Leviathan Wakes

“Nice thought,” he said. “But how do you propose we defend something the size of Eros Station if Earth and Mars bring their navies to bear?”

It was a good point. Miller felt a tug of sorrow. Even though Julie Mao — his Julie — was dead and gone, it felt like disloyalty to say it.

“Then you have to get rid of it,” he said.

“And how would I do that?” Fred said. “Even if we studded the thing with nukes, how would we be sure that no little scrap of the thing would make its way to a colony or down a well? Blowing that thing up would be like blowing dandelion fluff into the breeze.”

Miller had never seen a dandelion, but he saw the problem. Even the smallest portion of the goo filling Eros might be enough to start the whole evil experiment over again. And the goo thrived on radiation; simply cooking the station might hurry the thing along its occult path rather than end it. To be sure that the protomolecule on Eros never spread, they’d need to break everything on the station down to its constituent atoms…

“Oh,” Miller said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. You’re not going to like this.”

“Try me.”

“Okay. You asked. You drive Eros into the sun.”

“Into the sun,” Fred said. “Do you have any idea how much mass we’re talking about here?”

Miller nodded to the wide, clear expanse of window, to the construction yards beyond it. To the Nauvoo.

“Big engines on that thing,” Miller said. “Get some fast ships out to the station, make sure no one can get in before you get there. Run the Nauvoo into Eros Station. Knock it sunward.”

Fred’s gaze turned inward as he planned, calculated.

“Got to make sure no one gets into it until it hits corona. That’ll be hard, but Earth and Mars are both just as interested in keeping the other guy from having it as in getting it themselves.”

I’m sorry I couldn’t do better, Julie, he thought. But it’ll be a hell of a funeral.

Fred’s breath grew slow and deep, his gaze flickering as if he were reading something in the air that only he could see. Miller didn’t interrupt, even when the silence got heavy. It was almost a minute later that Fred let out a short, percussive breath.

“The Mormons are going to be pissed,” he said.

Chapter Forty-Five: Holden

Naomi talked in her sleep. It was one of a dozen things Holden hadn’t known about her before tonight. Even though they’d slept in crash couches a few feet apart on many occasions, he’d never heard it. Now, with her face against his bare chest, he could feel her lips move and the soft, punctuated exhalations of her words. He couldn’t hear what she was saying.

She also had a scar on her back, just above her left buttock. It was three inches long and had the uneven edges and rippling that came from a tear rather than a slice. Naomi would never get herself knifed in a bar fight, so it had to have come on the job. Maybe she had been climbing through tight spaces in the engine room when the ship maneuvered unexpectedly. A competent plastic surgeon could have made it invisible in one visit. That she hadn’t bothered and clearly didn’t care was another thing he had learned about her tonight.

She stopped murmuring and smacked her lips a few times, then said, “Thirsty.”

Holden slid out from under her and headed for the kitchen, knowing that this was the obsequiousness that always accompanied a new lover. For the next couple of weeks, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from fulfilling every whim Naomi might have. It was a behavior some men carried at the genetic level, their DNA wanting to make sure that first time wasn’t just a fluke.

Her room was laid out differently than his, and the unfamiliarity made him clumsy in the dark. He fumbled around for a few minutes in her small kitchen nook, looking for a glass. By the time he found it, filled it, and headed back into the bedroom, Naomi was sitting up in bed. The sheet lay pooled on her lap. The sight of her half nude in the dimly lit room gave him an embarrassingly sudden erection.

Naomi panned her gaze up his body, pausing at his midsection, then at the water glass, and said, “Is that for me?”

Holden didn’t know which thing she was asking about, so he just said, “Yes.”

* * *

“You asleep?”

Naomi’s face was on his belly, her breathing slow and deep, but to his surprise she said, “No.”

“Can we talk?”

Naomi rolled off him and pulled herself up until her face lay next to his on the pillow. Her hair fell across her eyes, and Holden reached out and brushed it away in a move that felt so intimate and proprietary that he had to swallow a lump in his throat.

“Are you about to get serious on me?” she asked, her eyes half lidded.

“Yeah, I am,” he said, and kissed her forehead.