“And then I was here, talking to you,” he said dryly. “I don’t know what happens next.”
“All right,” she said. Her expression gave away nothing.
“You’ll want a full medical workup to see if there’s anything organically wrong with my brain,” Holden said.
“Probably,” the captain said. “My medical staff has its hands full at the moment. You will be kept in administrative detention for the time being.”
“I understand,” Holden said. “But I need to get in contact with my crew. You can monitor the connection. I don’t care. I just need to know they’re okay.”
The angle of the captain’s mouth asked why he thought they were.
“I’ll try to get a report to you,” she said. “Everyone’s scrambling right now, and the situation could get worse quickly.”
“Is it bad, then?”
“It is.”
Time in his cell passed slowly. A guard brought tubes of rations: protein, oil, water, and vegetable paste. Sometimes it had a nearly homeopathic dose of curry. It was food meant to keep you alive. Everything after that was your own problem. Holden ate it because he had to stay alive. He had to find his crew, his ship. He had to get out of there.
He had seen a massive alien empire fall. He’d seen suns blown apart. He’d watched a man overwhelmed and slaughtered by nightmare mechanisms on a space station that human hands hadn’t built. All he could think about was Naomi and Amos and Alex. How they were going to keep their ship. How they were going to get home. And home meant anyplace but here. Not for the first time, he wished they were all transporting sketchy boxes of unknown cargo to Titania. He floated in the coffin-sized cell and tried not to go crazy from the toxic combination of inaction and mind-bending fear.
Even if the whole crew was well, he was in custody of Mars now. He hadn’t harmed the Seung Un, and everyone would know that. He hadn’t made the false broadcast. All the things they were accusing him of could fall away, and there would still be the fact that Mars would take away his ship. He tried to focus on that despair, because as bad as it would be, if he kept the ship and lost his crew, that would feel worse.
“You’ve got lousy taste in friends,” Miller said.
“Where the hell have you been?” Holden snapped.
The dead man shrugged. In the cramped quarters, Holden could smell the man’s breath. A firefly flicker of blue sped around Miller’s head like a low-slung halo and vanished.
“Time’s hard,” he said, as if the comment carried its own context. “Anyway, we were talking about something.”
“The station. The lockdown.”
“Right,” Miller said, nodding. He plucked off his ridiculous hat and scratched his temple. “That. So the thing is, as long as there’s a shitload of high energy floating around, the station’s not going to get comfortable. You guys have, what? Twenty big ships?”
“About that, I guess.”
“They’ve all got fusion reactions. They’ve all got massive internal power grids. Not a big deal by themselves, but the station’s been spooked a couple times. It’s jumpy. You’re going to have to give it a little massage. Show that you’re not a threat. Do that, and I’m pretty sure I can get you moving again. That or it’ll break you all down to your component atoms.”
“It’ll what?”
Miller’s smile was apologetic.
“Sorry,” he said. “Joke. Just get the reactors off-line and the internal grids off. It’ll get you below threshold, and I can take it from there. I mean, if that’s what you decide you want to do.”
“What do you mean, if?”
Holden shifted. The ceiling brushed against his shoulders. He couldn’t stretch in here. There wasn’t room for two people.
There wasn’t room for two people.
For a fraction of a second, his brain tried to fit two images—Miller floating beside him and the too-small cell—together and failed. The flesh on his back felt like there were insects crawling all over it. The two things couldn’t both be true, and his brain shuddered and recoiled from the fact that they were. Miller coughed.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “This is hard enough the way it is. What I mean by if is that lockdown’s lockdown. I don’t get to pick what part of the trap gets unsprung. If I take off the dampening and you all start burning for home or shooting at each other or whatever, that means I also open the gates. All of them.”
“Including the ones with the burned-up stars?”
“No,” Miller said. “Those gates are gone. Only real star systems on the other side of the ones that are left.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Depends on what comes through,” Miller said. “That’s a lot of doors to kick down all at once.” The only sound was the hiss of the air recyclers. Miller nodded as if Holden had said something. “The other option is figure out a way to sneak back home with your tails between your legs and try and pretend this all never happened.”
“You think we should do that?”
“I think there was an empire once that touched thousands of stars. The Eros bug? That’s one of their tools. It’s a wrench. And something was big enough to put a bullet in them. Whatever it is could be waiting behind one of those gates, waiting for someone to do something stupid. So maybe you’d rather set up shop here. Make little doomed babies. Live and die in the darkness. But at least whatever’s out there stays out there.”
Holden put his hand on the crash couch to steady himself. His heart was beating a mile a minute, and his hands were clammy and pale. He felt like he might throw up, and wondered whether he could get the vacuum commode working in time. In his memory, stars died.
“You think that’s what we should do?” he asked. “Be quiet and get the hell out of here?”
“No, I want to open ’em. I’ve learned everything I can get from here, especially in lockdown. I want to figure out what happened, and that means going and taking a look at the scene.”
“You’re the machine that finds things.”
“Yes,” Miller said. “Consider the source, right? You might want to talk about it with someone who’s not dead. You people have more to lose than I do.”
Holden thought for a moment, then smiled. Then laughed.
“I’m not sure it matters. I’m not in much of a position to set policy,” he said.