“Any speculation on what they’re doing?” Naomi said, switching her view to match his.
“They’re engineers. They know how crippled we are. How vulnerable. So my guess is they’re going to try to kill us.”
Chapter Forty-Eight: Holden
Life at the naval academy had been so stressful for Holden that at the end of his first term he’d celebrated by going to a party and drinking until he passed out for twenty hours. It had been his first lesson on the difference between unconsciousness and sleep. They might seem the same, but they weren’t. After twenty hours, he’d woken feeling totally unrested, and the morning PT the next day had almost killed him.
Riding on Miller’s material transfer network, it was difficult to get any sense of the passage of time. The first time Holden came to, his hand terminal told him ten hours had passed. He could tell he’d spent it unconscious rather than sleeping because he felt exhausted and sick. His throat hurt, his eyes burned like they’d been sandpapered, and all of his muscles ached. It almost felt like a flu, except that the antivirals he took every three months made that pretty much impossible. He turned on his armor’s diagnostic system, and it gave him a series of shots. He had no idea what. He drank half the water in his canteen and closed his eyes.
It was nine hours later when he woke again, and this time he was almost rested, the soreness in his throat gone. At some point he’d passed the threshold from unconsciousness to sleep, and his body was rewarding him for it. He stretched out on the metal floor until his joints popped, then drank the rest of his water.
“Wakey wakey,” Miller said. He slowly appeared in the darkness, surrounded by a halo of blue light, as if someone were turning up his dimmer switch.
“I’m awake,” Holden replied, then rattled his empty canteen at Miller. “But you stuffed me into this cattle car so fast I wasn’t able to get supplies. Gonna get pretty thirsty if there isn’t, you know, an alien drinking fountain for something.”
“We’ll see. But that’s actually the least of our problems right now.”
“Says the guy who doesn’t drink.”
“There’s a damaged piece of the system ahead,” Miller continued, “and I’d hoped we’d be able to get around it. No such luck. We’re on foot from here.”
“Your fancy alien train is broken?”
“My fancy alien material transfer system has been sitting unused for over a billion years and half the planet just exploded. Your ship was built less than a decade ago and you can barely keep the coffee pot running.”
“You are a sad, bitter little man,” Holden said as he climbed to his feet and pushed against the train door. It didn’t open.
“Hold on,” Miller said and vanished.
Holden turned the brightness up on his terminal and spent a few minutes checking over his equipment while he waited. Miller had grabbed him right after his final patrol around the settlement, which meant he had his armor, his pistol, and quite a few magazines of ammunition, all of which was pretty likely to be useless. He also had one empty canteen, no food, and a suit medical pack that was running low on almost everything, all of which would have been much handier to have fully stocked. When his body finally woke up enough to be hungry, he expected to be quite willing to trade his gun in for a sandwich. He didn’t think the alien structures would have many vending machines.
Ten minutes passed, and his anxiety shifted to impatience. He sat down again and tried to call the Rocinante on his hand terminal, but got a failed connection message. He tried Elvi, Lucia, and Amos. All failed. Whatever the alien subway was made out of, it was blocking his signals to the hub on the Roci. It had to be that. The alternative was that the Roci wasn’t working, and that opened up too many bad scenarios. He pulled up a mindless pattern-matching game and played that for a while, until the terminal gave him a low-battery warning and he turned it off.
After an hour passed, he started to get nervous. He wasn’t claustrophobic, and he’d spent most of his adult life in tiny cabins on space ships, but that didn’t mean he relished the idea of dying alone in a small metal box deep under the earth. He kicked the container’s door a few times and shouted to Miller, but got no reply.
Which was, in its own way, fairly alarming.
The container he’d been sleeping in during the long trip north was empty. The only tools he had with him were used for repairing his armor and weapons. There was nothing that could cut through the metal or bend it. He kicked the door again, this time putting enough effort into it that it hurt his shins. It didn’t move at all.
“Huh,” he said out loud. If Miller had brought him all this way just to let him die in an abandoned train car, it was the longest prank setup in history.
Holden was doing a mental inventory of everything he was carrying, trying to figure out if any combination of things might make an explosive powerful enough to blow the door off, and carefully ignoring the fact that any such explosion would probably liquefy any biology inside the small metal compartment, when a loud metallic groan came from outside the cart that rose in pitch to a shriek. The compartment shuddered and rocked. A long series of powerful hammering sounds assaulted him. Then another metallic scream that grew to deafening levels.
The door to the compartment vanished, torn from the container in one massive blow. On the other side stood a nightmare.
At first glance, it looked like a massive collection of appendages and cutting tools. It stood on six of its limbs, and waved four others in the air like a crustacean made of steel and knives. Whipping through the air around the heavier cutting arms were a dozen or more tentacles of what looked like black rubber. As he watched, two of the tentacles gripped the inside edges of the doorway and bent them out with fearsome strength.
He pulled his pistol, but didn’t point it at the thing. It felt very small and inadequate in his hand.
“Put that away,” the monster said in Miller’s voice. “You’ll put your eye out.”
Holden hadn’t thought much about the fact that every time he heard Miller’s voice over the last year, it had been a protomolecule-induced hallucination. But at the sound of the detective’s voice in the air, actual vibrations moving through the atmosphere and hitting his eardrums, the strangeness of it made him feel a little lightheaded.
“Is that you?” Holden asked in what he was pretty sure was the new universal winner for stupid questions.
“Depends what you mean,” the Miller-bot said and backed away from the opening. It was surprisingly quiet for such a huge metallic monster. “I’m able to get into the local hardware, and this thing was in pretty good shape for having missed its three-month warranty check by a thousand million years or so.”
Miller did something, and suddenly Holden could see the detective in his rumpled suit standing where the monster had been. He shrugged and smiled apologetically. But even as Holden saw a projection of Miller, superimposed over it he saw the robot. It was doing the same shrug, though instead of hands it used two massive serrated crab claws. It would have been comic if it hadn’t come with a splitting headache.
“One or the other,” Holden said, squeezing his eyes shut. “I can’t see both things. It breaks my brain.”
“Sorry. No problem,” Miller replied, and when Holden opened his eyes again only the robot was there. “Come on, we have a lot of ground to cover.”
Holden hopped out of the material transfer container and onto a flat metal floor. Various sections of the Miller-bot’s carapace glowed with a faint light, and unlike the blue light that had always accompanied the Miller ghost, it actually illuminated the space around it.