No one else had come to the security station yet. Probably, they were all still on the Rocinante, eating breakfast in the galley. Or maybe stopping at one of the little kiosks in the docks where the locals still took their scrip.
Naomi stopped beside him, her gaze on the screen with his. Her lips twitched like she was talking to herself, having a heated conversation no one else was welcome to. Not even him. She shook her head, disagreeing with herself. She’d seemed calmer when she’d first called, but the more they talked about it, the more agitated she became. The more frightened, even.
It looked like she was starting to hope.
“So this thing. Is it a thing we can use?”
“I don’t know what it is. The mechanism? I’ve got no idea. All we have is this pattern, but it looks so consistent.”
He tried again. “Is this a consistent pattern we can use? And specifically, is there something here that maybe gives us a third alternative in that ‘stay here and be slaughtered versus run away through one of the gates and be slaughtered’ conversation?”
She took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly between her teeth. He’d kind of hoped she’d laugh, but she didn’t. She sat at her workstation again, pulled up a complex equation that Holden couldn’t follow.
“I think,” she said, “we can simulate a high-traffic interval. Load the Giambattista with as much junk as we can weld on it. Overload the reactor a little so it’s generating more energy. Then, when we run it through a gate”—she tapped the spike-and-decay curve—“we should get one of these. Not a big one, though. Even a massive ship is only one ship …”
“And one of these is what?”
“It’s an obstacle. It’s something that the Free Navy ships may run into. If their ships have enough mass and enough energy that this line crosses the curve before it dies away … I think they just stop.”
“Meaning they go where all the other eaten ships go?”
Naomi nodded. “We could put extra mass in the Giambattista. We’ve still got those attack boats. Some of them have fuel left in their drives. If we put them through at the same time, we could increase the curve a little. And Marco will almost certainly bring all his ships through at once, so that might help us. But I don’t know the mechanism—”
“Hey,” Holden said. “Do you know what Planck’s constant is?”
“Six point six two six plus change times ten to the negative thirty-fourth meters squared kilos per second?”
“Sure, why not,” Holden said, raising one finger. “But do you know why it’s that and not six point seven whatever the rest of it was?”
Naomi shook her head.
“Neither does anyone else. They still call it science. Most of what we know isn’t why things are what they are. We just figure out enough about how they work that we can predict the next thing that’s going to happen. That’s what you’ve got. Enough to predict. And if you think you’re right, then I do too. So let’s do this.”
She shook her head, but not at him. “A massive n equals one study where our null hypothesis is that we all get killed.”
“Not necessarily,” Holden said. “They only have fifteen to our one. We might still take them. We have Bobbie and Amos.”
This time she did laugh. He put his arm under hers, and she leaned against him. “If it doesn’t work, we won’t be any more fucked than we are now,” she said.
“Probably not,” Holden said. “I mean, weird, dead alien technology with effects we don’t understand sweeping whole ships away without leaving a trace or explanation. That’s probably safe to play with, right?”
The Pella and her fourteen warships—all that was left of the Free Navy—came closer to the ring, already past their halfway point and on their braking burn. Avasarala had sent a list of the tactics she was using to try to slow or stop the attack days before, and with a heaviness that said she knew it was all bullshit even before she got around to making it explicit. She’d ended with I’ll do whatever I can, but you might have to make do with being avenged. Sorry about that. He wondered what she’d have thought about Naomi’s discovery and their plan.
Holden felt every hour that passed, knowing Inaros and his soldiers were a little nearer. It was like someone pushing at his back, making him hurry. It would almost have been easier if it had been hours and days. At least it would have been over.
The captain of the Giambattista misunderstood at first, thinking that his ship would be lost to the whatever-it-was that the gates did. Naomi had to explain to him four different times that if it went well, the Giambattista would just sail into some other system, loaf around there for a few days, and then come back, unharmed. Once she convinced him that, even if it failed, it meant he and his crew would miss the battle, his objections evaporated.
Naomi coordinated it all—loading the boats back into their positions in the hold, retuning the reactor so that both the bottle and the reaction were working almost at the edge of their capacity. She took Amos and Clarissa with her to backload the Giambattista’s internal power grid so that everything was on the verge of overload without ever quite tripping. It reminded Holden of Father Tom telling him about bears when he was young. If a black bear wandered onto the ranch, the thing to do was to open your coat and raise your arms over your head, shout and make noise. If it was a grizzly, the only thing to do was very quietly to get as far away as you could. Only this felt like they were making noise at a grizzly in hopes that it would eat the other guy.
While Naomi made her preparations, he tried to make himself useful.
There were backlogs of communications from the colony worlds. Status reports and threats and begging. It was sobering to remember how many planets humanity had already spread to. How many seeds they’d planted in strange soils. With Naomi’s flood of information just gone out, a lot of the colonies were only now beginning to understand why they’d been cut off. Only now hearing about what had happened to Earth and its solar system. The messages coming back flooded the comm buffers with rage and sorrow, threats of vengeance and offers of aid.
Those last were the hardest. New colonies still trying to force their way into local ecosystems so exotic that their bodies could hardly recognize them as life at all, isolated, exhausted, sometimes at the edge of their resources. And what they wanted was to send back help. He listened to their voices, saw the distress in their eyes. He couldn’t help but love them a little bit.
Under the best conditions, disasters and plagues did that. It wasn’t universally true. There would always be hoarders and price gouging, people who closed their doors to refugees and left them freezing and starving. But the impulse to help was there too. To carry a burden together, even if it meant having less for yourself. Humanity had come as far as it had in a haze of war, sickness, violence, and genocide. History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage. The one didn’t come without the other, and Holden had to take comfort in that. The sense that however terrible humanity’s failings were, there was still a little more in them worth admiring.
He did what he could to answer the most pressing messages, offer what hope he could. The voice, however briefly, of Medina Station. Coordinating supplies for all the colonies was more than he could manage. It would be full-time work for a staff of dozens at least, and he was only one man with a radio. Still, just seeing the need, dipping his toes into the oceanic task of being the physical hub of a thousand different solar systems, gave him a covert sense of hope for the future.
He’d been right. There was a niche here.
Providing the plan worked. Providing they didn’t all die. Providing that any of a million things he hadn’t even thought of yet didn’t swing through and destroy everything he was still looking for and planning. There was always the forgotten arm. The thing you didn’t see coming. Hopefully, the thing Marco Inaros wouldn’t see coming either.