“Well shit,” Alex said. “Looks like last-dance time.”
The alert came up on her tactical map as he spoke. A new ship had arrived through the Laconia gate. Its transponder was off, but that didn’t matter. The silhouette was enough. Larger than anything besides the void cities and uncannily organic in its design, the Voice of the Whirlwind came into the ring space. It was almost a relief to see it. The dread of knowing it was coming had been terrible. Now the worst had happened, and all that was left was playing out the last few moves, and then packing up the board and seeing whether death was the end or something more interesting.
She started a recording. “This is Naomi Nagata. Concentrate all fire on the Whirlwind. When you’re dry, evacuate the area on your own judgment. We will hold our post.”
She grabbed the comms and set the Roci to deliver it to each of the remaining ships in turn. By the time she’d finished, the Whirlwind was visibly farther into the ring space. Its velocity was terrifying and its braking burn murderous. The Roci ran the numbers in an instant. The Magnetar was on course for the ring station, covering half a million klicks in a little more than twenty minutes. They were coming to protect Duarte.
“Hey,” Amos said through the comms. “About how many rail-gun rounds do you think we could put in that thing before it gets here?”
“Only one way to be sure,” Alex answered, and Naomi felt an overwhelming rush of affection for them both.
All across the ring space, the last vestiges of humanity, the few whose minds were still their own, threw the missiles and PDC rounds and rail-gun slugs that they had toward the incoming behemoth, clear in the knowledge that it wouldn’t matter. Naomi watched as the torpedoes were shot down, the streams of fast-moving slugs dodged or ignored. They were gnats, and the Whirlwind could disregard them.
A message from Elvi came with the report on the isolation chamber, and Naomi put it in the Roci’s torpedoes—a last message in her final bottles—and fired them out. The Roci’s loadout dropped to zero. Well, you tried, an old man said. You did try. She could picture his house—a little row house on a thin street in Bogotá—and the orange tabby who slept on his windowsill. Like she was falling into a daydream, she felt the other lives around her, felt herself forgetting Naomi Nagata and the pain and loss and anger of being her. And also the joy.
She checked her timer. It was still an hour before her next dose of the drugs was due. But by that time, it wouldn’t matter. She opened the ship-wide comm. She tried to find her last words. Something that would fit the love she had for these men, this ship, the life she’d led. The Whirlwind was more than halfway to the station already, though the second stretch would be slower. Even at a quarter million kilometers away, the Roci was picking up the excess radiation from its drive plume.
The shout, when it came, literally defied description. It was an overpowering taste of mint or a vibrant purple or the shuddering sense of an orgasm without the pleasure. Her mind skipped and jumped, trying to make sense of something it had no capacity to understand, matching the signal to one sensation and then another and then another until she found herself on the float above her crash couch with no idea how much time had passed.
“Ah,” Alex said. “Did you guys feel that?”
“Yup,” Amos said.
“Any idea what it was?”
“Nope.”
Naomi’s tactical map was still up, and it had changed. The Whirlwind had cut its braking burn and was on its way to overshooting the station entirely. The other ships—both the enemy and her own—were in disarray. The comms lit up with a broadcast message, and she realized that the jamming had stopped. She accepted the message.
The woman on the screen was young, dark-skinned, with close-cropped hair, and Naomi had seen her once before.
“This is Admiral Sandrine Gujarat of the Laconian battleship Voice of the Whirlwind. I would very much appreciate someone telling me how the fuck I got here.”
Naomi’s finger hovered over Reply, while she tried to think of what to say. She was still there when another broadcast message came through, this one from the Falcon. Elvi’s eyes were wide and bright, and her smile was so fierce it was almost a threat.
“This is Dr. Elvi Okoye, head of the Laconian Science Directorate, in cooperation with Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. You have all experienced a cognitive manipulation. You may be disoriented or have inappropriately strong emotional reactions. No ships in this space pose any threat. Please stand down and remain safely in place. We will reach out to each of you shortly. Message repeats…”
Naomi turned off the comms. In the quiet of the Rocinante, she let her mind drift, and nothing drifted back. No outside memories. No voices. No sense of looming invisible presence.
“Naomi?” Alex called down. “I’m feeling weird up here.”
“It’s gone. The hive mind. It’s gone.”
“So it’s not just me?”
Amos’ voice was calm and affable. “Nobody’s bumping into the back of my head either.”
“He did it,” she said. “I think Jim did it.”
She closed her eyes and relaxed and something hit her, hard as a kick, from every direction at once. Her eyes shot open, and she couldn’t quite understand what she was seeing. The ops deck hadn’t changed at all—the comm display, the crash couches, the passage up to the flight deck and down to the rest of the ship. And also everything had been transformed. The comm display was a field of bright pixels, glowing and flickering too fast for the human eye to follow. The detail of each one made the shapes of words and buttons that they created too abstract to comprehend, like trying to see the curve of a planet from its surface. She raised her hand, and the skin on her knuckles was a range of crags and valleys as complex as anything that stone and erosion had ever managed. When she cried out, the air fluttered with her breath, compression waves bouncing and curving, enhancing and annihilating.
She tried to find the clasp on the crash couch straps, but she couldn’t make out the surface where one thing began and another ended. And streaking through the emptiness of things, the vacuum that still lived in the heart of matter, threads of living blackness, more solid and real than anything she’d ever seen. They writhed and swam, and behind them, everything swirled and came apart. With no one manning the lighthouse now, the elder gods returned.
Oh, she managed to think, right.
Chapter Forty-Six: Tanaka
Teresa!” Holden shouted at the girl. “Get away from there! Don’t damage the station!”
Well, Tanaka thought, aren’t we just fucked?
The girl ignored him, ripping at the black threads that were wired into the high consul’s body. None of this was in her brief. None of it was going even remotely the way she or Trejo had intended or hoped. There was some independent judgment she was going to have to exercise very, very soon now.
The girl shuddered and jumped, but not in a way that made sense. Something had her, lifting her away from what had been Duarte. The raw panic on Holden’s face told her that he knew what this was, and it wasn’t good. The girl screamed without seeming to be aware that she was screaming, and Holden grabbed at her, pulled himself to her. For a moment, the girl looked like she was widening. Tanaka could almost imagine invisible angels pulling at her arms and legs. There had been an execution method like that once, she thought. Tie a horse to each limb of the prisoner and see which one kept the biggest chunk. But then Holden shouted and the angels all vanished, leaving the girl behind.