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“Us?” Holden asked.
“People. She loves humans. She gave up being the little rich girl and joined the OPA. She backed the Belt because it was the right thing to do. No way she kills us if she knows that’s what’s happening. I just need to find a way to explain. I can do this. Give me a chance.”
Holden ran a hand through his hair, grimacing at the accumulating grease. A day or two at high g was not conducive to regular showering.
“Can’t do it,” Holden said. “Stakes are too high. We’re going ahead with the plan. I’m sorry.”
“She’ll beat you,” Miller said.
“What?”
“Okay, maybe she won’t. You’ve got a shitload of firepower. But the protomolecule’s figured out how to get around inertia. And Julie? She’s a fighter, Holden. If you take her on, my money’s on her.”
Holden had seen the video of Julie fighting off her attackers on board the stealth ship. She’d been methodical and ruthless in her own defense. She’d fought without giving quarter. He’d seen the wildness in her eyes when she felt trapped and threatened. Only her attackers’ combat armor had kept her from doing a lot more damage before they took her down.
Holden felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up at the idea of Eros actually fighting. So far it had been content to run from their clumsy attacks. What happened when it went to war?
“You could find her,” Holden said, “and use the bomb.”
“If I can’t get through to her,” Miller said, “that’s my deal. I’ll find her. I’ll talk to her. If I can’t get through, I’ll take her out, and you can turn Eros into a cinder. I’m fine with that. But you have to give me time to try it my way first.”
Holden looked at Naomi looking back at him. Her face was pale. He wanted to see the answer in her expression, to know what he should do based on what she thought. He didn’t. It was his call.
“Do you need more than twenty-seven hours?” Holden finally asked.
He heard Miller exhale loudly. There was gratitude in his voice that was, in its own way, worse than the pleading had been.
“I don’t know. There are a couple thousand kilometers of tunnels down here, and none of the transit systems work. I have to walk everywhere pulling this damn wagon. Not to mention the fact that I don’t really know what I’m even looking for. But give me a little time, I’ll figure it.”
“And you know that if this doesn’t work, you’ll have to kill her. Yourself and Julie?”
“I know.”
Holden had the Roci calculate how long it would take Eros to reach the Earth at the current rate of acceleration. The missiles from Earth were covering the distance a lot faster than Eros was. The IPBMs were just overpowered Epstein drives with nuclear bombs riding up front. Their acceleration limits were the functional limits of the Epstein drive itself. If the missiles didn’t arrive, it would still take nearly a week for Eros to get to Earth, even if it kept a constant rate of acceleration.
There was some flexibility in there.
“Hold on, let me work something out here,” Holden said to Miller, then muted the connection. “Naomi, the missiles are flying in a straight line toward Eros, and the Roci thinks they’ll intercept it in about twenty-seven hours, give or take. How much time do we buy if we turn that straight line into a curve? How much of a curve can we do and still give the missiles a chance to catch Eros before it gets too close?”
Naomi tipped her head to one side, looking at him suspiciously through narrowed eyes.
“What are you about to do?” she said.
“Maybe give Miller a chance to head off the first interspecies war.”
“You trust Miller?” she said with surprising vehemence. “You think he’s insane. You threw him off the ship because you thought he was a psychopath and a killer, and now you’re going to let him speak for humanity to an alien God-thing that wants to rip us to shreds?”
Holden had to suppress a smile. Telling an angry woman was how attractive her anger made her would make it stop being cute very quickly. And besides that, he needed it to make sense to her. That was how he’d know if he was right.
“You told me once that Miller was right, even when I thought he was wrong.”
“I didn’t make it a blanket statement,” Naomi said, spacing her words out like she was speaking to an idiot child. “I said he was right to shoot Dresden. That doesn’t mean Miller’s stable. He’s in the process of committing suicide, Jim. He’s fixated on this dead girl. I can’t even begin to imagine what might be going through his head right now.”
“Agreed. But he’s there, on the scene, and he’s got a keen eye for observation and just plain figuring shit out. This guy tracked us to Eros based on the ship name we picked. That’s pretty damned impressive. He’d never even met me, and he knew me well enough from researching me to know I’d like naming my ship after Don Quixote’s horse.”
Naomi laughed. “Really? Is that where that comes from?”
“So when he says that he knows Julie, I believe him.”
Naomi started to say something, then paused.
“You think she’ll beat the nukes?” Naomi said, more softly.
“He thinks she can. And he thinks he can talk her into not killing us all. I have to give him that chance. I owe it to him.”
“Even if it means killing Earth?”
“No,” Holden said. “Not that much.”
Naomi paused again. Her anger faded.
“So delay the impact, not abort,” Naomi said.
“Buy him some time. How much can we get?”
Naomi frowned, looking at the readouts. He could almost see the options clicking through her mind. She smiled, her fierceness gone now, replaced by the mischievous look she got when she knew she was being really clever.
“As much as you want.”
“You want to do what?” Fred asked.
“Pull the nukes off course for a while to buy Miller some time, but not so much that we can’t still use them to destroy Eros if we need to,” Holden said.
“It’s simple,” Naomi added. “I’m sending you detailed instructions.”
“Give me the overview,” Fred said.
“Earth has targeted their missiles on the five freighter transponders on Eros,” Naomi said, pulling her plan up as an overlay on the comm video. “You have ships and stations all over the Belt. You use the transponder reconfiguring program you gave us way back when, and you keep shifting those transponder codes to ships or stations along these vectors to pull the missiles into a long arc that eventually wraps back around to Eros.”
