The black filaments that swirled in from the walls of the great, bright chamber laced into his arms and pierced his side. Tiny pulses ran through them, thickening and thinning. Flickers of blue danced in the black threads and seemed to vanish if she looked directly at them. When he opened his eyes, the irises glowed the same blue as the station, and they focused on nothing, like a blind man’s.
“Daddy?” she repeated, more softly this time.
The lips that had kissed her head as a baby curved into a smile. “Teresa? Is that you?”
“I’m here. I’m right here.”
“It’s going to be all right,” he said. “I dreamed too small before. I see that now. I thought I could save us by organizing, by keeping us together, and I was right about that. I was right, baby. But I didn’t understand how to do it.”
“Look at you,” Teresa said, pointing at the way the station pierced his body through. “Look what it did to you.”
“This is why it will work. The meat, the matter, the rude clay of us. It’s hard to kill. The ones who came before were brilliant, but they were fragile. Genius made of tissue paper, and the chaos blew them apart. We can be the best of both now…”
Teresa shifted closer. Her father, sensing her though his eyes never rested on her, tried to embrace her, but the dark threads held his arms. She put her own arms around him. His skin was burning hot against her cheek.
“We need to get him out of that fucking web,” Tanaka said. “Can he get loose? Ask him if he can get loose.”
“Daddy,” Teresa said. Tears were sheeting over her eyes and turning everything into smears of color and light. “Daddy, we need to go. You need to come with us. Can you do that?”
“No no no, baby. No. This is where I am supposed to be. Where I was always supposed to be. You’ll understand soon, I promise.”
“High Consul Duarte. My name is Colonel Aliana Tanaka. I have been given Omega status by Admiral Trejo and assigned the task of finding and recovering you.”
“We were doomed as soon as the gates appeared,” he said, but to her, not Tanaka. “If no one had taken responsibility, we would have bumbled along until the other ones came and killed us all. I saw that, and I did what I had to do. It was never for me. The empire was only a tool. It was a way to coordinate. To prepare for the war that was coming. The war in heaven.”
A hand touched her shoulder, pulling her gently back. It was Jim, his expression full of sorrow. “Come away. Come on.”
“It’s him. It’s still him.”
“Is and isn’t,” Jim said, and his voice was strange, like the cadence belonged to someone else. “I’ve seen this before. The station’s inside him. What it wants and what he wants? No way to tell one from the other. Not now.”
“You’ve seen this before?” Tanaka said. “Where?”
“On Eros,” Jim said. “Julie was like this. She wasn’t so far gone, but she was just like this.” And then, to Teresa, “I’m sorry, kid. I’m so sorry.”
Teresa blinked the sheet of tears away as best she could. In the distortion, Jim looked odd. The shape of his face seemed changed, bent in a permanent weariness and amusement. She blinked again, and he was only himself.
Tanaka was jetting from side to side, her maneuvering thrusters hissing constantly as she circled the Gothic sculpture that had been Teresa’s father. “I need you to talk to him. He needs to stop this. You have to make him stop this.”
“Colonel, I am right here, and I can hear you,” her father said. He turned his head toward Tanaka, his eyes steady and blank. “And I remember you. You were one of the first with me. You saw Mars die, and you were part of the remaking of it in the empire. This is the continuation of that. This is what we were fighting for all along. We will make all of humanity safe and whole and unified.”
“Sir,” Tanaka said, “we can do this without mindfucking everyone. We can fight this war and still be human beings.”
“You don’t understand, Colonel. But you will.”
Teresa shook herself out of Jim’s grasp. “You don’t have to do this. You can come back.” But she heard the despair in her own voice as she said it.
Her father’s smile was beatific. “It’s all right to let go. Holding on is only pain and weariness. You can let go.”
Teresa felt a wave of nothingness swim through her, an emptiness where her self should be, and she shouted. It wasn’t words or a warning or a threat. It was just her heart screaming because there wasn’t anything else to do. She fired the suit thrusters, slamming herself into the black web that held her father, and she started ripping. Grabbing handfuls of the dark, spiraling filament and yanking it free. The smell of ozone came into the sweltering light like the threat of storms at the edge of a heatwave. Her father shouted and tried to push her away, but the strands held him.
Jim’s voice seemed to come from a great distance. “Teresa! Get away from there! Don’t damage the station!”
Her universe shrank to her body, her vac suit, her father’s compromised flesh, and the alien thing consuming him. He writhed in pain as she tried to tear him free, and screamed for her to stop.
A force grabbed her like a vast, invisible hand and pulled her away. A million tiny, unreal needles bore into her flesh and began to rip her apart. Oh, she thought, my father’s going to kill me.
And then, the pain eased. Jim was beside her, and for a moment someone else was too, but she couldn’t see him. The glimmer in Jim’s eyes was brighter, and his skin had gone waxy with an eerie opalescence under it. His teeth were bared in raw, animal effort.
“He’s gone,” Jim said. It was barely a grunt. “He’s gone. If he’s willing to kill you, it isn’t him anymore. He’s gone.”
Her father—the thing that had been her father—was still held in the black threads. His mouth was open in pain and rage, but no sound came out. The blue fireflies danced along the torn threads like ants from a kicked hill.
“Holden,” Tanaka said. “We have a problem.”
Tanaka had her back to them. Over her shoulder, the wide, bright space was filling with bodies. From every corridor and passage, the alien sentinels were pouring in like smoke.
Chapter Forty-Five: Naomi
The closer the Rocinante and the Falcon kept to the station, the more cover the alien structure provided and the less of the field of battle was in her scopes. The Roci was able to build real-time reports by syncing with other ships in her little fleet by tightbeam and making a patchwork map with data from half a dozen different ships. She didn’t like it, though. It left her feeling half blinded.
“Two more in,” Alex said.
“Got them,” Naomi shouted back. One from Argatha system, another from Quivira. She set the Roci to identifying their silhouettes and drive signatures. Neither one was running a transponder. There was no reason to. Everyone on the hive mind’s side already knew who they were, and they weren’t about to let her in on it.
On the far side of the ring space, three enemy ships were slowly dismantling her fighters. She’d lost the Amador and the Brian and Kathy Yates. The Senator had taken heavy damage and was venting air. More enemy ships were coming through the rings, wave after wave after wave. Some of them—many of them—were ships she’d called there. Laconian science and military ships, survey and support ships from the underground. The crews had answered to her or Elvi or Trejo, and now were something else entirely. A different organism.