The Dragon’s Path (141 page)

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.”

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.”

A
ctually, 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.
”