“Sure, probably. I seem to be an all-purpose remote as far as local things are concerned. But what are you going to put her on when she gets there?”
Despite the heat, Jim felt a chill. “Why not the Roci?”
Miller tilted his head like he was hearing an unfamiliar noise. “You’re forgetting what got us here. All this is a complication on the real problem. When Colonel Friendly aced Duarte, she took his finger out of the dike. We’re safe in here. This place has already taken the worst the bad guys could dish out and stayed solid. But everyone else out there?” He shook his head.
The coolness in Jim’s chest bloomed into pain for a second, and then switched back off. He tried to catch his breath. “What do I do? How do I stop it?”
“Stop what?” Teresa asked.
“Hey,” Miller said. “We’ve only got one brain here. If I know, you do too. It’s like I told you last time. Walking around with a body on means you’ve got a certain level of status.”
“Of access,” Jim said.
“You’re not making a remote connection. It’s why he had to come here. Had to be here.”
Jim felt a tension he didn’t know he was carrying release. His arms were numb to the shoulder now, his legs up to the waist. His breath was shallow and his jaw ached. Miller shrugged. “You knew coming in here you weren’t coming back out.”
“I did. But I’d hoped. You know, maybe.”
“Optimism is for assholes,” Miller said with a laugh.
“Maybe what?” Teresa asked. “I don’t know what you mean. Maybe what?”
He took her by the shoulders. The tears sheeting her eyes had turned her sclera pink and raw. Her lips trembled and shook. He’d known her since he’d first been sent to Laconia in chains. She’d been a child then, but she’d never looked as young as she did now.
“There’s something I have to do. I don’t know how it’s going to work out exactly, but listen. I will not leave you here alone, okay?”
She shook her head, and he could tell she wasn’t hearing him. Not really. Of course she was in shock. Who wouldn’t be? He wished there was something more he could do. He fumbled, taking her hands in his. He had to watch his fingers to know where they were.
“I will take care of you,” he said. “But I have to do this now. Right now.”
“Do what?”
He drew back his hands, and turned toward the network of black filaments. The space where Duarte’s body had been was empty apart from floating black fibers. They stirred in a breeze Jim couldn’t feel. Something about the motion reminded him of sea creatures putting out feelers to catch their prey. A wave of nausea washed over him.
He held out his arms, fingers splayed, and let the threads touch him. Glimmers of blue ran along them and swirled through the air. He felt a gentle tug across his shoulders as the web pulled taut. The ranks of inert sentinels floated randomly through the wide, bright, empty air. The Laconian corpses, still drifting, drew farther away. The black threads snaked toward him like they were following a scent and laced themselves into his sides when they found him.
Teresa was watching him, stunned. Her eyes were wide with horror and disbelief. He tried to think of something to say—a joke that would break the tension and let her laugh at the nightmare. He couldn’t come up with anything.
“Whatever he did, he did before,” Miller said, beside him now. “If there was any setup or arrangements that needed to be made, Duarte already put them in place before the Preiss did its not-vanishing trick. We’ll have to navigate it a little.”
“How am I supposed to find it?” Jim said. “I don’t know how any of this works. I don’t know how to do anything but put myself in the circuit and hope.”
“It’s like the doc said. This whole thing wants to do what it’s going to do. You’re just here to let it. You’re not building a gun, just pulling a trigger.”
“That’s a lot less helpful than you think,” Jim said.
The thing in his gut shifted. His heart did something violent and not at all heart-like, and he was someplace else. Someplace cool. He could feel his arms and legs again, and there was no pain anymore. If he concentrated, he could still see the bright room, the floating sentinels. He could still feel his body, wracked by the threads and the changes the protomolecule was making to him. It was like being on the edge of sleep, aware of his sleeping self and his dream self at the same time.
Miller cleared his throat. “It’s happening. You should hurry.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
Miller’s face was an apology. “You’re the station now. This is your Eros, and you’re what Julie was. Relax, and let it show you what you want to know.”
Naomi, Jim thought, aching. I want to see Naomi again.
And awkward as a child taking its first steps, his awareness broadened. It wasn’t quite like seeing, and it wasn’t quite like knowing something intellectually, but a mix of both. He felt Naomi at her place on the flight deck, recognized her distress. And as it bore down on her, scattering the molecules and atoms of his ship like a wind scattering dust, Jim saw the enemy clearly for the first time.
Instinctively, he reached out and pushed it back. The black thing from a different reality screamed and fought, pressing against him. Jim wanted to feel the struggle pushing against his hands, but that wasn’t quite right. His sense of his body was very strange now. But he could feel the black thing making its way forward like it was swimming toward Naomi against a heavy current.
“You’re going to need to think a little bigger,” Miller said, and the scope of Jim’s awareness expanded. The ring gates and the space between them exploded into his mind. Not just the physical space and the ships scattered through it, not just the crews of the ships and their candle-flame-bright minds, but the invisible structures of it: lines of subtle force that laced between the gates and the station, looping and reinforcing, coming together and apart in a complex sacred geometry. From this perspective, the intrusion of the enemy on the Rocinante and on all the other vessels was a single thing. A deformation in the lines of force that kept the ring space from collapsing back into nothingness.
He pushed back, trying to bring the nature of the ring space back to true, but the pressure working against him was implacable. It was omnipresent, and anyplace he resisted it, it flowed around him.
“Miller?”
“I’m right here.”
“I can’t do this. I can’t stop it.”
“That’s a problem, then.”
“Miller! They’re going to die!”
Jim pressed back like he was trying to lift a blanket with a toothpick. He was too small, and the pressure, the deformation, was coming from everywhere at once. He felt the candlelight minds on a dozen ships starting to go out. Jim started to panic, flailing. Another few flickering lights went out. One of the ships changed from a single thing with a bright core of energy at its heart to a thousand tiny things, to nothing, as the enemy shattered it and the flow of the attack carried it outside the bubble of space.
“How do I stop this?”
“You know,” Miller said. “I told you. You stop it the same way he did.”
Jim reached out to the candle-flame minds, pushing into them, and with each one he touched, he felt himself growing wider. A man from Earth, born after the devastation, who joined the underground because he was angry with his father who had capitulated to Laconia became part of Jim. A woman whose mother was sick and might be dying at a medical center on Auberon. Someone who was secretly in love with their pilot. Someone who had been thinking of killing themselves. Jim washed through the minds of everyone in the ring space—Naomi, Alex, Amos—and what had been impossible became possible.