He tried to get through to the Rocinante, to Naomi, but the marine he was strapped to had either disabled his suit radio when they were restraining him or something had jammed the signal. One way or another, he couldn’t get anything. Not from the Roci, not from the marines, not from anywhere. There was only the gentle loping and an almost unbearable dread.
His suit gave him a low air warning.
He didn’t have any sense of where they were or how far they’d gone. The surface of the station might be through the next tunnel or they might not have reached the halfway point. Or, for that matter, the station could be changing around them, and the way they’d come in might not exist. The suit said he had another twenty minutes.
“Hey!” he shouted. He tried to swing his legs against the armor of the person carrying him. “Hey! I’m going to need air!”
The marine didn’t respond. No matter how hard Holden tried to thrash, his strength and leverage were a rounding error compared to the abilities of the powered armor. All he could do was hope that he wasn’t about to die from an oversight. Worrying about that was actually better than wondering about Naomi and Alex and Amos.
The air gauge was down to three minutes and Holden had shouted himself hoarse when the marine carrying him crouched slightly, hopped up, and the station fell away beneath them. The luminescent surface irised closed behind them, automatic and unthinking. The skiff hung in the vacuum not more than five hundred meters away, its exterior lights making it the brightest thing in the eerie starless sky. They found their way into the mass airlock quickly. Holden’s suit was blaring its emergency, the carbon dioxide levels crept up toward the critical level, and he had to fight to catch his breath.
The marine flipped him into a wall-mounted holding bar and strapped him in.
“I’m out of air!” Holden screamed. “Please!”
The marine reached out and cracked the seal on Holden’s suit. The rush of air smelled like old plastic and poorly recycled urine. Holden sucked it in like it was roses. The marine popped off his own helmet. His real head looked perversely small in the bulk of the combat armor.
“Sergeant Verbinski!” a woman’s voice snapped.
“Yes, sir,” the marine who’d been carrying him said.
“There something wrong with the prisoner?”
“He ran out of air a few minutes back.”
The woman grunted. Nothing more was said about it.
The acceleration burn, when it came, was almost subliminal. A tiny sensation of weight settling Holden into his suit, gone as soon as it came. The marines murmured among themselves and ignored him. It was all the confirmation he needed. What Miller had said was true. The slow zone’s top speed had changed again. And from the expressions on their faces, he guessed that the casualties had been terrible.
“I need to check in with my ship,” he said. “Can someone contact the Rocinante, please?” No one answered him. He pressed his luck. “My crew may be hurt. If we could just—”
“Someone shut the prisoner up,” the woman who’d spoken before said. He still couldn’t see her. The nearest marine, a thick-jawed man with skin so black it seemed blue turned toward him. Holden braced himself for a threat or violence.
“There’s nothing you could do,” the man said. “Please be quiet now.”
His cell in the brig of the Hammurabi was a little over a meter and a half wide and three meters deep. The crash couch was a dirty blue and the walls and floor a uniform white that gleamed in the harsh light of the overhead LED. The jumpsuit he’d been issued felt like thick paper and crackled when he moved. When the guards came for him, they didn’t bother putting the restraints back on his arms and legs.
The captain floated near a desk, her close-cropped silver hair making her look like an ancient Roman emperor. Holden was strapped into a crash couch that was canted slightly forward, so that he had to look up at her, even without the convenience of an up.
“I am Captain Jakande,” she said. “You are a military prisoner. Do you understand what that means?”
“I was in the navy,” Holden said. “I understand.”
“Good. That’ll cut about half an hour of legal bullshit.”
“I’ll happily tell you everything I know,” Holden said. “No need for the rough stuff.”
The captain smiled like winter.
“If you were anyone else, I’d think that was a figure of speech,” she said. “What is your relationship to the structure at the center of the slow zone? What were you doing there?”
He had spent so many months trying not to talk about Miller, trying not to tell anyone anything. Except Naomi, and even then he’d felt guilty putting the burden of the mystery on her. On one hand, the chance to unburden himself pulled at him like gravity. On the other…
He took a deep breath.
“This is going to sound a little strange,” he said.
“All right.”
“Shortly after the protomolecule construct lifted off from Venus and headed out to start assembling the Ring? I was… contacted by Detective Josephus Miller. The one who rode Eros down onto Venus. Or at least something that looked and talked like him. He’s shown up every few weeks since then, and I came to the conclusion that the protomolecule was using him. Well, him and Julie Mao, who was the first one to be infected, to drive me out through the Ring. I thought that they… it wanted me to come here.”
The captain’s expression didn’t change. Holden felt a strange lump in his throat. He didn’t want to be having this conversation here. He wanted to be talking with Naomi in their bedroom on the Rocinante. Or at a bar on Ceres. It didn’t matter where. Only who.
Was she dead? Had the station killed her?
“Go on,” the captain said.
“Apparently I was mistaken,” Holden said.
He began with the journey out, with the protomolecule’s vision of Miller waiting for him at the station. The attack by her marine, and the consequences as Miller explained them. The visions of the vast empire and the darkness that flowed over it, the death of suns. He relaxed as he went along, the words coming easier, faster. He sounded insane even to himself. Visions no one else could see. Vast secrets revealed only to him.
Except it had all been a mistake.
He’d thought he was important. That he was special and chosen, and that what had happened to him and his crew had been dictated by a vast and mysterious power. He’d misunderstood everything. Doors and corners, Miller had said, and because he hadn’t puzzled out what the dead man meant by it, they’d all come through the Ring. And to the station. His relief and his growing self-disgust mingled with every phrase. He’d been a fool dancing at the edge of the cliff, because he’d been sure that he couldn’t fall. Not him.