More often, he listened to the voice of Eros. Sometimes he watched the video feeds too, but usually, he just listened. Over the hours and days, he began to hear, if not patterns, at least common structures. Some of the voices spooling out of the dying station were consistent — broadcasters and entertainers who were overrepresented in the audio files archives, he guessed. There seemed to be some specific tendencies in, for want of a better term, the music of it too. Hours of random, fluting static and snatched bits of phrases would give way, and Eros would latch on to some word or phrase, fixating on it with greater and greater intensity until it broke apart and the randomness poured back in.
“Dieu! Dieu!” someone shouted. “Bombs son vamen roja! Going to fry it! Fry us toda!”
There was the usual polite chuckle that the same joke had occasioned over the course of the trip, and the boy who’d made it — a pimply Belter no more than fifteen years old — grinned with pleasure at his own wit. If he didn’t stop that shit, someone was going to beat him with a crowbar before they got back to Tycho. But Miller figured that someone wasn’t him.
A massive jolt forward pushed him hard into the couch, and then gravity was back, the familiar 0.3 g. Maybe a little more. Except that with the airlocks pointing toward ship’s down, the pilot had to grapple the spinning skin of Eros’ belly first. The spin gravity made what had been the ceiling the new floor; the lowest rank of couches was now the top; and while they rigged the fusion bombs to the docks, they were all going to have to climb up onto a cold, dark rock that was trying to fling them off into the vacuum.
Such were the joys of sabotage.
Miller suited up. After the military-grade suits of the
The thought made him smile.
“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
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.