“Sir,” Tanaka said, “we can do this without mindfucking everyone. We can fight this war and still be human beings.”
“You don’t understand, Colonel. But you will.”
Teresa shook herself out of Jim’s grasp. “You don’t have to do this. You can come back.” But she heard the despair in her own voice as she said it.
Her father’s smile was beatific. “It’s all right to let go. Holding on is only pain and weariness. You can let go.”
Teresa felt a wave of nothingness swim through her, an emptiness where her self should be, and she shouted. It wasn’t words or a warning or a threat. It was just her heart screaming because there wasn’t anything else to do. She fired the suit thrusters, slamming herself into the black web that held her father, and she started ripping. Grabbing handfuls of the dark, spiraling filament and yanking it free. The smell of ozone came into the sweltering light like the threat of storms at the edge of a heatwave. Her father shouted and tried to push her away, but the strands held him.
Jim’s voice seemed to come from a great distance. “Teresa! Get away from there! Don’t damage the station!”
Her universe shrank to her body, her vac suit, her father’s compromised flesh, and the alien thing consuming him. He writhed in pain as she tried to tear him free, and screamed for her to stop.
A force grabbed her like a vast, invisible hand and pulled her away. A million tiny, unreal needles bore into her flesh and began to rip her apart. Oh, she thought, my father’s going to kill me.
And then, the pain eased. Jim was beside her, and for a moment someone else was too, but she couldn’t see him. The glimmer in Jim’s eyes was brighter, and his skin had gone waxy with an eerie opalescence under it. His teeth were bared in raw, animal effort.
“He’s gone,” Jim said. It was barely a grunt. “He’s gone. If he’s willing to kill you, it isn’t him anymore. He’s gone.”
Her father—the thing that had been her father—was still held in the black threads. His mouth was open in pain and rage, but no sound came out. The blue fireflies danced along the torn threads like ants from a kicked hill.
“Holden,” Tanaka said. “We have a problem.”
Tanaka had her back to them. Over her shoulder, the wide, bright space was filling with bodies. From every corridor and passage, the alien sentinels were pouring in like smoke.
Chapter Forty-Five: Naomi
The closer the Rocinante and the Falcon kept to the station, the more cover the alien structure provided and the less of the field of battle was in her scopes. The Roci was able to build real-time reports by syncing with other ships in her little fleet by tightbeam and making a patchwork map with data from half a dozen different ships. She didn’t like it, though. It left her feeling half blinded.
“Two more in,” Alex said.
“Got them,” Naomi shouted back. One from Argatha system, another from Quivira. She set the Roci to identifying their silhouettes and drive signatures. Neither one was running a transponder. There was no reason to. Everyone on the hive mind’s side already knew who they were, and they weren’t about to let her in on it.
On the far side of the ring space, three enemy ships were slowly dismantling her fighters. She’d lost the Amador and the Brian and Kathy Yates. The Senator had taken heavy damage and was venting air. More enemy ships were coming through the rings, wave after wave after wave. Some of them—many of them—were ships she’d called there. Laconian science and military ships, survey and support ships from the underground. The crews had answered to her or Elvi or Trejo, and now were something else entirely. A different organism.
When she had a moment to gather herself, she wondered how many people there were still left out there. Had Duarte invaded and co-opted the minds of everyone in all the systems, or was he targeting the ones on their way toward the rings? She imagined whole stations filled with silent bodies working in perfect coordination, the need for verbal communication replaced by the direct influence of brain on brain. A single hand with billions of fingers. If that was what humanity was now, there would never be another conversation, another misunderstanding or joke or shitty pop song. She tried to imagine what it would be like for a baby born into a world like that, not as an individual but an appendage that had never known itself as anything else.
“Naomi?” Alex said. “Three more, and one of ’em is a Storm-class.”
“I see it. Tightbeam to the . . . the Lin Siniang.”