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“Himmler’s hypothermia experiments at Dachau—” the leathery coyo began, wagging his finger in the air, but now it was the pretty Martian’s turn to interrupt.
Yikes
Amos had spent thirty grand during a stopover on Callisto, buying them some after-market engine upgrades. When Holden pointed out that the Roci was already capable of accelerating fast enough to kill her crew and asked why they’d need to upgrade her, Amos had replied, “Because this shit is awesome.”
Apart from painting teeth on her and welding on an apartment building–sized sharkfin, nothing could have been more clearly or effectively built to intimidate. Which was good, because she was a retrofitted piece of crap, and if they ever got in a real fight, they were boned.
“And if you were a member of my congregation, I’d have you call me Pastor Anna. Buddhist?” “Only when I’m at my grandmother’s house,” Jin said with a wink. “The rest of the time I’m a navy man.” “Is that a religion now?” Anna asked with a laugh. “The navy thinks so.”
“What are they?” Holden asked. “What’s out there?” Miller glanced down at the display. His face was expressionless. “Nothing,” the dead man said. And then, “It scares the shit out of me.”
She had a sudden vision of Jesus, who’d asked His disciples to keep doing this in remembrance of Him, watching her little congregation as they floated in microgravity and drank reconstituted grape beverage out of suction bulbs. It seemed to stretch the boundaries of what He’d meant by this.
Eschatology had always been Anna’s least favorite study of theology. When asked about Armageddon, she’d tell her parishioners that God Himself had been pretty circumspect on the topic, so it didn’t do much good to worry about it.
“EMT?” one of the young men asked. “Don’t have them to spare, and that galley doesn’t have crash couches. Everyone in there is pasta sauce, but the El Tee says look anyway.”
Well that’s a mental image
Of course it was just as likely they’d all be dead when she got there. The catastrophe would have hit them as hard as the Thomas Prince or any of the other ships. Holden’s crew might be nothing but cooling meat already, only waiting for her to come and light their funeral pyre. There was, she thought, a beauty in that too. She ran across the skins of the ships, leaped from one to the next like a nerve impulse crossing a synapse. Like a bad idea being thought by a massive, moonlit brain.
“I think there was an empire once that touched thousands of stars. The Eros bug? That’s one of their tools. It’s a wrench. And something was big enough to put a bullet in them. Whatever it is could be waiting behind one of those gates, waiting for someone to do something stupid. So maybe you’d rather set up shop here. Make little doomed babies. Live and die in the darkness. But at least whatever’s out there stays out there.”
Sorrow couldn’t really feel like a heart breaking, could it? That was just a phrase.
“History is made up of people recovering from the last disaster,”
Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she’ll be haunted by what might be behind it.
Heroism is a label most people get for doing shit they’d never do if they were really thinking about it.”
“Mister Baca, do you believe in God?” To his credit, he tried not to roll his eyes. He almost succeeded. “I believe in whatever gets you through the night.”
“They got a story they can tell where they don’t look weak. That’s all they needed. But if we didn’t find something, they’d have stuck to their posts until they all died. Nothing ever killed more people than being afraid to look like a sissy.”
He was sick. Hell, he was dying. It seemed deeply unfair that he should have to improvise at the same time.
They’d made a plan, and so far everything was more or less going the way they’d hoped. The thought left Holden increasingly terrified.
“New plan?” Corin asked. “Shoot back, I guess,”
She was not a political creature. She felt that politics was the second most evil thing humanity had ever invented, just after lutefisk.
“So many stars,” she said. “Some of them might be ours someday.” “I wonder,” Hector replied, his voice low and sad. “I wonder if we should have them. God gave man the Earth. He never promised him the stars. I wonder if He’ll follow us out there.”
“Whatever she finds out there,” Cortez said, “just remember it’s the future you chose for her.” His words were full of hope and threat. Like the stars.
