The old detective’s eyebrows rose in surprise.
“You’ve seen me before?”
“On and off for the last year or so.”
“Well, that’s pretty disturbing,” Miller said. “If they’re planning to shoot you, we’d better get going.”
Miller seemed to flicker out of existence, reappearing at the edge of the mosslike walls. Holden followed, his body fighting with the nauseating sense of being weightless and heavy at the same time. When he drew close, he could see the spirals within the moss on the walls. He’d seen something like this before where the protomolecule had been, but this was lush by comparison. Complex and rich and deep. A vast ripple seemed to pass over the wall like a stone thrown in a pond, and despite having his own isolated air supply, Holden smelled something like orange peels and rain.
“Hey,” Miller said.
“Sorry,” Holden said. “What?”
“We better get going?” the dead man said. He gestured toward what looked like a fold of the strange moss, but when Holden came close, he saw a fissure behind it. The hole looked soft as flesh at the edges, and it glistened with something. It wept.
“Where are we going?”
“Deeper,” Miller said. “Since we’re here, there’s something we should probably do. I have to tell you, though, you got a lot of balls.”
“For what?” Holden said, and his hand slid against the wall. A layer of slime stuck to the fingers of his suit.
“Coming here.”
“You told me to,” Holden said. “You brought me. Julie brought me.”
“I don’t want to talk about what happened to Julie,” the dead man said.
Holden followed him into the narrow tunnel. Its walls were slick and organic. It was like crawling through a deep cave or down the throat of a vast animal.
“You’re definitely making more sense than usual.”
“There are tools here,” Miller said. “They’re not… they’re not right, but they’re here at least.”
“Does this mean you might still say something enigmatic and vanish in a puff of blue fireflies?”
“Probably.”
Miller didn’t expand on this, so Holden followed him for several dozen meters through the tunnel until it turned again and Miller led him into a much larger room.
“Uh, wow,” he managed to say.
Because the floor of the first room and the tunnel that led out of it had both had a consistent “down,” Holden had thought he was moving laterally just under the skin of the station. That couldn’t have been right, because the room the tunnel opened into had a much higher ceiling than was possible if that were true. The space stretched out from the tunnel into a cathedral-vast opening, hundreds of meters across. The walls slanted inward into a domed ceiling that was twenty meters off the floor in the center. Scattered across the room in seemingly random places were two-meter-thick columns of something that looked like blue glass with black, branching veins shooting through it. The columns pulsed with light, and each pulse was accompanied by a subsonic throb that Holden could feel in his bones and teeth. It felt like enormous power, carefully restrained. A giant, whispering.
“Holy shit,” he finally said when his breath came back. “We’re in a lot of trouble, aren’t we?”
“Yeah,” Miller said. “You should not have come.”
Miller walked off across the room, and Holden hurried to catch up. “Wait, what?” he said. “I thought you wanted me here!”
Miller walked around something that from a distance had looked like a blue statue of an insect, but up close was a massive confusion of metallic limbs and protrusions, like a construction mech folded up on itself. Holden tried to guess at its purpose and failed.
“Why would you think that?” Miller said as he walked. “You don’t know what’s in here. Doors and corners. Never walk into a crime scene until you know there’s not someone there waiting to put you down. You’ve got to clear the room first. But maybe we got lucky. For now. Wouldn’t recommend doing it again, though.”
“I don’t understand.”
They came to a place in the floor that was covered in what looked like cilia or plant stalks, gently rippling in a nonexistent wind. Miller walked around it. Holden was careful to do the same. As they passed, a swarm of blue fireflies burst out of the ground cover and flew up to a vent in the ceiling where they vanished.
“So there was this unlicensed brothel down in sector 18. We went thinking we’d be hauling fifteen, twenty people in. More, maybe. Got there, and the place was stripped to the stone,” Miller said. “It wasn’t that they’d gotten wind of us, though. The Loca Greiga had heard about the place, sent their guys to clean it up. Took about a week to find the bodies. According to forensics, they’d all been shot twice in the head pretty much while we were getting one last cup of coffee. If we’d been a little bit faster, we’d have walked in on it. Nothing says f**ked like opening the door on a bunch of kids who thought they’d make a quick buck off the sex trade and having an organized kill squad there for the meet and greet instead.”
“What has that got to do with anything?”
“This place is the same,” Miller said. “There was supposed to be something. A lot of something. There was supposed to be… shit, I don’t have the right words. An empire. A civilization. A home. More than a home, a master. Instead, there’s a bunch of locked doors and the lights on a timer. I don’t want you charging into the middle of that. You’ll get your ass killed.”
“What the hell do you mean?” Holden said. “You, or the protomolecule, or Julie Mao, or whatever, you set this whole thing up. The job, the attack, all of it.”
That stopped Miller. He turned around with a frown on his face. “Julie’s dead, kid. Miller’s dead. I’m just the machine for finding lost things.”
“I don’t understand,” Holden said. “If you didn’t do this, then who did?”
“See now, that’s a good question, on several levels. Depending on what you mean by ‘this.’” Miller’s head lifted like a dog catching an unfamiliar scent on the wind. “Your friends are here. We should go.” He moved off at a faster walk toward the far wall of the room.
“The marines,” Holden said. “Could you stop them?”
“No,” Miller said. “I don’t protect anything. I can tell the station they’re a threat. There’d be consequences, though.”