“Of course it does.”
“Then how you use that power matters too. I’m not saying that we were right to put the protomolecule thing under the rug. I’m saying that telling everyone about it – especially right now while whatever the hell this is is still going on – is worse. When we were in the slow zone, you were the voice that pulled us all together. You gave a shape to that moment of chaos. And it made people safer and calmer and more rational. More civilized. We need that again. I need that again.”
“How can you say —” Monica began, and her hand terminal buzzed. She looked down at it in annoyance, then did a double take. She lifted a finger to him. Just a second.
“What is it?” Holden said, but she was reading her terminal, her eyes getting wider. “Monica? If this is some kind of object lesson about how shitty it is to withhold information, I admit it’s weirdly elegant. But if you could stop it now —”
“The attack ships. The ones going after the Martian prime minister. The command ship put out a message.” She looked up at him. “It’s for you.”
Naomi’s voice on the hand terminal was thin and tinny and like waking up from a nightmare into something worse. “If you receive this, please retransmit. This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. Message is for James Holden. The software controlling the magnetic bottle has been sabotaged. Do not start the reactor —”
She kept talking, but Holden already had his hand terminal up. His knuckles ached, and he had to force himself to stop squeezing the device. He put out a connection request to Drummer. His heart beat against his ribs and he felt like he was falling, like he’d stepped off a tower and hadn’t quite caught the ledge on the way down. Monica was cursing quietly under her breath. It sounded like prayer.
It the reactor came up and the bottle failed, the Rocinante would die in a fraction of a second. Tycho Station might survive. Some of it, anyway.
“Drummer here,” his hand terminal said. “How can I help you, Captain?”
“Have you started the reactor?” Holden said.
Drummer went silent for maybe half a second. It felt like years. “Yes, sir. We’re at sixty percent, and looking great.”
“Shut it down,” Holden said. “Shut it down right now.”
There was a moment of silence. Don’t ask me why, Holden thought. Don’t argue or ask me to explain. Please don’t.
“Done. The core is down,” Drummer said. “So can I ask what this is about?”
Chapter Thirty-four: Alex
… Do not start the reactor without reloading the hardware drivers from a known good source. If you hear this message, please retr—”
The message cut off.
“We have to get this out,” Alex said. “We have to get that to Holden.”
“I’ll take care of it,” the captain said. “You and the prime minister need to evacuate. Right now.”
Alex looked at her, confused. Naomi was on the attack ships. The Roci had been sabotaged. He felt like the moment of stillness between being hit in the head and the bloom of pain. His first semi-coherent, irrational thought was If Naomi’s with them, maybe they’re not so bad.
“Mister Kamal?”
“No, I’m fine. It’s just —”
Prime Minister Smith looked at him, the man’s gentle, innocuous eyes seeming utterly out of place. “Does this change anything for us?”
“No,” Alex said. “I just… No. No, we should go. Wait. Bobbie…”
“Gunny Draper knows where you’re going,” Captain Choudhary said. “I’ll see she doesn’t get lost.”
They moved to the lift, the two marines before and behind them. The lift car gave Alex a moment of orientation as it pushed them down into the heart of the ship. It only took a few seconds to match velocity and go back to floating, but it was enough of a cue that his mind made one direction into down, the other into up. The lift car was wide enough for three times the load. The marines took stations at the door, ready to face danger if there was any. The prime minister took a place at the side near the front, where there was a little cover. No one commented on it. It was just a thing that happened. The dynamics of political power as positions in an elevator.
Naomi was here. Right here. Maybe less than ten thousand kilometers away. It was like he’d turned a corner and she was there. Except, of course, that she wasn’t. Even close-quarters battle meant distances that were vast in any other context. If the ship had been transparent, the enemy vessels would only have been visible by their drive plumes – dots of light in a sky filled with them. The Pella could be as far from him right now as Boston was from Sri Lanka, and it would still be almost intimate in the vast scale of the solar system.
“You’re thinking of your friend,” Smith said.
“Yes, sir,” Alex said.
“Do you know why she would be on the Pella?”