Screw it, she thought. Posterity can take care of itself.
“Please get back to me. The sooner we can establish some working protocols, the sooner we can address this situation.”
She stopped the recording.
“And the less likely we are to be sucked up into a vast, inhuman consciousness in which we are all lost like raindrops falling into an ocean,” she finished to the inactive lens.
Elvi, at her workstation, gave a thumbs-up. The recording was good. Naomi stretched her arms out to the side, easing the tension that had knotted itself between her shoulder blades. For a moment, she pictured all the people who had sworn to join the fight against Duarte and Laconia who would be seeing this. She wanted to believe that they’d all follow her lead, they’d all see the wisdom in her choices, they’d all put aside their grudges and their guns. Or a plurality of them, even. There was a future not far from here where she was going to be fighting against a bunch of the people who’d once been her allies. She would be announcing not only the situation with Duarte, but laying her cards on the table with the underground and Trejo alike. It was the most James Holden–esque thing she’d ever contemplated.
“Last chance,” she said. “Do we send it or not?”
Elvi looked stricken. “Oh. No. I . . .” She made the thumbs-up gesture again, more tentatively this time. “It’s sent. It’s gone. I sent it. Was that not what we agreed?”
“It’s fine,” Naomi said. “Now, let’s see if he sends us a bouquet or a battle group. I should go tell my crew what we’ve done.”
“Same.”
“This was the right thing,” Naomi said.
Elvi tilted her head and looked away. When she spoke, her voice was smaller, but also strangely more relaxed. “I think it was. I wish that meant we’d be rewarded for it.”
Naomi left, skimming down the Laconian corridors for the airlock. The enemy crew that maybe, sort of, technically wasn’t the enemy for the moment made way for her. Slipping across the bridge and back into the Rocinante felt like pulling on a favorite jacket. She had known that she was doing something momentous, but somehow she hadn’t really felt it until it was behind her. Whatever happened from here, Trejo would know she’d been working with Elvi and everything Duarte had said about his plan.
As she headed down toward engineering and the machine shop, she found herself wondering what it would be like to feel her connection to the vast swelling mass of humanity more immediately than she felt her own sense of self. She’d read some of the early analyses that Elvi’s team had done with a theoretical model based on Cara and Amos. The ways that the folds of their brains began to act as if they were physically cross-connected, and a thought that began in one could cascade over into the other and then back again like a song traveling through a window. It seemed oddly poetic when it didn’t seem like annihilation.
When she reached engineering, Teresa and Amos were hard at work. The preflight checklists were on the wall screens, and almost half were already in the green.
“Boss,” the thing that had been Amos said. “What’s up?”
“I was going to say we might want to look at prepping for a burn, but—” She gestured at the screens.
“Figured we were better ready than not ready.”
“Good call,” she said. “I took Trejo’s offer. I’m waiting to see if he’s still offering. If he’s not . . .”
“Amos said you saw him,” Teresa said. She was wearing a flight suit with one of the old Tachi designs. Naomi was surprised that after all this time the Roci still had the instructions to make those. “My father. You saw him?”
“We saw something,” Naomi said. “But we know it was an illusion. We can’t know what it was really based on. It seemed like him.”
“Pretty sure it was the guy,” Amos said. “My vantage point was a little different.”
“Are we going to kill him?” Teresa asked. There was no fear or pleading in her voice. If there was anger—and there was anger—it wasn’t aimed at her.
“We don’t know what we’re going to do,” Naomi said. “I’m not looking to kill anybody. But there may be a way to use what he’s found without using it the way he wants to use it.”
“If you were going to kill him, would you tell me?”
“Yes,” Naomi said, and meant it.
For a moment, all three of them were still. Teresa was the first to move, just a terse nod and then she turned back to the inventory screens. Amos’ smile widened a millimeter. Naomi had the impression that the girl had just done something he was proud of her for.