“No!” Holden said. He knew that inside the
“Uh,” Alex said in a low voice. “Huh.”
Behind Holden, at almost the same moment, Naomi said, “Jim?”
Before he could ask, Alex came back on the general comm.
“Hey, Captain, Eros just came back.”
“What?” Holden said, a brief image of the asteroid sneaking up like a cartoon villain on the two circling warships popping into his head.
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Eros. It just popped back up on radar. Whatever it was doing to block our sensors, it just stopped doing it.”
“What’s it doing?” Holden said. “Get me a course.”
Naomi pulled the tracking information to her console and began working on it, but Alex was done a few seconds sooner.
“Yeah,” he said. “Good guess. It’s changing course. Still heading sunward, but deflecting away from the Earth vector it was on.”
“If it keeps this course and speed,” Naomi chimed in, “I’d say it was heading toward Venus.”
“Wow,” said Holden. “That was a joke.”
“Good joke,” Naomi said.
“Well, someone tell McBride she doesn’t need to shoot us now.”
“Hey,” Alex said, his voice thoughtful. “If we made those nukes stop listening, that means we can’t shut ’em down, right? Wonder where Fred’s going to drop those.”
“Hell if I know,” Amos said. “Just disarmed Earth, though. That’s gotta be fucking embarrassing.”
“Unintended consequences,” Naomi sighed. “Always with the unintended consequences.”
Eros crashing into Venus was the most widely broadcast and recorded event in history. By the time the asteroid reached the sun’s second planet, several hundred ships had taken up orbits there. Military vessels tried to keep the civilian ships away, but it was no use. They were just outnumbered. The video of Eros’ descent was captured by military gun cameras, civilian ship telescopes, and the observatories on two planets and five moons.
Holden wished he could have been there to see it up close, but Eros had picked up speed after it had turned, almost as though the asteroid were impatient for the journey to end now that the destination was in sight. He and the crew sat in the galley of the
It was all over but the fireworks.
Holden reached out, took Naomi’s hand, and held it tightly as the asteroid entered Venus orbit and then seemed to stop. He felt like he could feel the entire human race holding their breath. No one knew what Eros-no, what
When the end came, it was beautiful.
In orbit around Venus, Eros came apart like a puzzle box. The giant asteroid split into a dozen chunks, stringing out around the equator of the planet in a long necklace. Then those dozen pieces split into a dozen more, and then a dozen after that, a glittering fractal seed cloud spreading out across the entire surface of the planet, disappearing into the thick cloud layer that usually hid Venus from view.
“Wow,” Amos said, his voice almost reverent.
“That was gorgeous,” Naomi said. “Vaguely unsettling, but gorgeous.”
“They won’t stay there forever,” Holden said.
Alex tossed off the last of the tequila in his glass, then refilled it from the bottle.
“What d’ya mean, Cap?” he asked.
“Well, I’m just guessing. But I doubt the things that built the protomolecule just wanted to store it here. This was part of a bigger plan. We saved the Earth, Mars, the Belt. Question is, what happens now?”
Naomi and Alex exchanged glances. Amos pursed his lips. On-screen, Venus glittered as arcs of lightning danced all across the planet.
“Cap,” Amos said. “You are seriously harshing my buzz.”
Epilogue: Fred
Frederick Lucius Johnson. Former colonel in Earth’s armed forces, Butcher of Anderson Station. Thoth Station now too. Unelected prime minister of the OPA. He had faced his own mortality a dozen times, lost friends to violence and politics and betrayal. He’d lived through four assassination attempts, only two of which were on any record. He’d killed a pistol-wielding attacker using only a table knife. He’d given the orders that had ended hundreds of lives, and stood by his decisions.
And yet public speaking still made him nervous as hell. It didn’t make sense, but there it was.
“General Sebastian will be at the reception,” his personal secretary said. “Remember not to ask after her husband.”
“Why? I didn’t kill him, did I?”
“No, sir. He’s having a very public affair, and the general’s a bit touchy about it.”
“So she might
“You can make the offer, sir.”
The “greenroom” was actually done in red and ochre, with a black leather couch, a mirrored wall, and a table laid out with hydroponic strawberries and carefully mineralized drinking water. The head of Ceres security, a dour- faced woman named Shaddid, had escorted him from the dock to the conference facilities three hours earlier. Since then, he’d been pacing-three steps in one direction, turn, three steps back-like the captain of an ancient ship of the line on his quarterdeck.
Elsewhere in the station, the representatives of the formerly warring factions were in rooms of their own, with secretaries of their own. Most of them hated Fred, which wasn’t particularly a problem. Most of them feared him too. Not because of his standing in the OPA, of course. Because of the protomolecule.
The political rift between Earth and Mars was probably irreparable; the Earth forces loyal to Protogen had engineered a betrayal too deep for apologies, and too many lives had been lost on both sides for the coming peace to look anything like it had been before. The naive among the OPA thought this was a good thing: an opportunity to play one planet against the other. Fred knew better. Unless all three forces-Earth, Mars, and the Belt-could reach a real peace, they would inevitably fall back into a real war.
Now if only Earth or Mars thought of the Belt as something more than an annoyance to be squashed after their true enemy was humiliated… But in truth, anti-Mars sentiment on Earth was higher now than it had been during the shooting war, and Martian elections were only four months away. A significant shift in the Martian polity could ease the tensions or make things immeasurably worse. Both sides had to see the big picture.
Fred stopped before a mirror, adjusted his tunic for the hundredth time, and grimaced.
“When did I turn into a damned marriage counselor?” he said.
“We aren’t still talking about General Sebastian, are we, sir?”
“No. Forget I said anything. What else do I need to know?”
“There’s a possibility that Blue Mars will try to disrupt your presentation. Hecklers and signs, not guns. Captain Shaddid has several Blues in custody, but some may have slipped past her.”
“All right.”
