James Corey - Leviathan Wakes

One. Two.

The heavy bomb casing had carved a little divot in the touch pad, but it still worked. Miller took the cart handle and leaned forward, the uneven, organic surface beneath him translated into the rough tug and flutter of the cart’s vibration.

He’d died here once. He’d been poisoned. Shot. These halls, or ones much like them, had been his battleground. His and Holden’s. They were unrecognizable now.

He passed through a wide, nearly empty space. The crust had thinned here, the metal walls of the warehouse showing through in places. One LED still glowed in the ceiling, the cool white light spilling onto the darkness.

The path led him to the casino level, the architecture of commerce still bringing visitors to the same spot. The alien bark was nearly gone, but the space had been transformed. Pachinko machines stood in their rows, half melted or exploded or, like a few, still glittering and asking for the financial information that would unlock the gaudy lights and festive, celebratory sound effects. The card tables were still visible under mushroom caps of clear glutinous gel. Lining the walls and cathedral-high ceilings, black ribs rippled with hairlike threads that glowed at the tips without offering any illumination.

Something screamed, the sound muffled by Miller’s suit. The broadcast feed of the station sounded louder and richer now that he was under its skin. He had the sudden, transporting memory of being a child and watching a video feed of a boy who’d been swallowed by a monstrous whale.

Something gray and the size of Miller’s two fists together flew by almost too fast to see. It hadn’t been a bird. Something scuttled behind an overturned vending machine. He realized what was missing. There had been a million and a half people on Eros, and a large percentage of them had been here, on the casino level, when their own personal apocalypse came. But there were no bodies. Or, no. That wasn’t true. The black crust, the millions of dark rills above him with their soft, oceanic glow. Those were the corpses of Eros, recreated. Human flesh, remade. A suit alarm told him he was starting to hyperventilate. Darkness started to creep in at the edge of his vision.

Miller sank to his knees.

Don’t pass out, you son of a bitch, he told himself. Don’t pass out, or if you do, at least land so your weight’s on the damned trigger.

Julie put her hand on his. He could almost feel it, and it steadied him. She was right. They were only bodies. Just dead people. Victims. Just another slab of recycled meat, same as every unlicensed whore he’d seen stabbed to death in the cheap hotels on Ceres. Same as all the suicides who’d thrown themselves out of airlocks. Okay, the protomolecule had mutilated the flesh in weird ways. Didn’t change what it was. Didn’t change what he was.

“When you’re a cop,” he told Julie, repeating something he’d told every rookie he’d been partnered with in his career, “you don’t have the luxury of feeling things. You have to do the job.”

So do the job, she said gently.

He nodded. He stood. Do the job.

As if in response, the sound in his suit changed, the Eros feed fluting up through a hundred different frequencies before exploding in a harsh flood of what he thought was Hindi. Human voices. Till human voices wake us, he thought, without quite being able to recall where the phrase came from.

Somewhere in the station, there was going to be… something. A control mechanism or a power supply or whatever the protomolecule was using instead of an engine. He didn’t know what it would look like or how it would be defended. He didn’t have any idea how it worked, apart from the assumption that if he blew it up, it wouldn’t keep going very well.

So we go back, he told Julie. We go back to what we do know.

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.