Holden tore his eyes way from the slowly growing sphere that was his destination and spun around to look for the Rocinante behind him. She wasn’t visible until Alex fired a maneuvering thruster and a gossamer cone of steam reflected some of the sphere’s blue glow. His suit told him that the Roci was over thirty thousand kilometers away—more than twice as far as any two people on Earth could ever be from each other—and receding. And here he was, in a suit of vacuum armor, wearing a disposable EVA pack that had about five minutes of thrust in it. He’d burned one minute accelerating toward the sphere. He’d burn another slowing down when he got there. That left enough to fly back to the Roci when he was done.
Optimism expressed as conservation of delta V.
Ships from the three fleets had begun coming through the gate even before he’d started his trip. The Roci was now protected from them only by the absolute speed limit of the slow zone. She was drifting off at just under that limit to put as much space between her and the fleets as possible. They had a sphere a million kilometers in diameter to play with, even without going beyond the area marked by the gates. The gates had close to fifty thousand kilometers of empty space between them, but the idea of flying out of the slow zone and into that starless void beyond made Holden’s skin crawl. He and Naomi had agreed it would be a maneuver of last resort.
As long as no one could fire a ballistic weapon, the Roci should be plenty safe with five hundred quadrillion square kilometers to move around in.
Holden spun back around, using two quarter-second blasts from his EVA pack, and took a range reading to the sphere. He was still hours away. The minute-long burst he’d fired from the pack to start his journey had accelerated him to a slow crawl, astronomically speaking, and the Roci had come to a relative stop before releasing him. He’d never have had enough juice in the EVA pack to stop himself if the ship had flung him out at the slow zone’s maximum speed.
Ahead in the middle of all that starless black, the blue sphere waited.
It had waited for two billion years for someone to come through his particular gate, if the researchers were right about how long ago Phoebe had been captured by Saturn. But lately the strangeness surrounding the protomolecule and the Ring left Holden with the disquieting feeling that maybe all of the assumptions they’d made about its origins and purpose were wrong.
Protogen had named the protomolecule and decided it was a tool that could redefine what it meant to be human. Jules-Pierre Mao had treated it like a weapon. It killed humans, therefore it was a weapon. But radiation killed humans, and a medical X-ray machine wasn’t intended as a weapon. Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.
So here the monkeys were, poking the shiny box and making guesses about what it did. Holden could tell himself that in his case the box was asking to be poked, but even that was making a lot of assumptions. Miller looked human, had been human once, so it was easy to think of him as having human motivations. Miller wanted to communicate. He wanted Holden to know or do something. But it was just as likely—more likely, maybe—that Holden was anthropomorphizing something far stranger.
He imagined himself landing on the station, and Miller saying, James Holden, you and only you in the universe have the correct chemical composition to make a perfect wormhole fuel! then stuffing him into a machine to be processed.
“Everything okay?” Naomi asked in response to his chuckle.
“Still just thinking about how incredibly stupid this is. Why didn’t I let you talk me out of it?”
“It looks like you did, but it took a couple of hours for it to process. Want us to come get you?”
“No. If I bail out now, I’ll never have the balls to try it again,” Holden said. “How’s it look out there?”
“The fleets came through with about two dozen ships, mostly heavies. Alex has figured out the math on doing short torpedo burns to get one up to the speed limit but not over. Which means everyone on those other ships are doing the same thing. So far no one has fired at us.”
“Maybe your protestations of my innocence worked?”
“Maybe,” she said. “There were a couple of small ships detaching from the fleet on an intercept course with you. The Roci is calling them landing skiffs.”
“Shit, they’re sending the Marines after me?”
“They’ve burned up to the speed limit, but the Roci says you make stationfall before they catch you. But just before.”
“Damn,” Holden said. “I really hope there’s a door.”
“They lost the UN ship. The other is Martian. So maybe they brought Bobbie. She can make sure the others are nice to you.”
“No,” Holden said with a sigh. “No, these will be the ones that are still mad at me.”
Knowing the marines were following made the back of his neck itch. Being in a space suit just added that to his already lengthy list of insoluble problems.
“On the good news level, Monica’s team is getting evacuated to the Behemoth.”
“You never did like her.”
“Not much, no.”
“Why not?”
“Her job is digging up old things,” Naomi said, the lightness of her tone almost covering her anxieties. “And digging up old things leads to messes like this one.”
When Holden was nine, Rufus the family Labrador died. He’d already been an adult dog when Holden was born, so Holden had only ever known Rufus as a big black slobbering bundle of love. He’d taken some of his first steps clutching the dog’s fur in one stubby fist. He’d run around their Montana farm not much bigger than a toddler with Rufus as his only babysitter. Holden had loved the dog with the simple intensity only children and dogs share.
But when he was nine, Rufus was fifteen, and old for such a big dog. He slowed down. He stopped running with Holden, barely managing a trot to catch up, then gradually only a slow walk. He stopped eating. And one night he flopped onto his side next to a heater vent and started panting. Mother Elise had told him that Rufus probably wouldn’t last the night, and even if he did they’d have to call the vet in the morning. Holden had tearfully sworn to stay by the dog’s side. For the first couple of hours, he held Rufus’ head on his lap and cried, as Rufus struggled to breathe and occasionally gave one halfhearted thump of his tail.