The Dragon’s Path

by Abraham Daniel

  Fred shook his head.

  “Won’t work. The minute UNN Command sees we’re doing it, they’ll just tell the missiles to stop following those particular codes, and they’ll try to figure out some other way to target Eros,” he said. “And they’ll also be really pissed at us.”

  “Yeah, they’re going to be pissed all right,” Holden said. “But they’re not going to get their missiles back. Just before you start leading the missiles off course, we’re going to launch a massive hacking attempt from multiple locations on the missiles.”

  “So they’ll assume an enemy is trying to trick them, and shut down mid-flight reprogramming,” Fred said.

  “Yep,” Holden replied. “We’ll tell them we’re going to trick them so they stop listening, and once they’re not listening, we’ll trick them.”

  Fred shook his head again, this time giving Holden the vaguely frightened look of a man who wanted to back slowly out of the room.

  “There is no way in hell I am going along with this,” he said. “Miller isn’t going to work some magical deal with the aliens. We’re going to wind up nuking Eros no matter what. Why delay the inevitable?”

  “Because,” Holden said. “I’m starting to think it might be less dangerous this way. If we use the missiles without taking out Eros’ command center… brain… whatever, we don’t know if it’ll work, but I’m pretty sure our chances go down. Miller’s the only one who can do that. And these are his terms.”

  Fred said something obscene.

  “If Miller doesn’t manage to talk to it, he’ll take it out. I do trust him for that,” Holden said. “Come on, Fred, you know these missile designs as well as I do. Better. They put enough fuel pellets in those drives to fly around the solar system twice. We aren’t losing anything by giving Miller a little more time.”

  Fred shook his head a third time. Holden saw his face go hard. He wasn’t going to buy it. Before he could say no, Holden said, “Remember that box with the protomolecule samples, and all the lab notes? Want to know what my price is for it?”

  “You,” Fred said slowly, drawing it out, “are out of your God damn mind.”

  “Want to buy it or what?” Holden replied. “You want the magic ticket to a seat at the table? You know my price now. Give Miller his chance, and the sample’s yours.”

  “I’d be curious to know how you talked them into it,” Miller said. “I was thinking I was probably screwed.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Holden said. “We bought you your time. Go find the girl and save humanity. We’ll be waiting to hear back.” And ready to nuke you into dust if we don’t remained unsaid. There was no need.

  “I’ve been thinking about where to go, if I can talk to her,” Miller said. He had the already lost hopefulness of a man with a lottery ticket. “I mean, she’s got to park this thing somewhere.”

  If we live. If I can save her. If the miracle is true.

  Holden shrugged, even though no one could see it.

  “Give her Venus,” he said. “It’s an awful place.”

  Chapter Fifty-Four: Miller

  I don’t and I don’t,” the voice of Eros muttered. Juliette Mao, talking in her sleep. “I don’t and I don’t and I don’t… ”

  “Come on,” Miller said. “Come on, you sonofabitch. Be here.”

  The medical bays were lush and overgrown, black spirals with filaments of bronze and steel climbing the walls, encrusting the examination tables, feeding on the supplies of narcotics, steroids, and antibiotics spilling out of the broken supply cabinets. Miller dug through the clutter with one hand, his suit alarm chiming. His air had the sour taste that came from being through the recyclers too many times. His thumb, still mashed on the dead man’s switch, tingled when it wasn’t shooting with pain.

  He brushed the almost fungal growth off a storage box that wasn’t broken yet, found the latch. Four medical gas cylinders: two red, one green, one blue. He looked at the seal. The protomolecule hadn’t gotten them yet. Red for anesthetic. Blue nitrogen. He picked up the green. The sterile shield on the delivery nipple was in place. He took a deep sighing breath of dying air. Another few hours. He put down his hand terminal (one… two…), popped the seal (three…), fed the nipple into his suit’s intake (four…), and put a finger on the hand terminal. He stood, feeling the cool of the oxygen tank in his hand while his suit revised his life span. Ten minutes, an hour, four hours. The medical cylinder’s pressure hit equality with the suit’s, and he popped it off. Four more hours. He’d won himself four more hours.

  It was the third time he’d managed an emergency resupply since he’d talked to Holden. The first had been at a fire-suppression station, the second at a backup recycling unit. If he went back down to the port, there would probably be some uncompromised oxygen in some of the supply closets and docked ships. If he went all the way back to the surface, the OPA ships would have plenty.

  But there wasn’t time for that. He wasn’t looking for air; he was looking for Juliette. He let himself stretch. The kinks in his neck and back were threatening to turn into cramps. The CO2 levels in the suit were still on the high side of acceptable, even with the new oxygen coming into the mix. The suit needed maintenance and a new filter. It’d have to wait. Behind him, the bomb in its cart kept its own counsel.

  He had to find her. Somewhere in the maze of corridors and rooms, the dead city, Juliette Mao was driving them back to Earth. He’d tracked four hot spots. Three had been decent candidates for his original plan of vast nuclear immolation: hubs of wire and black alien filament tangling into huge organic-looking nodes. The fourth had been a cheap lab reactor churning on its way to meltdown. It had taken him fifteen minutes to get the emergency shutdown going, and he probably shouldn’t have wasted the time. But wherever he went, no Julie. Even the Julie of his imagination was gone, as if the ghost had no place now that he knew the real woman was still alive. He missed having her around, even if she’d only been a vision.

  A wave went through the medical bays, all the alien growth rising and falling like iron filings with a magnet passed beneath them. Miller’s heart sped up, adrenaline leaking into his blood, but it didn’t happen again.

  He had to find her. He had to find her soon. He could feel exhaustion grinding at him, little teeth chewing at the back of his mind. He already wasn’t thinking as clearly as he should. Back on Ceres, he’d have gone back to his hole, slept for a day, and come back to the problem whole. Not an option here.

  Full circle. He’d come full circle. Once, in a different life, he’d taken on the task of finding her; then, when he’d failed, there’d been taking vengeance. And now he had the chance to find her again, to save her. And if he couldn’t, he was still pulling a cheap, squeaky-wheeled wagon behind him that would do for revenge.

  Miller shook his head. He was having too many moments like this, getting lost in his own thoughts. He took a fresh grip on the cart full of fusion bomb, leaned forward, and headed out. The station around him creaked the way he imagined an old sailing ship might have, timbers bent by waves of salt water and the great tidal tug-of-war between earth and moon. Here, it was stone, and Miller couldn’t guess what forces were acting on it. Hopefully nothing that would interfere with the signal between his hand terminal and his cargo. He didn’t want to be reduced to his component atoms unintentionally.

  It was getting more and more clear that he couldn’t cover the whole station. He’d known that from the start. If Julie had gotten herself someplace obscure—hidden in some niche or hole like a dying cat—he wouldn’t find her. He’d become a gambler, betting against all hope on drawing the inside straight. The voice of Eros shifted, different voices now, singing something in Hindi. A child’s round, Eros harmonizing with itself in a growing richness of voices. Now that he knew to listen for it, he heard Julie’s voice threading its way among the others. Maybe it had always been there. His frustration verged on physical pain. She was so close, but he couldn’t quite reach her.

  He pulled himself bac
k into the main corridor complex. The hospital bays had been a good place to look for her too. Plausible. Fruitless. He’d looked at the two mercantile bio-labs. Nothing. He’d tried the morgue, the police holding tanks. He’d even gone through the evidence room, bin after plastic bin of contraband drugs and confiscated weapons scattered on the floor like oak leaves in one of the grand parks. It had all meant something once. Each one had been part of a small human drama, waiting to be brought out into the light, part of a trial or at least a hearing. Some small practice for judgment day, postponed now forever. All points were moot.

  Something silver flew above him, faster than a bird, and then another, and then a flock, streaming by overhead. Light glittered off the living metal, bright as fish scales. Miller watched the alien molecule improvising in the space above him.

  You can’t stop here, Holden said. You have to stop running and get on the right road.

  Miller looked over his shoulder. The captain stood, real and not, where his inner Julie would have been.

  Well, that’s interesting, Miller thought.

  “I know,” he said. “It’s just… I don’t know where she went. And… well, look around. Big place, you know?”

  You can stop her or I will, his imaginary Holden said.

  “If I just knew where she went,” Miller said.

  She didn’t, Holden said. She never went.

  Miller turned to look at him. The swarm of silver roiled overhead, chittering like insects or a badly tuned drive. The captain looked tired. Miller’s imagination had put a surprising swath of blood at the corner of the man’s mouth. And then it wasn’t Holden anymore; it was Havelock. The other Earther. His old partner. And then it was Muss, her eyes as dead as his own.

  Julie didn’t go anyplace. Miller had seen her in the hotel room, back when he still hadn’t believed that anything but a bad smell could rise from the grave. Back before. She’d been taken away in a body bag. And then taken somewhere else. The Protogen scientists had recovered her, harvested the protomolecule, and spread Julie’s remade flesh through the station like bees pollinating a field of wildflowers. They’d given her the station, but before they’d done it, they’d put her someplace they thought they would be safe.

  Safe room. Until they were ready to distribute the thing, they’d want to contain it. To pretend it could be contained. It wasn’t likely they’d have gone to the trouble of cleaning up after they’d gotten what they needed. It wasn’t as if anyone else was going to be around to use the space, so chances were good she was still there. That narrowed things.

  There would be isolation wards in the hospital, but Protogen wouldn’t have been likely to use facilities where non-Protogen doctors and nurses might wonder what was happening. Unnecessary risk.

  All right.

  They could have set up in one of the manufacturing plants down by the port. There were plenty of places there that required all-waldo work. But again, it would have been at the risk of being discovered or questioned before the trap was ready to spring.

  It’s a drug house, Muss said in his mind. You want privacy, you want control. Extracting the bug from the dead girl and extracting the good shit from the poppy seeds might have different chemistry, but it’s still crime.

  “Good point,” Miller said. “And near the casino level… No, that’s not right. The casino was the second stage. The first was the radiation scare. They put a bunch of people in the radiation shelters and cooked them to get the protomolecule good and happy, then they infected the casino level.”

  So where would you put a drug kitchen that was close to the rad shelters? Muss asked.

  The roiling silver stream overhead veered left and then right, pouring through the air. Tiny curls of metal began to rain down, drawing thin trails of smoke behind them as they did.

  “If I had the access? The backup environment controls. It’s an emergency facility. No foot traffic unless someone’s running inventory. It’s got all the equipment for isolation built in already. Wouldn’t be hard.”

  And since Protogen ran Eros security even before they put the disposable thugs in place, they’d be able to arrange it, Muss said, and she smiled joylessly. See? I knew you could think that through.

  For less than a second, Muss was gone and Julie Mao—his Julie—was in her place. She was smiling and beautiful. Radiant. Her hair floated around her as if she were swimming in zero g. And then she was gone. His suit alarm warned him about an increasingly corrosive environment.

  “Hang tight,” he said to the burning air. “I’ll be right there.”

  It was just less than thirty-three hours from the moment he’d realized that Juliette Andromeda Mao wasn’t dead to the one when he cycled down the emergency seals and pulled his cart into Eros’ backup environmental control facility. The clean, simple lines and error-reducing design of the place still showed under the outgrowth of the protomolecule. Barely. Knots of dark filament and nautilus spirals softened the corners of wall and floor and ceiling. Loops hung from the ceiling like Spanish moss. The familiar LED lights still shone under the soft growth, but more illumination came from the swarm of faint blue dots glowing in the air. His first step onto the floor sank him into a thick carpet up the ankle; the bomb cart would have to stay outside. His suit reported a wild mix of exotic gases and aromatic molecules, but all he smelled was himself.

  All the interior rooms had been remade. Transformed. He walked through the wastewater treatment control areas like a scuba diver in a grotto. The blue lights swirled around him as he passed, a few dozen adhering to his suit and glittering there. He almost didn’t brush them off the helmet’s faceplate, thinking they would smear like dead fireflies, but they only swirled back up into the air. The air recycling monitors still danced and glowed, the thousand alarms and incident reports silhouetting the latticework of protomolecule that covered the screens. Water was flowing somewhere close by.

  She was in a hazmat analysis node, lying on a bed of the dark thread that spilled out from her spine until it was indistinguishable from a massive fairy-tale cushion of her own flowing hair. Tiny points of blue light glittered on her face, her arms, her breasts. The bone spurs that had been pressing out of her skin had grown into sweeping, almost architectural connections with the lushness around her. Her legs were gone, lost in the tangle of dark alien webs; she reminded Miller of a mermaid who had traded her fins for a space station. Her eyes were closed, but he could see them shifting and dancing under the lids. And she was breathing.

  Miller stood beside her. She didn’t have quite the same face as his imagined Julie. The real woman was wider through the jaw, and her nose wasn’t as straight as he remembered it. He didn’t notice that he was weeping until he tried to wipe the tears away, batting his helmet with a gloved hand. He had to make do with blinking hard until his sight cleared.

  All this time. All this way. And here was what he’d come for.

  “Julie,” he said, putting his free hand on her shoulder. “Hey. Julie. Wake up. I need you to wake up now.”

  He had his suit’s medical supplies. If he needed to, he could dose her with adrenaline or amphetamines. Instead, he rocked her gently, like he had Candace on a sleepy Sunday morning, back when she’d still been his wife, back in some distant, near-forgotten lifetime. Julie frowned, opened her mouth, closed it.

  “Julie. You need to wake up now.”

  She moaned and lifted an ineffectual arm to push him away.

  “Come back to me,” he said. “You need to come back now.”

  Her eyes opened. They weren’t human anymore—the sclera etched with swirls of red and black, the iris the same luminous blue as the fireflies. Not human, but still Julie. Her lips moved soundlessly. And then:

  “Where am I?”

  “Eros Station,” Miller said. “The place isn’t what it used to be. Not even where it used to be, but… ”

  He pressed the bed of filament with his hand, judging it, and then rested his hip at her side like he was sitting on her bed. His body
felt achingly tired and also lighter than it should. Not like low gravity. The unreal buoyancy had nothing to do with the weary flesh.

  Julie tried to talk again, struggled, stopped, tried again.

  “Who are you?”

  “Yeah, we haven’t officially met, have we? My name’s Miller. I used to be a detective for Star Helix Security back on Ceres. Your parents contracted with us, only it was really more a friends-in-high-places thing. I was supposed to track you down, grab you, ship you back down the well.”

  “Kidnap job?” she said. Her voice was stronger. Her gaze seemed more focused.

  “Pretty standard,” Miller said, then sighed. “I kind of cocked it up, though.”

  Her eyes fluttered closed, but she kept talking.

  “Something happened to me.”

  “Yeah. It did.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “No, no, no. Don’t be scared. It’s all right. In an ass-backward kind of way, but it’s all right. Look, right now the whole station is heading back for Earth. Really fast.”

  “I dreamed I was racing. I was going home.”

  “Yeah, we need to stop that.”

  Her eyes opened again. She looked lost, anguished, alone. A tear streaked down from the corner of her eye, glowing blue.

  “Give me your hand,” Miller said. “No, really, I need you to hold something for me.”

  She lifted her hand slowly, seaweed in a soft current. He took his hand terminal, settled it in her palm, pressed her thumb to the dead man’s switch.

  “Just hold that there. Don’t let it up.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Long story, just don’t let up.”

  His suit alarms shrieked at him when he undid his helmet seals. He turned them off. The air was strange: acetate and cumin and a deep, powerful musk that made him think of hibernating animals. Julie watched him as he stripped off his gloves. Right then, the protomolecule was latching on to him, burrowing into his skin and eyes, getting ready to do to him what it had done to everyone on Eros. He didn’t care. He took the hand terminal back and then laced his fingers through hers.