James Corey - Abaddon's Gate

“Someone shut the prisoner up,” the woman who’d spoken before said. He still couldn’t see her. The nearest marine, a thick-jawed man with skin so black it seemed blue turned toward him. Holden braced himself for a threat or violence.

“There’s nothing you could do,” the man said. “Please be quiet now.”

His cell in the brig of the Hammurabi was a little over a meter and a half wide and three meters deep. The crash couch was a dirty blue and the walls and floor a uniform white that gleamed in the harsh light of the overhead LED. The jumpsuit he’d been issued felt like thick paper and crackled when he moved. When the guards came for him, they didn’t bother putting the restraints back on his arms and legs.

The captain floated near a desk, her close-cropped silver hair making her look like an ancient Roman emperor. Holden was strapped into a crash couch that was canted slightly forward, so that he had to look up at her, even without the convenience of an up.

“I am Captain Jakande,” she said. “You are a military prisoner. Do you understand what that means?”

“I was in the navy,” Holden said. “I understand.”

“Good. That’ll cut about half an hour of legal bullshit.”

“I’ll happily tell you everything I know,” Holden said. “No need for the rough stuff.”

The captain smiled like winter.

“If you were anyone else, I’d think that was a figure of speech,” she said. “What is your relationship to the structure at the center of the slow zone? What were you doing there?”

He had spent so many months trying not to talk about Miller, trying not to tell anyone anything. Except Naomi, and even then he’d felt guilty putting the burden of the mystery on her. On one hand, the chance to unburden himself pulled at him like gravity. On the other…

He took a deep breath.

“This is going to sound a little strange,” he said.

“All right.”

“Shortly after the protomolecule construct lifted off from Venus and headed out to start assembling the Ring? I was… contacted by Detective Josephus Miller. The one who rode Eros down onto Venus. Or at least something that looked and talked like him. He’s shown up every few weeks since then, and I came to the conclusion that the protomolecule was using him. Well, him and Julie Mao, who was the first one to be infected, to drive me out through the Ring. I thought that they… it wanted me to come here.”

The captain’s expression didn’t change. Holden felt a strange lump in his throat. He didn’t want to be having this conversation here. He wanted to be talking with Naomi in their bedroom on the Rocinante . Or at a bar on Ceres. It didn’t matter where. Only who.

Was she dead? Had the station killed her?

“Go on,” the captain said.

“Apparently I was mistaken,” Holden said.

He began with the journey out, with the protomolecule’s vision of Miller waiting for him at the station. The attack by her marine, and the consequences as Miller explained them. The visions of the vast empire and the darkness that flowed over it, the death of suns. He relaxed as he went along, the words coming easier, faster. He sounded insane even to himself. Visions no one else could see. Vast secrets revealed only to him.

Except it had all been a mistake.

He’d thought he was important. That he was special and chosen, and that what had happened to him and his crew had been dictated by a vast and mysterious power. He’d misunderstood everything. Doors and corners , Miller had said, and because he hadn’t puzzled out what the dead man meant by it, they’d all come through the Ring. And to the station. His relief and his growing self-disgust mingled with every phrase. He’d been a fool dancing at the edge of the cliff, because he’d been sure that he couldn’t fall. Not him.

“And then I was here, talking to you,” he said dryly. “I don’t know what happens next.”

“All right,” she said. Her expression gave away nothing.

“You’ll want a full medical workup to see if there’s anything organically wrong with my brain,” Holden said.

“Probably,” the captain said. “My medical staff has its hands full at the moment. You will be kept in administrative detention for the time being.”

“I understand,” Holden said. “But I need to get in contact with my crew. You can monitor the connection. I don’t care. I just need to know they’re okay.”

The angle of the captain’s mouth asked why he thought they were.

“I’ll try to get a report to you,” she said. “Everyone’s scrambling right now, and the situation could get worse quickly.”

“Is it bad, then?”

“It is.”

Time in his cell passed slowly. A guard brought tubes of rations: protein, oil, water, and vegetable paste. Sometimes it had a nearly homeopathic dose of curry. It was food meant to keep you alive. Everything after that was your own problem. Holden ate it because he had to stay alive. He had to find his crew, his ship. He had to get out of there.

He had seen a massive alien empire fall. He’d seen suns blown apart. He’d watched a man overwhelmed and slaughtered by nightmare mechanisms on a space station that human hands hadn’t built. All he could think about was Naomi and Amos and Alex. How they were going to keep their ship. How they were going to get home. And home meant anyplace but here. Not for the first time, he wished they were all transporting sketchy boxes of unknown cargo to Titania. He floated in the coffin-sized cell and tried not to go crazy from the toxic combination of inaction and mind-bending fear.

Even if the whole crew was well, he was in custody of Mars now. He hadn’t harmed the Seung Un , and everyone would know that. He hadn’t made the false broadcast. All the things they were accusing him of could fall away, and there would still be the fact that Mars would take away his ship. He tried to focus on that despair, because as bad as it would be, if he kept the ship and lost his crew, that would feel worse.

“You’ve got lousy taste in friends,” Miller said.

“Where the hell have you been?” Holden snapped.

The dead man shrugged. In the cramped quarters, Holden could smell the man’s breath. A firefly flicker of blue sped around Miller’s head like a low-slung halo and vanished.

“Time’s hard,” he said, as if the comment carried its own context. “Anyway, we were talking about something.”

“The station. The lockdown.”

“Right,” Miller said, nodding. He plucked off his ridiculous hat and scratched his temple. “That. So the thing is, as long as there’s a shitload of high energy floating around, the station’s not going to get comfortable. You guys have, what? Twenty big ships?”

“About that, I guess.”

“They’ve all got fusion reactions. They’ve all got massive internal power grids. Not a big deal by themselves, but the station’s been spooked a couple times. It’s jumpy. You’re going to have to give it a little massage. Show that you’re not a threat. Do that, and I’m pretty sure I can get you moving again. That or it’ll break you all down to your component atoms.”

“It’ll what?”

Miller’s smile was apologetic.

“Sorry,” he said. “Joke. Just get the reactors off-line and the internal grids off. It’ll get you below threshold, and I can take it from there. I mean, if that’s what you decide you want to do.”

“What do you mean, if ?”

Holden shifted. The ceiling brushed against his shoulders. He couldn’t stretch in here. There wasn’t room for two people.

There wasn’t room for two people.