“That’s all right, kid,” the robot-thing said in a tinny Belter accent. “It ain’t news to me.”
“Amos and Fayez and I got another cart going, and we came after them. To warn you.”
“Okay,” Holden said. “You did great. We’re going to be fine now. How did you find us?”
Elvi held up her hand terminal, took a breath, let it out. “It was complicated.”
“Fair enough. What about Amos? Where’s he?”
“Murtry shot him. I think he’s dead.”
Holden’s face went pale and then flushed. He shook his head, and when he spoke, his voice was low and careful. “Amos isn’t dead.”
“How do you know?”
“If Amos goes down, it’s because literally everyone else there has already died. We’re still alive, so Amos is too.”
“Don’t pay too much attention to him,” the robot monster said. “He gets a little romantic about these things. If you say the bald guy’s dead, I believe you.”
“Thank you,” Elvi said by reflex.
“I am sorry about it, though. I liked him.”
“I did too,” Elvi said. “And Fayez. I heard gunshots when I was running. I think Fayez —”
“How about Murtry?” Holden asked.
“He’s coming. He’s behind me. I don’t know how far. But he’s coming to find you. To stop you.”
“Why the fuck would he stop me?” Holden asked, biting the words.
“He wants RCE to have the artifacts still working.”
“That man’s kind of an asshole,” the alien said. “We’ve got a pretty full plate, though. We’re close.”
“Close to what?” Elvi said.
“That would be the question,” the alien answered, but Holden’s gaze was fixed over her shoulder. His jaw was tight and angry.
“All right,” he said. “We’ve got two things we need to do.”
“We do?” the alien said. It occurred to Elvi that they were talking to an alien. She thought that was remarkable, and she was a little confused that Holden hadn’t remarked on it.
“Someone has to find this whatever-it-is and shut off the planetary defenses, and someone has to shoot Murtry.”
“Not to disagree with you,” the alien said, shifting its weight on six articulated legs. “One of those seems a little more important to me.”
“Me too,” Holden said, “but I don’t think it’s the same one. Elvi, I’m going to need you to go save everyone, okay?”
“Um,” she said. “All right?”
“Good. This is Detective Miller. He died when Eros hit Venus and now he’s a puppet of the protomolecule.”
“Semi-autonomous,” the alien said.
“Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise.”
“Okay,” Holden said. “I’m going to go take care of this.”
To Elvi’s surprise and unease, Holden walked away, following the passage she’d taken. The alien thing cleared its throat apologetically, only she was fairly sure it didn’t have a throat. So the sound was just a kind of conversational inflection.
“Sorry about that,” the alien – Miller – said. “He gets an idea in his head sometimes and there’s no talking to him.”
“It’s all right,” Elvi said. “So… um.”
“Right, saving everyone in the world. Follow me, kid. I’ll get you up to speed.”
“So it’s a distributed consciousness,” she said, following Miller through a low archway. She felt lightheaded, and not just from hunger. Fayez was dead. Amos was dead. She was going to die. She was on an alien world. She was talking to a dead man wearing an alien robot. The part of her that could feel things was done, shut off. Her heart was a numbness behind her ribs, and when – if – it came back, she couldn’t guess who or what she would be.
“Except it’s not exactly conscious,” Miller said. “There’s nodes in it that are, but they don’t run the joint. I’m not actually one of them. I’m a construct based on the dead guy, only I’m based really closely on him, and he was kind of a bulldog about this kind of thing. At least by the end he was.”
“So are you conscious?”
The alien robot – the skin the Miller construct was using – shrugged. It was strange how well the gesture translated. “Don’t know. Seems like I’m acing my Turing test, though.”
Elvi thought about it and nodded. “Fair enough.”
“So I sort of… well, triangulated where the dead spot was in space. If you see what I mean.”
“Sure, yes. Triangulation. I totally understand that,” Elvi said. “So. Four now.”
“Four?”
“Our biosphere, the local organisms, the things that made the gates, and the things that killed them. Four.”
Miller stopped at a seam in the wall and placed his claws on it, ready to push. “In through here? It used to be one of the major control centers for the planet. Like a… like a nerve cluster or something. As near as I can figure it, the dead spot’s in here.”
He pushed. The wall retracted, not sliding back so much as changing conformation. Beyond it, a wide, tall space opened. Hundreds of niches rose, level after level, one above the other, with mechanisms like Miller in each of them. Dots of bright blue light like fireflies swirled spiral patterns in the air, riding currents of air that Elvi couldn’t feel. And in the center, floating a meter above the floor, was…
She looked away, putting her hand on Miller’s side to steady herself, then forced her gaze back up. It was hard to look at directly. The margins of the space were bright without illuminating anything or casting shadows, sharp and terrible. It reminded her of the way schizophrenics and people suffering migraines would describe light as assaulting and dangerous. And within that boundary, darkness swirled. It was more than an absence. She could sense a structure within it, layers interpenetrating, like shadows casting shadows. It throbbed with an inhuman power, tidal and deep and painful. Look at this too long, Elvi thought, and I will lose my mind in it. She took a step toward it, feeling the structures in the blackness respond to her. She felt as if she could see the spaces between molecules in the air, like atoms themselves had become a thin fog, and for the first time she could see the true shape of reality looming up just beyond her reach.
Once, there had been a civilization here beyond anything Elvi had ever imagined. Beings that could design tools like the protomolecule, like the rings. They had peopled a thousand worlds, and more, spread through time and through space, and they were gone now. And this – she had no doubt at all – this was the footprint of the thing that had killed them.
“So,” Miller said, moving his claws in a wide, spreading gesture, “you need to look for anything, you know, odd. Something that doesn’t seem like it fits.”
She turned to him, confused, and pointed at the uncanny thing in the center of the room. “You mean like that?”
Miller shifted, alien eyes moving their lenses in the complexity of the mechanism. “Like what?”
“That. In the middle of the room. That.”
“I don’t see anything,” Miller said. “What’s it look like?”
“The eye of an angry God?” Elvi said.
“Oh,” Miller said. The heavy plates of his robotic body clicked and hissed against each other as he shifted. “Yeah, well that’s probably it, then. Good work.”
Chapter Fifty-Three: Holden
W
hen Murtry pulled himself through a gap in the machinery and walked across the ledge to the narrow bridge, Holden was waiting for him on the other side. His hand was draped casually on the butt of his gun. The RCE security chief gave Holden a vague nod, then carefully examined his surroundings. He looked down into the hundred-meter chasm, and tapped the narrow tonguelike bridge with the tip of one boot. He spun once slowly, peering carefully into the crevices created by the cramped machines. When he was through, he looked at Holden again and gave him a flat, meaningless smile. Holden noticed his hand wasn’t far from his own weapon.
&n
bsp; You came by yourself,” Murtry said. “The better plan is to put one person in the open with a second hidden behind the target.”
“That the one you use?” Holden asked. He tried to match Murtry’s casual nonchalance and felt like he mostly succeeded.
“It works,” Murtry replied with a nod. “So how does this go down?”
“I’ve been wondering that myself.”
“Well,” Murtry said with an almost imperceptible shrug, “I need to get over there and stop whatever you people are cooking up. Doctor Okoye seems to think you are going to break the defense network down.”
“Yeah,” Holden replied. “Pretty much am. Call it saving people.”
Murtry nodded but didn’t speak for a moment. Holden waited for him to reach for his gun. The distance between them, the width of the chasm, was just over five meters. An easy shot at the range. Harder when you were rushing because the other guy was shooting back. The lighting was good and Murtry wasn’t wearing a helmet. Risk the head shot? The RCE man’s armor looked pretty chewed up. The blast patterns on it made Holden suspect that was the work of Amos’ autoshotgun. The chest shot was easier, but it was possible the damage to the armor was mostly cosmetic, in which case his sidearm wasn’t going to do much.
Murtry winked at him, and Holden suddenly felt like the man was reading his mind as he calculated the best way to kill him. “I can’t let that happen,” Murtry said. His shrug was almost apologetic. “By charter, this all belongs to RCE. You don’t get to break it.”
Holden shook his head in disbelief. “You really are crazy. If I don’t break it, our ships fall out of the sky and we all die.”
“Maybe. Maybe we die. Maybe we find some other way to stay alive. Either way, the RCE claim remains in force.” Murtry waved one hand, not his gun hand, around the room. “All this is worth trillions intact. We’ve made incredible advances in materials science just by looking at the rings. How much will working technology do for us? This is what we came here for, Captain. You don’t get to decide what we do with it.”
“Trillions,” Holden said, unable to keep the disbelief out of his voice. “I’ve never seen a dead person spend money.”
“Sure you have. They call it a foundation or a bequest. Happens all the time.”
“This is all so you can make a bequest?”
Murtry’s smile widened a millimeter.
“No,” he said. “I came to conquer a new world. This is how you do that. I understand what I’m doing seems cruel and inflexible to you, but it’s what this situation requires. The tools you’re using here are the ones that let you get along once civilization takes over. They’re the wrong shape for this work. I have no illusions about what it will take to carve out a place in this new frontier. It will take sacrifices, and it will take blood, and things we wouldn’t do back where everything’s regulated and controlled will have to happen here. You think we can do it with committee meetings and press releases.”
“I wonder if this will sound like a compelling argument to the people dying in orbit right now.”
“I’m sorry for them. I truly am. But they knew the risks when they got on board. And their deaths will have meaning,” Murtry said.
“Meaning?”
“They are the sign that we didn’t give up a centimeter. What we came for, we held to the last gasp. This isn’t something humanity can do halfway, Captain. It never has been. Even Cortez burned his ships.”
Holden’s laugh was half disbelief and half contempt. “What is it with you guys and worshiping mass murderers?”
Murtry frowned. A swirl of bright blue lights rose and fell between them like dust blowing down a desert street.
“How do you mean?” Murtry asked.
“A guy I once knew tried to justify his life choices to me by comparing himself to Genghis Khan.”
“I take it you didn’t find his argument compelling?” Murtry asked with a smirk.
“No,” Holden said. “And then a friend of mine shot him in the face.”
“An ironic rebuttal to an argument about necessary violence.”
“I thought so too, at the time.”
Murtry reached up and scratched his head with his left hand, his short greasy hair shifting into a configuration vaguely resembling Miller’s carapace. A sculpture of curves and spikes. He looked at his fingertips in disgust and wiped them on his armor. Holden waited. Somewhere far behind them, a strange chittering sound rose like cicadas on a summer afternoon.
“So,” Murtry finally said. “I’m going to need to come over there.” He gestured at Holden’s side of the chasm with his chin. His right hand still hovered over his gun.
“Nope,” Holden replied.
Murtry nodded, as if expecting this. “You going to arrest me, Sheriff?”
“Actually, I was kind of thinking I’d shoot you.”
“In the face, no doubt.”
“If that’s what I can hit.”
“Seems like a radical shift,” Murtry said, “for a man who wants to tame the frontier with mediation and committee meetings.”
“Oh, no, this isn’t about that. Elvi says you killed Amos. I wouldn’t kill a single person for your fucking frontier, but for my crew? Yeah, I’ll kill you for that.”
“They say revenge is empty.”
“This is my first try at it,” Holden said. “Forgive me if my opinions on it are fairly unformed.”
“Will it change things if your boy isn’t dead? He was still shooting when I left him.”
The wave of relief that hit Holden at this almost doubled him over. If Murtry had pulled his pistol and shot at that moment the fight would have been over. But he managed to keep his face blank and his knees from buckling.
“Is he hurt?”
“Oh my, yes. Pretty badly. He killed one of mine before he went down. For a guy who wants to solve problems without violence, you travel in dangerous company.”
“Yeah,” Holden said, unable to keep the smile off his face. “But he’s a great mechanic. What about the other one? Fayez?”
“Down, not dead. I didn’t get to finish him before your boy started blazing away. Neither one was walking, so I just left.”
The matter-of-fact discussion of why Murtry hadn’t just killed Fayez chilled Holden’s blood.
“So here’s a deal,” Murtry said. “I let you cross to this side and you can go check on your man Amos. Save the egghead from bleeding out, too. You have my word I won’t interfere.”
“But,” Holden replied, “you head over to my side and stop Elvi from doing what I need her to do.”
“Seems a fair trade.”
Holden stopped just resting his hand on the butt of his pistol and wrapped it around the grip. He turned his body, getting his feet in position. Murtry gave him just the hint of a frown.
“No,” Holden said, and waited for the shooting to start.
“So,” Murtry said, not moving at all. “You know what people always forget about the new world?”
Holden didn’t answer.
“Civilization has a built-in lag time. Just like light delay. We fly out here to this new place, and because we’re civilized, we think civilization comes with us. It doesn’t. We build it. And while we’re building it, a whole lot of people die. You think the American west came with railroads and post offices and jails? Those things were built, and at the cost of thousands of lives. They were built on the corpses of everyone who was there before the Spanish came. You don’t get one without the other. And it’s people like me that do it. People like you come later. All of this?” Murtry waved his left hand at himself and Holden. “This is because you showed up too early. Come back after I’ve built a post office and we’ll talk.”
“You done?” Holden asked.
“So this is our day, I take it,” Murtry said. “No way but this way? Even if I didn’t kill your man?”
“Maybe you killed Amos and Fayez and maybe you didn’t. Maybe you’re right about the frontier and I’m just a naïve idiot. Mayb
e every single person you killed on this world had it coming and you were always in the right.”
“But you have people in orbit and saving them is all that counts?”
“I was going to say, ‘But you’re a flaming asshole,’ ” Holden said. “But the other works too. You don’t cross this bridge.”
“Well then,” Murtry said. He shifted his stance and his eyes narrowed. The chittering grew louder. Below them, the protomolecule fireflies swirled and shuddered. “Well then.”