“We did our best? What the hell does that matter?” Holden felt a red haze in his mind, and not all of it was from the drugs. “I did my best to help the Canterbury, too. I tried to do the right thing when I let us be taken by the Donnager. Did my good intentions mean jack shit?”
Naomi’s expression went flat. Now her eyelids dropped, and she stared at him from narrow slits. Her lips pressed together until they were almost white. They wanted me to kill you, Holden thought. They wanted me to kill my crew just in case Eros can’t break fifteen g, and I couldn’t do it. The guilt and rage and sorrow played against each other, turning into something thin and unfamiliar. He couldn’t put a name to the feeling.
“You’re the last person I’d expect to hear self-pity from,” she said, her voice tight. “Where’s the captain who’s always asking, ‘What can we do right now to make things better?’”
Holden gestured around himself helplessly. “Show me which button to push to stop everyone on Earth from being killed, I’ll push it.”
Just as long as it doesn’t kill you.
Naomi unbuckled her harness and floated toward the crew ladder.
“I’m going below to check on Amos,” she said, then opened the deck hatch. She paused. “I’m your operations officer, Holden. Monitoring communication lines is part of the job. I know what Fred wanted.”
Holden blinked, and Naomi pulled herself out of sight. The hatch slammed behind her with a bang that couldn’t have been any harder than normal but felt like it was anyway.
Holden called up to the cockpit and told Alex to take a break and get some coffee. The pilot stopped on his way through the deck, looking like he wanted to talk, but Holden just waved him on. Alex shrugged and left.
The watery feeling in his gut had taken root and bloomed into a full-fledged, limb-shaking panic. Some vicious, vindictive, self-flagellating part of his mind insisted on running nonstop movies of Eros hurtling toward Earth. It would come screaming down out of the sky like every religion’s vision of apocalypse made real, fire and earthquakes and pestilential rain sweeping the land. But each time Eros hit the Earth in his mind, it was the explosion of the Canterbury he saw. A shockingly sudden white light, and then nothing but the sound of ice pebbles rattling across his hull like gentle hail.
Mars would survive, for a while. Pockets of the Belt would hold out even longer, probably. They had a culture of making do, surviving on scraps, living on the bleeding edge of their resources. But in the end, without Earth, everything would eventually die. Humans had been out of the gravity well a long time. Long enough to have developed the technology to cut that umbilical cord, but they’d just never bothered to do it. Stagnant. Humanity, for all its desire to fling itself into every livable pocket it could reach, had become stagnant. Satisfied to fly around in ships built half a century before, using technology that hadn’t changed in longer than that.
Earth had been so focused on her own problems that she’d ignored her far-flung children, except when asking for her share of their labors. Mars had bent her entire population to the task of remaking the planet, changing its red face to green. Trying to make a new Earth to end their reliance on the old. And the Belt had become the slums of the solar system. Everyone too busy trying to survive to spend any time creating something new.
We found the protomolecule at exactly the right time for it to do the most damage to us, Holden thought.
It had looked like a shortcut. A way to avoid having to do any of the work, to just jump straight to godhood. And it had been so long since anything was a real threat to humanity outside of itself that no one was even smart enough to be scared. Dresden had said it himself: The things that had made the protomolecule, loaded it into Phoebe, and shot it at the Earth were already godlike back when humanity’s ancestors thought photosynthesis and the flagellum were cutting-edge. But he’d taken their ancient engine of destruction and turned the key anyway, because when you got right down to it, humans were still just curious monkeys. They still had to poke everything they found with a stick to see what it did.
The red haze in Holden’s vision had taken on a strange strobing pattern. It took him a moment to realize that a red telltale on his panel was flashing, letting him know that the Ravi was calling. He kicked off a nearby crash couch, floated back to his station, and opened the link.
“Rocinante here, Ravi, go ahead.”
“Holden, why are we stopped?” McBride asked.
“Because we weren’t going to keep up anyway, and the danger of crew casualties was getting too high,” he replied. It sounded weak even to him. Cowardly. McBride didn’t seem to notice.
“Roger. I’m going to get new orders. Will let you know if anything changes.”
Holden killed the connection and stared blankly at the console. The visual tracking system was doing its very best to keep Eros in sight. The Roci was a good ship. State of the art. And since Alex had tagged the asteroid as a threat, the computer would do everything in its power to keep track of it. But Eros was a fast-moving, low-albedo object that didn’t reflect radar. It could move unpredictably and at high speed. It was just a matter of time before they lost track of it, especially if it wanted to be lost track of.
Next to the tracking information on his console, a small data window opened to inform him that the Ravi had turned on its transponder. It was standard practice even for military ships to keep them on when there was no apparent threat or need for stealth. The radio man on the little UNN corvette must have flipped it back on out of habit.
And now the Roci registered it as a known vessel and threw it onto the threat display with a gently pulsing green dot and a name tag. Holden looked at it blankly for a long moment. He felt his eyes go wide.
“Shit,” Holden said, then opened the shipwide comm. “Naomi, I need you in ops.”
“I think I’d rather stay down here for a bit,” she replied.
Holden hit the battle station’s alert button on his console. The deck lights shifted to red and a Klaxon sounded three times.
“XO Nagata to ops,” he said. Let her chew him out later. He’d have it coming. But right now he didn’t have any time to waste.
Naomi was on the ops deck in less than a minute. Holden had already buckled back into his crash couch and was pulling up the comm logs. Naomi pushed over to her chair and belted in as well. She gave him an inquiring look—Are we going to die after all? — but said nothing. If he said so, she would. He felt a spike of equal parts admiration for and impatience with her. He found what he was looking for in the logs before speaking.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ve had radio contact with Miller after Eros dropped off of radar. Is that right?”
“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “But his suit isn’t powerful enough to transmit through the shell of Eros out to much distance, so one of the moored ships is boosting the signal for him.”
“Which means that whatever Eros is doing to kill the radar isn’t killing all radio transmissions from outside.”
“That seems right,” Naomi said, a growing curiosity in her voice.
“And you still have the control codes for the five OPA freighters on the surface, right?”
“Yes, sir.” And then a moment later: “Oh, shit.”
“Okay,” Holden said, turning in his chair to face Naomi with a grin. “Why do the Roci and every other naval ship in the system have a switch to turn off their transponders?”