“Whatever he did, he did before,” Miller said, beside him now. “If there was any setup or arrangements that needed to be made, Duarte already put them in place before the Preiss did its not-vanishing trick. We’ll have to navigate it a little.”
“How am I supposed to find it?” Jim said. “I don’t know how any of this works. I don’t know how to do anything but put myself in the circuit and hope.”
“It’s like the doc said. This whole thing wants to do what it’s going to do. You’re just here to let it. You’re not building a gun, just pulling a trigger.”
“That’s a lot less helpful than you think,” Jim said.
The thing in his gut shifted. His heart did something violent and not at all heart-like, and he was someplace else. Someplace cool. He could feel his arms and legs again, and there was no pain anymore. If he concentrated, he could still see the bright room, the floating sentinels. He could still feel his body, wracked by the threads and the changes the protomolecule was making to him. It was like being on the edge of sleep, aware of his sleeping self and his dream self at the same time.
Miller cleared his throat. “It’s happening. You should hurry.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
Miller’s face was an apology. “You’re the station now. This is your Eros, and you’re what Julie was. Relax, and let it show you what you want to know.”
Naomi, Jim thought, aching. I want to see Naomi again.
And awkward as a child taking its first steps, his awareness broadened. It wasn’t quite like seeing, and it wasn’t quite like knowing something intellectually, but a mix of both. He felt Naomi at her place on the flight deck, recognized her distress. And as it bore down on her, scattering the molecules and atoms of his ship like a wind scattering dust, Jim saw the enemy clearly for the first time.
Instinctively, he reached out and pushed it back. The black thing from a different reality screamed and fought, pressing against him. Jim wanted to feel the struggle pushing against his hands, but that wasn’t quite right. His sense of his body was very strange now. But he could feel the black thing making its way forward like it was swimming toward Naomi against a heavy current.
“You’re going to need to think a little bigger,” Miller said, and the scope of Jim’s awareness expanded. The ring gates and the space between them exploded into his mind. Not just the physical space and the ships scattered through it, not just the crews of the ships and their candle-flame-bright minds, but the invisible structures of it: lines of subtle force that laced between the gates and the station, looping and reinforcing, coming together and apart in a complex sacred geometry. From this perspective, the intrusion of the enemy on the Rocinante and on all the other vessels was a single thing. A deformation in the lines of force that kept the ring space from collapsing back into nothingness.
He pushed back, trying to bring the nature of the ring space back to true, but the pressure working against him was implacable. It was omnipresent, and anyplace he resisted it, it flowed around him.
“Miller?”
“I’m right here.”
“I can’t do this. I can’t stop it.”
“That’s a problem, then.”
“Miller! They’re going to die!”
Jim pressed back like he was trying to lift a blanket with a toothpick. He was too small, and the pressure, the deformation, was coming from everywhere at once. He felt the candlelight minds on a dozen ships starting to go out. Jim started to panic, flailing. Another few flickering lights went out. One of the ships changed from a single thing with a bright core of energy at its heart to a thousand tiny things, to nothing, as the enemy shattered it and the flow of the attack carried it outside the bubble of space.
“How do I stop this?”
“You know,” Miller said. “I told you. You stop it the same way he did.”
Jim reached out to the candle-flame minds, pushing into them, and with each one he touched, he felt himself growing wider. A man from Earth, born after the devastation, who joined the underground because he was angry with his father who had capitulated to Laconia became part of Jim. A woman whose mother was sick and might be dying at a medical center on Auberon. Someone who was secretly in love with their pilot. Someone who had been thinking of killing themselves. Jim washed through the minds of everyone in the ring space—Naomi, Alex, Amos—and what had been impossible became possible.
This, Miller said, but not aloud, all of this was built by one kind of animal. An animal made from light that shared a single mind across more than a thousand systems. If you want to use their guns, you have to have hands the same shape as them.