James Corey - Leviathan Wakes

“I’d be curious to know how you talked them into it,” Miller said. “I was thinking I was probably screwed.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Holden said. “We bought you your time. Go find the girl and save humanity. We’ll be waiting to hear back.” And ready to nuke you into dust if we don’t remained unsaid. There was no need.

“I’ve been thinking about where to go, if I can talk to her,” Miller said. He had the already lost hopefulness of a man with a lottery ticket. “I mean, she’s got to park this thing somewhere.”

If we live. If I can save her. If the miracle is true.

Holden shrugged, even though no one could see it.

“Give her Venus,” he said. “It’s an awful place.”

I don’t and I don’t,” the voice of Eros muttered. Juliette Mao, talking in her sleep. “I don’t and I don’t and I don’t… ”

“Come on,” Miller said. “Come on, you sonofabitch. Be here.”

The medical bays were lush and overgrown, black spirals with filaments of bronze and steel climbing the walls, encrusting the examination tables, feeding on the supplies of narcotics, steroids, and antibiotics spilling out of the broken supply cabinets. Miller dug through the clutter with one hand, his suit alarm chiming. His air had the sour taste that came from being through the recyclers too many times. His thumb, still mashed on the dead man’s switch, tingled when it wasn’t shooting with pain.

He brushed the almost fungal growth off a storage box that wasn’t broken yet, found the latch. Four medical gas cylinders: two red, one green, one blue. He looked at the seal. The protomolecule hadn’t gotten them yet. Red for anesthetic. Blue nitrogen. He picked up the green. The sterile shield on the delivery nipple was in place. He took a deep sighing breath of dying air. Another few hours. He put down his hand terminal ( one… two… ), popped the seal ( three… ), fed the nipple into his suit’s intake ( four… ), and put a finger on the hand terminal. He stood, feeling the cool of the oxygen tank in his hand while his suit revised his life span. Ten minutes, an hour, four hours. The medical cylinder’s pressure hit equality with the suit’s, and he popped it off. Four more hours. He’d won himself four more hours.

It was the third time he’d managed an emergency resupply since he’d talked to Holden. The first had been at a fire-suppression station, the second at a backup recycling unit. If he went back down to the port, there would probably be some uncompromised oxygen in some of the supply closets and docked ships. If he went all the way back to the surface, the OPA ships would have plenty.

But there wasn’t time for that. He wasn’t looking for air; he was looking for Juliette. He let himself stretch. The kinks in his neck and back were threatening to turn into cramps. The CO2 levels in the suit were still on the high side of acceptable, even with the new oxygen coming into the mix. The suit needed maintenance and a new filter. It’d have to wait. Behind him, the bomb in its cart kept its own counsel.

He had to find her. Somewhere in the maze of corridors and rooms, the dead city, Juliette Mao was driving them back to Earth. He’d tracked four hot spots. Three had been decent candidates for his original plan of vast nuclear immolation: hubs of wire and black alien filament tangling into huge organic-looking nodes. The fourth had been a cheap lab reactor churning on its way to meltdown. It had taken him fifteen minutes to get the emergency shutdown going, and he probably shouldn’t have wasted the time. But wherever he went, no Julie. Even the Julie of his imagination was gone, as if the ghost had no place now that he knew the real woman was still alive. He missed having her around, even if she’d only been a vision.

A wave went through the medical bays, all the alien growth rising and falling like iron filings with a magnet passed beneath them. Miller’s heart sped up, adrenaline leaking into his blood, but it didn’t happen again.

He had to find her. He had to find her soon. He could feel exhaustion grinding at him, little teeth chewing at the back of his mind. He already wasn’t thinking as clearly as he should. Back on Ceres, he’d have gone back to his hole, slept for a day, and come back to the problem whole. Not an option here.

Full circle. He’d come full circle. Once, in a different life, he’d taken on the task of finding her; then, when he’d failed, there’d been taking vengeance. And now he had the chance to find her again, to save her. And if he couldn’t, he was still pulling a cheap, squeaky-wheeled wagon behind him that would do for revenge.

Miller shook his head. He was having too many moments like this, getting lost in his own thoughts. He took a fresh grip on the cart full of fusion bomb, leaned forward, and headed out. The station around him creaked the way he imagined an old sailing ship might have, timbers bent by waves of salt water and the great tidal tug-of-war between earth and moon. Here, it was stone, and Miller couldn’t guess what forces were acting on it. Hopefully nothing that would interfere with the signal between his hand terminal and his cargo. He didn’t want to be reduced to his component atoms unintentionally.

It was getting more and more clear that he couldn’t cover the whole station. He’d known that from the start. If Julie had gotten herself someplace obscure-hidden in some niche or hole like a dying cat-he wouldn’t find her. He’d become a gambler, betting against all hope on drawing the inside straight. The voice of Eros shifted, different voices now, singing something in Hindi. A child’s round, Eros harmonizing with itself in a growing richness of voices. Now that he knew to listen for it, he heard Julie’s voice threading its way among the others. Maybe it had always been there. His frustration verged on physical pain. She was so close, but he couldn’t quite reach her.

He pulled himself back into the main corridor complex. The hospital bays had been a good place to look for her too. Plausible. Fruitless. He’d looked at the two mercantile bio-labs. Nothing. He’d tried the morgue, the police holding tanks. He’d even gone through the evidence room, bin after plastic bin of contraband drugs and confiscated weapons scattered on the floor like oak leaves in one of the grand parks. It had all meant something once. Each one had been part of a small human drama, waiting to be brought out into the light, part of a trial or at least a hearing. Some small practice for judgment day, postponed now forever. All points were moot.

Something silver flew above him, faster than a bird, and then another, and then a flock, streaming by overhead. Light glittered off the living metal, bright as fish scales. Miller watched the alien molecule improvising in the space above him.

You can’t stop here, Holden said. You have to stop running and get on the right road.

Miller looked over his shoulder. The captain stood, real and not, where his inner Julie would have been.

Well, that’s interesting, Miller thought.

“I know,” he said. “It’s just… I don’t know where she went. And… well, look around. Big place, you know?”

You can stop her or I will, his imaginary Holden said.

“If I just knew where she went,” Miller said.

She didn’t, Holden said. She never went.

Miller turned to look at him. The swarm of silver roiled overhead, chittering like insects or a badly tuned drive. The captain looked tired. Miller’s imagination had put a surprising swath of blood at the corner of the man’s mouth. And then it wasn’t Holden anymore; it was Havelock. The other Earther. His old partner. And then it was Muss, her eyes as dead as his own.