James Corey - Leviathan Wakes

The optical tracking system watching Eros flashed a warning to him that the asteroid was increasing speed again. The giant sitting on his chest added a few pounds as Alex pushed the Rocinante to keep up. A flashing red indicator informed Holden that because of the duration they’d spent at the current acceleration, he could expect as much as 12 percent of the crew to stroke out. It would go up. Enough time, and it would reach 100 percent. He tried to remember the Roci ’s maximum theoretical acceleration. Alex had already flown it at twelve g briefly when they’d left the Donnager. The actual limit was one of those trivial numbers, a way to brag about something your ship would never really do. Fifteen g, was it? Twenty?

Miller hadn’t felt any acceleration at all. How fast could you go if you didn’t even feel it?

Almost without realizing he was going to do it, Holden activated the master engine cutoff switch. Within seconds he was in free fall, wracked with coughs as his organs tried to find their original resting places inside his body. When Holden had recovered enough to take one really deep breath, his first in hours, Alex came on the comm.

“Cap, did you kill the engines?” the pilot said.

“Yeah, that was me. We’re done. Eros is getting away no matter what we do. We were just prolonging the inevitable, and risking some crew deaths in the process.”

Naomi turned her chair and gave him a sad little smile. She was sporting a black eye from the acceleration.

“We did our best,” she said.

Holden shoved out of his chair hard enough that he bruised his forearms on the ceiling, then shoved off hard again and pinned his back to a bulkhead by grabbing on to a fire extinguisher mount. Naomi was watching him from across the deck, her mouth a comical O of surprise. He knew he probably looked ridiculous, like a petulant child throwing a tantrum, but he couldn’t stop himself. He broke free of his grip on the fire extinguisher and floated into the middle of the deck. He hadn’t known he’d been pounding on the bulkhead with his other fist. Now that he did, his hand hurt.

“God dammit,” he said. “Just God dammit.”

“We-” Naomi started, but he cut her off.

“We did our best? What the hell does that matter?” Holden felt a red haze in his mind, and not all of it was from the drugs. “I did my best to help the Canterbury, too. I tried to do the right thing when I let us be taken by the Donnager. Did my good intentions mean jack shit?”

Naomi’s expression went flat. Now her eyelids dropped, and she stared at him from narrow slits. Her lips pressed together until they were almost white. They wanted me to kill you, Holden thought. They wanted me to kill my crew just in case Eros can’t break fifteen g, and I couldn’t do it. The guilt and rage and sorrow played against each other, turning into something thin and unfamiliar. He couldn’t put a name to the feeling.

“You’re the last person I’d expect to hear self-pity from,” she said, her voice tight. “Where’s the captain who’s always asking, ‘What can we do right now to make things better?’ ”

Holden gestured around himself helplessly. “Show me which button to push to stop everyone on Earth from being killed, I’ll push it.”

Just as long as it doesn’t kill you.

Naomi unbuckled her harness and floated toward the crew ladder.

“I’m going below to check on Amos,” she said, then opened the deck hatch. She paused. “I’m your operations officer, Holden. Monitoring communication lines is part of the job. I know what Fred wanted.”

Holden blinked, and Naomi pulled herself out of sight. The hatch slammed behind her with a bang that couldn’t have been any harder than normal but felt like it was anyway.

Holden called up to the cockpit and told Alex to take a break and get some coffee. The pilot stopped on his way through the deck, looking like he wanted to talk, but Holden just waved him on. Alex shrugged and left.

The watery feeling in his gut had taken root and bloomed into a full-fledged, limb-shaking panic. Some vicious, vindictive, self-flagellating part of his mind insisted on running nonstop movies of Eros hurtling toward Earth. It would come screaming down out of the sky like every religion’s vision of apocalypse made real, fire and earthquakes and pestilential rain sweeping the land. But each time Eros hit the Earth in his mind, it was the explosion of the Canterbury he saw. A shockingly sudden white light, and then nothing but the sound of ice pebbles rattling across his hull like gentle hail.

Mars would survive, for a while. Pockets of the Belt would hold out even longer, probably. They had a culture of making do, surviving on scraps, living on the bleeding edge of their resources. But in the end, without Earth, everything would eventually die. Humans had been out of the gravity well a long time. Long enough to have developed the technology to cut that umbilical cord, but they’d just never bothered to do it. Stagnant. Humanity, for all its desire to fling itself into every livable pocket it could reach, had become stagnant. Satisfied to fly around in ships built half a century before, using technology that hadn’t changed in longer than that.

Earth had been so focused on her own problems that she’d ignored her far-flung children, except when asking for her share of their labors. Mars had bent her entire population to the task of remaking the planet, changing its red face to green. Trying to make a new Earth to end their reliance on the old. And the Belt had become the slums of the solar system. Everyone too busy trying to survive to spend any time creating something new.

We found the protomolecule at exactly the right time for it to do the most damage to us, Holden thought.

It had looked like a shortcut. A way to avoid having to do any of the work, to just jump straight to godhood. And it had been so long since anything was a real threat to humanity outside of itself that no one was even smart enough to be scared. Dresden had said it himself: The things that had made the protomolecule, loaded it into Phoebe, and shot it at the Earth were already godlike back when humanity’s ancestors thought photosynthesis and the flagellum were cutting-edge. But he’d taken their ancient engine of destruction and turned the key anyway, because when you got right down to it, humans were still just curious monkeys. They still had to poke everything they found with a stick to see what it did.

The red haze in Holden’s vision had taken on a strange strobing pattern. It took him a moment to realize that a red telltale on his panel was flashing, letting him know that the Ravi was calling. He kicked off a nearby crash couch, floated back to his station, and opened the link.

“ Rocinante here, Ravi, go ahead.”

“Holden, why are we stopped?” McBride asked.

“Because we weren’t going to keep up anyway, and the danger of crew casualties was getting too high,” he replied. It sounded weak even to him. Cowardly. McBride didn’t seem to notice.

“Roger. I’m going to get new orders. Will let you know if anything changes.”

Holden killed the connection and stared blankly at the console. The visual tracking system was doing its very best to keep Eros in sight. The Roci was a good ship. State of the art. And since Alex had tagged the asteroid as a threat, the computer would do everything in its power to keep track of it. But Eros was a fast-moving, low-albedo object that didn’t reflect radar. It could move unpredictably and at high speed. It was just a matter of time before they lost track of it, especially if it wanted to be lost track of.

Next to the tracking information on his console, a small data window opened to inform him that the Ravi had turned on its transponder. It was standard practice even for military ships to keep them on when there was no apparent threat or need for stealth. The radio man on the little UNN corvette must have flipped it back on out of habit.