Such were the joys of sabotage.
Miller suited up. After the military-grade suits of the Rocinante, the OPA’s motley assortment of equipment felt like third-hand clothes. His suit smelled of someone else’s body, and the Mylar faceplate had a deformation where it had cracked and been repaired. He didn’t like thinking about what had happened to the poor bastard who’d been wearing it. The magnetic boots had a thick layer of corroded plastic and old mud between the plates and a triggering mechanism so old that Miller could feel it click on and off even before he moved his foot. He had the image of the suit locking on to Eros and never letting go.
The thought made him smile. You belong with me, his own private Julie had said. It was true, and now that he was here, he felt perfectly certain that he wasn’t going to leave. He’d been a cop for too long, and the idea of trying to reconnect to humanity again filled him with the presentiment of exhaustion. He was here to do the last part of his job. And then he was done.
“Oi! Pampaw!”
“I’m coming,” Miller said. “Hold your damn horses. It’s not like the station’s going anyplace.”
“A rainbow is a circle you can’t see. Can’t see. Can’t see,” Eros said in a child’s singsong voice. Miller turned down the volume of his feed.
The rocky surface of the station had no particular purchase for the suits and control waldoes. Two other ships had made polar landings where there was no spin gravity to fight against, but the Coriolis would leave everyone with a subliminal nausea. Miller’s team had to keep to the exposed metal plates of the dock, clinging like flies looking down into the starlit abyss.
Engineering the placement of the fusion bombs wasn’t trivial work. If the bombs didn’t pump enough energy into the station, the surface might cool enough to give someone another chance to put a science team on it before the penumbra of the sun swallowed it and whatever parts of the Nauvoo were still clinging to it. Even with the best minds of Tycho, there was still the chance that the detonations wouldn’t sync up. If the pressure waves traveling through the rock amplified in ways they hadn’t anticipated, the station could crack open like an egg, spreading the protomolecule through the wide, empty track of the solar system like scattering a handful of dust. But the difference between success and disaster might be literally a question of meters.
Miller crawled up the airlock and out to the station surface. The first wave of technicians were setting up resonance seismographs, the glow of the work lights and readouts the brightest thing in the universe. Miller set his boots on a wide swath of a ceramic steel alloy and let the spin stretch the kinks out of his back. After days in the acceleration couch, the freedom felt euphoric. One of the techs raised her hands, the physical Belter idiom that called for attention. Miller upped the suit volume.
“… insectes rampant sur ma peau… ”
With a stab of impatience, he switched from the Eros feed to the team channel.
“Got to move,” a woman’s voice said. “Too much splashback here. We have to get to the other side of the docks.”
“These go on for almost two kilometers,” Miller said.
“Is,” she agreed. “We can unmoor and move the ship under power or we can tow it. We’ve got enough lead line.”
“Which one’s fastest? We don’t have a lot of spare time here.”
“Towing.”
“Tow it, then,” Miller said.
Slowly, the ship rose, twenty small, crawling transport drones clinging to leads like they were hauling a great metallic zeppelin. The ship was going to stay with him, here on the station, strapped to the rock like a sacrifice to the gods. Miller walked with the crew as they crossed the wide, closed bay doors. The only sounds were the tapping of his soles as the electromagnets jolted onto the surface and then a tick when they let go again. The only smells were of his own body and the fresh plastic of the air recycler. The metal under his feet shone like someone had cleaned it. Any dust or pebbles had been hurled away long ago.
They worked fast to place the ship, arm the bombs, and fit the security codes, everyone tacitly aware of the great missile that had been the Nauvoo speeding toward them.
If another ship came down and tried to disarm the trap, the ship would send synchronizing signals to all the other OPA bomb ships studding the moon’s surface. Three seconds later, the surface of Eros would be scrubbed clean. The spare air and supplies were loaded off the ship, bundled together and ready for reclamation. No reason to waste the resources.
Nothing horrific crawled out of an airlock and tried to attack the crew, which made Miller’s presence during the mission entirely superfluous. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just a ride.
When everything was done that could be, Miller sent the all clear, relayed through the now-dead ship’s system. The return transport appeared slowly, a dot of light that grew gradually brighter and then spread, the null-g boarding web strung out like scaffolding. At the new ship’s word, Miller’s team turned off their boots and fired simple maneuvering thrusters either from their suits or, if the suits were too old, from shared ablative evacuation shells. Miller watched them drop away.
“Call va and roll, Pampaw,” Diogo said from someplace. Miller wasn’t sure which of them he was at this distance. “This tube don’t sit.”
“I’m not coming,” Miller said.
“Sa que?”
“I decided. I’m staying here.”
There was a moment of silence. Miller had been waiting for this. He had the security codes. If he needed to crawl back into the shell of their old ship and lock the door behind him, he could. But he didn’t want to. He’d prepared his arguments: He would only be going back to Tycho as a political pawn for Fred Johnson’s negotiations; he was tired and old in a way that years didn’t describe; he’d already died on Eros once, and he wanted to be here to finish it. He’d earned that much. Diogo and the others owed it to him.
He waited for the boy to react, to try to talk him out of it.
“All correct, then,” Diogo said. “Buona morte.”
“Buona morte,” Miller said, and shut off his radio. The universe was silent. The stars below him shifted slowly but perceptibly as the station he hung from spun. One of those lights was the Rocinante. Two others were the ships Holden had been sent out to stall. Miller couldn’t pick them out. Julie floated beside him, her dark hair floating in the vacuum, the stars shining through her. She looked peaceful.