crawling transport drones clinging to leads like they were hauling a great metallic zeppelin. The ship was going to stay with him, here on the station, strapped to the rock like a sacrifice to the gods. Miller walked with the crew as they crossed the wide, closed bay doors. The only sounds were the tapping of his soles as the electromagnets jolted onto the surface and then a tick when they let go again. The only smells were of his own body and the fresh plastic of the air recycler. The metal under his feet shone like someone had cleaned it. Any dust or pebbles had been hurled away long ago.

  They worked fast to place the ship, arm the bombs, and fit the security codes, everyone tacitly aware of the great missile that had been the Nauvoo speeding toward them.

  If another ship came down and tried to disarm the trap, the ship would send synchronizing signals to all the other OPA bomb ships studding the moon’s surface. Three seconds later, the surface of Eros would be scrubbed clean. The spare air and supplies were loaded off the ship, bundled together and ready for reclamation. No reason to waste the resources.

  Nothing horrific crawled out of an airlock and tried to attack the crew, which made Miller’s presence during the mission entirely superfluous. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just a ride.

  When everything was done that could be, Miller sent the all clear, relayed through the now-dead ship’s system. The return transport appeared slowly, a dot of light that grew gradually brighter and then spread, the null-g boarding web strung out like scaffolding. At the new ship’s word, Miller’s team turned off their boots and fired simple maneuvering thrusters either from their suits or, if the suits were too old, from shared ablative evacuation shells. Miller watched them drop away.

  “Call va and roll, Pampaw,” Diogo said from someplace. Miller wasn’t sure which of them he was at this distance. “This tube don’t sit.”

  “I’m not coming,” Miller said.

  “Sa que?”

  “I decided. I’m staying here.”

  There was a moment of silence. Miller had been waiting for this. He had the security codes. If he needed to crawl back into the shell of their old ship and lock the door behind him, he could. But he didn’t want to. He’d prepared his arguments: He would only be going back to Tycho as a political pawn for Fred Johnson’s negotiations; he was tired and old in a way that years didn’t describe; he’d already died on Eros once, and he wanted to be here to finish it. He’d earned that much. Diogo and the others owed it to him.

  He waited for the boy to react, to try to talk him out of it.

  “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 exteri
or 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.

  “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?”