Another star flickered and failed. Another few voices went silent. Now, slowly and instantly both, everything changed. He felt the great debate raging in him as a fever, an illness. He had been beyond anything like a threat for so long that all the reflexes of survival had weakened, atrophied. Holden felt a fear that he knew belonged to him—the man trapped within the machine—because his larger self couldn’t remember to feel it. The vast parliament swirled, thoughts and opinions, analysis and poetry blending together and breaking apart. It was beautiful as sunlight on oil, and terrifying.
Three suns failed, and now Holden felt himself growing smaller. It was still very little, almost nothing. A white spot on the back of his hand, a sore that wouldn’t heal. The plague was still only a symptom, but it was one his vast self couldn’t ignore.
From the station at his core, he reached out into the places he had been, the darkened systems that were lost to him, and he reached out through the gates with fire. The fallen stars, mere matter now, empty and dead, bloated. Filled their systems in a rage of radiation and heat, sheared the electrons from every atom, and detonated. Their final deaths echoed, and Holden felt a sense of mourning and of peace. The cancer had struck, and been burned away. The loss of the minds that had been would never be redeemed. Mortality had returned from exile, but it had been cleansed with fire.
A hundred stars failed.
What had been a song became a shriek. Holden felt his body shifting against itself, furious as a swarm of bees trapped and dying. In despair, the hundred suns were burned away, the station hurling destruction through the gates as fast as the darkness appeared, but the growing shadow could not be stopped. All through his flesh, stars were going out, voices were falling into silence. Death rode the vacuum, faster than light and implacable.
He felt the decision like a seed crystal giving form to the chaos around it, solid, hard, resolute. Desperation, mourning, and a million farewells, one to the other. The word quarantine came to him, and with the logic of dreams, it carried an unsupportable weight of horror. But within it, like the last voice in Pandora’s box, the promise of reunion. One day, when the solution was found, everything that had been lost would be regained. The gates reopened. The vast mind restored.
The moment of dissolution came, sudden and expected, and Holden blew apart.
He was in darkness. Empty and tiny and lost, waiting for the promise to be fulfilled, waiting for the silent chorus to whisper again that Armageddon had been stopped, that all was not lost. And the silence reigned.
Huh, Miller thought at him. That was weird.
Like being pulled backward through an infinitely long tunnel of light, Holden was returned to his body. For one vertiginous moment he felt too small, like the tiny wrapping of skin and meat would explode trying to contain him.
Then he just felt tired, and sat down on the floor with a thump.
“Okay,” Miller said, rubbing his cheek with an open palm. “I guess that’s a start. Sort of explains everything, sort of nothing. Pain in the ass.”
Holden flopped onto his back. He felt like someone had run him through a shredder and then badly welded him back together. Trying to remember what it felt like to be the size of a galaxy gave him a splitting headache, so he stopped.
“Tell me everything it explains,” he said when he could remember how to speak. Being forced to move moist flaps of meat in order to form the words felt sensual and obscene.
“They quarantined the systems. Shut down the network to stop whatever was capping the locals.”
“So, behind each of those gates is a solar system full of whatever made the protomolecule?”
Miller laughed. Something in the sound of it sent a shiver down Holden’s spine. “That seems pretty f**king unlikely.”
“Why?”
“This station has been waiting for the all-clear signal to open the network back up for about two billion years. If they’d found a solve, they wouldn’t still be waiting. Whatever it was, I think it got them all.”
“All of them but you,” Holden said.
“Nah, kid. I’m one of them like the Rocinante is one of you. The Roci’s smart for a machine. It knows a lot about you. It could probably gin up a rough simulation of you if someone told it to. Those things? The ones you felt like? Compared to them, I’m a fancy kind of hand terminal.”
“And the nothing it explains,” Holden said. “You mean what killed them.”
“Well, if we’re gonna be fair, it’s not really nothing,” Miller said, crossing his arms. “We know it ate a galaxy spanning hive consciousness like it was popcorn, so that’s something. And we know it survived a sterilization that was a couple hundred solar systems wide.”
Holden had a powerfully vivid memory of watching the station hurl fire through the ring gates, of the stars on the other side blowing up like balloons, of the gates themselves abandoned to the fire and disappearing. Even just the echo of it nearly blinded him with remembered pain. “Seriously, did they blow up those stars to stop it?”
Holden’s image of Miller patted the column at the center of the room, though he knew now that Miller wasn’t really touching it. Something was pressing the right buttons on his synaptic keyboard to make him think Miller was.
“Yup. Autoclaved the whole joint. Fed a bunch of extra energy in and popped ’em like balloons.”
“They can’t still do that, though, right? I mean, if the things that ran this are all gone, no one to pull that trigger. It won’t do that to us.”
Miller’s grim smile chilled Holden’s blood. “I keep telling you. This station is in war mode, kid. It’s playing for keeps.”
“Is there a way we can make it feel better about things?”
“Sure. Now I’m in here, I can take off the lockdown,” Miller said, “but you’re going to have to—”
Miller vanished.
“To what?” Holden shouted. “I’m going to have to what?”
From behind came an electronically amplified voice. “James Holden, by authority of the Martian Congressional Republic, you are placed under arrest. Get down on your knees and place your hands on your head. Any attempt to resist will be met with lethal response.”
Holden did as he was told, but turned his head to look behind. Seven marines in recon armor had come into the room. They weren’t bothering to point their guns at him, but Holden knew they could catch him and tear him to pieces just using the strength of their suits.