The Dragon’s Path (144 page)

“If I had the access? The backup environment controls. It’s an emergency facility. No foot traffic unless someone’s running
inventory. It’s got all the equipment for isolation built in already. Wouldn’t be hard.”

And since Protogen ran Eros security even before they put the disposable thugs in place, they’d be able to arrange it,
Muss said, and she smiled joylessly.
See? I knew you could think that through.

For less than a second, Muss was gone and Julie Mao—his Julie—was in her place. She was smiling and beautiful. Radiant. Her hair floated around her as if she were swimming in zero g. And then she was gone. His suit alarm warned him about an increasingly corrosive environment.

“Hang tight,” he said to the burning air. “I’ll be right there.”

It was just less than thirty-three hours from the moment he’d realized that Juliette Andromeda Mao wasn’t dead to the one when he cycled down the emergency seals and pulled his cart into Eros’ backup environmental control facility. The clean, simple lines and error-reducing design of the place still showed under the outgrowth of the protomolecule. Barely. Knots of dark filament and nautilus spirals softened the corners of wall and floor and ceiling. Loops hung from the ceiling like Spanish moss. The familiar LED lights still shone under the soft growth, but more illumination came from the swarm of faint blue dots glowing in the air. His first step onto the floor sank him into a thick carpet up the ankle; the bomb cart would have to stay outside. His suit reported a wild mix of exotic gases and aromatic molecules, but all he smelled was himself.

All the interior rooms had been remade. Transformed. He walked through the wastewater treatment control areas like a scuba diver in a grotto. The blue lights swirled around him as he passed, a few dozen adhering to his suit and glittering there. He almost didn’t brush them off the helmet’s faceplate, thinking they would smear like dead fireflies, but they only swirled back up into the air. The air recycling monitors still danced and glowed, the
thousand alarms and incident reports silhouetting the latticework of protomolecule that covered the screens. Water was flowing somewhere close by.

She was in a hazmat analysis node, lying on a bed of the dark thread that spilled out from her spine until it was indistinguishable from a massive fairy-tale cushion of her own flowing hair. Tiny points of blue light glittered on her face, her arms, her breasts. The bone spurs that had been pressing out of her skin had grown into sweeping, almost architectural connections with the lushness around her. Her legs were gone, lost in the tangle of dark alien webs; she reminded Miller of a mermaid who had traded her fins for a space station. Her eyes were closed, but he could see them shifting and dancing under the lids. And she was breathing.

Miller stood beside her. She didn’t have quite the same face as his imagined Julie. The real woman was wider through the jaw, and her nose wasn’t as straight as he remembered it. He didn’t notice that he was weeping until he tried to wipe the tears away, batting his helmet with a gloved hand. He had to make do with blinking hard until his sight cleared.

All this time. All this way. And here was what he’d come for.

“Julie,” he said, putting his free hand on her shoulder. “Hey. Julie. Wake up. I need you to wake up now.”

He had his suit’s medical supplies. If he needed to, he could dose her with adrenaline or amphetamines. Instead, he rocked her gently, like he had Candace on a sleepy Sunday morning, back when she’d still been his wife, back in some distant, near-forgotten lifetime. Julie frowned, opened her mouth, closed it.

“Julie. You need to wake up now.”

She moaned and lifted an ineffectual arm to push him away.

“Come back to me,” he said. “You need to come back now.”

Her eyes opened. They weren’t human anymore—the sclera etched with swirls of red and black, the iris the same luminous blue as the fireflies. Not human, but still Julie. Her lips moved soundlessly. And then:

“Where am I?”

“Eros Station,” Miller said. “The place isn’t what it used to be. Not even
where
it used to be, but… ”

He pressed the bed of filament with his hand, judging it, and then rested his hip at her side like he was sitting on her bed. His body felt achingly tired and also lighter than it should. Not like low gravity. The unreal buoyancy had nothing to do with the weary flesh.

Julie tried to talk again, struggled, stopped, tried again.

“Who are you?”

“Yeah, we haven’t officially met, have we? My name’s Miller. I used to be a detective for Star Helix Security back on Ceres. Your parents contracted with us, only it was really more a friends-in-high-places thing. I was supposed to track you down, grab you, ship you back down the well.”

“Kidnap job?” she said. Her voice was stronger. Her gaze seemed more focused.

“Pretty standard,” Miller said, then sighed. “I kind of cocked it up, though.”

Her eyes fluttered closed, but she kept talking.

“Something happened to me.”

“Yeah. It did.”

“I’m scared.”

“No, no, no. Don’t be scared. It’s all right. In an ass-backward kind of way, but it’s all right. Look, right now the whole station is heading back for Earth. Really fast.”

“I dreamed I was racing. I was going home.”

“Yeah, we need to stop that.”

Her eyes opened again. She looked lost, anguished, alone. A tear streaked down from the corner of her eye, glowing blue.

“Give me your hand,” Miller said. “No, really, I need you to hold something for me.”

She lifted her hand slowly, seaweed in a soft current. He took his hand terminal, settled it in her palm, pressed her thumb to the dead man’s switch.

“Just hold that there. Don’t let it up.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“Long story, just don’t let up.”

His suit alarms shrieked at him when he undid his helmet seals. He turned them off. The air was strange: acetate and cumin and a deep, powerful musk that made him think of hibernating animals. Julie watched him as he stripped off his gloves. Right then, the protomolecule was latching on to him, burrowing into his skin and eyes, getting ready to do to him what it had done to everyone on Eros. He didn’t care. He took the hand terminal back and then laced his fingers through hers.

“You’re driving this bus, Julie,” he said. “Do you know that? I mean, can you tell?”

Her fingers were cool in his, but not cold.

“I can feel… something,” she said. “I’m hungry? Not hungry, but… I want something. I want to go back to Earth.”

“We can’t do that. I need you to change course,” Miller replied. What had Holden said?
Give her Venus.
“Head for Venus instead.”

“That’s not what it wants,” she said.

“It’s what we’ve got on offer,” Miller said. Then, a moment later: “We can’t go home. We need to go to Venus.”

She was quiet for a long moment.

“You’re a fighter, Julie. You’ve never let anyone call your shots for you. Don’t start now. If we go to Earth—”

“It’ll eat them too. The same way it ate me.”

“Yeah.”

She looked up at him.

“Yeah,” he said again. “Like that.”

“What happens on Venus?”

“We die maybe. I don’t know. But we don’t take a lot of people with us, and we make sure no one gets a hold of this crap,” he said, gesturing at the grotto around them. “And if we don’t die, then… well, that’ll be interesting.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“You can. The thing that’s doing all this? You’re smarter than it is. You’re in control. Take us to Venus.”

The fireflies swirled around them, the blue light pulsing slightly: bright and dim, bright and dim. Miller saw it in her face when she made the decision. All around them, the lights went bright, the grotto flooding in soft blue, and then dimmed back to where they had been before. Miller felt something catch at the back of his neck like the first warning of a sore throat. He wondered if he’d have time to deactivate the bomb. And then he looked at Julie. Juliette Andromeda Mao. OPA pilot. Heir to the Mao-Kwikowski corporate throne. The seed crystal of a future beyond anything he’d ever dreamed. He’d have plenty of time.

“I’m afraid,” she said.

“Don’t be,” he said.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said.

“No one ever does. And, look, you don’t have to do this alone,” he said.

“I can feel something in the back of my mind. It wants something I don’t understand. It’s so
big.
”

Reflexively, he kissed the back of her hand. There was an ache starting deep in his belly. A sense of illness. A moment’s nausea. The first pangs of his transformation into Eros.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re gonna be fine.”

H
olden dreamed.

He’d been a lucid dreamer most of his life, so when he found himself sitting in his parents’ kitchen in the old house in Montana, talking to Naomi, he knew. He couldn’t quite understand what she was saying, but she kept pushing her hair out of her eyes as she munched cookies and drank tea. And while he found that he wasn’t ever able to pick a cookie up and take a bite out of it, he could smell them, and the memory of Mother Elise’s chocolate chip oatmeal cookies was a very good one.

It was a good dream.

The kitchen strobed red once, and something changed. Holden felt the wrongness of it, felt the dream slipping from warm memory into nightmare. He tried to say something to Naomi but couldn’t form the words. The room strobed red again, but she didn’t seem to notice. He got up and went to the kitchen window
and looked out. When the room strobed a third time, he saw what was causing it. Meteors were falling out of the sky, leaving behind them fiery trails the color of blood. He somehow knew they were chunks of Eros as it crashed through the atmosphere. Miller had failed. The nuclear attack had failed.

Julie had come home.

He turned around to tell Naomi to run, but black tendrils had burst through the floor and wrapped her up, pierced her body in multiple places. They poured from her mouth and eyes.

Holden tried to run to her, to help her, but he couldn’t move, and when he looked down, he saw that the tendrils had come up and grabbed him too. One wrapped around his waist and held him. Another pressed into his mouth.

He woke with a yell in a dark room that was strobing with red light. Something was holding him around the waist. In a panic he began clawing at it, threatening to tear a fingernail loose on his left hand, before his rational mind reminded him where he was. On the ops deck, in his chair, belted down in zero g.

He popped his finger into his mouth, trying to soothe the abused fingertip he’d damaged on one of the chair buckles, and took a few deep breaths through his nose. The deck was empty. Naomi was asleep down in her cabin. Alex and Amos were off duty and presumably sleeping too. They’d spent almost two days without rest during the high-g chase of Eros. Holden had ordered everyone to get some shut-eye and had volunteered to take first watch.

And then had promptly fallen asleep. Not good.

The room flashed red again. Holden shook his head to clear the last of the sleep away, and refocused his attention on his console. A red warning light pulsed, and he tapped the screen to open up the menu. It was his threat panel. Someone was hitting them with a targeting laser.

He opened up the threat display and turned on the active sensors. The only ship within millions of kilometers was the
Ravi,
and it was the ship that was targeting them. According to the automatic logs, it had just started a few seconds earlier.

He reached out to activate the comm and call the
Ravi
as his incoming-message light flickered on. He opened the connection, and a second later, McBride’s voice said, “
Rocinante,
cease maneuvering, open your outer airlock door, and prepare to be boarded.”

Holden frowned at his console. Was that a weird joke?

“McBride, this is Holden. Uh, what?”

Her reply was in a clipped tone that was not encouraging.

“Holden, open your outer airlock and prepare for boarding. If I see a single defensive system wake up, I will fire on your ship. Is that understood?”