The missile would kill them all.

Holden sent the nav package to Alex, half expecting him to refuse. Hoping. Instead, the Rociaccelerated for an endless twenty-seven minutes, followed by a nauseating zero-g spin that lasted less than four seconds, and a deceleration burn that lasted four and a half minutes and knocked every single person on the ship unconscious.

“Wake up,” Miller said in the darkness.

The ship was in free fall. Holden began coughing furiously as his lungs attempted to find their normal shape again after the punishing deceleration burn. Miller floated beside him. No one else seemed to be awake yet. Naomi wasn’t moving at all. Holden watched her until he could see the gentle rise and fall of her rib cage. She was alive.

“Doors and corners,” Miller said. His voice was soft and rough. “I tell you check your doors and corners, and you blow into the middle of the room with your dick hanging out. Lucky sonofabitch. Give you this, though, you’re consistent.”

Something about the way he spoke seemed saner than usual. More controlled. As if guessing his thoughts, the detective turned to look at him. Smiled.

“Are you here?” Holden asked. His mind was still fuzzy, his brain abused by thrust and oxygen loss. “Are you real?”

“You’re not thinking straight. Take your time. Catch up. There’s no hurry.”

Holden pulled up the exterior cameras and blew out one long exhale that almost ended in a sob. The OPA missile was floating outside the ship, just over a hundred meters from the nose of the Roci. The torpedo’s drive was still firing, its tail a furious white torch stretching nearly a kilometer behind it. But the missile hung in space, motionless.

Holden didn’t know if the missile had been that close when they went through. He suspected not. More likely, they’d just wound up that close once they’d both stopped moving. Even so, the sight of the massive weapon, engine burning as it still fought to reach him, made a shiver go down his spine and his balls creep up into his belly. Ten meters closer and they’d have been in proximity. It would have detonated.

As he watched, the missile was slowly pulled away, dragged off to who knew where by whatever power set the speed limit on this side of the Ring.

“We made it,” he said. “We’re through.”

“Yeah,” Miller said.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it? This is why you did it.”

“You’re giving me too much credit.”

Amos and Naomi both groaned as they started to wake. The documentary crew was motionless. They might even be dead. Holden couldn’t tell without unstrapping, and his body wouldn’t allow that yet. Miller leaned close to the screen, squinting at it like he was searching for something. Holden pulled up the sensor data. A host of information flooded in. Numerous objects, clustered within a million kilometers, close as seeds in a pod. And past them, nothing. Not even starlight.

“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.”

Chapter Seventeen: Bull

“The hell are we?” Serge said, floating gently by the security desk. “Security or fucking babysitters?”

“We’re whatever gets the job done,” Bull said, but he couldn’t put much force behind the words.

It was thirty hours since the Behemothhad gone dark, and he had slept for six of them. Serge, Casimir, Jojo, and Corin had been trading off duty at the desk, coordinating the recovery. The rest of the security staff had been in ad hoc teams, putting down two little panic riots, coordinating the physical resources to free a dozen people trapped in storage bays where the air recycler hadn’t booted back up, arresting a couple of mech jockeys who’d taken the chaos as opportunity to settle a personal score.

The lights were on all across the ship now. The damage control systems, woken from their coma, were working double time to catch up. The crews were exhausted and frightened and on edge, and James fucking Holden had escaped through the Ring into whatever was on the other side. The security office smelled like old sweat and the bean curd masala that Casimir had brought in yesterday. For the first day, there had been an unconscious effort to keep a consistent physical orientation—feet toward the floor, head toward the ceiling. Now they all floated in whatever direction they happened to fall into. It seemed almost natural to the Belters. Bull still suffered the occasional bout of vertigo.

“Amen alles amen,” Serge said with a laugh. “Lube for the machine, us.”

“Least fun I’ve ever had with lube,” Corin said. Bull noted that when Corin got tired, she got raunchy. In his experience, everyone dealt with pushing too hard differently. Some got angry and irritable, some got sad. At a guess, it was all loss of inhibition. Wear down the façade with too much work or fear or both, and whoever was waiting underneath came out.

“All right,” Bull said. “You two go take a rest. I’ll watch the shop until the others get back. You two have done more than—”

The security desk chimed. The connection request was from Sam. Bull lifted a finger to Serge and Corin, and pulled himself over to the desk.

“Sam?” he said.

“Bull,” she replied, and the single syllable, short and sharp, carried a weight of annoyance and anger that verged on rage. “I need you to come down here.”

“You can call whoever you want,” a man’s voice said in the background. “I don’t care, you hear? I don’t care anymore. You do whatever you want.”

Bull checked the connection location. She was down near the machine shops. It wasn’t too far.

“I need to bring a sidearm?” Bull asked.

“I won’t stop you, sweetie,” Sam said.

“On my way,” he said, and dropped the connection.

“Gehst du,” Corin said to Serge. “You’ve been up longer. I’ll keep the place from burning.”

“You going to be all right?” Serge asked, and it took Bull a second to realize the man was talking to him.

“Unstoppable,” Bull said, trying to mean it.

Being exhausted in zero gravity wasn’t the same as it was under thrust or down a gravity well. Growing up, Bull had been dead tired pretty often, and the sense of weight, of his muscles falling off the bone like overcooked chicken, was what desperate fatigue meant. He’d been off of Earth for more years now than he’d been on it, and it still confused him on an almost cellular level to be worn to the point of collapse and not feel it in his joints. Intellectually, he knew it left him feeling that he could do more than he actually could. There were other signs: the grit against his eyes, the headache that bloomed slowly out from the center of his skull, the mild nausea. None of them had the same power, and none of them convinced.

The corridors weren’t empty, but they weren’t crowded. Even at full alert, with every team working double shifts and busting ass, the Behemothwas mostly empty. He moved through the ship, launching himself handhold to handhold, sailing down each long straightaway like he was in a dream. He was tempted to speed up, slapping at the handholds and ladders as they passed and adding just a touch of kinetic energy to his float the way he and his men had back in his days as a marine. More than one concussion had come out of the game, and he didn’t have time for it now. He wasn’t young anymore either.

He found Sam and her crew in a massive service bay. Four men in welding rigs floated near the wall, fixing lengths of conduit to the bulkhead with showers of sparks and lights brighter than staring at the sun. Sam floated nearby, her body at a forty-five-degree angle from the work. A young Belter floated near her, his body at an angle that pointed his feet toward her. Bull understood it was an insult.