“This is Naomi Nagata,” she said, matching the timing and cadence of her false self. “If you get this message, please retransmit. Tell James Holden I am in —” She slammed the wire onto the exposed leads. A shiver of electricity bit her fingertips even through the suit’s gloves. The radio was silent, but she kept mouthing the words, replaying them like a song stuck in her head until the right moment, then yanked the wire free “— control. Please retransmit. This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. If you get this message, please retransmit. Tell James Holden I am in —” Cut, pause. “— control. Please retransmit.”
After the fourth time, she took the length of steel spring she’d been using as a knife and cut the transmitter. Her false voice went dead. She scrambled down, moving from strut to strut, watching her hands and feet with every movement so she wouldn’t misjudge. The acceleration gravity made her ankles and wrists feel unstable. The air in her suit didn’t feel stale or close; the carbon dioxide scrubbers worked well enough on passive that she wouldn’t feel the panic of asphyxiation. She’d just gently pass out and die.
She ducked into the engineering deck, closed the access panel. On the way to the hatch, her knee buckled. She popped the hatch open, ripped off her helmet, and sank down, gasping. Her vision narrowed, bright sparkles filling in her peripheral vision. She dry heaved once, paused, did it again, and let her body’s weight sink deep into the deck below her.
Tell James Holden I’m in control for some really broad definition of control, she thought and laughed. Then coughed until her ribs hurt even worse. Then laughed again.
At her seventy-first sortie, she hit the wall. It wasn’t subtle. She had closed the hatch to the main body of the ship, closed the seals, and put her helmet onto the environment suit. Before she fixed it into place and started the next five-minute count, her hands dropped to her sides. She hadn’t consciously intended to do that; it had just happened. Alarmed in a vague, distant kind of way, she sat on the deck with her back against the wall and tried moving them. If she’d just become paralyzed or something, that would change the situation. Give her permission to stop. But her hands still flexed; her shoulders still moved. She was just exhausted. Even the effort to swallow seemed heroic. She closed her eyes, wondering if she’d instantly fall asleep, but she was too weary for that. So she sat.
If the suit had a battery, it would probably be cataloging the failures of her body right now. The dehydration headache was worse now, and moving in toward nausea. Her skin felt raw where the unshielded sun had burned her. Though she wasn’t producing as much, she was still coughing. And she figured her blood was probably about equal parts plasma and fatigue poisons by now.
Her two little victories – the thruster, the transmitter – had been the end. Since then, either her efforts had degraded or things had genuinely gotten more complicated, or both. The repeaters that would cause the core to shut down had either been omitted in the build or were tucked someplace that couldn’t be reached from between the hulls. The sensor array that would trigger the bottle failure when a rescue ship got too close would have been a lovely thing to access, but it appeared to be mounted on the exterior where she couldn’t get to it. There were half a dozen places she could have tried tapping into the computer system, but none of them had interfaces, and she didn’t have any she could bring. Other plans and strategies flickered through her mind from time to time like fireflies. Some of them might have been good. She couldn’t keep hold of them long enough to say.
She might have slept or the timeless skipping might just have been how her brain worked now. The voice she heard was just a whisper fainter than her own voice had been, but it snapped her back to herself.
“Hey there, Chetzemoka. This is Alex Kamal presently of the Razorback. Naomi? If you’re there, I’d appreciate you giving me a sign. I’d sort of like to make sure it’s you before we come over. Your ship’s been acting a mite odd, and we’re a little on the jumpy side. And, just in case it’s not Naomi Nagata? I’ve got fifteen missiles locked on you right now, so whoever you are, you might want to talk with me.”
“Don’t,” she said, knowing he couldn’t hear her. “Stay away. Stay away.”
Everything hurt. Everything whirled. Nothing was easy. When she got to her feet, her head swam. She was afraid she was going to pass out, but if she bent over, she wasn’t sure she’d have the strength to stand back up. She had to find a way to wave him off. She had to keep him from getting close enough to be caught in the blast. Whether it saved her life or not didn’t matter. She’d had her good day. It was more than she’d expected, and she was so deeply weary…