The little ship shuddered and bumped. From a crash couch, one of the OPA techs called out a string of obscenities remarkable more for inventiveness than actual rancor. Miller closed his eyes, trying to keep the micro-g adjustments of their nonstandard docking from nauseating him. After days of joint-aching acceleration and an equally bruising braking routine, the small shifts and movements felt arbitrary and strange.
“You are, are, are, are, are, are, are… ”
He’d spent some time listening to the newsfeeds. Three days after they’d left Tycho, the news of Protogen’s involvement with Eros broke. Amazingly, Holden hadn’t been the one to do it. Since then, the corporation had gone from total denial, to blaming a rogue subcontractor, to claiming immunity under an Earth defense secrets statute. It didn’t sound good for them. Earth’s blockade of Mars was still in place, but attention had shifted to the power struggle within Earth, and the Martian navy had slowed its burn, giving the Earth forces a little more breathing room before any permanent decisions had to be made. It looked like they’d postponed Armageddon for a few weeks, anyway. Miller found he could take a certain joy in that. It also left him tired.
More often, he listened to the voice of Eros. Sometimes he watched the video feeds too, but usually, he just listened. Over the hours and days, he began to hear, if not patterns, at least common structures. Some of the voices spooling out of the dying station were consistent-broadcasters and entertainers who were overrepresented in the audio files archives, he guessed. There seemed to be some specific tendencies in, for want of a better term, the music of it too. Hours of random, fluting static and snatched bits of phrases would give way, and Eros would latch on to some word or phrase, fixating on it with greater and greater intensity until it broke apart and the randomness poured back in.
“… are, are, are, ARE, ARE, ARE… ”
Aren’t,Miller thought, and the ship suddenly shoved itself up, leaving Miller’s stomach about half a foot from where it had been. A series of loud clanks followed, and then the brief wail of a Klaxon.
“Dieu! Dieu!” someone shouted. “Bombs son vamen roja! Going to fry it! Fry us toda!”
There was the usual polite chuckle that the same joke had occasioned over the course of the trip, and the boy who’d made it-a pimply Belter no more than fifteen years old-grinned with pleasure at his own wit. If he didn’t stop that shit, someone was going to beat him with a crowbar before they got back to Tycho. But Miller figured that someone wasn’t him.
A massive jolt forward pushed him hard into the couch, and then gravity was back, the familiar 0.3 g. Maybe a little more. Except that with the airlocks pointing toward ship’s down, the pilot had to grapple the spinning skin of Eros’ belly first. The spin gravity made what had been the ceiling the new floor; the lowest rank of couches was now the top; and while they rigged the fusion bombs to the docks, they were all going to have to climb up onto a cold, dark rock that was trying to fling them off into the vacuum.
Such were the joys of sabotage.
Miller suited up. After the military-grade suits of the Rocinante,the OPA’s motley assortment of equipment felt like third-hand clothes. His suit smelled of someone else’s body, and the Mylar faceplate had a deformation where it had cracked and been repaired. He didn’t like thinking about what had happened to the poor bastard who’d been wearing it. The magnetic boots had a thick layer of corroded plastic and old mud between the plates and a triggering mechanism so old that Miller could feel it click on and off even before he moved his foot. He had the image of the suit locking on to Eros and never letting go.
The thought made him smile. You belong with me,his own private Julie had said. It was true, and now that he was here, he felt perfectly certain that he wasn’t going to leave. He’d been a cop for too long, and the idea of trying to reconnect to humanity again filled him with the presentiment of exhaustion. He was here to do the last part of his job. And then he was done.
“Oi! Pampaw!”
“I’m coming,” Miller said. “Hold your damn horses. It’s not like the station’s going anyplace.”
“A rainbow is a circle you can’t see. Can’t see. Can’t see,” Eros said in a child’s singsong voice. Miller turned down the volume of his feed.
The rocky surface of the station had no particular purchase for the suits and control waldoes. Two other ships had made polar landings where there was no spin gravity to fight against, but the Coriolis would leave everyone with a subliminal nausea. Miller’s team had to keep to the exposed metal plates of the dock, clinging like flies looking down into the starlit abyss.
Engineering the placement of the fusion bombs wasn’t trivial work. If the bombs didn’t pump enough energy into the station, the surface might cool enough to give someone another chance to put a science team on it before the penumbra of the sun swallowed it and whatever parts of the Nauvoowere still clinging to it. Even with the best minds of Tycho, there was still the chance that the detonations wouldn’t sync up. If the pressure waves traveling through the rock amplified in ways they hadn’t anticipated, the station could crack open like an egg, spreading the protomolecule through the wide, empty track of the solar system like scattering a handful of dust. But the difference between success and disaster might be literally a question of meters.
Miller crawled up the airlock and out to the station surface. The first wave of technicians were setting up resonance seismographs, the glow of the work lights and readouts the brightest thing in the universe. Miller set his boots on a wide swath of a ceramic steel alloy and let the spin stretch the kinks out of his back. After days in the acceleration couch, the freedom felt euphoric. One of the techs raised her hands, the physical Belter idiom that called for attention. Miller upped the suit volume.
“… insectes rampant sur ma peau… ”
With a stab of impatience, he switched from the Eros feed to the team channel.
“Got to move,” a woman’s voice said. “Too much splashback here. We have to get to the other side of the docks.”
“These go on for almost two kilometers,” Miller said.
“Is,” she agreed. “We can unmoor and move the ship under power or we can tow it. We’ve got enough lead line.”
“Which one’s fastest? We don’t have a lot of spare time here.”
“Towing.”
“Tow it, then,” Miller said.
Slowly, the ship rose, twenty small, crawling transport drones clinging to leads like they were hauling a great metallic zeppelin. The ship was going to stay with him, here on the station, strapped to the rock like a sacrifice to the gods. Miller walked with the crew as they crossed the wide, closed bay doors. The only sounds were the tapping of his soles as the electromagnets jolted onto the surface and then a tick when they let go again. The only smells were of his own body and the fresh plastic of the air recycler. The metal under his feet shone like someone had cleaned it. Any dust or pebbles had been hurled away long ago.
They worked fast to place the ship, arm the bombs, and fit the security codes, everyone tacitly aware of the great missile that had been the Nauvoospeeding toward them.
If another ship came down and tried to disarm the trap, the ship would send synchronizing signals to all the other OPA bomb ships studding the moon’s surface. Three seconds later, the surface of Eros would be scrubbed clean. The spare air and supplies were loaded off the ship, bundled together and ready for reclamation. No reason to waste the resources.
Nothing horrific crawled out of an airlock and tried to attack the crew, which made Miller’s presence during the mission entirely superfluous. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just a ride.