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.”
The temperature was climbing faster now. It took him a few minutes to decide that spinward might be slightly warmer. He hauled the cart. He could feel the squeaking, a tiny, rattling tremor in the bones of his hand. Between the mass of the bomb and the failing wheel bearings, his shoulders were starting to really ache. Good thing he wasn’t going to have to haul this damn thing back down.
Julie was waiting for him in the darkness; the thin beam from his hand terminal cut through her. Her hair floated, spin gravity having, after all, no effect on phantoms of the mind. Her expression was grave.
How does it know? she asked.
Miller paused. Every now and then, all through his career, some daydreamed witness would say something, use some phrase, laugh at the wrong thing, and he’d know that the back of his mind had a new angle on the case.
This was that moment.
“You can’t take the razor back,” Eros crowed.
The comet that took the protomolecule into the solar system in the first place was a dead drop, not a ship, Julie said, her dark lips never moving. It was just ballistic. Any ice bullet with the protomolecule in deep freeze. It was aimed at Earth, but it missed and got grabbed by Saturn instead. The payload didn’t steer it. Didn’t drive it. Didn’t navigate.
“It didn’t need to,” Miller said.
It’s navigating now. It’s going to Earth. How does it know to go to Earth? Where did that information come from? It’s talking. Where did that grammar come from?
Who is the voice of Eros?
Miller closed his eyes. His suit mentioned that he only had twenty minutes of air.
“You can’t take the Razorback! She is gone and gone and gone!”
“Oh fuck,” Miller said. “Oh Jesus.”
He let go of the cart, turning back toward the ramp and the light and the wide station corridors. Everything was shaking, the station itself trembling like someone on the edge of hypothermia. Only of course it wasn’t. The only one shaking was him. It was all in the voice of Eros. It had been there all the time. He should have known.
Maybe he had.
The protomolecule didn’t know English or Hindi or Russian or any of the languages it had been spouting. All of that had been in the minds and softwares of Eros’ dead, coded in the neurons and grammar programs that the protomolecule had eaten. Eaten, but not destroyed. It had kept the information and languages and complex cognitive structures, building itself on them like asphalt over the roads the legions built.
The dead of Eros weren’t dead. Juliette Andromeda Mao was alive.
He was grinning so hard his cheeks ached. With one gloved hand, he tried the connection. The signal was too weak. He couldn’t get through. He told his uplink on the surface ship to crank up the power, got a connection.
Holden’s voice came over the link.
“Hey. Miller. How you doing?”
The words were soft, apologetic. A hospice worker being gentle to the dying. An incandescent spark of annoyance lit his mind, but he kept his voice steady.
“Holden,” he said. “We have a problem.”
Chapter Fifty-Three: Holden
“Actually, we’ve sort of figured out how to solve the problem,” Holden replied.
“I don’t think so. I’m linking you to my suit’s med data,” Miller said.
A few seconds later, four columns of numbers popped up in a small window on Holden’s console. It all looked fairly normal, though there were subtleties that only a med-tech, like Shed, would be able to interpret correctly.
“Okay,” Holden said. “That’s great. You’re getting a little irradiated, but other than that—”
Miller cut him off.
“Am I suffering from hypoxia?” he said.
The data from his suit showed 87 mmHg, comfortably above baseline.
“No,” Holden said.
“Anything that would make a guy hallucinate or get demented? Alcohol, opiates. Something like that?”
“Not that I can see,” Holden said, growing impatient. “What’s this about? Are you seeing things?”
“Just the usual,” Miller replied. “I wanted to get that shit out the way, because I know what you’re going to say next.”
He stopped talking, and the radio hissed and popped in Holden’s ear. When Miller spoke again after several seconds of silence, his voice had taken on a different tone. It wasn’t quite pleading, but close enough to make Holden shift uncomfortably in his seat.
“She’s alive.”
There was only one she in Miller’s universe. Julie Mao. “Uh, okay. Not sure how to respond to that.”
“You’ll have to take my word that I’m not having a nervous breakdown or psychotic episode or anything like that. But Julie’s in here. She’s driving Eros.”
Holden looked at the suit’s medical data again, but it kept reporting normal readings, all the numbers except for radiation comfortably in the green. His blood chemistry didn’t even look like he was particularly stressed for a guy carrying a fusion bomb to his own funeral.
“Miller, Julie’s dead. We both saw the body. We saw what the protomolecule… did to it.”
“We saw her body, sure. We just assumed she was dead because of the damage—”
“She didn’t have a heartbeat,” Holden said. “No brain activity, no metabolism. That’s pretty much the definition of dead.”
“How do we know what dead looks like to the protomolecule?”
“We—” Holden started, then stopped. “We don’t, I guess. But no heartbeat, that’s a pretty good start.”
Miller laughed.
“We’ve both seen the feeds, Holden. Those rib cages equipped with one arm that drag themselves around, think they have a heartbeat? This shit hasn’t been playing by our rules since day one, you expect it to start now?”
Holden smiled to himself. Miller was right.
“Okay, so what makes you think Julie isn’t just a rib cage and a mass of tentacles?”
“She might be, but it’s not her body I’m talking about,” Miller said. “She’s in here. Her mind. It’s like she’s flying her old racing pinnace. The Razorback. She’s been babbling about it on the radio for hours now, and I just didn’t put it together. But now that I have, it’s pretty goddamn clear.”