She used her hand terminal to check in with Amos. The lag was suspicious until she realized it was still trying to route through the Roci’s system. She shifted it to the Falcon, and the connection request was instantaneous.
“Hey, Boss,” the thing that had been Amos—that maybe sort-of still was—said.
“All of ours in place?”
“Yep. Muskrat’s a little anxious about the whole thing. Between the new digs and Tiny freaking the fuck out. The medical guy gave Tiny a little something to take the edge off. She’s sleeping now. He said she’s traumatized?”
“Seems plausible.”
“I don’t know how I got this old without someone telling me they had pills for that,” Amos said, and she could hear the disapproval in his tone. It reminded her of who he’d been before.
“There’s a big toolbox,” she said. “Everyone has to find their own way through.”
“I guess. Anyway, I’m strapped in. Tiny’s good. Dog’s good. And that’s us.”
Fuck, Naomi thought. That’s us.
“All right.”
“How’re you holding together?” Amos asked.
“I’ll see you on the other side,” she said, and let the connection drop.
A moment later, Elvi came over the ship-wide system telling everyone to strap in and prepare for hard burn. Naomi pulled up the exterior telescope and set it to track the station. To track Jim. She knew that for the most part, he’d be lost in the drive plume, but she did it anyway.
The countdown came. The crash couch needles bit into her, the juice flowed into her blood, and the Falcon slammed up into her from below.
Holden felt the ships leaving the space, one and then another. The ones still in the bubble of false space shifted toward the escapes, going mind-numbingly fast and still too slow. Holden willed them to go faster. To get out. To be safe.
The brightness of the gates, the light they passed between them, was unfolding for him as he grew more fully into the mechanism. It reminded him of the way babies learn without seeming to try—soaking up information and discovering pattern as part of growing into the being they were going to become. Part of him wished that he could stay longer, see more, die knowing something.
“Hard to let go of a bad idea,” Miller said as if he were agreeing. “I mean, I’m not the guy who can start throwing stones at someone for not wanting to give up the case, right?”
“But you’re pretty good at dying if that’s what it takes to make things right.”
“Turns out that is a talent of mine,” Miller said with a lopsided grin. “There’s always new mysteries out there. We get those for free.”
The dark things shifted again, deforming the space, reaching into it. Trying to change its nature, and this time, touching the ring gates. Pushing through them to the systems beyond. Their attention felt slick and muscular. Wet, somehow. Holden reached out to pull them back, and the effort was terrible.
“Harder to do on your own,” Miller said.
“You could help.”
And the feeling changed, as if there really were two of them and not just an illusion made from memories in a dying body. The thick, slimy reach of the things beyond the gates squirmed and resisted, pushing past Holden’s will, trying to find one more way to end the intrusion.
“Just give me a little fucking time,” Holden said, but if the enemy could hear him, it ignored him. Holden redoubled his efforts, and slowly, reluctantly, the invisible tentacle retracted into its own universe and left him spent and exhausted.
If an attack came again, he wouldn’t be able to stop it.
“You left it all on the field,” Miller said. “Whatever that means.”
“Football.”
“What?”
“It’s a football thing.”
“Oh,” Miller said, and scratched his neck. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
The Rocinante cleared the Nieuwestad gate. Two other ships passed through to Sol. The only things left alive in the ring space were Holden and the Falcon. He could feel Naomi on the ship. And Amos. His actual body shuddered and wept, and he did everything he could to ignore it.
“Kind of funny,” Miller said. “You being here to do this.”
“Yeah, it’s hilarious.”
“It actually is, smartass. Mister make-sure-everyone-has-a-voice. Fight against everyone who is making decisions for other people. Your whole fucking life has been that. Now here you are. Those colony systems aren’t baked yet. A lot of them rely on trade. We do this, and some of them aren’t going to make it.”
“I know.”
The dark things shifted, pressed. They weren’t tired at all. Holden felt their hunger and didn’t know if it was real, or just something he projected onto them. The Falcon drew nearer to the Sol gate. Each second, it moved faster than the second before. Falling toward safety and away from him faster than just falling would have done. Go, he thought. Please be safe. The rings sang their songs in light. The blue sludge in his veins plucked at him, changed him, offered ways that he could live and spread and know.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong. My analysis of the situation is a lot like yours. But you got to see there’s an irony in it. All the shit you gave me about giving people all the information and trusting them to do the right thing? Most of these fuckers aren’t gonna know what happened. This decision you’re making for the whole human race.”
“Is there a reason you’re needling me like this?”
Miller’s expression went stern and sorrowful. “I’m trying to keep you awake, old fella. You’re drifting.”
Holden realized that was true. He made an effort to pull his mind back together. The Falcon was approaching the Sol gate. Not minutes now. Less.
“I absolutely believe that people are more good on balance than bad,” he said. “All the wars and all of the cruelty and all of the violence. I’m not looking away from any of that, and I still think there’s something beautiful about being what we are. History is soaked in blood. The future probably will be too. But for every atrocity, there’s a thousand small kindnesses that no one noticed. A hundred people who spent their lives loving and caring for each other. A few moments of real grace. Maybe it’s only a little more good than bad in us, but…”
The Falcon passed through the Sol gate. Nothing was left in the ring space but him.
“And yet,” Miller said, “we’re about to consign millions of people to slow deaths. That’s just the truth. Are you sure this thing you’re about to do is the right one?”
“I don’t have a fucking clue,” Holden said, and then did it anyway.
For an instant, there was a release of energy second only to the beginning of the universe. There was no one there to see it.
The ring gate faded. Its recent brightness went first, and then the distortion at its center… faded. Where there had been a mystery and a miracle, a gateway to the galaxy, now there were just distant stars framed by a dull loop of metal a thousand kilometers across.
And then it fell.
The Falcon was on a fairly gentle one-third g burn that would put it near Ganymede in a few weeks, and the whole staff—the brightest minds of a shattered empire—were watching the ring gate die, measuring it, collecting data from the corpse. Naomi, sitting alone in the galley with a bulb of tea, just watched it. For decades, it had been fixed in place, one of the farthest objects in the solar system. It didn’t orbit. It didn’t move. Now, it tumbled a little, pulled in toward the sun the way anything would be. The miracle, ended.