The Dragon’s Path (140 page)

The red haze in Holden’s vision had taken on a strange strobing pattern. It took him a moment to realize that a red telltale on his panel was flashing, letting him know that the
Ravi
was calling. He kicked off a nearby crash couch, floated back to his station, and opened the link.

“
Rocinante
here,
Ravi,
go ahead.”

“Holden, why are we stopped?” McBride asked.

“Because we weren’t going to keep up anyway, and the danger of crew casualties was getting too high,” he replied. It sounded weak even to him. Cowardly. McBride didn’t seem to notice.

“Roger. I’m going to get new orders. Will let you know if anything changes.”

Holden killed the connection and stared blankly at the console. The visual tracking system was doing its very best to keep Eros in sight. The
Roci
was a good ship. State of the art. And since Alex had tagged the asteroid as a threat, the computer would do everything in its power to keep track of it. But Eros was a fast-moving, low-albedo object that didn’t reflect radar. It could move unpredictably and at high speed. It was just a matter of time before they lost track of it, especially if it wanted to be lost track of.

Next to the tracking information on his console, a small data window opened to inform him that the
Ravi
had turned on its transponder. It was standard practice even for military ships to keep them on when there was no apparent threat or need for stealth. The radio man on the little UNN corvette must have flipped it back on out of habit.

And now the
Roci
registered it as a known vessel and threw it onto the threat display with a gently pulsing green dot and a name tag. Holden looked at it blankly for a long moment. He felt his eyes go wide.

“
Shit,
” Holden said, then opened the shipwide comm. “Naomi, I need you in ops.”

“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.”

O
ne. 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 in 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.