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“That’s where you come in. We need you to try bouncing a laser off of it. We can use the Rocinante’s targeting system to guide the missiles in.”
I HATE TO BREAK IT TO YOU, BUT WE’LL BE OUT OF THIS GAME LONG BEFORE THOSE MISSILES SHOW. WE CAN’T KEEP UP. WE CAN’T GUIDE THE MISSILES IN FOR YOU. AND ONCE WE LOSE VISUAL, NO ONE WILL BE ABLE TO TRACK WHERE EROS IS.
“You might have to put it on autopilot,” Fred said.
Meaning You might all have to die in the seats you’re in right now.
I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO DIE A MARTYR AND ALL, BUT WHAT MAKES YOU THINK THE ROCI CAN BEAT THIS THING ON ITS OWN? I’M NOT KILLING MY CREW BECAUSE YOU CAN’T COME UP WITH A GOOD PLAN.
Fred leaned toward the screen, his eyes narrowing. For the first time, Fred’s mask slipped and Holden saw the fear and helplessness behind it.
“Look, I know what I’m asking, but you know the stakes. This is what we have. I didn’t call you to hear how it won’t work. Either help or give up. Right now devil’s advocate is just another name for ass**le.”
I’m crushing myself to death, probably doing permanent damage, just because I wouldn’t give up, you bastard. So sorry I didn’t sign my crew up to die the minute you said to do it.
Having to type everything out had the advantage of restraining emotional outbursts. Instead of ripping into Fred for questioning his commitment, Holden just typed LET ME THINK ABOUT IT and cut the connection.
The optical tracking system watching Eros flashed a warning to him that the asteroid was increasing speed again. The giant sitting on his chest added a few pounds as Alex pushed the Rocinante to keep up. A flashing red indicator informed Holden that because of the duration they’d spent at the current acceleration, he could expect as much as 12 percent of the crew to stroke out. It would go up. Enough time, and it would reach 100 percent. He tried to remember the Roci’s maximum theoretical acceleration. Alex had already flown it at twelve g briefly when they’d left the Donnager. The actual limit was one of those trivial numbers, a way to brag about something your ship would never really do. Fifteen g, was it? Twenty?
Miller hadn’t felt any acceleration at all. How fast could you go if you didn’t even feel it?
Almost without realizing he was going to do it, Holden activated the master engine cutoff switch. Within seconds he was in free fall, wracked with coughs as his organs tried to find their original resting places inside his body. When Holden had recovered enough to take one really deep breath, his first in hours, Alex came on the comm.
“Cap, did you kill the engines?” the pilot said.
“Yeah, that was me. We’re done. Eros is getting away no matter what we do. We were just prolonging the inevitable, and risking some crew deaths in the process.”
Naomi turned her chair and gave him a sad little smile. She was sporting a black eye from the acceleration.
“We did our best,” she said.
Holden shoved out of his chair hard enough that he bruised his forearms on the ceiling, then shoved off hard again and pinned his back to a bulkhead by grabbing on to a fire extinguisher mount. Naomi was watching him from across the deck, her mouth a comical O of surprise. He knew he probably looked ridiculous, like a petulant child throwing a tantrum, but he couldn’t stop himself. He broke free of his grip on the fire extinguisher and floated into the middle of the deck. He hadn’t known he’d been pounding on the bulkhead with his other fist. Now that he did, his hand hurt.
“God dammit,” he said. “Just God dammit.”
“We—” Naomi started, but he cut her off.
“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.
