By the third, against his will and every good thought he’d had about himself, Holden was bored.
It was a lesson he’d never forgotten. That humans only have so much emotional energy. No matter how intense the situation, or how powerful the feelings, it was impossible to maintain a heightened emotional state forever. Eventually you’d just get tired and want it to end.
For the first hours drifting toward the glowing blue station, Holden had felt awe at the immensity of empty starless space around him. He’d felt fear of what the protomolecule might want from him, fear of the marines following him, fear that he’d made the wrong choice and that he’d arrive at the station to find nothing at all. Most of all fear that he’d never see Naomi or his crew again.
But after four hours of being alone in his space suit, even the fear burned out. He just wanted it all to be over with.
With the infinite and unbroken black all around him, and the only visible spot of light coming from the blue sphere directly ahead, it was easy to feel like he was in some vast tunnel, slowly moving toward the exit. The human mind didn’t do well with infinite spaces. It wanted walls, horizons, limits. It would create them if it had to.
His suit beeped at him to let him know it was time to replenish his O2 supply. He pulled a spare bottle out of the webbing clipped to his EVA pack and attached it to the suit’s nipple. The gauge on his HUD climbed back up to four hours and stopped. The next time he had to refill, he’d be on the station or in Marine custody.
One way or the other, he wouldn’t be alone anymore, and that was a relief. He wondered what his mothers would have thought about all this, whether they would have approved of the choices he’d made, how he could arrange to have a dog for their children since Naomi wouldn’t be able to live at the bottom of the gravity well. His attention wandered, and then his mind.
He awoke to a harsh buzzing sound, and for a few seconds slapped his hand at empty space trying to turn his alarm off. When he finally opened sleep-gummed eyes, he saw his HUD flashing a proximity warning. He’d somehow managed to fall asleep until the station was only a few kilometers away.
At that distance, it loomed like a gently curving wall of metallic blue, glowing with its own inner light. No radiation alarms were flashing, so whatever made it glow wasn’t anything his suit thought was dangerous to him. The flight program Alex had written for him was spooling out on the HUD, counting down to the moment when he’d need to do his minute-long deceleration burn. Waving his hand around when he first woke up had put him into a gentle rotation, and the flight program was prompting him to allow it to make course corrections. Since he trusted Alex completely on matters of navigation, Holden authorized the suit to handle the descent automatically.
A few quick bursts of compressed gas later, he was facing out into the black, the sphere at his back. Then came a minute-long burn from the pack to slow him to a gentle half meter per second for landing. He kicked on his boot magnets, not knowing if they’d actually help or not—the sphere looked like metal, but that didn’t mean much—and turned around.
The wall of glowing blue was less than five meters away. Holden bent his knees, bracing for the impact of hitting the surface, and hoping to absorb enough energy that he didn’t just bounce off. The half meters ticked away, each second taking too long and passing too quickly. With only a meter before impact, he realized he’d been holding his breath and let out a long exhale.
“Here we go,” he said to no one.
“Hey, boss?” Alex said in a burst of radio static.
Before Holden could reply, the surface of the sphere irised open and swallowed him up.
After Holden passed through the portal into the interior of the sphere he landed on the gently curving floor of a room shaped like an inverted dome. The walls were the metallic blue of the sphere’s exterior. The surfaces were textured almost like moss, and tiny lights seemed to flicker in and out of existence like fireflies. His suit reported a thin atmosphere made mostly of benzene compounds and neon. The ceiling irised closed again, its flat unbroken surface showing no sign that there had ever been an opening.
Miller stood a few meters from where Holden landed, his rumpled gray suit and porkpie hat made both mundane and exotic by the alien setting. The lack of breathable air didn’t seem to bother him at all.
Holden straightened his knees, and was surprised to feel something like gravity’s resistance. He’d felt the weight of spin and of thrust, and the natural deep pull of a gravity well. The EVA pack was heavy on his back, but the quality of it was different. He almost felt like something was pushing down on him from above instead of the ground coming up to meet him.
“Hey, boss?” Alex repeated, a note of worry in his voice. Miller held up a hand in a don’t-mind-me gesture. Wordless permission for Holden to answer.
“Receiving, Alex. Go ahead.”
“The sphere just swallowed you,” Alex said. “You okay in there?”
“Yep, five by five. But you called before I went in. What’s up?”
“Just wanted to warn you that company’s comin’ pretty close on. You can expect them in about five minutes at best guess.”
“Thanks for the report. I’m hoping Miller won’t let them in.”
“Miller?” Alex and Naomi said at the same time. She must have been monitoring the exchange.
“I’ll call when I know more,” Holden said with a grunt as he finished getting the EVA pack off. It fell to the floor with a thud.
That was odd.
Holden turned on the suit’s external speakers and said, “Miller?” He heard the sound of his own voice echoing off of the walls and around the room. The atmosphere shouldn’t have been thick enough for that.
“Hey,” Miller replied, his voice unmuffled by the space suit, as if they were standing together on the deck of the Roci. He nodded slowly, his sad basset hound face twisting into something resembling a smile. “There are others coming. They yours?”
“Not mine, no,” Holden replied. “That would be the skiff full of Martian recon marines that are coming to arrest me. Or maybe just shoot me. It’s complicated.”
“You’ve been making friends without me,” Miller said, his tone sardonic and amused.
“How are you doing?” Holden asked. “You seem more coherent than usual.”
Miller gave a short Belter shrug. “How do you mean?”
“Usually when we talk, it’s like only half the signal’s getting through.”