Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“So are you conscious?”

The alien robot – the skin the Miller construct was using – shrugged. It was strange how well the gesture translated. “Don’t know. Seems like I’m acing my Turing test, though.”

Elvi thought about it and nodded. “Fair enough.”

“So I sort of… well, triangulated where the dead spot was in space. If you see what I mean.”

“Sure, yes. Triangulation. I totally understand that,” Elvi said. “So. Four now.”

“Four?”

“Our biosphere, the local organisms, the things that made the gates, and the things that killed them. Four.”

Miller stopped at a seam in the wall and placed his claws on it, ready to push. “In through here? It used to be one of the major control centers for the planet. Like a… like a nerve cluster or something. As near as I can figure it, the dead spot’s in here.”

He pushed. The wall retracted, not sliding back so much as changing conformation. Beyond it, a wide, tall space opened. Hundreds of niches rose, level after level, one above the other, with mechanisms like Miller in each of them. Dots of bright blue light like fireflies swirled spiral patterns in the air, riding currents of air that Elvi couldn’t feel. And in the center, floating a meter above the floor, was…

She looked away, putting her hand on Miller’s side to steady herself, then forced her gaze back up. It was hard to look at directly. The margins of the space were bright without illuminating anything or casting shadows, sharp and terrible. It reminded her of the way schizophrenics and people suffering migraines would describe light as assaulting and dangerous. And within that boundary, darkness swirled. It was more than an absence. She could sense a structure within it, layers interpenetrating, like shadows casting shadows. It throbbed with an inhuman power, tidal and deep and painful. Look at this too long, Elvi thought, and I will lose my mind in it. She took a step toward it, feeling the structures in the blackness respond to her. She felt as if she could see the spaces between molecules in the air, like atoms themselves had become a thin fog, and for the first time she could see the true shape of reality looming up just beyond her reach.

Once, there had been a civilization here beyond anything Elvi had ever imagined. Beings that could design tools like the protomolecule, like the rings. They had peopled a thousand worlds, and more, spread through time and through space, and they were gone now. And this – she had no doubt at all – this was the footprint of the thing that had killed them.

“So,” Miller said, moving his claws in a wide, spreading gesture, “you need to look for anything, you know, odd. Something that doesn’t seem like it fits.”

She turned to him, confused, and pointed at the uncanny thing in the center of the room. “You mean like that?”

Miller shifted, alien eyes moving their lenses in the complexity of the mechanism. “Like what?”

“That. In the middle of the room. That.”

“I don’t see anything,” Miller said. “What’s it look like?”

“The eye of an angry God?” Elvi said.

“Oh,” Miller said. The heavy plates of his robotic body clicked and hissed against each other as he shifted. “Yeah, well that’s probably it, then. Good work.”

Chapter Fifty-Three: Holden

When Murtry pulled himself through a gap in the machinery and walked across the ledge to the narrow bridge, Holden was waiting for him on the other side. His hand was draped casually on the butt of his gun. The RCE security chief gave Holden a vague nod, then carefully examined his surroundings. He looked down into the hundred-meter chasm, and tapped the narrow tonguelike bridge with the tip of one boot. He spun once slowly, peering carefully into the crevices created by the cramped machines. When he was through, he looked at Holden again and gave him a flat, meaningless smile. Holden noticed his hand wasn’t far from his own weapon.

You came by yourself,” Murtry said. “The better plan is to put one person in the open with a second hidden behind the target.”

“That the one you use?” Holden asked. He tried to match Murtry’s casual nonchalance and felt like he mostly succeeded.

“It works,” Murtry replied with a nod. “So how does this go down?”

“I’ve been wondering that myself.”

“Well,” Murtry said with an almost imperceptible shrug, “I need to get over there and stop whatever you people are cooking up. Doctor Okoye seems to think you are going to break the defense network down.”

“Yeah,” Holden replied. “Pretty much am. Call it saving people.”

Murtry nodded but didn’t speak for a moment. Holden waited for him to reach for his gun. The distance between them, the width of the chasm, was just over five meters. An easy shot at the range. Harder when you were rushing because the other guy was shooting back. The lighting was good and Murtry wasn’t wearing a helmet. Risk the head shot? The RCE man’s armor looked pretty chewed up. The blast patterns on it made Holden suspect that was the work of Amos’ autoshotgun. The chest shot was easier, but it was possible the damage to the armor was mostly cosmetic, in which case his sidearm wasn’t going to do much.

Murtry winked at him, and Holden suddenly felt like the man was reading his mind as he calculated the best way to kill him. “I can’t let that happen,” Murtry said. His shrug was almost apologetic. “By charter, this all belongs to RCE. You don’t get to break it.”

Holden shook his head in disbelief. “You really are crazy. If I don’t break it, our ships fall out of the sky and we all die.”

“Maybe. Maybe we die. Maybe we find some other way to stay alive. Either way, the RCE claim remains in force.” Murtry waved one hand, not his gun hand, around the room. “All this is worth trillions intact. We’ve made incredible advances in materials science just by looking at the rings. How much will working technology do for us? This is what we came here for, Captain. You don’t get to decide what we do with it.”

“Trillions,” Holden said, unable to keep the disbelief out of his voice. “I’ve never seen a dead person spend money.”

“Sure you have. They call it a foundation or a bequest. Happens all the time.”

“This is all so you can make a bequest?”

Murtry’s smile widened a millimeter.

“No,” he said. “I came to conquer a new world. This is how you do that. I understand what I’m doing seems cruel and inflexible to you, but it’s what this situation requires. The tools you’re using here are the ones that let you get along once civilization takes over. They’re the wrong shape for this work. I have no illusions about what it will take to carve out a place in this new frontier. It will take sacrifices, and it will take blood, and things we wouldn’t do back where everything’s regulated and controlled will have to happen here. You think we can do it with committee meetings and press releases.”