James Corey - Abaddon's Gate

“Where are we going?”

“Deeper,” Miller said. “Since we’re here, there’s something we should probably do. I have to tell you, though, you got a lot of balls.”

“For what?” Holden said, and his hand slid against the wall. A layer of slime stuck to the fingers of his suit.

“Coming here.”

“You told me to,” Holden said. “You brought me. Julie brought me.”

“I don’t want to talk about what happened to Julie,” the dead man said.

Holden followed him into the narrow tunnel. Its walls were slick and organic. It was like crawling through a deep cave or down the throat of a vast animal.

“You’re definitely making more sense than usual.”

“There are tools here,” Miller said. “They’re not… they’re not right, but they’re here at least.”

“Does this mean you might still say something enigmatic and vanish in a puff of blue fireflies?”

“Probably.”

Miller didn’t expand on this, so Holden followed him for several dozen meters through the tunnel until it turned again and Miller led him into a much larger room.

“Uh, wow,” he managed to say.

Because the floor of the first room and the tunnel that led out of it had both had a consistent “down,” Holden had thought he was moving laterally just under the skin of the station. That couldn’t have been right, because the room the tunnel opened into had a much higher ceiling than was possible if that were true. The space stretched out from the tunnel into a cathedral-vast opening, hundreds of meters across. The walls slanted inward into a domed ceiling that was twenty meters off the floor in the center. Scattered across the room in seemingly random places were two-meter-thick columns of something that looked like blue glass with black, branching veins shooting through it. The columns pulsed with light, and each pulse was accompanied by a subsonic throb that Holden could feel in his bones and teeth. It felt like enormous power, carefully restrained. A giant, whispering.

“Holy shit,” he finally said when his breath came back. “We’re in a lot of trouble, aren’t we?”

“Yeah,” Miller said. “You should not have come.”

Miller walked off across the room, and Holden hurried to catch up. “Wait, what?” he said. “I thought you wanted me here!”

Miller walked around something that from a distance had looked like a blue statue of an insect, but up close was a massive confusion of metallic limbs and protrusions, like a construction mech folded up on itself. Holden tried to guess at its purpose and failed.

“Why would you think that?” Miller said as he walked. “You don’t know what’s in here. Doors and corners. Never walk into a crime scene until you know there’s not someone there waiting to put you down. You’ve got to clear the room first. But maybe we got lucky. For now. Wouldn’t recommend doing it again, though.”

“I don’t understand.”

They came to a place in the floor that was covered in what looked like cilia or plant stalks, gently rippling in a nonexistent wind. Miller walked around it. Holden was careful to do the same. As they passed, a swarm of blue fireflies burst out of the ground cover and flew up to a vent in the ceiling where they vanished.

“So there was this unlicensed brothel down in sector 18. We went thinking we’d be hauling fifteen, twenty people in. More, maybe. Got there, and the place was stripped to the stone,” Miller said. “It wasn’t that they’d gotten wind of us, though. The Loca Greiga had heard about the place, sent their guys to clean it up. Took about a week to find the bodies. According to forensics, they’d all been shot twice in the head pretty much while we were getting one last cup of coffee. If we’d been a little bit faster, we’d have walked in on it. Nothing says fucked like opening the door on a bunch of kids who thought they’d make a quick buck off the sex trade and having an organized kill squad there for the meet and greet instead.”

“What has that got to do with anything?”

“This place is the same,” Miller said. “There was supposed to be something. A lot of something. There was supposed to be… shit, I don’t have the right words. An empire. A civilization. A home. More than a home, a master . Instead, there’s a bunch of locked doors and the lights on a timer. I don’t want you charging into the middle of that. You’ll get your ass killed.”

“What the hell do you mean?” Holden said. “You, or the protomolecule, or Julie Mao, or whatever, you set this whole thing up. The job, the attack, all of it.”

That stopped Miller. He turned around with a frown on his face. “Julie’s dead, kid. Miller’s dead. I’m just the machine for finding lost things.”

“I don’t understand,” Holden said. “If you didn’t do this, then who did?”

“See now, that’s a good question, on several levels. Depending on what you mean by ‘this.’” Miller’s head lifted like a dog catching an unfamiliar scent on the wind. “Your friends are here. We should go.” He moved off at a faster walk toward the far wall of the room.

“The marines,” Holden said. “Could you stop them?”

“No,” Miller said. “I don’t protect anything. I can tell the station they’re a threat. There’d be consequences, though.”

Holden felt a punch of dread in his gut.

“That sounds bad.”

“It wouldn’t be good. Come on. If we’re going to do this, we need to stay ahead of them.”

The halls and passages widened and narrowed, meeting and falling away from each other like blood vessels of some massive organism. Holden’s suit lights seemed almost lost in the vast darkness, and the blue firefly flickers came in waves and vanished again. Along the way they passed more of the metallic blue insectlike constructs.

“What are these?” Holden asked, pointing to an especially large and dangerous-looking model as they passed it.

“Whatever they need to be,” Miller replied without turning around.

“Oh, great, so we’re back to inscrutable, are we?”

Miller spun around, a worried look on his face, and blinked out of existence. Holden turned.

Far across the huge room, a form was coming out of the tunnel. Holden had seen similar armor before. A Martian marine’s powered armor was made of equal parts efficiency and threat.

There was no escaping it. Anyone in those suits could run him down without trying. Holden switched his suit to an open frequency.

“Hey! I’m right here. Let’s talk about this,” he said, then started to walk toward the group. As one, all eight marines raised their right arms and opened fire. Holden braced himself for death even while part of his mind knew that he shouldn’t have time to brace for death. At the distance they were, the rounds from their high-velocity guns would be hitting in a fraction of a second. He’d be dead long before the sound of the shots reached him.

He heard the rapid and deafening buzzsaw sound of the guns firing, but nothing hit him.

A diffuse cloud of gray formed in front of the marines. When the firing finally stopped, the cloud drifted away toward the walls of the room. Bullets. They’d stopped centimeters from the gun barrels, and were now being drawn away just like the objects outside the station.

The marines broke into a fast run across the room, and Holden tried to scramble away. They were beautiful in their way, the lethal power of the suits harnessed by years of training to make their movements seem like a dance. Even without their weapons, they could tear him limb from limb. One punch from that armor would break all the bones he had and change his viscera to a thin slurry. His only chance was to outrun them, and he couldn’t outrun them.