The Dragon's Path

  “I think I’d rather stay down here for a bit,” she replied.

  Holden hit the battle station’s alert button on his console. The deck lights shifted to red and a Klaxon sounded three times.

  “XO Nagata to ops,” he said. Let her chew him out later. He’d have it coming. But right now he didn’t have any time to waste.

  Naomi was on the ops deck in less than a minute. Holden had already buckled back into his crash couch and was pulling up the comm logs. Naomi pushed over to her chair and belted in as well. She gave him an inquiring look—Are we going to die after all?—but said nothing. If he said so, she would. He felt a spike of equal parts admiration for and impatience with her. He found what he was looking for in the logs before speaking.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ve had radio contact with Miller after Eros dropped off of radar. Is that right?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” she said. “But his suit isn’t powerful enough to transmit through the shell of Eros out to much distance, so one of the moored ships is boosting the signal for him.”

  “Which means that whatever Eros is doing to kill the radar isn’t killing all radio transmissions from outside.”

  “That seems right,” Naomi said, a growing curiosity in her voice.

  “And you still have the control codes for the five OPA freighters on the surface, right?”

  “Yes, sir.” And then a moment later: “Oh, shit.”

  “Okay,” Holden said, turning in his chair to face Naomi with a grin. “Why do the Roci and every other naval ship in the system have a switch to turn off their transponders?”

  “So the enemy can’t get a missile lock on the transponder signal and blow them up,” she said, sharing his grin now.

  Holden spun his chair back around and began opening a comm channel to Tycho Station.

  “XO, would you be so kind as to use the control codes Miller gave you to turn those five OPA freighters back on and fire up their transponders? Unless our visitor on Eros can outrun radio waves, I think we’ve gotten around the acceleration problem.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” Naomi replied. Even looking the other way, Holden could hear the smile in her voice, and it melted the last of the ice in his gut. They had a plan. They were going to make a difference.

  “Call coming in from the Ravi,” Naomi said. “You want it before I turn the transponders on?”

  “Hell yes.”

  The line clicked.

  “Captain Holden. We’ve got our new orders. Seems we’re going to be chasing that thing a little further.”

  McBride sounded almost like someone who hadn’t just been sent to her death. Stoic.

  “You might want to hold off on that for a couple minutes,” Holden said. “We have an alternative.”

  As Naomi activated the transponders on the five OPA freighters Miller had left moored to the surface of Eros, Holden laid out the plan to McBride and then, on a separate line, Fred. By the time Fred had gotten back to him with an enthusiastic approval of the plan from both him and the UN Naval command, the five freighters were pinging away, telling the solar system where they were. An hour after that, the largest swarm of interplanetary nuclear weapons in the history of humanity had been fired and were winging their way toward Eros.

  We’re going to win, Holden thought as he watched the missiles take flight like a swarm of angry red dots on his threat display. We’re going to beat this thing. And what was more, his crew was going to see the end of it. No one else had to die.

  Except…

  “Miller’s calling,” Naomi said. “Probably noticed we turned his ships back on.”

  Holden had a wrenching feeling in his stomach. Miller would be there, on Eros, when those missiles arrived. Not everyone would get to celebrate the coming victory.

  “Hey. Miller. How you doing?” he said, not quite able to keep the funereal tone out of his voice.

  Miller’s voice was choppy, and half drowned by static, but not so garbled that Holden couldn’t hear the tone in it and know that he was about to take a piss all over their parade.

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

  Chapter Fifty-Two: Miller

  One. Two. Three.

  Miller pushed down on the hand terminal, resetting the trigger again. The double doors in front of him had once been one of thousands of quietly automated mechanisms. They had run reliably in their subtle magnetic tracks, maybe for years. Now something black with the texture of tree bark grew like creepers around their sides, deforming the metal. Past them lay the port corridors, the warehouses, the casino. Everything that had been Eros Station and was now the vanguard of an invading alien intelligence. But to reach it, Miller had to pry open a stuck door. In less than five seconds. While wearing an environment suit.

  He put the hand terminal down again and reached quickly for the thin crack where the two doors met. One. Two. The door shifted a centimeter, flakes of black matter sifting down. Three.

  Four.

  He grabbed the hand terminal again, resetting the trigger.

  This shit just wasn’t going to work.

  Miller sat on the ground beside the cart. The Eros feed whispered and muttered, apparently unaware of the tiny invader scratching at the station’s skin. Miller took a long, deep breath. Door didn’t move. He had to get past it.

  Naomi wasn’t going to like this.

  With his one free hand, Miller loosened the woven metal strap around the bomb until it could rock back and forth a little. Carefully, slowly, he lifted the corner of it. Then, watching the status readouts, he wedged the hand terminal under it, the metal corner digging hard into the touch screen over the enter button. The trigger stayed green. If the station shook or shifted, he’d still have five seconds to get to it.

  Good enough.

  Braced with both hands, Miller tugged at the doors. More of the black crust fell away as he levered the doors open far enough to see through. The corridor beyond was nearly round; the dark growth had filled in the corners until the passage looked like a huge desiccated blood vessel. The only lights were his suit’s headlights and a million tiny luminescent dots that swirled in the air like blue fireflies. When the Eros feed pulsed, growing momentarily louder, the fireflies dimmed and then returned. The environment suit reported breathable air with higher than expected concentrations of argon, ozone, and benzene.

  One of the luminescent dots floated past him, swirling on currents he couldn’t feel. Miller ignored it, pushing at the doors, widening the gap centimeter by centimeter. He could put in an arm to feel the crust. It seemed solid enough to support the cart. That was a godsend. If it had been thigh-high alien mud, he would have had to find some other way to carry the bomb. It was going to be bad enough hauling the cart up to the rounded surface.

  No rest for the wicked, Julie Mao said in his mind. No peace for the good.

  He went back to work.

  By the time he’d shoved the doors wide enough to get through, he was sweating. His arms and back ached. The dark crust had started growing down the corridor, tendrils shooting out toward the airlock, keeping to the edges, where walls met floor or ceiling. The blue glow had colonized the air. Eros was heading out the corridor as quickly as he was heading in. Faster, maybe.

  Miller hauled the cart up with both hands, watching the hand terminal closely. The bomb rocked, but not so much it lost its grip on the trigger. Once he was safely in the corridor, he took the terminal back.

  One. Two.

  The heavy bomb casing had carved a little divot in the touch pad, but it still worked. Miller took the cart handle and leaned forward, the uneven, organic surface beneath him translated into the rough tug and flutter of the cart’s vibration.

  He’d died here once. He’d been poisoned. Shot. These halls, or ones much like them, had been his battleground. His and Holden’s. They were unrecognizable now.

  He passed through a wide, nearly empty space. The crust had thinned here, the metal walls of the warehouse showing through i
n places. One LED still glowed in the ceiling, the cool white light spilling onto the darkness.

  The path led him to the casino level, the architecture of commerce still bringing visitors to the same spot. The alien bark was nearly gone, but the space had been transformed. Pachinko machines stood in their rows, half melted or exploded or, like a few, still glittering and asking for the financial information that would unlock the gaudy lights and festive, celebratory sound effects. The card tables were still visible under mushroom caps of clear glutinous gel. Lining the walls and cathedral-high ceilings, black ribs rippled with hairlike threads that glowed at the tips without offering any illumination.

  Something screamed, the sound muffled by Miller’s suit. The broadcast feed of the station sounded louder and richer now that he was under its skin. He had the sudden, transporting memory of being a child and watching a video feed of a boy who’d been swallowed by a monstrous whale.

  Something gray and the size of Miller’s two fists together flew by almost too fast to see. It hadn’t been a bird. Something scuttled behind an overturned vending machine. He realized what was missing. There had been a million and a half people on Eros, and a large percentage of them had been here, on the casino level, when their own personal apocalypse came. But there were no bodies. Or, no. That wasn’t true. The black crust, the millions of dark rills above him with their soft, oceanic glow. Those were the corpses of Eros, recreated. Human flesh, remade. A suit alarm told him he was starting to hyperventilate. Darkness started to creep in at the edge of his vision.

  Miller sank to his knees.

  Don’t pass out, you son of a bitch, he told himself. Don’t pass out, or if you do, at least land so your weight’s on the damned trigger.

  Julie put her hand on his. He could almost feel it, and it steadied him. She was right. They were only bodies. Just dead people. Victims. Just another slab of recycled meat, same as every unlicensed whore he’d seen stabbed to death in the cheap hotels on Ceres. Same as all the suicides who’d thrown themselves out of airlocks. Okay, the protomolecule had mutilated the flesh in weird ways. Didn’t change what it was. Didn’t change what he was.

  “When you’re a cop,” he told Julie, repeating something he’d told every rookie he’d been partnered with in his career, “you don’t have the luxury of feeling things. You have to do the job.”

  So do the job, she said gently.

  He nodded. He stood. Do the job.

  As if in response, the sound in his suit changed, the Eros feed fluting up through a hundred different frequencies before exploding in a harsh flood of what he thought was Hindi. Human voices. Till human voices wake us, he thought, without quite being able to recall where the phrase came from.

  Somewhere in the station, there was going to be… something. A control mechanism or a power supply or whatever the protomolecule was using instead of an engine. He didn’t know what it would look like or how it would be defended. He didn’t have any idea how it worked, apart from the assumption that if he blew it up, it wouldn’t keep going very well.

  So we go back, he told Julie. We go back to what we do know.

  The thing that was growing inside Eros, using the stone skin of the asteroid as its own unarticulated exoskeleton, hadn’t cut off the ports. It hadn’t moved the interior walls or recreated the chambers and passages of the casino level. So the station’s layout should be pretty near what it had always been. Okay.

  Whatever it used to drive the station through space, it was using a shitload of energy. Okay.

  So find the hot spot. With his free hand, he checked the environment suit. Ambient temperature was twenty-seven degrees: hot but far from unbearable. He walked briskly back toward the port corridor. The temperature dropped by less than a hundredth of a degree, but it did drop. All right, then. He could go to each of the corridors, find which one was hottest, and follow it. When he found a place in the station that was, say, three or four degrees hotter than the rest, that would be the place. He’d roll the cart up beside it, let up his thumb, and count to five.

  No problem.

  When he got back to the cart, something golden with the soft look of heather was growing around the wheels. Miller scraped it off as best he could, but one of the wheels had still developed a squeak. Nothing to be done about that.

  With one hand hauling the cart and the other mashing down on his hand terminal’s dead-man’s-switch, Miller headed up, deeper into the station.

  “She’s mine,” mindless Eros said. It had been stuck on the phrase for the better part of an hour. “She’s mine. She’s… mine.”

  “Fine,” Miller muttered. “You can have her.”

  His shoulder ached. The squeak in the cart’s wheel had grown worse, the whine of it cutting through the souls-of-the-damned madness of the Eros feed. His thumb was starting to tingle from the constant, relentless pressure of not annihilating himself quite yet. With each level he rose, the spin gravity grew lighter and the Coriolis a little more noticeable. It wasn’t quite the same as on Ceres, but it was close and felt like coming home. He found himself looking forward to when the job was done. He imagined himself back in his hole, a six-pack of beer, some music on the speakers that had an actual composer instead of the wild, empty-minded glossolalia of the dead station. Maybe some light jazz.

  Who ever thought the idea of light jazz would be appealing?

  “Catch me if you can, cocksuckers,” Eros said. “I am gone and gone and gone. Gone and gone and gone.”

  The inner levels of the station were both more familiar and stranger. Away from the mass grave of the casino level, more of Eros’ old life showed through. Tube stops still glowed, announcing line errors and counseling patience. Air recyclers hummed. The floors were relatively clean and clear. The sense of near normalcy made the changes stand out eerily. Dark fronds coated the walls with swirling nautilus patterns. Flakes of the stuff drifted down from above, whirling in the spin gravity like soot. Eros still had spin gravity but didn’t have gravity from the massive acceleration it was under. Miller chose not to try to figure that out.

  A flock of softball-sized spiderlike things crawled through the corridor, leaving a slick sheen of glowing slime behind them. It wasn’t until he paused to knock one off the cart that he recognized them as severed hands, the trailing wrist bones charred black and remade. Part of his mind was screaming, but it was a distant one and easy to ignore.

  He had to respect the protomolecule. For something that had been expecting prokaryotic anaerobes, it was doing a bang-up job of making do. He paused to check his suit’s sensor array. The temperature had risen half a degree since he’d left the casino and a tenth of a degree since he’d entered this particular main hall. The background radiation was also climbing, his poor abused flesh sucking in more rads. The concentration of benzene was going down, and his suit was picking up more exotic aromatic molecules—tetracene, anthracene, naphthalene—with behavior sufficiently strange to confuse the sensors. So it was the right direction. He leaned forward, the cart resisting his pull like a bored kid. As he recalled, the structural layout was roughly like Ceres’, and he knew Ceres like he knew his name. One more level up—maybe two—there would be a confluence of services from the lower, high-g levels and the supply and energy systems that did better at lower gravity. It seemed as likely a place to grow a command and control center as any. As good a location for a brain.

  “Gone and gone and gone,” Eros said. “And gone.”

  It was funny, he thought, how the ruins of the past shaped everything that came after. It seemed to work on all levels; one of the truths of the universe. Back in the ancient days, when humanity still lived entirely down a well, the paths laid down by Roman legions had become asphalt and later ferroconcrete without ever changing a curve or a turn. On Ceres, Eros, Tycho, the bore of the standard corridor had been determined by mining tools built to accommodate the trucks and lifts of Earth, which had in turn been designed to go down tracks wide enough for a mule cart’s axle.


  And now the alien—the thing from out in the vast dark—was growing along the corridors, ducts, tube routes, and water pipes laid out by a handful of ambitious primates. He wondered what it would have been like if the protomolecule hadn’t been captured by Saturn, had actually found its way into the soup of primordial Earth. No fusion reactors, no navigation drives, no complex flesh to appropriate. What would it have done differently if it hadn’t had to build around some other evolution’s design choices?

  Miller, Julie said. Keep moving.

  He blinked. He was standing in the empty passageway at the base of an access ramp. He didn’t know how long he’d been lost in his own mind.

  Years, maybe.

  He blew out a long breath and started up the ramp. The corridors above him were reading as considerably hotter than ambient. Almost three degrees. He was getting close. There was no light, though. He took his tingling, half-numbed thumb off the select button, turned on the hand terminal’s little utility LED, and got back to the dead man’s switch just before the count of four.

  “Gone and gone and… and… and and and and.”

  The Eros feed squealed, a chorus of voices chattering in Russian and Hindi clamoring over the old singular voice and being drowned out in turn by a deep creaking howl. Whale song, maybe. Miller’s suit mentioned politely that he had half an hour of oxygen left. He shut the alarm down.

  The transfer station was overgrown. Pale fronds swarmed along the corridors and twisted into ropes. Recognizable insects—flies, cockroaches, water spiders—crawled along the thick white cables in purposeful waves. Tendrils of something that looked like articulated bile swept back and forth, leaving a film of scurrying larvae. They were as much victim of the protomolecule as the human population. Poor bastards.

  “You can’t take the razor back,” Eros said, and its voice sounded almost triumphant. “You can’t take the razor back. She is gone and gone and gone.”