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“I’m afraid,” she said.
“Don’t be,” he said.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said.
“No one ever does. And, look, you don’t have to do this alone,” he said.
“I can feel something in the back of my mind. It wants something I don’t understand. It’s so big.”
Reflexively, he kissed the back of her hand. There was an ache starting deep in his belly. A sense of illness. A moment’s nausea. The first pangs of his transformation into Eros.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re gonna be fine.”
Chapter Fifty-Five: Holden
Holden dreamed.
He’d been a lucid dreamer most of his life, so when he found himself sitting in his parents’ kitchen in the old house in Montana, talking to Naomi, he knew. He couldn’t quite understand what she was saying, but she kept pushing her hair out of her eyes as she munched cookies and drank tea. And while he found that he wasn’t ever able to pick a cookie up and take a bite out of it, he could smell them, and the memory of Mother Elise’s chocolate chip oatmeal cookies was a very good one.
It was a good dream.
The kitchen strobed red once, and something changed. Holden felt the wrongness of it, felt the dream slipping from warm memory into nightmare. He tried to say something to Naomi but couldn’t form the words. The room strobed red again, but she didn’t seem to notice. He got up and went to the kitchen window and looked out. When the room strobed a third time, he saw what was causing it. Meteors were falling out of the sky, leaving behind them fiery trails the color of blood. He somehow knew they were chunks of Eros as it crashed through the atmosphere. Miller had failed. The nuclear attack had failed.
Julie had come home.
He turned around to tell Naomi to run, but black tendrils had burst through the floor and wrapped her up, pierced her body in multiple places. They poured from her mouth and eyes.
Holden tried to run to her, to help her, but he couldn’t move, and when he looked down, he saw that the tendrils had come up and grabbed him too. One wrapped around his waist and held him. Another pressed into his mouth.
He woke with a yell in a dark room that was strobing with red light. Something was holding him around the waist. In a panic he began clawing at it, threatening to tear a fingernail loose on his left hand, before his rational mind reminded him where he was. On the ops deck, in his chair, belted down in zero g.
He popped his finger into his mouth, trying to soothe the abused fingertip he’d damaged on one of the chair buckles, and took a few deep breaths through his nose. The deck was empty. Naomi was asleep down in her cabin. Alex and Amos were off duty and presumably sleeping too. They’d spent almost two days without rest during the high-g chase of Eros. Holden had ordered everyone to get some shut-eye and had volunteered to take first watch.
And then had promptly fallen asleep. Not good.
The room flashed red again. Holden shook his head to clear the last of the sleep away, and refocused his attention on his console. A red warning light pulsed, and he tapped the screen to open up the menu. It was his threat panel. Someone was hitting them with a targeting laser.
He opened up the threat display and turned on the active sensors. The only ship within millions of kilometers was the Ravi, and it was the ship that was targeting them. According to the automatic logs, it had just started a few seconds earlier.
He reached out to activate the comm and call the Ravi as his incoming-message light flickered on. He opened the connection, and a second later, McBride’s voice said, “Rocinante, cease maneuvering, open your outer airlock door, and prepare to be boarded.”
Holden frowned at his console. Was that a weird joke?
“McBride, this is Holden. Uh, what?”
Her reply was in a clipped tone that was not encouraging.
“Holden, open your outer airlock and prepare for boarding. If I see a single defensive system wake up, I will fire on your ship. Is that understood?”
“No,” he said, not quite able to keep the annoyance out of his voice. “It’s not understood. And I’m not going to let you board me. What the hell is going on?”
“I’ve been ordered by UNN Command to take control of your vessel. You’re charged with interfering with UNN military operations, unlawfully commandeering UNN military assets, and a list of other crimes I’m not going to bother reading right now. If you do not surrender immediately, we will be forced to fire on you.”
“Oh,” said Holden. The UNN had discovered that their missiles were changing course, had attempted to reprogram them, and had discovered that the missiles weren’t listening.
They were upset.
“McBride,” Holden said after a moment. “Boarding us won’t do any good. We can’t give you those missiles back. And it’s unnecessary, anyway. They’re just taking a little detour.”
McBride’s laugh sounded more like the sharp bark of an angry dog just before it bit.
“Detour?” she said. “You handed three thousand five hundred and seventy-three high-yield thermonuclear interplanetary ballistic missiles over to a traitor and accused war criminal!”
It took Holden a minute.
“You mean Fred? I think traitor is a bit harsh—”
McBride cut in.
“Deactivate the false transponders leading our missiles away from Eros, and reactivate the transponders on the surface, or we will fire on your ship. You have ten minutes to comply.”
The connection dropped with a click. Holden looked at the console with something between disbelief and outrage, then shrugged and hit the battle stations alarm. Deck lights came on all over the ship in an angry red. The warning Klaxon sounded three times. In less than two minutes, Alex rushed up the ladder to the cockpit, and half a minute behind him, Naomi threw herself into her ops station.
Alex spoke first.
“The Ravi is four hundred kilometers away,” he said. “Ladar says her tube is open, and she’s got us locked.”
Clearly enunciating his words, Holden said, “Do not—I repeat, do not—open our tubes or attempt to get a target lock on the Ravi at this time. Just keep a close eye on her, and prepare to go defensive if she looks like she’s firing. Let’s not do anything to provoke her.”
“Shall I begin jamming?” Naomi said from behind him.
“No, that would look aggressive. But prep a countermeasures package and have your finger on the ready button,” Holden said. “Amos, you in engineering?”
