They fell. Jim couldn’t interpret it as anything but falling now. When he tried to see the float as moving forward or rising up, the reframe worked for a heartbeat or two, and then they were falling again. Either the little stringlike lines of force were gone now, or he’d lost the trick of seeing them. The blue fireflies were thicker here, swirling and dancing in eddies that had nothing to do with the local air. Jim found himself thinking of flocks of birds at dawn and schools of silver-scaled fish. Thousands of individual animals coordinating into something larger, wider, capable of things that no one of them could have managed. It seemed important.
Something was happening with his left hand, and he noticed that Teresa had taken it. He could see her squeezing his fingers in hers, but he couldn’t feel it.
“Don’t fall asleep,” she said, and he was pretty sure sleep was a euphemism for something more permanent. He tried to turn on his mic, but it seemed harder to do than it should have been. With his right hand, he fumbled with the helmet’s seals until he managed to pop off the visor. The air was weirdly thick, like humidity but without the water. Teresa watched him, her eyes widening. Then she pulled her own helmet off and latched it to her suit at the hip.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Jim said. “I promise.”
“What the fuck are you two doing?” Tanaka’s voice was fuzzy compared to Teresa’s. Jim made a mental note to check the speakers in his helmet when he got back to the Roci. Probably a loose connection.
“I was having trouble with my mic. And my nose itched.”
“Teresa, put your helmet back on.”
Teresa still had his hand in hers. She looked at Tanaka with a breathtakingly false innocence and pointed to her ears. I can’t hear you. A flash of pure anger passed over Tanaka’s expression, and Jim felt a little hitch of fear. But then she popped her visor open too.
“Be ready to put that back in place on my order,” Tanaka said. Teresa nodded, but didn’t speak.
There was a warmth radiating from the metal walls. He hadn’t felt it before because his skin had been covered, but now it was like the pressure of sunlight on a hot day. Or an oven, just opened. And more than that, there was an eerie sense of pressure. He couldn’t explain it. The air was hardly over a single atmosphere, but some part of him felt an inhumanly powerful force kept in check. Like the station wasn’t floating in vacuum, but at the bottom of an ocean that was bigger than worlds.
“Well, that’s literally true,” Miller said. “That was the trick.”
“What was the trick?”
Miller gestured at the walls, the fireflies, the incomprehensible complexity and strangeness of the station. “It’s where the power comes from. They cracked the universe open, pushed their way in here, and it pushed back. A whole other universe trying to smash this place flat, and it powers the gates, the artifacts. That magnetic ray gun Duarte was playing with. They built stars with it. Broke rules that you can’t break without a different set of physics to strain it through. You can Eve-and-apple it all you want, but this shit right here? This is all made out of original sin.”
“When we find him, you make the approach,” Tanaka said, and Jim didn’t understand for a second what she meant.
“I understand,” Teresa said with a resentment that meant it wasn’t the first time she’d been told.
“I will take care of everything else.”
Teresa answered more slowly this time, but she said the same thing. “I understand.”
The heat was growing more intense, and Jim felt sweat starting to bead on his skin. The metal hall joined three others like it, each of them coming in at an acute angle, to form a single larger passage with a nearly symmetrical hexagonal shape that was disorienting somehow. Like the angles shouldn’t quite all work together. The glow was brighter, and the heat was ramping up toward unpleasant.
Tanaka checked her wristpad. “I think we’re getting close.”
“We better be,” Miller said, “or you three are all going to be lightly broiled before we find our perp.”
Something moved ahead of them. Something bright. Jim thought for a moment he was just imagining it—protomolecule hallucination or heat exhaustion—but Tanaka moved to put herself between them and whatever it was, her armored face shield slamming closed, protecting them out of instinct. The barrel at her forearm popped open.
“Oh,” Miller said. “She doesn’t want to do that.”
“Wait,” Jim said, but Tanaka was moving forward. He followed. Without his visor on, his HUD wasn’t working. His suit chimed to let him know his maneuvering thrusters were nearing half charge and he should turn back to avoid being caught on the float. In other circumstances, it would have seemed really important.
The thing was familiar, metallic blue and insectile. Half a meter taller than Tanaka, and she wasn’t short. It moved with a fast twitch like a clockwork ticking from one position to the next. Now that he thought to look, there were others like it embedded in the walls all around them, so tightly packed that there might not be structure to the walls apart from their bodies.
“Don’t do anything aggressive,” Jim said.
“This is the first thing we’ve seen that looks like a sentry,” Tanaka said, her voice booming out of the suit’s external speakers. “We’re not doubling back.”
She shifted, and it shifted to block her. A feral grin stretched the asymmetry of her cheeks. Miller leaned over beside her, staring into her visor with a look of astonishment. “She really is going to get you all killed, isn’t she?”
“Let me try,” Jim said. “I’m here. I opened the station. At least let me try just shutting it down.”
Tanaka’s gun barrel closed and opened and closed again. She gestured him forward with her chin.
“Miller?”
The detective shrugged. “Give me a minute. I’ll see what I can do.”
Jim felt that same oddness. Flexing his phantom limb, an awareness that he was doing something, but not of what exactly it was. The cramp in his gut came again, higher now. Closer to his chest. The pain rose and fell again quickly.
“Try now,” he said.
Tanaka moved to one side, and the sentinel ignored her. She moved past it, and it remained inert. Tanaka gestured Teresa forward, and the girl went as Tanaka watched the sentinel, waiting, it seemed, for an excuse to defend them. Jim went last. His breath was shallow and fast. He couldn’t feel his legs below the knee.
“We’re running out of time on a lot of fronts here,” Miller said. “Any play you want to make, you’d better make it soon.”
“Thank you,” Jim murmured, “for your support and advice.”
Ahead of them, the light went from blue to white. Jim fired his thrusters, moving into a chamber like a sphere a hundred meters across. Other passages like the one they’d come through were touches of darkness in the brightness. The light itself felt wrong—thick, tangible, jittering, alive. It made Jim’s skin crawl.
From opposite sides of the sphere, dark filaments wove a huge web like a stalactite and a stalagmite reaching from the roof and floor of a cave to touch at a single point. Or like the wings of a great dark angel.
At the center was something the size of a human being. A man with his arms outstretched, cruciform. Thick cables of the filament wove into his sides, his arms, his legs. He was still dressed in Laconian blue, except his feet, which were bare.
Jim knew the face almost before they were close enough to see it.
“Daddy?” Teresa said.
Chapter Forty-Four: Teresa
From the moment they entered the station, Teresa had been watching James Holden die.
She’d known something was wrong with him as soon as she’d gotten to the rendezvous. She’d been around him for years, first in the State Building on Laconia, where he’d been a figure of danger and subtle threat. Then on his ship, where he’d become something smaller, gentler, and more fragile. She knew his moods, the way he used humor to cover over the darkness that haunted him, the vulnerability he carried with him, and the strength. She was fairly certain he didn’t know that about her, and that was fine.