“Because it wanted me to. You can order the sun to come up if you time it right. I’m not driving this bus. Making it do what I want would be like talking someone out of a seizure.”
“Okay,” Holden said. “We have got to get off this planet.”
“Before that, though, there’s this thing. This not-thing. Look, I’ve got a pretty good map of the global network. Lots of leftover stuff coming up, checking in. Except one spot. Like a big ball of nothing.”
Holden shrugged. “Maybe it’s just a place where there are no nodes on the network.”
“Kid, this whole planet is a node on the network. There shouldn’t be anyplace that’s off-limits to me.”
“So what does it mean?”
“Maybe it’s just a spot that’s really really broken,” Miller said. “That’d be interesting but useless.”
“And the useful thing?”
“It’s a leftover bit of whatever killed this place.”
They stood in silence for a moment, the cool evening wind of Ilus ruffling Holden’s pants and not affecting the detective at all. Holden felt a chill start at the base of his spine and slowly climb his back. The hairs on his arms stood up.
“I don’t want to find that,” he finally said.
“And I do?” Miller replied with his best attempt at a friendly smile. “Free will left the conversation for me a while back. But that’s where the clues are. You should come with. It’s going to happen eventually anyway.”
“Why is that?”
“Because real monsters don’t go away when you close your eyes. Because you need to know what happened here just as bad as I do.”
Miller’s expression was still friendly, but there was a dread in it too. A fear that Holden recognized. And shared.
“Naomi first. I don’t go anywhere until we get her back.”
Miller nodded again and flew apart into a spray of blue fireflies.
Amos was waiting for him when he got back to the bar. The big man sitting alone at a table with a half-empty bottle of something that smelled like antiseptic and smoke.
“I’m guessing you didn’t kill him after I left,” Amos said as Holden sat down.
“I feel like I’m walking a tightrope so narrow I can’t even see it,” Holden replied. He shook his head when Amos offered him the bottle, so the mechanic took a long swig from it instead.
“This ends in blood,” Amos said after a moment. His voice sounded distant, dreamlike. “No way around that.”
“Well, since my job is pretty much exactly the opposite of that, I hope you’re wrong.”
“I’m not.”
Holden lacked a compelling argument, so instead he said, “What did Alex have to say?”
“We put together a list of demands for the captain of the Israel. Make sure Naomi gets well taken care of while she’s there.”
“What will we give up in exchange?”
“Alex isn’t blowing the Israel into its component atoms right this second.”
“I hope they agree we’re being generous.”
“He is, however,” Amos continued, “keeping a constant rail gun lock on the Israel’s reactor.”
Holden ran his fingers through his hair. “So not too generous, then.”
“Say pretty please, but carry a one-kilo slug of tungsten accelerated to a detectable percentage of c.”
“I believe I’ve heard that said,” Holden replied, then stood up. He suddenly felt very tired. “I’m going to bed.”
“Naomi’s in Murtry’s goddamn brig, and you can sleep?” Amos said and took another drink.
“No, but I can go to bed. Then tomorrow I’m going to figure out how to get my first officer back from the RCE maniac holding her hostage, so that I can go find the scary alien bullet fragment embedded in the planet.”
Amos nodded as if that all made sense. “Nothing in the afternoon, then.”
Chapter Twenty-Four: Elvi
Elvi slept, and she dreamed.
In her dream she was back on Earth, which was also the corridors of the Edward Israel. A sense of urgency pressed at her, shifting quickly toward dread. Something was on fire somewhere because she hadn’t turned in the right forms. She had to file the forms before everything burned. She was in the bursar’s office at the university and Governor Trying was there too, only he was waiting for his death certificate and it was taking too long. She couldn’t submit her forms. She looked at the onionskin papers, trying to find the submission deadline, but the words kept changing. First, the line at the bottom read, Elvi Okoye, lead researcher and Argonaut, and the next time she read it, Fines to be paid directly at the temple: rabbits and hogs. The urgency pushed at her, and when she shouted the onionskin started coming apart in her fingers. She tried to press the forms back together, but they wouldn’t go.
Someone touched her shoulder, and it was James Holden, only he looked like someone else. Younger, darker, but she knew it was him. She realized she’d been naked this whole time. She was embarrassed, but also a little pleased. His hand touched her breast, and —
“Elvi! Wake up!”
Her eyes opened, the lids heavy and slow. Her eyes struggled to focus. She didn’t know where she was, only that some dumb bastard was interrupting something she didn’t want interrupted. The dark lines before her slowly became familiar. The roof of her hut. She shifted, reaching out for someone but already uncertain who. She was alone in her bed. Her hand terminal glowed dimly. Her analysis equipment flickered as data from her work flew up and out, through the vast darkness to the Ring and Medina Station, to Earth, and answering information flew back out to her. Which was all fine and as it should be, so why the hell was she awake?
A soft knock came at the door, and Fayez’s voice. “Elvi! Wake up. You’ve got to see this.”
Elvi yawned so deeply her jaw ached with it. She pulled herself up to sitting. The dream was already fading quickly. There had been something about a fire and someone touching her whom she had badly wanted to be touched by. The details lost all coherence as she sat up and reached for her robe.
“Elvi? Are you there?”
When she spoke her words were slow, heavy, a little slurred. “If this isn’t important, I will rip your throat open and piss down your lungs.”
Fayez laughed. There were other voices behind his. Sudyam saying something too low to make out the words. Yma Chappel, the geochemistry lead too. Elvi paused, threw off the robe, and pulled on her real clothes and work boots to go with them. When she stepped out of her hut, a dozen of the people in the research teams were standing in pairs or small groups all across the night-dark plain. They were all looking up. And in the high darkness, something larger than a star glowed a sullen red. Fayez, squatting on the ground, glanced over at her.