Sudden crushing g’s hit Holden, stuffing him into his chair. Alex had started maneuvering.

“At this distance, maybe I can out-turn her. Keep her from bein’ able to take a shot,” the pilot said.

“Do it, and open the tubes.”

“Roger,” Alex said, his professional pilot’s calm not quite able to keep the excitement about a possible battle out of his voice.

“I’ve broken the targeting lock,” Naomi said. “Their laser array is not nearly as good as the Roci’s. I’m just drowning it in clutter.”

“Hooray for bloated Martian defense budgets,” Holden replied.

The ship jerked suddenly through a series of wild maneuvers.

“Damn,” Alex said, his voice strained by the g-force of the sharp turns. “The Ravijust opened up on us with her PDCs.”

Holden checked his threat display and saw the long glowing pearl strands of incoming rounds displayed there. The shots were falling well behind them. The Rocireported the distance between the ships as 370 kilometers—pretty long range for computer targeting systems to hit a wildly maneuvering ship with a ballistic shot from another wildly maneuvering ship.

“Return fire?” Amos yelled into the comm.

“No!” Holden yelled back. “If she wanted us dead, she’d be throwing torpedoes. Don’t give her a reason to want us dead.”

“Cap, we’re out-turnin’ her,” Alex said. “The Roci’s just too fast. We’ll have a firing solution in less than a minute.”

“Roger,” Holden said.

“Do I take the shot?” Alex asked, his silly Martian cowboy accent fading as his tension rose.

“No.”

“Their targeting laser just shut off,” Naomi said.

“Which means they’ve given up trying to cut our jamming,” Holden replied, “and have just switched their missiles over to radar tracking.”

“Not as accurate,” Naomi said hopefully.

“A corvette like that carries at least a dozen fish. They only need to hit us with one to make us dead. And at this rangec ”

A gentle sound came from his threat console, letting him know that the Rocihad calculated a firing solution to the Ravi.

“I’ve got tone!” Alex yelled. “Fire?”

“No!” Holden said. He knew that inside the Ravi,they were getting the loud warning buzz of an enemy lock. Stop,Holden willed them. Please don’t make me kill you.

“Uh,” Alex said in a low voice. “Huh.”

Behind Holden, at almost the same moment, Naomi said, “Jim?”

Before he could ask, Alex came back on the general comm.

“Hey, Captain, Eros just came back.”

“What?” Holden said, a brief image of the asteroid sneaking up like a cartoon villain on the two circling warships popping into his head.

“Yeah,” Alex said. “Eros. It just popped back up on radar. Whatever it was doing to block our sensors, it just stopped doing it.”

“What’s it doing?” Holden said. “Get me a course.”

Naomi pulled the tracking information to her console and began working on it, but Alex was done a few seconds sooner.

“Yeah,” he said. “Good guess. It’s changing course. Still heading sunward, but deflecting away from the Earth vector it was on.”

“If it keeps this course and speed,” Naomi chimed in, “I’d say it was heading toward Venus.”

“Wow,” said Holden. “That was a joke.”

“Good joke,” Naomi said.

“Well, someone tell McBride she doesn’t need to shoot us now.”

“Hey,” Alex said, his voice thoughtful. “If we made those nukes stop listening, that means we can’t shut ’em down, right? Wonder where Fred’s going to drop those.”

“Hell if I know,” Amos said. “Just disarmed Earth, though. That’s gotta be fucking embarrassing.”

“Unintended consequences,” Naomi sighed. “Always with the unintended consequences.”

  Eros crashing into Venus was the most widely broadcast and recorded event in history. By the time the asteroid reached the sun’s second planet, several hundred ships had taken up orbits there. Military vessels tried to keep the civilian ships away, but it was no use. They were just outnumbered. The video of Eros’ descent was captured by military gun cameras, civilian ship telescopes, and the observatories on two planets and five moons.

Holden wished he could have been there to see it up close, but Eros had picked up speed after it had turned, almost as though the asteroid were impatient for the journey to end now that the destination was in sight. He and the crew sat in the galley of the Rocinanteand watched it on the broadcast newsfeeds. Amos had dug up yet another bottle of faux tequila from somewhere and was liberally splashing it into coffee cups. Alex had them flying toward Tycho at a gentle one-third g. No need to hurry now.

It was all over but the fireworks.

Holden reached out, took Naomi’s hand, and held it tightly as the asteroid entered Venus orbit and then seemed to stop. He felt like he could feel the entire human race holding their breath. No one knew what Eros—no, what Julie—would do now. No one had spoken to Miller after the last time Holden had, and he wasn’t answering his hand terminal. No one knew for sure what had happened on the asteroid.

When the end came, it was beautiful.

In orbit around Venus, Eros came apart like a puzzle box. The giant asteroid split into a dozen chunks, stringing out around the equator of the planet in a long necklace. Then those dozen pieces split into a dozen more, and then a dozen after that, a glittering fractal seed cloud spreading out across the entire surface of the planet, disappearing into the thick cloud layer that usually hid Venus from view.

“Wow,” Amos said, his voice almost reverent.

“That was gorgeous,” Naomi said. “Vaguely unsettling, but gorgeous.”

“They won’t stay there forever,” Holden said.

Alex tossed off the last of the tequila in his glass, then refilled it from the bottle.

“What d’ya mean, Cap?” he asked.

“Well, I’m just guessing. But I doubt the things that built the protomolecule just wanted to store it here. This was part of a bigger plan. We saved the Earth, Mars, the Belt. Question is, what happens now?”

Naomi and Alex exchanged glances. Amos pursed his lips. On-screen, Venus glittered as arcs of lightning danced all across the planet.

“Cap,” Amos said. “You are seriously harshing my buzz.”

Epilogue: Fred

  Frederick Lucius Johnson. Former colonel in Earth’s armed forces, Butcher of Anderson Station. Thoth Station now too. Unelected prime minister of the OPA. He had faced his own mortality a dozen times, lost friends to violence and politics and betrayal. He’d lived through four assassination attempts, only two of which were on any record. He’d killed a pistol-wielding attacker using only a table knife. He’d given the orders that had ended hundreds of lives, and stood by his decisions.

And yet public speaking still made him nervous as hell. It didn’t make sense, but there it was.

Ladies and gentlemen, we stand at a crossroads—

“General Sebastian will be at the reception,” his personal secretary said. “Remember not to ask after her husband.”

“Why? I didn’t kill him, did I?”

“No, sir. He’s having a very public affair, and the general’s a bit touchy about it.”

“So she might wantme to kill him.”

“You can make the offer, sir.”

The “greenroom” was actually done in red and ochre, with a black leather couch, a mirrored wall, and a table laid out with hydroponic strawberries and carefully mineralized drinking water. The head of Ceres security, a dour-faced woman named Shaddid, had escorted him from the dock to the conference facilities three hours earlier. Since then, he’d been pacing—three steps in one direction, turn, three steps back—like the captain of an ancient ship of the line on his quarterdeck.