But unaware is not inactive. It finds power where it can, nestled in a bath of low radiation. Tiny structures, smaller than atoms, harvest the energy of the fast-moving particles that pass through it. Subatomic windmills. It eats the void and it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out.
In the artifacts that are conscious, memories of vanished lives still flicker. Tissues that were changed without dying hold the moment that a boy heard his sister was leaving home. They hold multiplication tables. They hold images of sexuality and violence and beauty. They hold the memories of flesh that no longer exists. They hold metaphors: mitochondria, starfish, Hitler’s-brain-in-a-jar, hell realm. They dream. Structures that were neurons twitch and loop and burn and dream. Images and words and pain and fear, endless. An overwhelming sense of illness. An old man’s remembered voice whispering dry words that it is unaware of. Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made.
If there had been a reply, it could end. If there had been anyone to answer, it would have come to rest like a marble at the bottom of a hill, but nothing answers. The scars know that no answer will ever come, but the reflex triggers the reflex triggers the reflex and it reaches out.
It has solved a billion small puzzles already in cascades of reflex. It has no memory of having done so, except in its scars. There is only reaching out, delivering the message that its task is complete. Nothing answers, and so it cannot end. It reaches out. It is a complex mechanism for solving puzzles using what there is to be used.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
And so it has the investigator.
Of all the scars, there is one that came last. That is most intact. It is useful and so it is used. It builds the investigator from that template, unaware that it is doing so, and tries another way of reaching out. And something answers. Something wrong and foreign and aboriginal, but there is an answer, so over the course of years it builds the investigator again and reaches out. The investigator becomes more complex.
It will not stop until it makes that final connection, and it will never make that final connection. It stretches, tries new combinations, different ways to reach out, unaware that it is doing so. Unaware that it exists. Empty, except in the insignificant parts.
The insectile leg will twitch forever. The scar that wails for death will wail forever. The investigator will search forever. The low voice will mutter forever.
Nothing of him doth fade but suffers a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
It reaches out.
Chapter Four: Holden
“MCRN Sally Ride, this is independent vessel Rocinante, requesting permission to pass through the Ring with one ship. OPA heavy freighter Callisto’s Dream.”
“Transmit authorization code now, Rocinante.”
“Transmitting.” Holden tapped the screen to send the codes and stretched out his arms and legs, letting the motion pull him out of his chair in the microgravity. Several abused joints at various places on his skeleton responded with popping sounds.
“You’re getting old,” Miller said. The detective stood in a rumpled gray suit and porkpie hat a few meters away, his feet on the deck as though there were gravity. The smarter the Miller simulation had gotten—and over the last two years it had become damned near coherent—the less it seemed to care about matching the reality around it.
“You’re not.”
“Of my bones are coral made,” the ghost said as if in agreement. “It’s all about the trade-offs.”
When the Sally Ride sent the go-ahead code, Alex took them through the Ring nice and slow, the Callisto matching speed and course. The stars vanished as the ship moved into the black nothingness of the hub. Miller flickered as they passed through the gate, started to resolidify, and vanished in a puff of blue fireflies as the deck hatch banged open and Amos pulled himself through.
“We landing?” the mechanic asked without preamble.
“No need on this trip,” Holden said, and opened a channel to Alex up in the cockpit. “Keep us here until we see the Callisto dock, then take us back out.”
“Sure could use a few days station-side, chief,” Amos said, pulling himself over to one of the ops stations and belting in. His gray coverall had a scorch mark on the sleeve, and he had a bandage covering half of his left hand. Holden pointed at it. Amos shrugged.
“We’ve got a pair of soil ships waiting at Tycho Station,” Holden said.
“No one’s had the balls to try and rip off any of the ships on this route. This many navy ships hanging around? It’d be suicide.”
“And yet Fred pays us very well to escort his ships out to Medina Station, and I like taking his money.” Holden panned the ship’s telescopes around, zooming in on the rings. “And I don’t like being in here any longer than necessary.”
Miller’s ghost was an artifact of the alien technology that had created the gates and a dead man. It had been following Holden around for the two years since they’d deactivated the Ring Station. It spent its time demanding, asking, and cajoling Holden to go through the newly opened gates to begin its investigation on the planets beyond them. The fact that Miller could only appear to Holden when he was alone—and on a ship the size of the Rocinante he was almost never alone—had kept him sane.
Alex floated down from the cockpit, his thinning black hair sticking out in every direction from his brown scalp. There were dark circles under his eyes. “We’re not landin’? Could really use a couple days station-side.”
“See?” Amos said.
Before Holden could reply, Naomi came up through the deck hatch. “Aren’t we going to dock?”
“Captain wants to rush back for those soil transports at Tycho,” Amos said, his voice somehow managing to be neutral and mocking at the same time.
“I could really use a few days—” Naomi started.
“I promise we’ll take a week on Tycho when we get back. I just don’t want to spend my vacation time, you know”—he pointed at the viewscreens around them displaying the dead sphere of the Ring Station and the glittering gates—“here.”
“Chicken,” Naomi said.
“Yep.”
The comm station flashed an incoming tightbeam alert at them. Amos, who was closest, tapped the screen.
“Rocinante here,” he said.
“Rocinante,” a familiar voice replied. “Medina Station here.”
“Fred,” Holden said with a sigh. “Problem?”
“You guys aren’t landing? I’m betting you could use a few—”
“Can I help you with something?” Holden said over the top of him.
“Yeah, you can. Call me after you’ve docked. I have business to discuss.”
“Dammit,” Holden said after he’d killed the connection. “You ever get the sense that the universe is out to get you?”
“Sometimes I get the sense that the universe is out to get you,” Amos said with a grin. “It’s fun to watch.”
“They changed the name again,” Alex said, zooming in on the spinning station that had until recently been called Behemoth. “Medina Station. Good name for it.”
“Doesn’t that mean ‘fortress’?” Naomi said with a frown. “Too martial, maybe.”
“Naw,” Alex said. “Well, sort of. It was the walled part of a city. But it sort of became the social center too. Narrow streets designed to keep invaders out also kept motorized traffic or horse-drawn carts out. So you could only get around by walkin’. So the street vendors gathered there. It turned into the place to shop and congregate and drink tea. It’s a safe place where people gather. Good name for the station.”