She checked her timer. It was still an hour before her next dose of the drugs was due. But by that time, it wouldn’t matter. She opened the ship-wide comm. She tried to find her last words. Something that would fit the love she had for these men, this ship, the life she’d led. The Whirlwind was more than halfway to the station already, though the second stretch would be slower. Even at a quarter million kilometers away, the Roci was picking up the excess radiation from its drive plume.
The shout, when it came, literally defied description. It was an overpowering taste of mint or a vibrant purple or the shuddering sense of an orgasm without the pleasure. Her mind skipped and jumped, trying to make sense of something it had no capacity to understand, matching the signal to one sensation and then another and then another until she found herself on the float above her crash couch with no idea how much time had passed.
“Ah,” Alex said. “Did you guys feel that?”
“Yup,” Amos said.
“Any idea what it was?”
“Nope.”
Naomi’s tactical map was still up, and it had changed. The Whirlwind had cut its braking burn and was on its way to overshooting the station entirely. The other ships—both the enemy and her own—were in disarray. The comms lit up with a broadcast message, and she realized that the jamming had stopped. She accepted the message.
The woman on the screen was young, dark-skinned, with close-cropped hair, and Naomi had seen her once before.
“This is Admiral Sandrine Gujarat of the Laconian battleship Voice of the Whirlwind. I would very much appreciate someone telling me how the fuck I got here.”
Naomi’s finger hovered over Reply, while she tried to think of what to say. She was still there when another broadcast message came through, this one from the Falcon. Elvi’s eyes were wide and bright, and her smile was so fierce it was almost a threat.
“This is Dr. Elvi Okoye, head of the Laconian Science Directorate, in cooperation with Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. You have all experienced a cognitive manipulation. You may be disoriented or have inappropriately strong emotional reactions. No ships in this space pose any threat. Please stand down and remain safely in place. We will reach out to each of you shortly. Message repeats . . .”
Naomi turned off the comms. In the quiet of the Rocinante, she let her mind drift, and nothing drifted back. No outside memories. No voices. No sense of looming invisible presence.
“Naomi?” Alex called down. “I’m feeling weird up here.”
“It’s gone. The hive mind. It’s gone.”
“So it’s not just me?”
Amos’ voice was calm and affable. “Nobody’s bumping into the back of my head either.”
“He did it,” she said. “I think Jim did it.”
She closed her eyes and relaxed and something hit her, hard as a kick, from every direction at once. Her eyes shot open, and she couldn’t quite understand what she was seeing. The ops deck hadn’t changed at all—the comm display, the crash couches, the passage up to the flight deck and down to the rest of the ship. And also everything had been transformed. The comm display was a field of bright pixels, glowing and flickering too fast for the human eye to follow. The detail of each one made the shapes of words and buttons that they created too abstract to comprehend, like trying to see the curve of a planet from its surface. She raised her hand, and the skin on her knuckles was a range of crags and valleys as complex as anything that stone and erosion had ever managed. When she cried out, the air fluttered with her breath, compression waves bouncing and curving, enhancing and annihilating.
She tried to find the clasp on the crash couch straps, but she couldn’t make out the surface where one thing began and another ended. And streaking through the emptiness of things, the vacuum that still lived in the heart of matter, threads of living blackness, more solid and real than anything she’d ever seen. They writhed and swam, and behind them, everything swirled and came apart. With no one manning the lighthouse now, the elder gods returned.
Oh, she managed to think, right.
Chapter Forty-Six: Tanaka
Teresa!” Holden shouted at the girl. “Get away from there! Don’t damage the station!”
Well, Tanaka thought, aren’t we just fucked?
The girl ignored him, ripping at the black threads that were wired into the high consul’s body. None of this was in her brief. None of it was going even remotely the way she or Trejo had intended or hoped. There was some independent judgment she was going to have to exercise very, very soon now.