Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

Ten minutes passed, and his anxiety shifted to impatience. He sat down again and tried to call the Rocinante on his hand terminal, but got a failed connection message. He tried Elvi, Lucia, and Amos. All failed. Whatever the alien subway was made out of, it was blocking his signals to the hub on the Roci. It had to be that. The alternative was that the Roci wasn’t working, and that opened up too many bad scenarios. He pulled up a mindless pattern-matching game and played that for a while, until the terminal gave him a low-battery warning and he turned it off.

After an hour passed, he started to get nervous. He wasn’t claustrophobic, and he’d spent most of his adult life in tiny cabins on space ships, but that didn’t mean he relished the idea of dying alone in a small metal box deep under the earth. He kicked the container’s door a few times and shouted to Miller, but got no reply.

Which was, in its own way, fairly alarming.

The container he’d been sleeping in during the long trip north was empty. The only tools he had with him were used for repairing his armor and weapons. There was nothing that could cut through the metal or bend it. He kicked the door again, this time putting enough effort into it that it hurt his shins. It didn’t move at all.

“Huh,” he said out loud. If Miller had brought him all this way just to let him die in an abandoned train car, it was the longest prank setup in history.

Holden was doing a mental inventory of everything he was carrying, trying to figure out if any combination of things might make an explosive powerful enough to blow the door off, and carefully ignoring the fact that any such explosion would probably liquefy any biology inside the small metal compartment, when a loud metallic groan came from outside the cart that rose in pitch to a shriek. The compartment shuddered and rocked. A long series of powerful hammering sounds assaulted him. Then another metallic scream that grew to deafening levels.

The door to the compartment vanished, torn from the container in one massive blow. On the other side stood a nightmare.

At first glance, it looked like a massive collection of appendages and cutting tools. It stood on six of its limbs, and waved four others in the air like a crustacean made of steel and knives. Whipping through the air around the heavier cutting arms were a dozen or more tentacles of what looked like black rubber. As he watched, two of the tentacles gripped the inside edges of the doorway and bent them out with fearsome strength.

He pulled his pistol, but didn’t point it at the thing. It felt very small and inadequate in his hand.

“Put that away,” the monster said in Miller’s voice. “You’ll put your eye out.”

Holden hadn’t thought much about the fact that every time he heard Miller’s voice over the last year, it had been a protomolecule-induced hallucination. But at the sound of the detective’s voice in the air, actual vibrations moving through the atmosphere and hitting his eardrums, the strangeness of it made him feel a little lightheaded.

“Is that you?” Holden asked in what he was pretty sure was the new universal winner for stupid questions.

“Depends what you mean,” the Miller-bot said and backed away from the opening. It was surprisingly quiet for such a huge metallic monster. “I’m able to get into the local hardware, and this thing was in pretty good shape for having missed its three-month warranty check by a thousand million years or so.”

Miller did something, and suddenly Holden could see the detective in his rumpled suit standing where the monster had been. He shrugged and smiled apologetically. But even as Holden saw a projection of Miller, superimposed over it he saw the robot. It was doing the same shrug, though instead of hands it used two massive serrated crab claws. It would have been comic if it hadn’t come with a splitting headache.

“One or the other,” Holden said, squeezing his eyes shut. “I can’t see both things. It breaks my brain.”

“Sorry. No problem,” Miller replied, and when Holden opened his eyes again only the robot was there. “Come on, we have a lot of ground to cover.”

Holden hopped out of the material transfer container and onto a flat metal floor. Various sections of the Miller-bot’s carapace glowed with a faint light, and unlike the blue light that had always accompanied the Miller ghost, it actually illuminated the space around it.

Pointing at one glowing limb, Holden said, “Can you make that brighter?”

In answer, all of the glowing sections of the robot intensified until the tunnel was as bright as noon. The reason for the material transfer cart’s stoppage became apparent. A couple dozen meters ahead, the metal tunnel was blown apart and filled with rocks and debris.

Reading his mind, Miller said, “Yeah. Not everything is handling the reboot well. Power node for the mag-lev woke up bad and blew itself up. Only it’s not exactly mag-lev. Close enough, though, you can get the picture.”

“Can we get past it?”

“Well, we can’t repair the track, but I can get you out. Making passages,” the Miller-bot said, waving one massive claw in the air, “is what this thing’s for. He used to dig and maintain these tunnels. Hop on.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“No, seriously, climb on. This guy can move faster than you can on foot.”

“Miller,” Holden said. “You are made entirely out of cutting edges and pinch points.”

One of the black tentacles twisted around, looking over the robot’s carapace carefully. “Hold on,” Miller said, and with a hum and a few metallic clanks, the torso of the robot twisted into a new configuration, leaving a wide flat spot on its back. “There you go.”

Holden hesitated for a moment, then climbed up one of the robot’s legs and onto its back. The Miller-bot trundled forward to the damaged section of tunnel and the four big forward limbs went to work, tearing out the twisted metal of the tunnel walls and clearing the earth and stone that had filled the space. The machine worked with speed, precision, and a terrifying casual strength.

“Hey Miller,” Holden said, watching the robot peel up a two-meter section of the tunnel’s metal flooring and rapidly cut it into tiny pieces. “We’re still friends, right?”

“What? Ah, I see. When I’m a ghost, you yell at me, tell me to get lost, say you’ll find a way to kill me. Now I’m wearing the shell of an invincible wrecking machine and you want to be buddies again?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Holden replied.

“Nah, we’re good.”