When she had a moment to gather herself, she wondered how many people there were still left out there. Had Duarte invaded and co-opted the minds of everyone in all the systems, or was he targeting the ones on their way toward the rings? She imagined whole stations filled with silent bodies working in perfect coordination, the need for verbal communication replaced by the direct influence of brain on brain. A single hand with billions of fingers. If that was what humanity was now, there would never be another conversation, another misunderstanding or joke or shitty pop song. She tried to imagine what it would be like for a baby born into a world like that, not as an individual but an appendage that had never known itself as anything else.
“Naomi?” Alex said. “Three more, and one of ’em is a Storm-class.”
“I see it. Tightbeam to the… the Lin Siniang.”
“It’s yours,” Alex said.
“And watch the dropship coming in from Torfaen system.”
“Just waiting until she’s in range.”
Naomi pulled up their ammunition supply even though she didn’t really have time to. They still had a decent number of torpedoes and rail-gun slugs. PDCs were a little low. And they were the back of the fleet, to the degree that a spherical battlefield had a back.
The connection came up. The woman on the other side of it had long, black hair pulled back in a functional bun and the old-school split circle of the OPA tattooed on her collarbone, though she looked too young to have been born when the OPA was still a real force. The Roci put her name up in a chyron for Naomi.
“Captain Melero, I need you to intercept and delay the incoming ships. Take the Duffy, the Cane Rosso, and the Malak Alnuwr.”
The young woman’s eyes went flat and her face pale. She’d just been handed a death sentence, and they both knew it. Belay that, Naomi thought. Get your people and run like hell. Live to fight another day. Except there weren’t any other days. This was the last day anyone had, and it was only as long as the time they could win for Jim and Teresa.
She tried not to think about Jim.
“Compra todas, sa sa,” Melero said. “Count on us, ke?”
She dropped the connection. Naomi didn’t think she’d ever met Captain Melero before, and she was certain she would never see or speak to the woman again. She wished they could put together a more coordinated defense, but the best she could manage was to set small groups together and give them leave to do what they thought was best. That and hope.
Her timer went off, and she took another pill out of her pocket and swallowed it dry.
You don’t need to do that. There’s no shame in letting go. It’s going to happen eventually anyway. Naomi didn’t push back at the thought. She had the impression that engaging with the other thoughts and memories, even to fight against them, made them stronger. The best she could manage was to let them rise up in her and fall away, and keep chugging down pharmaceuticals until her kidneys cried uncle. She wasn’t worried about long-term damage. An outright overdose would be bad, but she didn’t see much option there either. If she was swamped by other people’s selves, lost in the chatter of minds that weren’t her own, it would be just as good as dead. From a tactical standpoint, worse.
“Everyone brace,” Alex said. “I’m taking the shot.”
“Braced,” Amos said over the comms as Naomi centered herself in her crash couch. The kick of the rail gun was almost subliminal, counteracted by a thrust from the drive, but if the timing went wrong, she didn’t want to be bouncing around the deck like a bad throw in golgo.
She pulled up the scopes in time to see the dropship scattering into bright dust. There had been people on that ship. She wondered if they were dead now, or if their memories and opinions and senses of their own selves were stuck flickering through a billion different brains that weren’t theirs to begin with. Or if they’d been dead before their bodies were destroyed. Maybe those were different ways of saying the same thing.
The comms chimed with a connection request from the Falcon. From Elvi. Naomi checked her timers. The window for the Whirlwind’s entry into the system was already open. Depending on how hard the Magnetar had burned and braked, it could pass through the Laconia gate at any time now. The end was about as nigh as they got. She accepted the connection.
Elvi looked even more exhausted than usual. Naomi had a flashbulb memory of a dark-skinned man with pale hair and soft, hooded eyes reciting My candle burns at both ends. It will not last the night. She didn’t know if the recollection was hers or someone else’s.
“Give me good news.”
“Well,” Elvi said. “It looks like the isolation chamber is effective in stopping the shared consciousness effect. Being in the catalyst chamber stops the hive mind, even after Tanaka’s psychoactives have dropped to subclinical levels.”
“How quickly can we expand that to something, say, the size of a gunship?”
“With enough labor and materials, we could probably pull it off in a couple years. Until then, you can pick the three, maybe four people you want to stuff in there until someone opens it and hauls them out again.”
Naomi couldn’t help laughing, but there wasn’t any mirth in it.
“Yeah,” Elvi said. “I know.”
“Get me a report. How the isolation chamber works. Directions for building one. We’ll put it on a torpedo, get it through some gates. It won’t do us any good, but maybe someone out there can benefit from it.”
“Can I start it ‘Be sure, stranger, to let the Laconians know we rest here, obedient to their command’?”
“I won’t stop you,” Naomi said. “Sol, Auberon, and Bara Gaon. Where else do we send it?”
“We should send it everywhere. The big tech centers are where Duarte’s most likely to concentrate. The smaller colonies might not have the supplies and manufacturing ready to go, but the knowledge will keep as long as there’s anyone who’s not part of the hive mind.”
“If there is anyone. I’ve got thirty-one ships left, including us. I’m about to have fewer. I don’t have thirteen hundred torpedoes, and every one of these messages we send is one less round we can use defending ourselves and Jim.”
Elvi nodded. “I’ll get you the data.”
“Do it quickly,” Naomi said. “We don’t have long.”
Elvi dropped the connection. On the tactical display, the Lin Siniang and the little battle group with it were engaging with the two new enemy ships. Four more enemy arrived simultaneously in different quadrants of the ring space. They’re pulling us apart, she thought. They’re drawing us away from the station. And it was working. Naomi’s little fleet was falling apart before her eyes, and there was nothing she could do about it. As she watched, the Cane Rosso blinked from green to orange and vanished like an ember going cool. Thirty ships to defend one station with the full weight of thirteen hundred systems pouring down on her.
“Alex,” she said. “We have four more friends who’ve come to the dance. Get me tightbeams to… the Lastialus and the Kaivalya.”
“Coming up,” Alex said, as calmly as if she’d asked him for a flight schedule.
He had been her pilot longer than anyone else in her life. They knew each other’s moods and rhythms, and stress only made them work more smoothly together. Maybe group minds weren’t that strange after all. In their way, the crew of Roci had developed something between them that, over the decades, had felt like more than the sum of its parts. It was cracked and fractured now—Bobbie gone, Clarissa gone, Jim gone, Amos changed—but with her and Alex, there was still the spark of it. The last smooth surface in a universe that had gone rough and biting.