Leviathan Wakes

Miller set his suit to play some old pop tunes he’d enjoyed when he was young and let himself be sung to sleep. When he dreamed, he dreamed he’d found a tunnel at the back of his old hole on Ceres that meant he would at last, at last, be free.

* * *

His last breakfast was a hard kibble bar and a handful of chocolate scrounged from a forgotten survival pack. He ate it with tepid recycled water that tasted of iron and rot. The signals from Eros were almost drowned by the oscillating frequencies blasting out from the station above him, but Miller made out enough to know where things stood.

Holden had won, much as Miller had expected him to. The OPA was responding to a thousand angry accusations from Earth and Mars and, in the true and permanent style, factions within the OPA itself. It was too late. The Nauvoo was due in hours now. The end was coming.

Miller put on his suit for the last time, turned out the lights, and crawled back up the airlock. For a long moment, the exterior release didn’t respond, the safety lights glowing red, and he had a stab of fear that he would spend his last moments there, trapped in a tube like a torpedo ready to fire. But he cycled the lock’s power, and it opened.

The Eros feed was wordless now, with only a soft murmuring like water over stone. Miller walked out across the wide mouth of the docking bays. The sky above him turned, and the Nauvoo rose from the horizon like the sun. His splayed hand held at full arm’s length wasn’t big enough to cover the glow of its engines. He hung by his boots, watching the ship approach. The phantom Julie watched with him.

If he’d done the math right, the Nauvoo’s impact site would be at the center of Eros’ major axis. Miller would be able to see it when it happened, and the giddy excitement in his chest reminded him of being young. It would be a show. Oh, it would be something to see. He considered recording it. His suit would be able to make a simple visual file and stream the data out in real time. But no. This was his moment. His and Julie’s. The rest of humanity could guess what it had been like if they cared.

The massive glow of the Nauvoo filled a quarter of the sky now, and the full circle of it was free of the horizon. The Eros feed’s soft murmur shifted to something more clearly synthetic: a rising, spiraling sound that reminded him for no particular reason of the green sweeping radar screens of ancient films. There were voices at the back of it, but he couldn’t make out the words or even the language.

The great torch of the Nauvoo was a full half of the sky, the stars around it blotted out by the light of full burn. Miller’s suit chirped a radiation warning and he shut it off.

A manned Nauvoo would never have sustained a burn like that; even in the best couch, the thrust gravity would have pulped bones. He tried to guess how fast the ship would be going when it hit.

Fast enough. That was all that mattered. Fast enough.

There, in the center of the fiery bloom, Miller saw a dark spot, no more than the dot of a pencil’s tip. The ship itself. He took a deep breath. When he closed his eyes, the light pressed red through his lids. When he opened them again, the Nauvoo had length. Shape. It was a needle, an arrow, a missile. A fist rising from the depths. For the first time in memory, Miller felt awe.

Eros shouted.

“DON’T YOU FUCKING TOUCH ME!”

Slowly, the bloom of engine fire changed from a circle to an oval to a great feathery plume, the Nauvoo itself showing silver in rough profile. Miller gaped.

The Nauvoo had missed. It had turned. It was right now, right now, speeding past Eros and not into it. But he hadn’t seen any kind of maneuvering rockets fire. And how would you turn something that big, moving that quickly, so abruptly that it would veer off between one breath and the next without also tearing the ship apart? The acceleration g alone…

Miller looked at the stars as if there was some answer written in them. And to his surprise, there was. The sweep of the Milky Way, the infinite scattering of stars were still there. But the angles had changed. The rotation of Eros had shifted. Its relation to the plane of the ecliptic.

For the Nauvoo to change course at the last minute without falling apart would have been impossible. And so it hadn’t happened. Eros was roughly six hundred cubic kilometers. Before Protogen, it had housed the second-largest active port in the Belt.

And without so much as overcoming the grip of Miller’s magnetic boots, Eros Station had dodged.

Chapter Forty-Nine: Holden

“Holy shit,” said Amos in a flat voice.

“Jim,” Naomi said to Holden’s back, but he waved her off and opened a channel to Alex in the cockpit.

“Alex, did we just see what my sensors say we saw?”

“Yeah, Cap,” the pilot replied. “Radar and scopes are both sayin’ Eros jumped two hundred klicks spinward in a little less than a minute.”