“Can I start it ‘Be sure, stranger, to let the Laconians know we rest here, obedient to their command’？”
“I won’t stop you,” Naomi said. “Sol, Auberon, and Bara Gaon. Where else do we send it?”
“We should send it everywhere. The big tech centers are where Duarte’s most likely to concentrate. The smaller colonies might not have the supplies and manufacturing ready to go, but the knowledge will keep as long as there’s anyone who’s not part of the hive mind.”
“If there is anyone. I’ve got thirty-one ships left, including us. I’m about to have fewer. I don’t have thirteen hundred torpedoes, and every one of these messages we send is one less round we can use defending ourselves and Jim.”
Elvi nodded. “I’ll get you the data.”
“Do it quickly,” Naomi said. “We don’t have long.”
Elvi dropped the connection. On the tactical display, the Lin Siniang and the little battle group with it were engaging with the two new enemy ships. Four more enemy arrived simultaneously in different quadrants of the ring space. They’re pulling us apart, she thought. They’re drawing us away from the station. And it was working. Naomi’s little fleet was falling apart before her eyes, and there was nothing she could do about it. As she watched, the Cane Rosso blinked from green to orange and vanished like an ember going cool. Thirty ships to defend one station with the full weight of thirteen hundred systems pouring down on her.
“Alex,” she said. “We have four more friends who’ve come to the dance. Get me tightbeams to . . . the Lastialus and the Kaivalya.”
“Coming up,” Alex said, as calmly as if she’d asked him for a flight schedule.
He had been her pilot longer than anyone else in her life. They knew each other’s moods and rhythms, and stress only made them work more smoothly together. Maybe group minds weren’t that strange after all. In their way, the crew of Roci had developed something between them that, over the decades, had felt like more than the sum of its parts. It was cracked and fractured now—Bobbie gone, Clarissa gone, Jim gone, Amos changed—but with her and Alex, there was still the spark of it. The last smooth surface in a universe that had gone rough and biting.
“Well shit,” Alex said. “Looks like last-dance time.”
The alert came up on her tactical map as he spoke. A new ship had arrived through the Laconia gate. Its transponder was off, but that didn’t matter. The silhouette was enough. Larger than anything besides the void cities and uncannily organic in its design, the Voice of the Whirlwind came into the ring space. It was almost a relief to see it. The dread of knowing it was coming had been terrible. Now the worst had happened, and all that was left was playing out the last few moves, and then packing up the board and seeing whether death was the end or something more interesting.
She started a recording. “This is Naomi Nagata. Concentrate all fire on the Whirlwind. When you’re dry, evacuate the area on your own judgment. We will hold our post.”
She grabbed the comms and set the Roci to deliver it to each of the remaining ships in turn. By the time she’d finished, the Whirlwind was visibly farther into the ring space. Its velocity was terrifying and its braking burn murderous. The Roci ran the numbers in an instant. The Magnetar was on course for the ring station, covering half a million klicks in a little more than twenty minutes. They were coming to protect Duarte.
“Hey,” Amos said through the comms. “About how many rail-gun rounds do you think we could put in that thing before it gets here?”
“Only one way to be sure,” Alex answered, and Naomi felt an overwhelming rush of affection for them both.
All across the ring space, the last vestiges of humanity, the few whose minds were still their own, threw the missiles and PDC rounds and rail-gun slugs that they had toward the incoming behemoth, clear in the knowledge that it wouldn’t matter. Naomi watched as the torpedoes were shot down, the streams of fast-moving slugs dodged or ignored. They were gnats, and the Whirlwind could disregard them.
A message from Elvi came with the report on the isolation chamber, and Naomi put it in the Roci’s torpedoes—a last message in her final bottles—and fired them out. The Roci’s loadout dropped to zero. Well, you tried, an old man said. You did try. She could picture his house—a little row house on a thin street in Bogotá—and the orange tabby who slept on his windowsill. Like she was falling into a daydream, she felt the other lives around her, felt herself forgetting Naomi Nagata and the pain and loss and anger of being her. And also the joy.