The Dragon's Path

by Daniel Abraham

The temperature was climbing faster now. It took him a few minutes to decide that spinward might be slightly warmer. He hauled the cart. He could feel the squeaking, a tiny, rattling tremor in the bones of his hand. Between the mass of the bomb and the failing wheel bearings, his shoulders were starting to really ache. Good thing he wasn’t going to have to haul this damn thing back down.

  Julie was waiting for him in the darkness; the thin beam from his hand terminal cut through her. Her hair floated, spin gravity having, after all, no effect on phantoms of the mind. Her expression was grave.

  How does it know? she asked.

  Miller paused. Every now and then, all through his career, some daydreamed witness would say something, use some phrase, laugh at the wrong thing, and he’d know that the back of his mind had a new angle on the case.

  This was that moment.

  “You can’t take the razor back,” Eros crowed.

  The comet that took the protomolecule into the solar system in the first place was a dead drop, not a ship, Julie said, her dark lips never moving. It was just ballistic. Any ice bullet with the protomolecule in deep freeze. It was aimed at Earth, but it missed and got grabbed by Saturn instead. The payload didn’t steer it. Didn’t drive it. Didn’t navigate.

  “It didn’t need to,” Miller said.

  It’s navigating now. It’s going to Earth. How does it know to go to Earth? Where did that information come from? It’s talking. Where did that grammar come from?

  Who is the voice of Eros?

  Miller closed his eyes. His suit mentioned that he only had twenty minutes of air.

  “You can’t take the Razorback! She is gone and gone and gone!”

  “Oh fuck,” Miller said. “Oh Jesus.”

  He let go of the cart, turning back toward the ramp and the light and the wide station corridors. Everything was shaking, the station itself trembling like someone on the edge of hypothermia. Only of course it wasn’t. The only one shaking was him. It was all in the voice of Eros. It had been there all the time. He should have known.

  Maybe he had.

  The protomolecule didn’t know English or Hindi or Russian or any of the languages it had been spouting. All of that had been in the minds and softwares of Eros’ dead, coded in the neurons and grammar programs that the protomolecule had eaten. Eaten, but not destroyed. It had kept the information and languages and complex cognitive structures, building itself on them like asphalt over the roads the legions built.

  The dead of Eros weren’t dead. Juliette Andromeda Mao was alive.

  He was grinning so hard his cheeks ached. With one gloved hand, he tried the connection. The signal was too weak. He couldn’t get through. He told his uplink on the surface ship to crank up the power, got a connection.

  Holden’s voice came over the link.

  “Hey. Miller. How you doing?”

  The words were soft, apologetic. A hospice worker being gentle to the dying. An incandescent spark of annoyance lit his mind, but he kept his voice steady.

  “Holden,” he said. “We have a problem.”

  Chapter Fifty-Three: Holden

  Actually, we’ve sort of figured out how to solve the problem,” Holden replied.

  “I don’t think so. I’m linking you to my suit’s med data,” Miller said.

  A few seconds later, four columns of numbers popped up in a small window on Holden’s console. It all looked fairly normal, though there were subtleties that only a med-tech, like Shed, would be able to interpret correctly.

  “Okay,” Holden said. “That’s great. You’re getting a little irradiated, but other than that—”

  Miller cut him off.

  “Am I suffering from hypoxia?” he said.

  The data from his suit showed 87 mmHg, comfortably above baseline.

  “No,” Holden said.

  “Anything that would make a guy hallucinate or get demented? Alcohol, opiates. Something like that?”

  “Not that I can see,” Holden said, growing impatient. “What’s this about? Are you seeing things?”

  “Just the usual,” Miller replied. “I wanted to get that shit out the way, because I know what you’re going to say next.”

  He stopped talking, and the radio hissed and popped in Holden’s ear. When Miller spoke again after several seconds of silence, his voice had taken on a different tone. It wasn’t quite pleading, but close enough to make Holden shift uncomfortably in his seat.

  “She’s alive.”

  There was only one she in Miller’s universe. Julie Mao. “Uh, okay. Not sure how to respond to that.”

  “You’ll have to take my word that I’m not having a nervous breakdown or psychotic episode or anything like that. But Julie’s in here. She’s driving Eros.”

  Holden looked at the suit’s medical data again, but it kept reporting normal readings, all the numbers except for radiation comfortably in the green. His blood chemistry didn’t even look like he was particularly stressed for a guy carrying a fusion bomb to his own funeral.

  “Miller, Julie’s dead. We both saw the body. We saw what the protomolecule… did to it.”

  “We saw her body, sure. We just assumed she was dead because of the damage—”

  “She didn’t have a heartbeat,” Holden said. “No brain activity, no metabolism. That’s pretty much the definition of dead.”

  “How do we know what dead looks like to the protomolecule?”

  “We—” Holden started, then stopped. “We don’t, I guess. But no heartbeat, that’s a pretty good start.”

  Miller laughed.

  “We’ve both seen the feeds, Holden. Those rib cages equipped with one arm that drag themselves around, think they have a heartbeat? This shit hasn’t been playing by our rules since day one, you expect it to start now?”

  Holden smiled to himself. Miller was right.

  “Okay, so what makes you think Julie isn’t just a rib cage and a mass of tentacles?”

  “She might be, but it’s not her body I’m talking about,” Miller said. “She’s in here. Her mind. It’s like she’s flying her old racing pinnace. The Razorback. She’s been babbling about it on the radio for hours now, and I just didn’t put it together. But now that I have, it’s pretty goddamn clear.”

  “Why is she headed toward Earth?”

  “I don’t know,” Miller said. He sounded excited, interested. More alive than Holden had ever heard him. “Maybe the protomolecule wants to get there and it’s messing with her. Julie wasn’t the first person to get infected, but she’s the first one that survived long enough to get somewhere. Maybe she’s the seed crystal and everything that the protomolecule’s doing is built on her. I don’t know that, but I can find out. I just need to find her. Talk to her.”

  “You need to get that bomb to wherever the controls are and set it off.”

  “I can’t do that,” Miller said. Because of course he couldn’t.

  It doesn’t matter, Holden thought. In a little less than thirty hours, you’re both radioactive dust.

  “All right. Can you find your girl in less than”—Holden had the Roci do a revised time of impact for the incoming missiles—“twenty-seven hours?”

  “Why? What happens in twenty-seven hours?”

  “Earth fired her entire interplanetary nuclear arsenal at Eros a few hours ago. We just turned the transponders on in the five freighters you parked on the surface. The missiles are targeting them. The Roci is guessing twenty-seven hours to impact based on the current acceleration curve. The Martian and UN navies are on their way to sterilize the area after detonation. Make sure nothing survives or slips the net.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah,” Holden said with a sigh. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I’ve had a lot going on, and it sort of slipped my mind.”

  There was another long silence on the line.

  “You can stop them,” Miller said. “Shut down the transponders.”

  Holden spun his chair around to face Naomi. Her face had the sam
e what did he just say? look that he knew was on his own. She pulled the suit’s medical data over to her console, then called up the Roci’s medical expert system and began running a full medical diagnostic. The implication was clear. She thought something was wrong with Miller that wasn’t immediately apparent from the data they were getting. If the protomolecule had infected him, used him as a last-ditch misdirection…

  “Not a chance, Miller. This is our last shot. If we blow this one, Eros can orbit the Earth, spraying brown goo all over it. No way we take that risk.”

  “Look,” Miller said, his tone alternating between the earlier pleading and a growing frustration. “Julie is in here. If I can find her, a way to talk to her, I can stop this without the nukes.”

  “What, ask the protomolecule to pretty please not infect the Earth, when that was what it was designed to do? Appeal to its better nature?”

  Miller paused for a moment before speaking again.

  “Look, Holden, I think I know what’s going on here. This thing was intended to infect single-celled organisms. The most basic forms of life, right?”

  Holden shrugged, then remembered there was no video feed and said, “Okay.”

  “That didn’t work, but it’s a smart bastard. Adaptive. It got into a human host, a complex multicelled organism. Aerobic. Huge brain. Nothing like what it was built for. It’s been improvising ever since. That mess on the stealth ship? That was its first try. We saw what it was doing with Julie in that Eros bathroom. It was learning how to work with us.”

  “Where are you going with this?” Holden said. There was no time pressure yet, with the missiles still more than a day away, but he couldn’t quite keep the impatience out of his voice.

  “All I’m saying is Eros now isn’t what the protomolecule’s designers planned on. It’s their original plan laid over the top of billions of years of our evolution. And when you improvise, you use what you’ve got. You use what works. Julie’s the template. Her brain, her emotions are all over this thing. She sees this run to Earth as a race, and she’s crowing about winning. Laughing at you because you can’t keep up.”

  “Wait,” Holden said.

  “She’s not attacking Earth, she’s going home. For all we know, she’s not heading for Earth at all. Luna, maybe. She grew up there. The protomolecule piggybacked on her structure, her brain. And so she infected it as much as it infected her. If I can make her understand what’s really going on, then maybe I can negotiate with her.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Call it a hunch,” Miller said. “I’m good with hunches.”

  Holden whistled, the entire situation doing a flip-flop in his head. The new perspective was dizzying.

  “But the protomolecule still wants to obey its program,” Holden said. “And we have no idea what that is.”

  “I can damn sure tell you it isn’t wiping humans out. The things that shot Phoebe at us two billion years ago didn’t know what the hell humans were. Whatever it wants to do needed biomass, and it’s got that now.”

  Holden couldn’t stop himself from snorting at that.

  “So, what? They don’t mean us any harm? Seriously? You think if we explain that we’d rather not have it land on Earth, then it will just agree and go somewhere else?”

  “Not it,” Miller said. “Her.”

  Naomi looked up at Holden, shaking her head. She wasn’t seeing anything organic wrong with Miller either.

  “I’ve been working this case for, shit, almost a year,” Miller said. “I’ve climbed into her life, read her mail, met her friends. I know her. She’s about as independent as a person can be, and she loves us.”

  “Us?” Holden asked.

  “People. She loves humans. She gave up being the little rich girl and joined the OPA. She backed the Belt because it was the right thing to do. No way she kills us if she knows that’s what’s happening. I just need to find a way to explain. I can do this. Give me a chance.”

  Holden ran a hand through his hair, grimacing at the accumulating grease. A day or two at high g was not conducive to regular showering.

  “Can’t do it,” Holden said. “Stakes are too high. We’re going ahead with the plan. I’m sorry.”

  “She’ll beat you,” Miller said.

  “What?”

  “Okay, maybe she won’t. You’ve got a shitload of firepower. But the protomolecule’s figured out how to get around inertia. And Julie? She’s a fighter, Holden. If you take her on, my money’s on her.”

  Holden had seen the video of Julie fighting off her attackers on board the stealth ship. She’d been methodical and ruthless in her own defense. She’d fought without giving quarter. He’d seen the wildness in her eyes when she felt trapped and threatened. Only her attackers’ combat armor had kept her from doing a lot more damage before they took her down.

  Holden felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up at the idea of Eros actually fighting. So far it had been content to run from their clumsy attacks. What happened when it went to war?

  “You could find her,” Holden said, “and use the bomb.”

  “If I can’t get through to her,” Miller said, “that’s my deal. I’ll find her. I’ll talk to her. If I can’t get through, I’ll take her out, and you can turn Eros into a cinder. I’m fine with that. But you have to give me time to try it my way first.”

  Holden looked at Naomi looking back at him. Her face was pale. He wanted to see the answer in her expression, to know what he should do based on what she thought. He didn’t. It was his call.

  “Do you need more than twenty-seven hours?” Holden finally asked.

  He heard Miller exhale loudly. There was gratitude in his voice that was, in its own way, worse than the pleading had been.

  “I don’t know. There are a couple thousand kilometers of tunnels down here, and none of the transit systems work. I have to walk everywhere pulling this damn wagon. Not to mention the fact that I don’t really know what I’m even looking for. But give me a little time, I’ll figure it.”

  “And you know that if this doesn’t work, you’ll have to kill her. Yourself and Julie?”

  “I know.”

  Holden had the Roci calculate how long it would take Eros to reach the Earth at the current rate of acceleration. The missiles from Earth were covering the distance a lot faster than Eros was. The IPBMs were just overpowered Epstein drives with nuclear bombs riding up front. Their acceleration limits were the functional limits of the Epstein drive itself. If the missiles didn’t arrive, it would still take nearly a week for Eros to get to Earth, even if it kept a constant rate of acceleration.

  There was some flexibility in there.

  “Hold on, let me work something out here,” Holden said to Miller, then muted the connection. “Naomi, the missiles are flying in a straight line toward Eros, and the Roci thinks they’ll intercept it in about twenty-seven hours, give or take. How much time do we buy if we turn that straight line into a curve? How much of a curve can we do and still give the missiles a chance to catch Eros before it gets too close?”

  Naomi tipped her head to one side, looking at him suspiciously through narrowed eyes.

  “What are you about to do?” she said.

  “Maybe give Miller a chance to head off the first interspecies war.”

  “You trust Miller?” she said with surprising vehemence. “You think he’s insane. You threw him off the ship because you thought he was a psychopath and a killer, and now you’re going to let him speak for humanity to an alien God-thing that wants to rip us to shreds?”

  Holden had to suppress a smile. Telling an angry woman was how attractive her anger made her would make it stop being cute very quickly. And besides that, he needed it to make sense to her. That was how he’d know if he was right.

  “You told me once that Miller was right, even when I thought he was wrong.”

  “I didn’t make it a blanket statement,” Naomi said, spacing her words out like she was speaking to an idiot child. “I
said he was right to shoot Dresden. That doesn’t mean Miller’s stable. He’s in the process of committing suicide, Jim. He’s fixated on this dead girl. I can’t even begin to imagine what might be going through his head right now.”

  “Agreed. But he’s there, on the scene, and he’s got a keen eye for observation and just plain figuring shit out. This guy tracked us to Eros based on the ship name we picked. That’s pretty damned impressive. He’d never even met me, and he knew me well enough from researching me to know I’d like naming my ship after Don Quixote’s horse.”

  Naomi laughed. “Really? Is that where that comes from?”

  “So when he says that he knows Julie, I believe him.”

  Naomi started to say something, then paused.

  “You think she’ll beat the nukes?” Naomi said, more softly.

  “He thinks she can. And he thinks he can talk her into not killing us all. I have to give him that chance. I owe it to him.”

  “Even if it means killing Earth?”

  “No,” Holden said. “Not that much.”

  Naomi paused again. Her anger faded.

  “So delay the impact, not abort,” Naomi said.

  “Buy him some time. How much can we get?”

  Naomi frowned, looking at the readouts. He could almost see the options clicking through her mind. She smiled, her fierceness gone now, replaced by the mischievous look she got when she knew she was being really clever.

  “As much as you want.”

  “You want to do what?” Fred asked.

  “Pull the nukes off course for a while to buy Miller some time, but not so much that we can’t still use them to destroy Eros if we need to,” Holden said.

  “It’s simple,” Naomi added. “I’m sending you detailed instructions.”

  “Give me the overview,” Fred said.

  “Earth has targeted their missiles on the five freighter transponders on Eros,” Naomi said, pulling her plan up as an overlay on the comm video. “You have ships and stations all over the Belt. You use the transponder reconfiguring program you gave us way back when, and you keep shifting those transponder codes to ships or stations along these vectors to pull the missiles into a long arc that eventually wraps back around to Eros.”