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 the 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.
There was no escaping it. Anyone in those suits could run him down without trying. Holden switched his suit to an open frequency.
“Hey! I’m right here. Let’s talk about this,” he said, then started to walk toward the group. As one, all eight marines raised their right arms and opened fire. Holden braced himself for death even while part of his mind knew that he shouldn’t have time to brace for death. At the distance they were, the rounds from their high-velocity guns would be hitting in a fraction of a second. He’d be dead long before the sound of the shots reached him.
He heard the rapid and deafening buzzsaw sound of the guns firing, but nothing hit him.
A diffuse cloud of gray formed in front of the marines. When the firing finally stopped, the cloud drifted away toward the walls of the room. Bullets. They’d stopped centimeters from the gun barrels, and were now being drawn away just like the objects outside the station.
The marines broke into a fast run across the room, and Holden tried to scramble away. They were beautiful in their way, the lethal power of the suits harnessed by years of training to make their movements seem like a dance. Even without their weapons, they could tear him limb from limb. One punch from that armor would break all the bones he had and change his viscera to a thin slurry. His only chance was to outrun them, and he couldn’t outrun them.
He almost didn’t see the movement when it came. His focus was locked on the Martians, on the danger he knew. He didn’t consciously notice that one of the insectlike things had started movi
ng until the marines turned to it.
The alien thing’s movements were fast and jagged, like a clockwork mechanism that only had full speed and full stop. It clicked toward the marines, jerking with each step, and it loomed larger than the tallest of them by almost half a meter.
They panicked in the way that people trained to expect violence panic. Two started firing, with the same results as before. Another marine’s suit shifted something in its arm, and a larger barrel appeared. Holden scooted away from the confrontation. He was sure there was shouting going on in those armored suits, but it wasn’t a frequency he had access to. The large barrel went white with muzzle flash, and a slow-arcing slug of metal the size of Holden’s fist took to the strange air.
A grenade.
The ticking monster ignored it, stepping closer to the marines, and the grenade detonated at its insectile feet where it landed. The alien thing jerked back, its appendages flailing and dust falling from its severed limbs like a smoke of fungal spores. The complex carpet of moss glowed with orange embers where the blast had burned it.
And all around the marines, a dozen other alien statues came to life. They moved faster this time. Before the marines could begin to react, the one who’d launched the grenade was lifted gently up and ripped apart. Blood sprayed up into the air, hanging, Holden thought numbly, too long before it drifted back to the ground. The surviving marines began to fall back, their guns pointing to the alien creatures that were swarming the dead man. While Holden watched, the marines retreated into the far tunnel, falling back. Regrouping.
The alien things fell on their own injured fellow, ripping and clawing, slaughtering it as if it were the enemy as much as the marines had been. And then, when it was gone, five of the monsters gathered together in the burned spot where the explosion had been. They shuddered, went still, shuddered again, and then from all five of them, a thin stream of opaque yellow goo spattered out onto the scar. Holden felt fascination and revulsion as the moss grabbed on to the stuff, regrowing like it had never been damaged. Like the attack hadn’t even existed.
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