• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The Nauvoo had missed. It had turned. It was right now, right now, speeding past Eros and not into it. But he hadn’t seen any kind of maneuvering rockets fire. And how would you turn something that big, moving that quickly, so abruptly that it would veer off between one breath and the next without also tearing the ship apart? The acceleration g alone…

Miller looked at the stars as if there was some answer written in them. And to his surprise, there was. The sweep of the Milky Way, the infinite scattering of stars were still there. But the angles had changed. The rotation of Eros had shifted. Its relation to the plane of the ecliptic.

For the Nauvoo to change course at the last minute without falling apart would have been impossible. And so it hadn’t happened. Eros was roughly six hundred cubic kilometers. Before Protogen, it had housed the second-largest active port in the Belt.

And without so much as overcoming the grip of Miller’s magnetic boots, Eros Station had dodged.

Chapter Forty-Nine: Holden

Holy shit,” said Amos in a flat voice.

“Jim,” Naomi said to Holden’s back, but he waved her off and opened a channel to Alex in the cockpit.

“Alex, did we just see what my sensors say we saw?”

“Yeah, Cap,” the pilot replied. “Radar and scopes are both sayin’ Eros jumped two hundred klicks spinward in a little less than a minute.”

“Holy shit,” Amos repeated in exactly the same emotionless tone. The metallic bang of deck hatches opening and closing echoed through the ship, signaling Amos’ approach up the crew ladder.

Holden shook off the flush of irritation he felt at Amos’ leaving his post. He’d deal with that later. He needed to be sure that the Rocinante and her crew hadn’t just experienced a group hallucination.

“Naomi, give me comms,” he said.

Naomi turned around in her chair to face him, her face ashen.

“How can you be so calm?” she asked.

“Panic won’t help. We need to know what’s going on before we can plan intelligently. Please transfer the comms to me.”

“Holy shit,” Amos said as he climbed into the ops deck. The deck hatch shut with a punctuating bang.

“I don’t remember ordering you to leave your post, sailor,” Holden said.

“Plan intelligently,” Naomi said like they were words in a foreign language that she almost understood. “Plan intelligently.”

Amos threw himself at a chair hard enough that the cushioning gel grabbed him and kept him from bouncing off.

“Eros is really fucking big,” Amos said.

“Plan intelligently,” Naomi repeated, speaking to herself now.

“I mean, really fucking big,” Amos said. “Do you know how much energy it took to spin that rock up? I mean, it took years to do that shit.”

Holden put his headset on to drown Amos and Naomi out, and called up Alex again.

“Alex, is Eros still changing velocity?”

“No, Cap. Just sitting there like a rock.”

“Okay,” Holden said. “Amos and Naomi are vapor locked. How are you doing?”

“Not taking my hands off the stick while that bastard is anywhere in my space, that’s for damn sure.”

Thank God for military training, Holden thought.

“Good, keep us at a constant distance of five thousand klicks until I say otherwise. Let me know if it moves again, even an inch.”

“Roger that, Cap,” said Alex.

Holden took off his headset and turned to face the rest of the crew. Amos was looking at the ceiling, ticking points off with his fingers, his eyes unfocused.

“—don’t really remember the mass of Eros off the top of my head… ” he was saying to no one in particular.

“About seven thousand trillion kilos,” Naomi replied. “Give or take. And the heat signature’s up about two degrees.”

“Jesus,” the mechanic said. “I can’t do that math in my head. That much mass coming up two degrees like that?”

“A lot,” Holden said. “So let’s move on—”

“About ten exajoules,” Naomi said. “That’s just off the top of my head, but I’m not off by an order of magnitude or anything.”

Amos whistled.

“Ten exajoules is like, what, a two-gigaton fusion bomb?”

“It’s about a hundred kilos converted directly