When the end came, it was beautiful.
In orbit around Venus, Eros came apart like a puzzle box. The giant asteroid split into a dozen chunks, stringing out around the equator of the planet in a long necklace. Then those dozen pieces split into a dozen more, and then a dozen after that, a glittering fractal seed cloud spreading out across the entire surface of the planet, disappearing into the thick cloud layer that usually hid Venus from view.
“Wow,” Amos said, his voice almost reverent.
“That was gorgeous,” Naomi said. “Vaguely unsettling, but gorgeous.”
“They won’t stay there forever,” Holden said.
Alex tossed off the last of the tequila in his glass, then refilled it from the bottle.
“What d’ya mean, Cap?” he asked.
“Well, I’m just guessing. But I doubt the things that built the protomolecule just wanted to store it here. This was part of a bigger plan. We saved the Earth, Mars, the Belt. Question is, what happens now?”
Naomi and Alex exchanged glances. Amos pursed his lips. On-screen, Venus glittered as arcs of lightning danced all across the planet.
“Cap,” Amos said. “You are seriously harshing my buzz.”
Epilogue: Fred
Frederick Lucius Johnson. Former colonel in Earth’s armed forces, Butcher of Anderson Station. Thoth Station now too. Unelected prime minister of the OPA. He had faced his own mortality a dozen times, lost friends to violence and politics and betrayal. He’d lived through four assassination attempts, only two of which were on any record. He’d killed a pistol-wielding attacker using only a table knife. He’d given the orders that had ended hundreds of lives, and stood by his decisions.
And yet public speaking still made him nervous as hell. It didn’t make sense, but there it was.
Ladies and gentlemen, we stand at a crossroads—
“General Sebastian will be at the reception,” his personal secretary said. “Remember not to ask after her husband.”
“Why? I didn’t kill him, did I?”
“No, sir. He’s having a very public affair, and the general’s a bit touchy about it.”
“So she might want me to kill him.”
“You can make the offer, sir.”
The “greenroom” was actually done in red and ochre, with a black leather couch, a mirrored wall, and a table laid out with hydroponic strawberries and carefully mineralized drinking water. The head of Ceres security, a dour-faced woman named Shaddid, had escorted him from the dock to the conference facilities three hours earlier. Since then, he’d been pacing—three steps in one direction, turn, three steps back—like the captain of an ancient ship of the line on his quarterdeck.
Elsewhere in the station, the representatives of the formerly warring factions were in rooms of their own, with secretaries of their own. Most of them hated Fred, which wasn’t particularly a problem. Most of them feared him too. Not because of his standing in the OPA, of course. Because of the protomolecule.
The political rift between Earth and Mars was probably irreparable; the Earth forces loyal to Protogen had engineered a betrayal too deep for apologies, and too many lives had been lost on both sides for the coming peace to look anything like it had been before. The naive among the OPA thought this was a good thing: an opportunity to play one planet against the other. Fred knew better. Unless all three forces—Earth, Mars, and the Belt—could reach a real peace, they would inevitably fall back into a real war.
Now if only Earth or Mars thought of the Belt as something more than an annoyance to be squashed after their true enemy was humiliated… But in truth, anti-Mars sentiment on Earth was higher now than it had been during the shooting war, and Martian elections were only four months away. A significant shift in the Martian polity could ease the tensions or make things immeasurably worse. Both sides had to see the big picture.
Fred stopped before a mirror, adjusted his tunic for the hundredth time, and grimaced.
“When did I turn into a damned marriage counselor?” he said.
“We aren’t still talking about General Sebastian, are we, sir?”
“No. Forget I said anything. What else do I need to know?”
“There’s a possibility that Blue Mars will try to disrupt your presentation. Hecklers and signs, not guns. Captain Shaddid has several Blues in custody, but some may have slipped past her.”
“All right.”
“You have interviews scheduled with two political narrowcasts and a news source based on Europa. The Europa interviewer is likely to ask about Anderson Station.”
“All right. Anything new from Venus?”
“Something’s happening down there,” his secretary said.
“It’s not dead, then.”
“Apparently not, sir.”
“Great,” he said bitterly.
Ladies and gentlemen, we stand at a crossroads. On one hand there is the very real threat of mutual annihilation, and on the other—
And on the other, there’s the bogeyman of Venus, getting ready to crawl up out of its well and slaughter you all in your sleep. I have the live sample, which is your best, if not only, hope of divining what its intentions and capabilities are, and which I have hidden so that you can’t just march over and take it from me. It’s the only reason any of you are listening to me in the first place. So how about a little respect here?
His secretary’s terminal chirped, and she consulted it briefly.
“It’s Captain Holden, sir.”
“Do I have to?”
“It would be best if he felt he was part of the effort, sir. He has a track record of amateur press releases.”
“Fine. Bring him in.”
The weeks that had passed since Eros Station had come apart in the thick skies of Venus had been good to Holden, but prolonged high-g dives like the one the Rocinante had sustained chasing Eros had long-lasting effects. The burst blood vessels in the man’s sclera had healed; the pressure bruising was gone from around his eyes and the back of his neck. Only a little hesitation in the way he walked spoke of the deep joint pain, cartilage still on its way back to its natural form. Acceleration swagger, they’d called it, back when Fred had been a different man.
“Hey,” Holden said. “You’re looking pretty. Did you see the latest feed from Venus? Two-kilometer-high crystal towers. What do you think that is?”
“Your fault?” Fred suggested, keeping the tone friendly. “You could have told Miller to drive it into the sun.”
“Yes, because two-kilometer-high crystal towers coming out of the sun wouldn’t be creepy at all,” Holden said. “Are those strawberries?”
“Have some,” Fred said. He hadn’t been able to eat anything since that morning.
“So,” Holden said around a mouthful of fruit, “are they really going to sue me over this?”
“Unilaterally giving away all mineral and development rights to an entire planet on an open radio channel?”
“Yeah,” Holden said.
“I would guess the people who actually owned those rights are probably going to sue you,” Fred said. “If they ever figure out who they are.”
“Could you give me a hand with that?” Holden asked.
“I’ll be a character witness,” Fred said. “I don’t actually make the law.”
“Then what exactly are you all doing here? Couldn’t there be some kind of amnesty? We retrieved the protomolecule, tracked down Julie Mao on Eros, broke Protogen, and saved Earth.”
“You saved Earth?”