Holden felt a punch of dread in his gut.

“That sounds bad.”

“It wouldn’t be good. Come on. If we’re going to do this, we need to stay ahead of them.”

The halls and passages widened and narrowed, meeting and falling away from each other like blood vessels of some massive organism. Holden’s suit lights seemed almost lost in the vast darkness, and the blue firefly flickers came in waves and vanished again. Along the way they passed more of the metallic blue insectlike constructs.

“What are these?” Holden asked, pointing to an especially large and dangerous-looking model as they passed it.

“Whatever they need to be,” Miller replied without turning around.

“Oh, great, so we’re back to inscrutable, are we?”

Miller spun around, a worried look on his face, and blinked out of existence. Holden turned.

Far across the huge room, a form was coming out of the tunnel. Holden had seen similar armor before. A Martian marine’s powered armor was made of equal parts efficiency and threat.

There was no escaping it. Anyone in those suits could run him down without trying. Holden switched his suit to an open frequency.

“Hey! I’m right here. Let’s talk about this,” he said, then started to walk toward the group. As one, all eight marines raised their right arms and opened fire. Holden braced himself for death even while part of his mind knew that he shouldn’t have time to brace for death. At the distance they were, the rounds from their high-velocity guns would be hitting in a fraction of a second. He’d be dead long before the sound of the shots reached him.

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He heard the rapid and deafening buzzsaw sound of the guns firing, but nothing hit him.

A diffuse cloud of gray formed in front of the marines. When the firing finally stopped, the cloud drifted away toward the walls of the room. Bullets. They’d stopped centimeters from the gun barrels, and were now being drawn away just like the objects outside the station.

The marines broke into a fast run across the room, and Holden tried to scramble away. They were beautiful in their way, the lethal power of the suits harnessed by years of training to make their movements seem like a dance. Even without their weapons, they could tear him limb from limb. One punch from that armor would break all the bones he had and change his viscera to a thin slurry. His only chance was to outrun them, and he couldn’t outrun them.

He almost didn’t see the movement when it came. His focus was locked on the Martians, on the danger he knew. He didn’t consciously notice that one of the insectlike things had started moving until the marines turned to it.

The alien thing’s movements were fast and jagged, like a clockwork mechanism that only had full speed and full stop. It clicked toward the marines, jerking with each step, and it loomed larger than the tallest of them by almost half a meter.

They panicked in the way that people trained to expect violence panic. Two started firing, with the same results as before. Another marine’s suit shifted something in its arm, and a larger barrel appeared. Holden scooted away from the confrontation. He was sure there was shouting going on in those armored suits, but it wasn’t a frequency he had access to. The large barrel went white with muzzle flash, and a slow-arcing slug of metal the size of Holden’s fist took to the strange air.

A grenade.

The ticking monster ignored it, stepping closer to the marines, and the grenade detonated at its insectile feet where it landed. The alien thing jerked back, its appendages flailing and dust falling from its severed limbs like a smoke of fungal spores. The complex carpet of moss glowed with orange embers where the blast had burned it.

And all around the marines, a dozen other alien statues came to life. They moved faster this time. Before the marines could begin to react, the one who’d launched the grenade was lifted gently up and ripped apart. Blood sprayed up into the air, hanging, Holden thought numbly, too long before it drifted back to the ground. The surviving marines began to fall back, their guns pointing to the alien creatures that were swarming the dead man. While Holden watched, the marines retreated into the far tunnel, falling back. Regrouping.

The alien things fell on their own injured fellow, ripping and clawing, slaughtering it as if it were the enemy as much as the marines had been. And then, when it was gone, five of the monsters gathered together in the burned spot where the explosion had been. They shuddered, went still, shuddered again, and then from all five of them, a thin stream of opaque yellow goo spattered out onto the scar. Holden felt fascination and revulsion as the moss grabbed on to the stuff, regrowing like it had never been damaged. Like the attack hadn’t even existed.

“Consequences,” Miller said at his side. He sounded tired.

“Did they… did they just turn that poor bastard into spackle?”

“They did,” Miller said. “He had it coming, though. That guy got happy with his grenade launcher? Just killed a lot of people.”

“What? How?”

“He taught the station that something moving as fast as a good baseball pitch might still be a threat.”

“Is it going to take revenge?”

“No,” Miller said. “It’s just going to protect itself. Reevaluate what counts as dangerous. Take control of all the ships that might be a problem.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Means a really bad day for a whole lot of people. When it slows you down, it ain’t gentle.”

Holden felt a cold hand close on his heart.

“The Roci…”

A look of sorrow, even sympathy, passed over the detective’s face.

“Maybe. I don’t know,” Miller said with a rueful shrug. “One way or the other, a whole lot of people just died.”

Chapter Twenty-Three: Melba

J

ulie saved her. There was no other way to look at it.

True to style, Holden’s proxy had given everything away. Cohen, discovered, told everything he knew, and put the image he’d stolen along with it. Melba had it on her hand terminal: a portrait of the young woman as ice sculpture. She hadn’t known the soundman had taken the data when she’d met with him, but she should have guessed he would. The mistake was obvious in retrospect.

It ought to have ended the chase. The people in power should have seen it, shrugged, and thrown her out an airlock. Except that it came with its own misinterpretation. Here, Holden said, is Julie Mao, and that’s what everyone saw. The differences that were obvious to her became invisible to others. They expected to see the protomolecule infiltrating and threatening and raising the dead, and so they saw it.




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