Then he just felt tired, and sat down on the floor with a thump.
“Okay,” Miller said, rubbing his cheek with an open palm. “I guess that’s a start. Sort of explains everything, sort of nothing. Pain in the ass.”
Holden flopped onto his back. He felt like someone had run him through a shredder and then badly welded him back together. Trying to remember what it felt like to be the size of a galaxy gave him a splitting headache, so he stopped.
“Tell me everything it explains,” he said when he could remember how to speak. Being forced to move moist flaps of meat in order to form the words felt sensual and obscene.
“They quarantined the systems. Shut down the network to stop whatever was capping the locals.”
“So, behind each of those gates is a solar system full of whatever made the protomolecule?”
Miller laughed. Something in the sound of it sent a shiver down Holden’s spine. “That seems pretty fucking unlikely.”
“Why?”
“This station has been waiting for the all-clear signal to open the network back up for about two billion years. If they’d found a solve, they wouldn’t still be waiting. Whatever it was, I think it got them all.”
“All of them but you,” Holden said.
“Nah, kid. I’m one of them like the Rocinanteis one of you. The Roci’s smart for a machine. It knows a lot about you. It could probably gin up a rough simulation of you if someone told it to. Those things? The ones you felt like? Compared to them, I’m a fancy kind of hand terminal.”
“And the nothing it explains,” Holden said. “You mean what killed them.”
“Well, if we’re gonna be fair, it’s not really nothing,” Miller said, crossing his arms. “We know it ate a galaxy spanning hive consciousness like it was popcorn, so that’s something. And we know it survived a sterilization that was a couple hundred solar systems wide.”
Holden had a powerfully vivid memory of watching the station hurl fire through the ring gates, of the stars on the other side blowing up like balloons, of the gates themselves abandoned to the fire and disappearing. Even just the echo of it nearly blinded him with remembered pain. “Seriously, did they blow up those starsto stop it?”
Holden’s image of Miller patted the column at the center of the room, though he knew now that Miller wasn’t really touching it. Something was pressing the right buttons on his synaptic keyboard to make him think Miller was.
“Yup. Autoclaved the whole joint. Fed a bunch of extra energy in and popped ’em like balloons.”
“They can’t still do that, though, right? I mean, if the things that ran this are all gone, no one to pull that trigger. It won’t do that to us.”
Miller’s grim smile chilled Holden’s blood. “I keep telling you. This station is in war mode, kid. It’s playing for keeps.”
“Is there a way we can make it feel better about things?”
“Sure. Now I’m in here, I can take off the lockdown,” Miller said, “but you’re going to have to—”
Miller vanished.
“To what?” Holden shouted. “I’m going to have to what?”
From behind came an electronically amplified voice. “James Holden, by authority of the Martian Congressional Republic, you are placed under arrest. Get down on your knees and place your hands on your head. Any attempt to resist will be met with lethal response.”
Holden did as he was told, but turned his head to look behind. Seven marines in recon armor had come into the room. They weren’t bothering to point their guns at him, but Holden knew they could catch him and tear him to pieces just using the strength of their suits.
“Guys, seriously, you couldn’t have given me five more minutes?”
Chapter Twenty-Six: Bull
Voices. Light. A sense of wrongness deep in places he couldn’t identify. Bull tried to grit his teeth and found his jaw already clenched hard enough to ache. Someone cried out, but he didn’t know where from.
The light caught his attention. Simple white LED with a sanded backsplash to diffuse it. An emergency light. The kind that came on when power was down. It hurt to look at, but he did, using it to focus. If he could make that make sense, everything else would come. A chiming alarm kept tugging at his attention, coming from outside. In the corridor. Bull’s mind tried to slide that way, going into the corridor, out into the wide, formless chaos, and he pulled it back to the light. It was like trying to wake up except he was already awake.
Slowly, he recognized the alarm as something he’d hear in the medical bay. He was in the medical bay, strapped onto a bed. The tugging sensation at his arm was a forced IV. With a moment of nauseating vertigo, his perception of the world shifted—he wasn’t standing, he was lying down. Meaningless distinctions without gravity, but human brains couldn’t seem to help trying to assert direction on the directionless. His neck ached. His head ached. Something else felt wrong.
There were other people in the bay. Men and women on every bed, most with their eyes closed. A new alarm sounded, the woman in the bay across from him losing blood pressure. Crashing. Dying. He shouted, and a man in a nurse’s uniform came floating past. He adjusted something on her bed’s control board, then pushed off and away. Bull tried to grab him as he went by, but he couldn’t.
He’d been in his office. Serge had already gone for the night. A few minor incidents were piled up from the day, the constant friction of a large, poorly disciplined crew. Like everyone else, he’d been waiting to see whether Holden and the Martians came back out of the station. Or if something else would. The fear had made sleep unlikely. He started watching the presentation that the Rocinantehad sent, James Holden looking surprisingly young and charming saying, This is what we’re calling the slow zone. He remembered noticing that everyone had accepted Holden’s name for the place, and wondered whether it was just that the man had gotten there first or if there was something about charisma that translated across the void.
And then he’d been here. Someone had attacked, then. A torpedo had gotten past their defenses or else sabotage. Maybe the whole damn ship was just coming apart.
There was a comm interface on the bed. He pulled it over, logged in, and used his security override to open its range to the full ship and not just the nurses’ station. He requested a connection to Sam, and a few heartbeats later she appeared on the screen. Her hair was floating around her head. Null g always made him think of drowned people. The sclera of her left eye was the bright red of fresh blood.
“Bull,” she said with a grin that looked like relief. “Jesus Christ with a side of chips, but I never thought I’d be glad to hear from you.”
“Need a status report.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I better come by for this one. You in your office?”
“Medical bay,” Bull said.
“Be there in a jiff,” she said.
“Sam. What happened?”
“You remember that asshole who shot the Ring and got turned into a thin paste when his ship hit the slow zone? Same thing.”
“We went too fast?” Bull said.
“We didn’t. Something changed the rules on us. I’ve got a couple techs doing some quick-and-dirty tests to figure out what the new top speed is, but we’re captured and floating into that big ring of ships. Along with everybodyelse.”
“The whole flotilla?”
“Everybody and their sisters,” Sam said. A sense of grim despair undercut the lightness of her words. “No one’s under their own power now except the shuttles that were inside the bays when it happened, and no one’s willing to send them going too fast either. The Behemothwas probably going the slowest when it happened. Other ships, it’s worse.”
How badfloated in his mind, but something about the words refused to be asked. His mind skated over them, flickering. The deep sense of wrongness welled up in him.