Leviathan Wakes (76 page)

“If I can’t get through to her,” Miller said, “that’s my deal. I’ll find her. I’ll talk to her. If I can’t get through, I’ll take her out, and you can turn Eros into a cinder. I’m fine with that. But you have to give me time to try it my way first.”

Holden looked at Naomi looking back at him. Her face was pale. He wanted to see the answer in her expression, to know what he should do based on what she thought. He didn’t. It was his call.

“Do you need more than twenty-seven hours?” Holden finally asked.

He heard Miller exhale loudly. There was gratitude in his voice that was, in its own way, worse than the pleading had been.

“I don’t know. There are a couple thousand kilometers of tunnels down here, and none of the transit systems work. I have to walk everywhere pulling this damn wagon. Not to mention the fact that I don’t really know what I’m even looking for. But give me a little time, I’ll figure it.”

“And you know that if this doesn’t work, you’ll have to kill her. Yourself and Julie?”

“I know.”

Holden had the
Roci
calculate how long it would take Eros to reach the Earth at the current rate of acceleration. The missiles from Earth were covering the distance a lot faster than Eros was. The IPBMs were just overpowered Epstein drives with nuclear bombs riding up front. Their acceleration limits were the functional limits of the Epstein drive itself. If the missiles didn’t arrive, it would still take nearly a week for Eros to get to Earth, even if it kept a constant rate of acceleration.

There was some flexibility in there.

“Hold on, let me work something out here,” Holden said to Miller, then muted the connection. “Naomi, the missiles are flying in a straight line toward Eros, and the
Roci
thinks they’ll intercept it in about twenty-seven hours, give or take. How much time do we buy if we turn that straight line into a curve? How much of a curve can we do and still give the missiles a chance to catch Eros before it gets too close?”

Naomi tipped her head to one side, looking at him suspiciously through narrowed eyes.

“What are you about to do?” she said.

“Maybe give Miller a chance to head off the first interspecies war.”

“You trust
Miller
?” she said with surprising vehemence. “You think he’s insane. You threw him off the ship because you thought he was a psychopath and a killer, and now you’re going to let him speak for humanity to an alien God-thing that wants to rip us to shreds?”

Holden had to suppress a smile. Telling an angry woman was
how attractive her anger made her would make it stop being cute very quickly. And besides that, he needed it to make sense to her. That was how he’d know if he was right.

“You told me once that Miller was right, even when I thought he was wrong.”

“I didn’t make it a blanket statement,” Naomi said, spacing her words out like she was speaking to an idiot child. “I said he was right to shoot Dresden. That doesn’t mean Miller’s
stable.
He’s in the process of committing suicide, Jim. He’s fixated on this dead girl. I can’t even begin to imagine what might be going through his head right now.”

“Agreed. But he’s there, on the scene, and he’s got a keen eye for observation and just plain figuring shit out. This guy tracked us to Eros based on the ship name we picked. That’s pretty damned impressive. He’d never even met me, and he knew me well enough from researching me to know I’d like naming my ship after Don Quixote’s horse.”

Naomi laughed. “Really? Is that where that comes from?”

“So when he says that he knows Julie, I believe him.”

Naomi started to say something, then paused.

“You think she’ll beat the nukes?” Naomi said, more softly.

“He thinks she can. And he thinks he can talk her into not killing us all. I have to give him that chance. I owe it to him.”

“Even if it means killing Earth?”

“No,” Holden said. “Not that much.”

Naomi paused again. Her anger faded.

“So delay the impact, not abort,” Naomi said.

“Buy him some time. How much can we get?”

Naomi frowned, looking at the readouts. He could almost see the options clicking through her mind. She smiled, her fierceness gone now, replaced by the mischievous look she got when she knew she was being really clever.

“As much as you want.”

“You want to do what?” Fred asked.

“Pull the nukes off course for a while to buy Miller some time, but not so much that we can’t still use them to destroy Eros if we need to,” Holden said.

“It’s simple,” Naomi added. “I’m sending you detailed instructions.”

“Give me the overview,” Fred said.

“Earth has targeted their missiles on the five freighter transponders on Eros,” Naomi said, pulling her plan up as an overlay on the comm video. “You have ships and stations all over the Belt. You use the transponder reconfiguring program you gave us way back when, and you keep shifting those transponder codes to ships or stations along these vectors to pull the missiles into a long arc that eventually wraps back around to Eros.”

Fred shook his head.

“Won’t work. The minute UNN Command sees we’re doing it, they’ll just tell the missiles to stop following those particular codes, and they’ll try to figure out some other way to target Eros,” he said. “And they’ll also be really pissed at us.”

“Yeah, they’re going to be pissed all right,” Holden said. “But they’re not going to get their missiles back. Just before you start leading the missiles off course, we’re going to launch a massive hacking attempt from multiple locations on the missiles.”

“So they’ll assume an enemy is trying to trick them, and shut down mid-flight reprogramming,” Fred said.

“Yep,” Holden replied. “We’ll tell them we’re going to trick them so they stop listening, and once they’re not listening, we’ll trick them.”

Fred shook his head again, this time giving Holden the vaguely frightened look of a man who wanted to back slowly out of the room.

“There is no way in hell I am going along with this,” he said. “Miller isn’t going to work some magical deal with the aliens. We’re going to wind up nuking Eros no matter what. Why delay the inevitable?”

“Because,” Holden said. “I’m starting to think it might be less dangerous this way. If we use the missiles without taking out Eros’ command center… brain… whatever, we don’t know if it’ll work, but I’m pretty sure our chances go down. Miller’s the only one who can do that. And these are his terms.”

Fred said something obscene.

“If Miller doesn’t manage to talk to it, he’ll take it out. I do trust him for that,” Holden said. “Come on, Fred, you know these missile designs as well as I do. Better. They put enough fuel pellets in those drives to fly around the solar system twice. We aren’t losing anything by giving Miller a little more time.”

Fred shook his head a third time. Holden saw his face go hard. He wasn’t going to buy it. Before he could say no, Holden said, “Remember that box with the protomolecule samples, and all the lab notes? Want to know what my price is for it?”

“You,” Fred said slowly, drawing it out, “are out of your God damn mind.”

“Want to buy it or what?” Holden replied. “You want the magic ticket to a seat at the table? You know my price now. Give Miller his chance, and the sample’s yours.”

“I’d be curious to know how you talked them into it,” Miller said. “I was thinking I was probably screwed.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Holden said. “We bought you your time. Go find the girl and save humanity. We’ll be waiting to hear back.”
And ready to nuke you into dust if we don’t
remained unsaid. There was no need.

“I’ve been thinking about where to go, if I can talk to her,” Miller said. He had the already lost hopefulness of a man with a lottery ticket. “I mean, she’s got to park this thing somewhere.”

If we live. If I can save her. If the miracle is true.

Holden shrugged, even though no one could see it.

“Give her Venus,” he said. “It’s an awful place.”

I
don’t and I don’t,” the voice of Eros muttered. Juliette Mao, talking in her sleep. “I don’t and I don’t and I don’t… ”

“Come on,” Miller said. “Come
on,
you sonofabitch.
Be
here.”

The medical bays were lush and overgrown, black spirals with filaments of bronze and steel climbing the walls, encrusting the examination tables, feeding on the supplies of narcotics, steroids, and antibiotics spilling out of the broken supply cabinets. Miller dug through the clutter with one hand, his suit alarm chiming. His air had the sour taste that came from being through the recyclers too many times. His thumb, still mashed on the dead man’s switch, tingled when it wasn’t shooting with pain.

He brushed the almost fungal growth off a storage box that wasn’t broken yet, found the latch. Four medical gas cylinders: two red, one green, one blue. He looked at the seal. The protomolecule hadn’t gotten them yet. Red for anesthetic. Blue nitrogen.
He picked up the green. The sterile shield on the delivery nipple was in place. He took a deep sighing breath of dying air. Another few hours. He put down his hand terminal (
one… two…
), popped the seal (
three…
), fed the nipple into his suit’s intake (
four…
), and put a finger on the hand terminal. He stood, feeling the cool of the oxygen tank in his hand while his suit revised his life span. Ten minutes, an hour, four hours. The medical cylinder’s pressure hit equality with the suit’s, and he popped it off. Four more hours. He’d won himself four more hours.

It was the third time he’d managed an emergency resupply since he’d talked to Holden. The first had been at a fire-suppression station, the second at a backup recycling unit. If he went back down to the port, there would probably be some uncompromised oxygen in some of the supply closets and docked ships. If he went all the way back to the surface, the OPA ships would have plenty.

But there wasn’t time for that. He wasn’t looking for air; he was looking for Juliette. He let himself stretch. The kinks in his neck and back were threatening to turn into cramps. The CO2 levels in the suit were still on the high side of acceptable, even with the new oxygen coming into the mix. The suit needed maintenance and a new filter. It’d have to wait. Behind him, the bomb in its cart kept its own counsel.

He had to find her. Somewhere in the maze of corridors and rooms, the dead city, Juliette Mao was driving them back to Earth. He’d tracked four hot spots. Three had been decent candidates for his original plan of vast nuclear immolation: hubs of wire and black alien filament tangling into huge organic-looking nodes. The fourth had been a cheap lab reactor churning on its way to meltdown. It had taken him fifteen minutes to get the emergency shutdown going, and he probably shouldn’t have wasted the time. But wherever he went, no Julie. Even the Julie of his imagination was gone, as if the ghost had no place now that he knew the real woman was still alive. He missed having her around, even if she’d only been a vision.

A wave went through the medical bays, all the alien growth ris
ing and falling like iron filings with a magnet passed beneath them. Miller’s heart sped up, adrenaline leaking into his blood, but it didn’t happen again.

He had to find her. He had to find her soon. He could feel exhaustion grinding at him, little teeth chewing at the back of his mind. He already wasn’t thinking as clearly as he should. Back on Ceres, he’d have gone back to his hole, slept for a day, and come back to the problem whole. Not an option here.