We found the protomolecule at exactly the right time for it to do the most damage to us,Holden thought.

It had looked like a shortcut. A way to avoid having to do any of the work, to just jump straight to godhood. And it had been so long since anything was a real threat to humanity outside of itself that no one was even smart enough to be scared. Dresden had said it himself: The things that had made the protomolecule, loaded it into Phoebe, and shot it at the Earth were already godlike back when humanity’s ancestors thought photosynthesis and the flagellum were cutting-edge. But he’d taken their ancient engine of destruction and turned the key anyway, because when you got right down to it, humans were still just curious monkeys. They still had to poke everything they found with a stick to see what it did.

The red haze in Holden’s vision had taken on a strange strobing pattern. It took him a moment to realize that a red telltale on his panel was flashing, letting him know that the Raviwas calling. He kicked off a nearby crash couch, floated back to his station, and opened the link.

“ Rocinantehere, Ravi,go ahead.”

“Holden, why are we stopped?” McBride asked.

“Because we weren’t going to keep up anyway, and the danger of crew casualties was getting too high,” he replied. It sounded weak even to him. Cowardly. McBride didn’t seem to notice.

“Roger. I’m going to get new orders. Will let you know if anything changes.”

Holden killed the connection and stared blankly at the console. The visual tracking system was doing its very best to keep Eros in sight. The Rociwas a good ship. State of the art. And since Alex had tagged the asteroid as a threat, the computer would do everything in its power to keep track of it. But Eros was a fast-moving, low-albedo object that didn’t reflect radar. It could move unpredictably and at high speed. It was just a matter of time before they lost track of it, especially if it wanted to be lost track of.

Next to the tracking information on his console, a small data window opened to inform him that the Ravihad turned on its transponder. It was standard practice even for military ships to keep them on when there was no apparent threat or need for stealth. The radio man on the little UNN corvette must have flipped it back on out of habit.

And now the Rociregistered it as a known vessel and threw it onto the threat display with a gently pulsing green dot and a name tag. Holden looked at it blankly for a long moment. He felt his eyes go wide.

“ Shit,” Holden said, then opened the shipwide comm. “Naomi, I need you in ops.”

“I think I’d rather stay down here for a bit,” she replied.

Holden hit the battle station’s alert button on his console. The deck lights shifted to red and a Klaxon sounded three times.

“XO Nagata to ops,” he said. Let her chew him out later. He’d have it coming. But right now he didn’t have any time to waste.

Naomi was on the ops deck in less than a minute. Holden had already buckled back into his crash couch and was pulling up the comm logs. Naomi pushed over to her chair and belted in as well. She gave him an inquiring look- Are we going to die after all?-but said nothing. If he said so, she would. He felt a spike of equal parts admiration for and impatience with her. He found what he was looking for in the logs before speaking.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ve had radio contact with Miller after Eros dropped off of radar. Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “But his suit isn’t powerful enough to transmit through the shell of Eros out to much distance, so one of the moored ships is boosting the signal for him.”

“Which means that whatever Eros is doing to kill the radar isn’t killing all radio transmissions from outside.”

“That seems right,” Naomi said, a growing curiosity in her voice.

“And you still have the control codes for the five OPA freighters on the surface, right?”

“Yes, sir.” And then a moment later: “Oh, shit.”

“Okay,” Holden said, turning in his chair to face Naomi with a grin. “Why do the Rociand every other naval ship in the system have a switch to turn off their transponders?”

“So the enemy can’t get a missile lock on the transponder signal and blow them up,” she said, sharing his grin now.

Holden spun his chair back around and began opening a comm channel to Tycho Station.

“XO, would you be so kind as to use the control codes Miller gave you to turn those five OPA freighters back on and fire up their transponders? Unless our visitor on Eros can outrun radio waves, I think we’ve gotten around the acceleration problem.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Naomi replied. Even looking the other way, Holden could hear the smile in her voice, and it melted the last of the ice in his gut. They had a plan. They were going to make a difference.

“Call coming in from the Ravi,” Naomi said. “You want it before I turn the transponders on?”

“Hell yes.”

The line clicked.

“Captain Holden. We’ve got our new orders. Seems we’re going to be chasing that thing a little further.”

McBride sounded almost like someone who hadn’t just been sent to her death. Stoic.

“You might want to hold off on that for a couple minutes,” Holden said. “We have an alternative.”

As Naomi activated the transponders on the five OPA freighters Miller had left moored to the surface of Eros, Holden laid out the plan to McBride and then, on a separate line, Fred. By the time Fred had gotten back to him with an enthusiastic approval of the plan from both him and the UN Naval command, the five freighters were pinging away, telling the solar system where they were. An hour after that, the largest swarm of interplanetary nuclear weapons in the history of humanity had been fired and were winging their way toward Eros.

We’re going to win,Holden thought as he watched the missiles take flight like a swarm of angry red dots on his threat display. We’re going to beat this thing.And what was more, his crew was going to see the end of it. No one else had to die.

Except…

“Miller’s calling,” Naomi said. “Probably noticed we turned his ships back on.”

Holden had a wrenching feeling in his stomach. Miller would be there, on Eros, when those missiles arrived. Not everyone would get to celebrate the coming victory.

“Hey. Miller. How you doing?” he said, not quite able to keep the funereal tone out of his voice.

Miller’s voice was choppy, and half drowned by static, but not so garbled that Holden couldn’t hear the tone in it and know that he was about to take a piss all over their parade.

“Holden,” Miller said. “We have a problem.”

Chapter Fifty-Two: Miller

One. Two. Three.

Miller pushed down on the hand terminal, resetting the trigger again. The double doors in front of him had once been one of thousands of quietly automated mechanisms. They had run reliably in their subtle magnetic tracks, maybe for years. Now something black with the texture of tree bark grew like creepers around their sides, deforming the metal. Past them lay the port corridors, the warehouses, the casino. Everything that had been Eros Station and was now the vanguard of an invading alien intelligence. But to reach it, Miller had to pry open a stuck door. In less than five seconds. While wearing an environment suit.

He put the hand terminal down again and reached quickly for the thin crack where the two doors met. One. Two. The door shifted a centimeter, flakes of black matter sifting down. Three.

Four.

He grabbed the hand terminal again, resetting the trigger.

This shit just wasn’t going to work.

Miller sat on the ground beside the cart. The Eros feed whispered and muttered, apparently unaware of the tiny invader scratching at the station’s skin. Miller took a long, deep breath. Door didn’t move. He had to get past it.