Protective and head-shy both, Miller thought. Bad combination.
Julie was waiting in the airlock. Not at first, of course. Miller slid back into the space, his mind churning through everything he’d seen, just like it was a case. A normal case. His gaze drifted toward the broken locker. There was no suit in it. For a moment, he was back on Eros, in the apartment where Julie had died. There had been an environment suit there. And then Julie was there with him, pushing her way out of the locker.
What were you doing there? he thought.
“No brig,” he said.
“What?” Holden said.
“I just noticed,” Miller said. “Ship’s got no brig. They aren’t built to carry prisoners.”
Holden made a low agreeing grunt.
“Makes you wonder what they were planning to do with the crew of the Scopuli,” Naomi said. The tone of her voice meant she didn’t wonder at all.
“I don’t think they were,” Miller said slowly. “This whole thing… they were improvising.”
“Improvising?” Naomi said.
“Ship was carrying an infectious something or other without enough containment to contain it. Taking on prisoners without a brig to hold ’em in. They were making this up as they went along.”
“Or they had to hurry,” Holden said. “Something happened that made them hurry. But what they did on Eros must have taken months to arrange. Maybe years. So maybe something happened at the last minute?”
“Be interesting to know what,” Miller said.
Compared to the rest of the ship, the ops deck looked peaceful. Normal. The computers had finished their diagnostics, screens glowing placidly. Naomi went to one, holding the back of the chair with one hand so the gentle touch of her fingers against the screen wouldn’t push her backward.
“I’ll do what I can here,” she said. “You can check the bridge.”
There was a pause that carried weight.
“I’ll be fine,” Naomi said.
“All right. I know you’ll… I… C’mon, Miller.”
Miller let the captain float ahead into the bridge. The screens there were spooling through diagnostics so standard Miller recognized them. It was a wider space than he’d imagined, with five stations with crash couches customized for other people’s bodies. Holden strapped in at one. Miller took a slow turn around the deck. Nothing seemed out of place here—no blood, no broken chairs or torn padding. When it happened, the fight had been down near the reactor. He wasn’t sure yet what that meant. He sat at what, under a standard layout, would have been the security station, and opened a private channel to Holden.
“Anything you’re looking for in particular?”
“Briefings. Overviews,” Holden said shortly. “Whatever’s useful. You?”
“See if I can get into the internal monitors.”
“Hoping to find…?”
“What Julie found,” Miller said.
The security assumed that anyone sitting at the console had access to the low-level feeds. It still took half an hour to parse the command structure and query interface. Once Miller had that down, it wasn’t hard. The time stamp on the log listed the feed as the day the Scopuli had gone missing. The security camera in the airlock bay showed the crew—Belters, most of them—being escorted in. Their captors were in armor, with faceplates lowered. Miller wondered if they’d meant to keep their identities secret. That would almost have suggested they were planning to keep the crew alive. Or maybe they were just wary of some last-minute resistance. The crew of the Scopuli weren’t wearing environment suits or armor. A couple of them weren’t even wearing uniforms.
But Julie was.
It was strange, watching her move. With a sense of dislocation, Miller realized that he’d never actually seen her in motion. All the pictures he’d had in his file back on Ceres had been stills. Now here she was, floating with her chosen compatriots, her hair back out of her eyes, her jaw clamped. She looked very small surrounded by her crew and the men in armor. The little rich girl who’d turned her back on wealth and status to be with the downtrodden Belt. The girl who’d told her mother to sell the Razorback—the ship she’d loved—rather than give in to emotional blackmail. In motion, she looked a little different from the imaginary version he’d built of her—the way she pulled her shoulders back, the habit of reaching her toes toward the floor even in null g—but the basic image was the same. He felt like he was filling in blanks with the new details rather than reimagining the woman.
The guards said something—the security feed’s audio was playing to vacuum—and the Scopuli crew looked aghast. Then, hesitantly, the captain started taking his uniform off. They were stripping the prisoners. Miller shook his head.
“Bad plan.”
“What?” Holden said.
“Nothing. Sorry.”
Julie wasn’t moving. One of the guards moved toward her, his legs braced on the wall. Julie, who’d lived through being raped, maybe, or something as bad. Who’d studied jiu jitsu to feel safe afterward. Maybe they thought she was just being modest. Maybe they were afraid she was hiding a weapon under her clothes. Either way, they tried to force the point. One of the guards pushed her, and she latched on to his arm like her life depended on it. Miller winced when he saw the man’s elbow bend the wrong way, but he also smiled.
That’s my girl, he thought. Give ’em hell.
And she did. For almost forty seconds, the airlock bay was a battleground. Even some of the cowed Scopuli crew tried to join in. But then Julie didn’t see a thick-shouldered man launch from behind her. Miller felt it when the gauntleted hand hammered Julie’s temple. She wasn’t out, but she was groggy. The men with guns stripped her with a cold efficiency, and when there were no weapons or comm devices, they handed her a jumpsuit and shoved her in a locker. The others, they led down into the ship. Miller matched time stamps and switched feeds.
The prisoners were taken to the galley, then bound to the tables. One of the guards spent a minute or so talking, but with his faceplate down, the only clues Miller had to the content of the sermon were the reactions of the crew—wide-eyed disbelief, confusion, outrage, and fear. The guard could have been saying anything.
Miller started skipping. A few hours, then a few more. The ship was under thrust, the prisoners actually sitting at the tables instead of floating near them. He flipped to other parts of the ship. Julie’s locker was still closed. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have assumed she was dead.
He skipped ahead.
One hundred and thirty-two hours later, the crew of the Scopuli grew a pair. Miller saw it in their bodies even before the violence started. He’d seen holding cells rise up before, and the prisoners had the same sullen-but-excited look. The feed showed the stretch of wall where he’d seen the bullet holes. They weren’t there yet. They would be. A man came into the picture with a tray of food rations.
Here it comes, Miller thought.
The fight was short and brutal. The prisoners didn’t stand a chance. Miller watched as they hauled one of them—a sandy-haired man—to the airlock and spaced him. The others were put in heavy restraints. Some wept. Some screamed. Miller skipped ahead.
It had to be in there someplace. The moment when it—whatever it was—got loose. But either it had happened in some unmonitored crew quarters or it had been there from the beginning. Almost exactly one hundred and sixty hours after Julie had gone into the locker, a man in a white jumper, eyes glassy and stance unsure, lurched out of the crew quarters and vomited on one of the guards.
“Fuck!” Amos shouted.
Miller was out of his chair before he knew what had happened. Holden was up too.
“Amos?” Holden said. “Talk to me.”
“Hold on,” Amos said. “Yeah, it’s okay, Cap’n. It’s just these fuckers stripped off a bunch of the reactor shielding. We’ve got her up, but I sucked down a few more rads than I’d have picked.”
“Get back to the Roci,” Holden said. Miller steadied himself a
gainst a wall, pushing back down toward the control stations.
“No offense, sir, but it ain’t like I’m about to start pissing blood or anything fun like that,” Amos said. “I got surprised more than anything. I start feeling itchy, I’ll head back over, but I can get some atmosphere for us by working out of the machine shop if you give me a few more minutes.”
Miller watched Holden’s face as the man struggled. He could make it an order; he could leave it be.
“Okay, Amos. But you start getting light-headed or anything—I mean anything—and you get over to the sick bay.”
“Aye, aye,” Amos said.
“Alex, keep an eye on Amos’ biomed feed from over there. Give us a heads-up if you see a problem,” Holden said on the general channel.
“Roger,” came Alex’s lazy drawl.
“You finding anything?” Holden asked Miller on their private channel.
“Nothing unexpected,” Miller said. “You?”
“Yeah, actually. Take a look.”
Miller pushed himself to the screen Holden had been working. Holden pulled himself back into the station and started pulling up feeds.
“I was thinking that someone had to go last,” Holden said. “I mean, there had to be someone who was the least sick when whatever it was got loose. So I went through the directory to see what activity was going on before the system went dead.”
“And?”
“There’s a whole bunch of activity that looks like it happened a couple days before the system shutdown, and then nothing for two solid days. And then a little spike. A lot of accessed files and system diagnostics. Then someone hacked the override codes to blow atmosphere.”
“It was Julie, then.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Holden said. “But one of the feeds she accessed was… Shit, where is it? It was right… Oh. Here. Watch this.”
The screen blinked, controls dropping to standby, and a high-res emblem, green and gold, came up. The corporate logo of Protogen, with a slogan Miller hadn’t seen before. First. Fastest. Furthest.
“What’s the time stamp on the file?” Miller asked.
“The original was created about two years ago,” Holden said. “This copy was burned eight months ago.”
The emblem faded, and a pleasant-faced man sitting at a desk took its place. He had dark hair, with just a scattering of gray at the temples, and lips that seemed used to smiling. He nodded at the camera. The smile didn’t reach his eyes, which were as empty as a shark’s.
Sociopath, Miller thought.
The man’s lips began moving soundlessly. Holden said, “Shit,” and hit a switch to have the audio transmitted to their suits. He rewound the video feed and started it over.
“Mr. Dresden,” the man said. “I would like to thank you and the members of the board for taking the time to review this information. Your support, both financial and otherwise, has been absolutely essential to the incredible discoveries we’ve seen on this project. While my team has been point man, as it were, Protogen’s tireless commitment to the advancement of science has made our work possible.
“Gentlemen, I will be frank. The Phoebe protomolecule has exceeded all our expectations. I believe it represents a genuinely game-changing technological breakthrough. I know that these kinds of corporate presentations are prone to hyperbole. Please understand that I have thought about this carefully and chosen my words: Protogen can become the most important and powerful entity in the history of the human race. But it will require initiative, ambition, and bold action.”
“He’s talking about killing people,” Miller said.
“You’ve seen this already?” Holden said.
Miller shook his head. The feed changed. The man faded out, and an animation took his place. A graphic representation of the solar system. Orbits marked in wide swaths of color showed the plane of the ecliptic. The virtual camera swirled out from the inner planets, where Mr. Dresden and board members presumably were, and out toward the gas giants.
“For those of you on the board unfamiliar with the project, eight years ago, the first manned landing was made on Phoebe,” the sociopath said.
The animation zoomed in toward Saturn, rings and planet flying past in a triumph of graphic design over accuracy.
“A small ice moon, the assumption was that Phoebe would eventually be mined for water, much like the rings themselves. The Martian government commissioned a scientific survey more out of a sense of bureaucratic completeness than from expectation of economic gain. Core samples were taken, and when silicate anomalies raised flags, Protogen was approached as cosponsor of a long-term research facility.”
The moon itself—Phoebe—filled the frame, turning slowly to show all sides like a prostitute at a cheap brothel. It was a crater-marked lump, indistinguishable from a thousand other asteroids and planetesimals Miller had seen.
“Given Phoebe’s extra-ecliptical orbit,” the sociopath went on, “one theory has been that it was a body that originated in the Kuiper belt and had been captured by Saturn when it happened to pass through the solar system. The existence of complex silicon structures within the interior ice, along with suggestions of impact-resistant structures within the architecture of the body itself, have forced us to reevaluate this.
“Using analyses proprietary to Protogen and not yet shared with the Martian team, we have determined beyond any credible doubt that what you are seeing now is not a naturally formed planetesimal, but a weapon. Specifically, a weapon designed to carry its payload through the depths of interplanetary space and deliver it safely onto Earth two and one third billion years ago, when life itself was in its earliest stages. And the payload, gentlemen, is this.”
The display clicked to a graphic that Miller couldn’t quite parse. It looked like the medical text of a virus, but with wide, looping structures that were at once beautiful and improbable.
“The protomolecule first caught our interest for its ability to maintain its primary structure in a wide variety of conditions through secondary and tertiary changes. It also showed an affinity for carbon and silicon structures. Its activity suggested it was not in itself a living thing, but a set of free-floating instructions designed to adapt to and guide other replicating systems. Animal experiments suggest that its effects are not exclusive to simple replicators, but are, in fact, scalable.”
“Animal tests,” Miller said. “What, they dumped it on a cat?”
“The initial implication of this,” the sociopath went on, “is that a larger biosphere exists, of which our solar system is only a part, and that the protomolecule is an artifact of that environment. That alone, I think you must agree, would revolutionize human understanding of the universe. Let me assure you, it’s small beer. If accidents of orbital mechanics had not captured Phoebe, life as we know it would not presently exist. But something else would. The earliest cellular life on Earth would have been hijacked. Reprogrammed along lines contained within the structure of the protomolecule.”
The sociopath reappeared. For the first time, smile lines appeared around his eyes, like a parody of themselves. Miller felt a visceral hatred growing in his gut and knew himself well enough to recognize it for what it was. Fear.
“Protogen is in a position to take sole possession of not only the first technology of genuinely extraterrestrial origin, but also a prefabricated mechanism for the manipulation of living systems and the first clues as to the nature of the larger—I will call it galactic—biosphere. Directed by human hands, the applications of this are limitless. I believe that the opportunity now facing not only us but life itself is as profound and transformative as anything that has ever happened. And, further, the control of this technology will represent the base of all political and economic power from now on.
“I urge you to consider the technical details I have outlined in the attached. Moving quickly to understand the programming, mechanism, and intent of the protomolecule, as well as its direct application to human beings, will mark the differe
nce between a Protogen-led future and being left behind. I urge immediate and decisive action to take exclusive control of the protomolecule and move forward with large-scale testing.
“Thank you for your time and attention.”
The sociopath smiled again, and the corporate logo reappeared. First. Fastest. Furthest. Miller’s heart was racing.
“Okay. All right,” he said. And then: “Fuck me.”
“Protogen, protomolecule,” Holden said. “They had no idea what it does, but they slapped their label on it like they’d made it. They found an alien weapon, and all they could think to do was brand it.”
“There’s reason to think these boys are pretty impressed with themselves,” Miller replied with a nod.
“Now, I’m not a scientist or anything,” Holden said, “but it seems to me like taking an alien supervirus and dropping it into a space station would be a bad idea.”
“It’s been two years,” Miller said. “They’ve been doing tests. They’ve been… I don’t know what the hell they’ve been doing. But Eros is what they decided on. And everyone knows what happened on Eros. The other side did it. No research and recovery ships because they’re all fighting each other or guarding something. The war? It’s a distraction.”
“And Protogen is doing… what?”
“Seeing what their toy does when you take it out for a spin is my guess,” Miller said.
They were silent for a long moment. Holden spoke first.
“So you take a company that seems to be lacking an institutional conscience, that has enough government research contracts to almost be a privately run branch of the military. How far will they go for the holy grail?”
“First, fastest, furthest,” Miller replied.
“Yeah.”
“Guys,” Naomi said, “you should come down here. I think I’ve got something.”
Chapter Thirty-Five: Holden
I’ve found the comm logs,” Naomi said as Holden and Miller drifted into the room behind her.
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