James Corey - Abaddon's Gate

He almost didn’t see the movement when it came. His focus was locked on the Martians, on the danger he knew. He didn’t consciously notice that one of the insectlike things had started moving until the marines turned to it.

The alien thing’s movements were fast and jagged, like a clockwork mechanism that only had full speed and full stop. It clicked toward the marines, jerking with each step, and it loomed larger than the tallest of them by almost half a meter.

They panicked in the way that people trained to expect violence panic. Two started firing, with the same results as before. Another marine’s suit shifted something in its arm, and a larger barrel appeared. Holden scooted away from the confrontation. He was sure there was shouting going on in those armored suits, but it wasn’t a frequency he had access to. The large barrel went white with muzzle flash, and a slow-arcing slug of metal the size of Holden’s fist took to the strange air.

A grenade.

The ticking monster ignored it, stepping closer to the marines, and the grenade detonated at its insectile feet where it landed. The alien thing jerked back, its appendages flailing and dust falling from its severed limbs like a smoke of fungal spores. The complex carpet of moss glowed with orange embers where the blast had burned it.

And all around the marines, a dozen other alien statues came to life. They moved faster this time. Before the marines could begin to react, the one who’d launched the grenade was lifted gently up and ripped apart. Blood sprayed up into the air, hanging, Holden thought numbly, too long before it drifted back to the ground. The surviving marines began to fall back, their guns pointing to the alien creatures that were swarming the dead man. While Holden watched, the marines retreated into the far tunnel, falling back. Regrouping.

The alien things fell on their own injured fellow, ripping and clawing, slaughtering it as if it were the enemy as much as the marines had been. And then, when it was gone, five of the monsters gathered together in the burned spot where the explosion had been. They shuddered, went still, shuddered again, and then from all five of them, a thin stream of opaque yellow goo spattered out onto the scar. Holden felt fascination and revulsion as the moss grabbed on to the stuff, regrowing like it had never been damaged. Like the attack hadn’t even existed.

“Consequences,” Miller said at his side. He sounded tired.

“Did they… did they just turn that poor bastard into spackle?”

“They did,” Miller said. “He had it coming, though. That guy got happy with his grenade launcher? Just killed a lot of people.”

“What? How?”

“He taught the station that something moving as fast as a good baseball pitch might still be a threat.”

“Is it going to take revenge?”

“No,” Miller said. “It’s just going to protect itself. Reevaluate what counts as dangerous. Take control of all the ships that might be a problem.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Means a really bad day for a whole lot of people. When it slows you down, it ain’t gentle.”

Holden felt a cold hand close on his heart.

“The Roci …”

A look of sorrow, even sympathy, passed over the detective’s face.

“Maybe. I don’t know,” Miller said with a rueful shrug. “One way or the other, a whole lot of people just died.”

Julie saved her. There was no other way to look at it.

True to style, Holden’s proxy had given everything away. Cohen, discovered, told everything he knew, and put the image he’d stolen along with it. Melba had it on her hand terminal: a portrait of the young woman as ice sculpture. She hadn’t known the soundman had taken the data when she’d met with him, but she should have guessed he would. The mistake was obvious in retrospect.

It ought to have ended the chase. The people in power should have seen it, shrugged, and thrown her out an airlock. Except that it came with its own misinterpretation. Here , Holden said, is Julie Mao , and that’s what everyone saw. The differences that were obvious to her became invisible to others. They expected to see the protomolecule infiltrating and threatening and raising the dead, and so they saw it.

She did what she could to keep anyone from noticing the similarities. She’d met Cohen on Earth with a full g pulling down. With the Thomas Prince already close to the Ring’s velocity limit, there was no acceleration thrust. Her cheeks looked fuller, her face round. She’d had her hair down then, so now she pulled it back in a braid. The image had no color, so she wore a little makeup to alter the shape of her eyes and lips. Doing something radical would only call attention, so she went small. She might not even have needed to do that.

Her schedule in the Thomas Prince was full. They were going to work her—work all of them—like dogs. She didn’t care. The service gantries and accessways would be safe. No one who knew Clarissa Mao would be there. She would stay away from the public parts of the ship as much as she could, and more often than not she could get one of the other techs to grab a tube of something from the commissary and bring it to her.

In the off-shifts, she would build her arsenal.

Holden was beyond her reach for the time being. It was almost funny. She’d gone to so much effort to make him seem like an unrepentant megalomaniac, and then left to his own devices, he named himself de facto ambassador of the whole human race. Julie had fooled him too. With any luck at all, he’d die in a firefight or get killed by the protomolecule. Her work had narrowed to destroying the evidence of Holden’s innocence. It wouldn’t be hard.

The Rocinante had begun its life as an escort corvette on the battleship Donnager . It was well designed and well constructed, but also now years past its last upgrade. The weaknesses in its defense were simple: The cargo doors nearest the reactor had been damaged and repaired, and would almost certainly be weaker than the original. The forward airlock had been built with a software glitch vulnerable to hacking; real Martian naval ships would have been updated as a matter of course, but Holden might have been sloppy.

Her first hope was the airlock. A short-range access transmitter built for troubleshooting malfunctioning airlocks had found its way in among her things. If that failed, getting through the cargo door was harder. She hoped for something explosive, but the Thomas Prince took its munitions very seriously. The equipment manifests did include a half-suit exoskeleton mech. It would fit over her chest and arms—it wasn’t designed for legs—and with a cutting torch to make the initial breach, it could probably bend the plating enough to let her through. It was also small and lightweight enough to carry, and her access card was a high enough grade for the system to let her take one away.

Once she was on, it would be simple. Kill everyone, overload the reactor, and blow the ship to atoms. With any luck at all, it would reignite suspicions about the bomb on the Seung Un . If she got out, fine. If she didn’t, she didn’t.

The only tricks now were getting there, and waiting like everyone else to hear what happened on the station.

She was dreaming when catastrophe came.

In it, she was walking through a field outside a schoolhouse. She knew that it was on fire, that she had to find a way in. She heard fire engine sirens, but their dark shapes never appeared in the sky. There were people trapped inside and she was supposed to get to them. To free them or to keep them from escaping or both.