Once, there had been a civilization here beyond anything Elvi had ever imagined. Beings that could design tools like the protomolecule, like the rings. They had peopled a thousand worlds, and more, spread through time and through space, and they were gone now. And this—she had no doubt at all—this was the footprint of the thing that had killed them.
“So,” Miller said, moving his claws in a wide, spreading gesture, “you need to look for anything, you know, odd. Something that doesn’t seem like it fits.”
She turned to him, confused, and pointed at the uncanny thing in the center of the room. “You mean like that?”
Miller shifted, alien eyes moving their lenses in the complexity of the mechanism. “Like what?”
“That. In the middle of the room. That.”
“I don’t see anything,” Miller said. “What’s it look like?”
“The eye of an angry God?” Elvi said.
“Oh,” Miller said. The heavy plates of his robotic body clicked and hissed against each other as he shifted. “Yeah, well that’s probably it, then. Good work.”
Chapter Fifty-Three: Holden
When Murtry pulled himself through a gap in the machinery and walked across the ledge to the narrow bridge, Holden was waiting for him on the other side. His hand was draped casually on the butt of his gun. The RCE security chief gave Holden a vague nod, then carefully examined his surroundings. He looked down into the hundred-meter chasm, and tapped the narrow tonguelike bridge with the tip of one boot. He spun once slowly, peering carefully into the crevices created by the cramped machines. When he was through, he looked at Holden again and gave him a flat, meaningless smile. Holden noticed his hand wasn’t far from his own weapon.
“You came by yourself,” Murtry said. “The better plan is to put one person in the open with a second hidden behind the target.”
“That the one you use?” Holden asked. He tried to match Murtry’s casual nonchalance and felt like he mostly succeeded.
“It works,” Murtry replied with a nod. “So how does this go down?”
“I’ve been wondering that myself.”
“Well,” Murtry said with an almost imperceptible shrug, “I need to get over there and stop whatever you people are cooking up. Doctor Okoye seems to think you are going to break the defense network down.”
“Yeah,” Holden replied. “Pretty much am. Call it saving people.”
Murtry nodded but didn’t speak for a moment. Holden waited for him to reach for his gun. The distance between them, the width of the chasm, was just over five meters. An easy shot at the range. Harder when you were rushing because the other guy was shooting back. The lighting was good and Murtry wasn’t wearing a helmet. Risk the head shot? The RCE man’s armor looked pretty chewed up. The blast patterns on it made Holden suspect that was the work of Amos’ autoshotgun. The chest shot was easier, but it was possible the damage to the armor was mostly cosmetic, in which case his sidearm wasn’t going to do much.
Murtry winked at him, and Holden suddenly felt like the man was reading his mind as he calculated the best way to kill him. “I can’t let that happen,” Murtry said. His shrug was almost apologetic. “By charter, this all belongs to RCE. You don’t get to break it.”
Holden shook his head in disbelief. “You really are crazy. If I don’t break it, our ships fall out of the sky and we all die.”
“Maybe. Maybe we die. Maybe we find some other way to stay alive. Either way, the RCE claim remains in force.” Murtry waved one hand, not his gun hand, around the room. “All this is worth trillions intact. We’ve made incredible advances in materials science just by looking at the rings. How much will working technology do for us? This is what we came here for, Captain. You don’t get to decide what we do with it.”
“Trillions,” Holden said, unable to keep the disbelief out of his voice. “I’ve never seen a dead person spend money.”
“Sure you have. They call it a foundation or a bequest. Happens all the time.”
“This is all so you can make a bequest?”
Murtry’s smile widened a millimeter.
“No,” he said. “I came to conquer a new world. This is how you do that. I understand what I’m doing seems cruel and inflexible to you, but it’s what this situation requires. The tools you’re using here are the ones that let you get along once civilization takes over. They’re the wrong shape for this work. I have no illusions about what it will take to carve out a place in this new frontier. It will take sacrifices, and it will take blood, and things we wouldn’t do back where everything’s regulated and controlled will have to happen here. You think we can do it with committee meetings and press releases.”
“I wonder if this will sound like a compelling argument to the people dying in orbit right now.”
“I’m sorry for them. I truly am. But they knew the risks when they got on board. And their deaths will have meaning,” Murtry said.
“Meaning?”
“They are the sign that we didn’t give up a centimeter. What we came for, we held to the last gasp. This isn’t something humanity can do halfway, Captain. It never has been. Even Cortez burned his ships.”
Holden’s laugh was half disbelief and half contempt. “What is it with you guys and worshiping mass murderers?”
Murtry frowned. A swirl of bright blue lights rose and fell between them like dust blowing down a desert street.
“How do you mean?” Murtry asked.
“A guy I once knew tried to justify his life choices to me by comparing himself to Genghis Khan.”
“I take it you didn’t find his argument compelling?” Murtry asked with a smirk.
“No,” Holden said. “And then a friend of mine shot him in the face.”
“An ironic rebuttal to an argument about necessary violence.”
“I thought so too, at the time.”
Murtry reached up and scratched his head with his left hand, his short greasy hair shifting into a configuration vaguely resembling Miller’s carapace. A sculpture of curves and spikes. He looked at his fingertips in disgust and wiped them on his armor. Holden waited. Somewhere far behind them, a strange chittering sound rose like cicadas on a summer afternoon.
“So,” Murtry finally said. “I’m going to need to come over there.” He gestured at Holden’s side of the chasm with his chin. His right hand still hovered over his gun.
“Nope,” Holden replied.
Murtry nodded, as if expecting this. “You going to arrest me, Sheriff?”
“Actually, I was kind of thinking I’d shoot you.”
“In the face, no doubt.”
“If that’s what I can hit.”
“Seems like a radical shift,” Murtry said, “for a man who wants to tame the frontier with mediation and committee meetings.”
“Oh, no, this isn’t about that. Elvi says you killed Amos. I wouldn’t kill a single person for your fucking frontier, but for my crew? Yeah, I’ll kill you for that.”