Protogen had named the protomolecule and decided it was a tool that could redefine what it meant to be human. Jules-Pierre Mao had treated it like a weapon. It killed humans, therefore it was a weapon. But radiation killed humans, and a medical X-ray machine wasn’t intended as a weapon. Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.
So here the monkeys were, poking the shiny box and making guesses about what it did. Holden could tell himself that in his case the box was asking to be poked, but even that was making a lot of assumptions. Miller looked human, had been human once, so it was easy to think of him as having human motivations. Miller wanted to communicate. He wanted Holden to know or do something. But it was just as likely—more likely, maybe—that Holden was anthropomorphizing something far stranger.
He imagined himself landing on the station, and Miller saying, James Holden, you and only you in the universe have the correct chemical composition to make a perfect wormhole fuel! then stuffing him into a machine to be processed.
“Everything okay?” Naomi asked in response to his chuckle.
“Still just thinking about how incredibly stupid this is. Why didn’t I let you talk me out of it?”
“It looks like you did, but it took a couple of hours for it to process. Want us to come get you?”
“No. If I bail out now, I’ll never have the balls to try it again,” Holden said. “How’s it look out there?”
“The fleets came through with about two dozen ships, mostly heavies. Alex has figured out the math on doing short torpedo burns to get one up to the speed limit but not over. Which means everyone on those other ships are doing the same thing. So far no one has fired at us.”
“Maybe your protestations of my innocence worked?”
“Maybe,” she said. “There were a couple of small ships detaching from the fleet on an intercept course with you. The Roci is calling them landing skiffs.”
“Shit, they’re sending the Marines after me?”
“They’ve burned up to the speed limit, but the Roci says you make stationfall before they catch you. But just before.”
“Damn,” Holden said. “I really hope there’s a door.”
“They lost the UN ship. The other is Martian. So maybe they brought Bobbie. She can make sure the others are nice to you.”
“No,” Holden said with a sigh. “No, these will be the ones that are still mad at me.”
Knowing the marines were following made the back of his neck itch. Being in a space suit just added that to his already lengthy list of insoluble problems.
“On the good news level, Monica’s team is getting evacuated to the Behemoth.”
“You never did like her.”
“Not much, no.”
“Why not?”
“Her job is digging up old things,” Naomi said, the lightness of her tone almost covering her anxieties. “And digging up old things leads to messes like this one.”
When Holden was nine, Rufus the family Labrador died. He’d already been an adult dog when Holden was born, so Holden had only ever known Rufus as a big black slobbering bundle of love. He’d taken some of his first steps clutching the dog’s fur in one stubby fist. He’d run around their Montana farm not much bigger than a toddler with Rufus as his only babysitter. Holden had loved the dog with the simple intensity only children and dogs share.
But when he was nine, Rufus was fifteen, and old for such a big dog. He slowed down. He stopped running with Holden, barely managing a trot to catch up, then gradually only a slow walk. He stopped eating. And one night he flopped onto his side next to a heater vent and started panting. Mother Elise had told him that Rufus probably wouldn’t last the night, and even if he did they’d have to call the vet in the morning. Holden had tearfully sworn to stay by the dog’s side. For the first couple of hours, he held Rufus’ head on his lap and cried, as Rufus struggled to breathe and occasionally gave one halfhearted thump of his tail.
By the third, against his will and every good thought he’d had about himself, Holden was bored.
It was a lesson he’d never forgotten. That humans only have so much emotional energy. No matter how intense the situation, or how powerful the feelings, it was impossible to maintain a heightened emotional state forever. Eventually you’d just get tired and want it to end.
For the first hours drifting toward the glowing blue station, Holden had felt awe at the immensity of empty starless space around him. He’d felt fear of what the protomolecule might want from him, fear of the marines following him, fear that he’d made the wrong choice and that he’d arrive at the station to find nothing at all. Most of all fear that he’d never see Naomi or his crew again.
But after four hours of being alone in his space suit, even the fear burned out. He just wanted it all to be over with.
With the infinite and unbroken black all around him, and the only visible spot of light coming from the blue sphere directly ahead, it was easy to feel like he was in some vast tunnel, slowly moving toward the exit. The human mind didn’t do well with infinite spaces. It wanted walls, horizons, limits. It would create them if it had to.
His suit beeped at him to let him know it was time to replenish his O2 supply. He pulled a spare bottle out of the webbing clipped to his EVA pack and attached it to the suit’s nipple. The gauge on his HUD climbed back up to four hours and stopped. The next time he had to refill, he’d be on the station or in Marine custody.
One way or the other, he wouldn’t be alone anymore, and that was a relief. He wondered what his mothers would have thought about all this, whether they would have approved of the choices he’d made, how he could arrange to have a dog for their children since Naomi wouldn’t be able to live at the bottom of the gravity well. His attention wandered, and then his mind.
He awoke to a harsh buzzing sound, and for a few seconds slapped his hand at empty space trying to turn his alarm off. When he finally opened sleep-gummed eyes, he saw his HUD flashing a proximity warning. He’d somehow managed to fall asleep until the station was only a few kilometers away.
At that distance, it loomed like a gently curving wall of metallic blue, glowing with its own inner light. No radiation alarms were flashing, so whatever made it glow wasn’t anything his suit thought was dangerous to him. The flight program Alex had written for him was spooling out on the HUD, counting down to the moment when he’d need to do his minute-long deceleration burn. Waving his hand around when he first woke up had put him into a gentle rotation, and the flight program was prompting him to allow it to make course corrections. Since he trusted Alex completely on matters of navigation, Holden authorized the suit to handle the descent automatically.
A few quick bursts of compressed gas later, he was facing out into the black, the sphere at his back. Then came a minute-long burn from the pack to slow him to a gentle half meter per second for landing. He kicked on his boot magnets, not knowing if they’d actually help or not—the sphere looked like metal, but that didn’t mean much—and turned around.
The wall of glowing blue was less than five meters away. Holden bent his knees, bracing for the impact of hitting the surface, and hoping to absorb enough energy that he didn’t just bounce off. The half meters ticked away, each second taking too long and passing too quickly. With only a meter before impact, he realized he’d been holding his breath and let out a long exhale.
“Here we go,” he said to no one.
“Hey, boss?” Alex said in a burst of radio static.
Before Holden could reply, the surface of the sphere irised open and swallowed him up.
After Holden passed through the portal into the interior of the sphere he landed on th
e gently curving floor of a room shaped like an inverted dome. The walls were the metallic blue of the sphere’s exterior. The surfaces were textured almost like moss, and tiny lights seemed to flicker in and out of existence like fireflies. His suit reported a thin atmosphere made mostly of benzene compounds and neon. The ceiling irised closed again, its flat unbroken surface showing no sign that there had ever been an opening.
Miller stood a few meters from where Holden landed, his rumpled gray suit and porkpie hat made both mundane and exotic by the alien setting. The lack of breathable air didn’t seem to bother him at all.
Holden straightened his knees, and was surprised to feel something like gravity’s resistance. He’d felt the weight of spin and of thrust, and the natural deep pull of a gravity well. The EVA pack was heavy on his back, but the quality of it was different. He almost felt like something was pushing down on him from above instead of the ground coming up to meet him.
“Hey, boss?” Alex repeated, a note of worry in his voice. Miller held up a hand in a don’t-mind-me gesture. Wordless permission for Holden to answer.
“Receiving, Alex. Go ahead.”
“The sphere just swallowed you,” Alex said. “You okay in there?”
“Yep, five by five. But you called before I went in. What’s up?”
“Just wanted to warn you that company’s comin’ pretty close on. You can expect them in about five minutes at best guess.”
“Thanks for the report. I’m hoping Miller won’t let them in.”
“Miller?” Alex and Naomi said at the same time. She must have been monitoring the exchange.
“I’ll call when I know more,” Holden said with a grunt as he finished getting the EVA pack off. It fell to the floor with a thud.
That was odd.
Holden turned on the suit’s external speakers and said, “Miller?” He heard the sound of his own voice echoing off of the walls and around the room. The atmosphere shouldn’t have been thick enough for that.
“Hey,” Miller replied, his voice unmuffled by the space suit, as if they were standing together on the deck of the Roci. He nodded slowly, his sad basset hound face twisting into something resembling a smile. “There are others coming. They yours?”
“Not mine, no,” Holden replied. “That would be the skiff full of Martian recon marines that are coming to arrest me. Or maybe just shoot me. It’s complicated.”
“You’ve been making friends without me,” Miller said, his tone sardonic and amused.
“How are you doing?” Holden asked. “You seem more coherent than usual.”
Miller gave a short Belter shrug. “How do you mean?”
“Usually when we talk, it’s like only half the signal’s getting through.”
The old detective’s eyebrows rose in surprise.
“You’ve seen me before?”
“On and off for the last year or so.”
“Well, that’s pretty disturbing,” Miller said. “If they’re planning to shoot you, we’d better get going.”
Miller seemed to flicker out of existence, reappearing at the edge of the mosslike walls. Holden followed, his body fighting with the nauseating sense of being weightless and heavy at the same time. When he drew close, he could see the spirals within the moss on the walls. He’d seen something like this before where the protomolecule had been, but this was lush by comparison. Complex and rich and deep. A vast ripple seemed to pass over the wall like a stone thrown in a pond, and despite having his own isolated air supply, Holden smelled something like orange peels and rain.
“Hey,” Miller said.
“Sorry,” Holden said. “What?”
“We better get going?” the dead man said. He gestured toward what looked like a fold of the strange moss, but when Holden came close, he saw a fissure behind it. The hole looked soft as flesh at the edges, and it glistened with something. It wept.
“Where are we going?”
“Deeper,” Miller said. “Since we’re here, there’s something we should probably do. I have to tell you, though, you got a lot of balls.”
“For what?” Holden said, and his hand slid against the wall. A layer of slime stuck to the fingers of his suit.
“Coming here.”
“You told me to,” Holden said. “You brought me. Julie brought me.”
“I don’t want to talk about what happened to Julie,” the dead man said.
Holden followed him into the narrow tunnel. Its walls were slick and organic. It was like crawling through a deep cave or down the throat of a vast animal.
“You’re definitely making more sense than usual.”
“There are tools here,” Miller said. “They’re not… they’re not right, but they’re here at least.”
“Does this mean you might still say something enigmatic and vanish in a puff of blue fireflies?”
“Probably.”
Miller didn’t expand on this, so Holden followed him for several dozen meters through the tunnel until it turned again and Miller led him into a much larger room.
“Uh, wow,” he managed to say.
Because the floor of the first room and the tunnel that led out of it had both had a consistent “down,” Holden had thought he was moving laterally just under the skin of the station. That couldn’t have been right, because the room the tunnel opened into had a much higher ceiling than was possible if that were true. The space stretched out from the tunnel into a cathedral-vast opening, hundreds of meters across. The walls slanted inward into a domed ceiling that was twenty meters off the floor in the center. Scattered across the room in seemingly random places were two-meter-thick columns of something that looked like blue glass with black, branching veins shooting through it. The columns pulsed with light, and each pulse was accompanied by a subsonic throb that Holden could feel in his bones and teeth. It felt like enormous power, carefully restrained. A giant, whispering.
“Holy shit,” he finally said when his breath came back. “We’re in a lot of trouble, aren’t we?”
“Yeah,” Miller said. “You should not have come.”
Miller walked off across the room, and Holden hurried to catch up. “Wait, what?” he said. “I thought you wanted me here!”
Miller walked around something that from a distance had looked like a blue statue of an insect, but up close was a massive confusion of metallic limbs and protrusions, like a construction mech folded up on itself. Holden tried to guess at its purpose and failed.
“Why would you think that?” Miller said as he walked. “You don’t know what’s in here. Doors and corners. Never walk into a crime scene until you know there’s not someone there waiting to put you down. You’ve got to clear the room first. But maybe we got lucky. For now. Wouldn’t recommend doing it again, though.”
“I don’t understand.”
They came to a place in the floor that was covered in what looked like cilia or plant stalks, gently rippling in a nonexistent wind. Miller walked around it. Holden was careful to do the same. As they passed, a swarm of blue fireflies burst out of the ground cover and flew up to a vent in the ceiling where they vanished.
“So there was this unlicensed brothel down in sector 18. We went thinking we’d be hauling fifteen, twenty people in. More, maybe. Got there, and the place was stripped to the stone,” Miller said. “It wasn’t that they’d gotten wind of us, though. The Loca Greiga had heard about the place, sent their guys to clean it up. Took about a week to find the bodies. According to forensics, they’d all been shot twice in the head pretty much while we were getting one last cup of coffee. If we’d been a little bit faster, we’d have walked in on it. Nothing says fucked like opening the door on a bunch of kids who thought they’d make a quick buck off the sex trade and having an organized kill squad there for the meet and greet instead.”
“What has that got to do with anything?”
“This place is the same,” Miller said. “There was supposed to be something. A lot of something. There was supposed to be… shit, I don
’t have the right words. An empire. A civilization. A home. More than a home, a master. Instead, there’s a bunch of locked doors and the lights on a timer. I don’t want you charging into the middle of that. You’ll get your ass killed.”
“What the hell do you mean?” Holden said. “You, or the protomolecule, or Julie Mao, or whatever, you set this whole thing up. The job, the attack, all of it.”
That stopped Miller. He turned around with a frown on his face. “Julie’s dead, kid. Miller’s dead. I’m just the machine for finding lost things.”
“I don’t understand,” Holden said. “If you didn’t do this, then who did?”
“See now, that’s a good question, on several levels. Depending on what you mean by ‘this.’” Miller’s head lifted like a dog catching an unfamiliar scent on the wind. “Your friends are here. We should go.” He moved off at a faster walk toward the far wall of the room.
“The marines,” Holden said. “Could you stop them?”
“No,” Miller said. “I don’t protect anything. I can tell the station they’re a threat. There’d be consequences, though.”
Holden felt a punch of dread in his gut.
“That sounds bad.”
“It wouldn’t be good. Come on. If we’re going to do this, we need to stay ahead of them.”
The halls and passages widened and narrowed, meeting and falling away from each other like blood vessels of some massive organism. Holden’s suit lights seemed almost lost in the vast darkness, and the blue firefly flickers came in waves and vanished again. Along the way they passed more of the metallic blue insectlike constructs.
“What are these?” Holden asked, pointing to an especially large and dangerous-looking model as they passed it.
“Whatever they need to be,” Miller replied without turning around.
“Oh, great, so we’re back to inscrutable, are we?”
Miller spun around, a worried look on his face, and blinked out of existence. Holden turned.
Far across the huge room, a form was coming out of the tunnel. Holden had seen similar armor before. A Martian marine’s powered armor was made of equal parts efficiency and threat.