“More stuff might explode? What else is left?”
“You’re asking me?” Miller laughed again.
“But you’re part of this! All this, this protomolecule masters bullshit. If you can’t control it, who can?”
“There’s an answer to that, but you won’t like it.”
“Nobody,” Holden said. “You’re telling me nobody.”
“The thing that’s turning all this crap on? It just does stuff. If the Rocinante arms and fires a torpedo at someone, what are the odds a wrench in her machine shop can bring the torpedo back? That’s who you’re talking to.”
“God damn it, Miller,” Holden said, then ran out of energy mid-sentence. It was less fun being the chosen one and prophet when the gods were violent and capricious and their spokesman was insane and powerless. The rain under his clothes had started to warm up, leaving him feeling covered in slime.
The detective lowered his head, frowning. Thinking.
“You might be able to sneak past them,” Miller said.
“How?”
“Well, the defenses are keying on threats. So don’t be threatening. You know the network gets itchy with high-energy sources.”
“No power sources,” Holden said. “Yeah, the shuttle had reactors. Don’t get much higher as energy sources go.”
“Slow is good too. Not sure if the defenses here key on kinetic energy, but safer to assume they do.”
“Okay,” Holden said, feeling a brief moment of relief and hope. “Okay, I can work with that. Food, filters, meds, we should be able to bring all those down without pissing it off. Slow drops with airfoils and parachutes. They can rig that from orbit.”
“Worth a try, anyway,” Miller said without enthusiasm. “So, about this dead spot I need to go north for. You won’t like this either, but there’s a way to —” He vanished.
“Cap,” Amos said, coming around the corner of the tower. “Sorry to interrupt, but that cute scientist is looking for you.”
It took Holden a moment. “The biologist?”
“Well, the geologist ain’t bad, I guess, but he’s not my preferred flavor.”
“What does she want?”
“To make more puppy dog eyes at you?” Amos said. “How the fuck should I know?”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“Go ask her yourself, then.”
“All right,” Holden said. “But I need Murtry first. Seen him?”
“Directing traffic by the front door last I saw,” Amos replied. “Need me for that?”
Holden noticed that Amos’ hand fell to the butt of his pistol when he asked. “What else have you been working on?”
“Death-slug patrol.”
“Go do that. I’ll chat with Murtry.”
Amos gave a mock salute and trotted off toward the tower entrance. Holden pulled out his hand terminal and left a message for Alex filling him in on the supply drop plan. As Amos had said, Holden found Murtry talking to a few members of his security team near the tower’s entrance.
“We’ve found some buried foundations,” Wei was saying, pointing over her shoulder in the direction First Landing had once been. “But unless these people had basements, there’s nothing left attached to them.”
“What about the mines?” Murtry asked her.
“What isn’t filled with mud is submerged,” Wei replied.
“Well,” Murtry said, cocking his head to one side and giving her a humorless smile. “Do we have people who know how to hold their breath?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then send them down to see if anything we can use is under that water, soldier.”
“Sir,” Wei replied and snapped off a salute. She and two other security people ran off, leaving Murtry and Holden alone.
“Captain Holden,” Murtry said, keeping his empty smile.
“Mister Murtry.”
“How can I help you today?”
“I think I might have a solution to our resupply problem,” Holden said. “If you’re willing to work with me on it.”
Murtry’s humorless grin relaxed a bit. “That’s pretty high on my to-do list. Fill me in.”
Holden summed it all up – the hypothesis of the alien systems tracking high-energy sources, the possibility of slow air drops. He couched it in terms of what they’d seen in the slow zone the first time humanity had gone through the gates and left Miller out. Murtry stood utterly still as he spoke, his expression not changing so much as a millimeter. When Holden finished, Murtry nodded once.
“I’ll call up to the Israel and start having them put packages together,” Murtry said.
Holden breathed a sigh of relief. “I have to admit, I kind of expected you to fight me on this.”
“Why? I’m not a monster, Captain. I will kill if it’s necessary to do my job, but your Mister Burton’s much the same. All of these people dying down here helps my cause not at all. I just want the squatters to go away as soon as we figure out the power problem.”
“Great,” Holden said, and then a moment later, “You don’t actually care about them, do you? All this time you were fighting against them. Now you’re willing to help, but it’s only because it’s helping them leave. You’d be just as happy if they all died.”
“That would also solve my problems, yes,” Murtry said.
“Just wanted to make sure you knew I knew,” Holden said, biting back the asshole that tried to follow.
He found Amos working with the locals on death-slug defense. They were using the wadded ponchos and plastic water jugs split into squares to block off the smaller entrances to the alien ruins. They put sheeting over the windows, stuffed shirts and torn pant legs into the smaller holes, and dug trenches in front of the large openings. The trenches filled with muddy rainwater like tiny moats, and the slugs avoided them.
Without a word, Holden pitched in with the trench digging. It was unpleasant work, with rain and muck getting under his clothes and chafing his skin as he moved. They dug with makeshift tools made out of tent poles and flat pieces of plastic that fell apart periodically and had to be put back together. The soil was stony and heavy with moisture and the occasional slug corpse. It was the sort of miserable physical labor that drove all other thoughts from Holden’s mind while he worked. He didn’t think about starving to death or Naomi trapped in a prison cell drifting slowly toward a fiery death or his own inability to make anything on the planet safe or sane or better.