“I have to go there,” he said out loud even as the thought popped into his head.

“Where?” Naomi asked, turning away from her work on the comm. The relief he could see on her face now that he’d finally said something wouldn’t last long. He felt a pang of guilt for that.

“The station. Or whatever it is. I have to go there.”

“No you don’t,” she said.

“Everything that’s happened over the last year has been to bring me here, now.” Holden rubbed his face with both hands, itching his eyes and hiding from Naomi’s scrutiny at the same time. “And that thing is the only place in here. There’s nothing else. No other open gates, no planets, no other ships. Nothing.”

“Jim,” Naomi said, a warning in her voice. “This thing where you always have to be the guy who goesc”

“I’ll never know why the protomolecule is talking to me until I get there, face-to-face.”

“Eros, Ganymede, the Agatha King,” Naomi continued. “You always think you have to go.”

Holden stopped rubbing his face and looked at her. She stared back, beautiful and angry and sad. He felt his throat threaten to close up, so he said, “Am I wrong? Tell me I’m wrong and we’ll think of something else. Tell me how all of what’s happened means something else and I’m just not seeing it.”

“No,” she said again, meaning something else this time.

“Okay.” He sighed. “Okay then.”

“It’s getting old being the one who stays behind.”

“You’re not staying behind,” Holden said. “You’re keeping the crew alive while I do something really stupid. It’s why we’re an awesome team. You’re the captain now.”

“That’s a shit job and you know it.”

Chapter Twenty-One: Bull

In the last hours before they shot the Ring, a kind of calm descended on the Behemoth. In the halls and galleries, people talked, but their voices were controlled, quiet, brittle. The independent feeds, always a problem, were pretty subdued. The complaints coming to the security desk fell to nothing. Bull kept an eye on the places people could get liquored up and stupid, but there were no flare-ups. The traffic going through the comm laser back toward Tycho Station and all points sunward spiked to six times its usual bandwidth. A lot of people on the ship wanted to say something to someone—a kid, a sister, a dad, a lover—before they passed through the signal-warping circumference and into whatever was on the other side.

Bull had thought about doing it too. He’d logged into the family group feed for the first time in months, and let the minutiae of the extended Baca family wash over him. One cousin was engaged, another one was divorcing, and they were trading notes and worldviews. His aunt on Earth was having trouble with her hip, but since she was on basic, she was on a waiting list to get a doctor to look at it. His brother had dropped a note to say that he’d gotten a job on Luna, but he didn’t say what it was or anything about it. Bull listened to the voices of the family he never saw except on a screen, the lives that didn’t intersect his own. The love he felt for them surprised him, and kept him from putting his own report in among them. It would only scare them, and they wouldn’t understand it. He could already hear his cousins telling him to jump ship, get on something that wasn’t going through. By the time the message got there, he’d already have gone anyway.

Instead, he recorded a private video for Fred Johnson, and all he said in it was, “After this, you owe meone.”

With an hour to go before they passed through, Bull put the whole ship on battle-ready status. Everyone in their couches, one per. No sharing. All tools and personal items secured, all carts in their stations and locked down, the bulkheads closed between major sections so that if something happened, they’d only lose air one deck at a time. He got a few complaints, but they were mostly just grousing.

They made the transit slowly, the thrust gravity hardly more than a tendency for things to drift toward the floor. Bull couldn’t say whether that was a technical decision on Sam’s part meant to keep them from moving too quickly in the uncanny reduced speed beyond the ring, or Ashford giving the Earth and Mars ships the time to catch up so that they’d all be passing through at more or less the same time. Only if it was that, it wouldn’t have been Ashford. That kind of diplomatic thinking was Pa.

Probably it was just that the main drive couldn’t go slow enough, and this was as fast as the maneuvering thrusters could move them.

Bull wasn’t that worried about the Earth forces. They’d been the ones to broker the deal, and they had civilians on board. Mars, on the other hand, might call itself a science mission, but its escort was explicitly military, and until Earth stepped in they’d been willing to poke holes in the Behemothuntil the air ran out.

Too many people with too many agendas, and everyone was worried that the other guy would shoot them in the back. Of all the ways to go and meet the God-like alien whatever-they-were that built the protomolecule, this was the stupidest, the most dangerous, and—for Bull’s money—the most human.

The transit actually took a measurable amount of time, the great bulk of the Behemothsulking through the Ring in a few seconds. An eerie fluting groan passed through the ship, and Bull, in his crash couch at the security office waiting for the next disaster, felt the gooseflesh on his arms and neck. He flipped through the security monitors like a dad walking through the house to see if the windows were all locked, all the kids safely in their beds. Memories of the Eros feed tugged at the back of his mind: black whorls of filament covering the corridors; the bodies of the innocent and the guilty alike warping, falling apart, and becoming something else without actually dying in between; the blue firefly glow that no one had yet explained. With every new monitor, he expected to see the Behemothin that same light, and every time he didn’t, his dread moved on to the one still to come.

He moved to the external sensor feed. The luminous blue object in the center of a sphere of anomalies that the computers interpreted as being approximately the same size as the Ring. Gates to God knew where.

“I don’t know what the hell we’re doing here,” he said under his breath.

“A-chatté-men, brother,” Serge said, pale-faced, from his desk.

A connect request popped on Bull’s hand terminal, the alert-red of senior staff. With dread growing at the back of his throat, Bull accepted it. Sam appeared on the screen.

“Hey,” she said. “This whole act-like-we’re-in-a-battle thing where we aren’t supposed to get out of our crash couches? I’d really appreciate it if you could ease up enough to let us make sure the ship isn’t falling apart.”

“You getting alerts?”

“No,” Sam admitted. “But we just sailed the Behemothinto a region of space with different, y’know, laws of physicsand stuff? Makes me want to take a peek.”

“We got eight ships coming in right behind us,” Bull said. “Hold tight until we see how that shakes down.”

Sam smiled in a way that expressed her annoyance with him perfectly.

“You can get the teensiest bit paternalistic sometimes, Bull. You know that?”

A new alert popped up by Sam’s face. A high-priority message was coming into the comm array. From the Rocinante.

“Sam, I got something here. I’ll get back to you.”

“I’ll be sitting here in my couch doing nothing,” she said.

He flipped over to the incoming message. It was a broadcast. A Belter woman, with black hair pulled back from her face in a style that gave Bull the impression she’d been welding something before she’d begun the broadcast and would be again as soon as she was finished, looked into the camera.