Prax pointed at one of the doors.
“This one,” he said. “Look at the hinges. It’s built to allow a gurney through.”
The passageway on the other side was warmer and the air was more humid. It wasn’t quite greenhouse level, but near to it. It opened into a long gallery with five-meter ceilings. Fitted tracks on the ceiling and floor allowed for moving high-mass equipment and containment cages. Bays lined it, each, it seemed, with a research bench not so different from the ones Prax had used as an undergraduate: smart table, wall display, inventory control box, specimen cages. The shouting voices were louder now. He was about to say as much, but Amos shook his head and pointed down the gallery toward one of the farther bays. A man’s voice came from that direction, his tone high and tight and angry.
“… not an evacuation if there’s no place to evacuate to,” he was saying. “I’m not giving up the one bargaining chip I have left.”
“You don’t have that option,” a woman said. “Put the gun down, and let’s talk this through. I’ve been handling you for seven years, and I will keep you in business for seven more, but you do not-”
“Are you delusional? You think there’s a tomorrow after this?”
Amos pointed forward with his shotgun, then began a slow, deliberate advance. Prax followed, trying to be silent. It had been months since he’d heard Dr. Strickland’s voice, but the shouting man could be him. It was possible.
“Let me make this perfectly clear,” the man said. “We have nothing. Nothing. The only hope of negotiation is if we have a card to play. That means them. Why do you think they’re alive?”
“Carlos,” the woman said as Prax came to the corner of the bay. “We can have this conversation later. There’s a hostile enemy force on the base right now, and if you’re still here when they come through that hatch-”
“Yeah,” Amos interrupted, “what happens then?”
The bay was just like the others. Strickland-it was unmistakably Strickland-stood beside a gray metal transport crate that went from the floor to just above his hip. In the specimen cages, a half dozen children lay motionless, sleeping or drugged. Strickland also had a small gun in his hand, pointed at the woman from the video. She was in a harshly cut uniform, the sort of thing that security forces adopted to make their staff look hard and intimidating. It worked for her.
“We came in the other hatch,” Prax said, pointing back over his shoulder.
“Da?”
One syllable, spoken softly. It rang out from the transport cart louder than all the weeks of explosions and gauss rounds and screams of the wounded and dying. Prax couldn’t breathe; he couldn’t move. He wanted to tell them all to put the guns away, to be careful. There was a child. His child.
Strickland’s pistol barked, and some sort of high-explosive round destroyed the woman’s neck and face in a spray of blood and cartilage. She tried to scream once, but with significant portions of her larynx already compromised, what she managed was more of a powerful, wet exhalation. Amos lifted the shotgun, but Strickland-Merrian, whatever his name was-put his pistol on the top of the crate and seemed almost to sag with relief. The woman drifted to the floor, blood and flesh fanning out and falling gently to the ground like a blanket of red lace.
“Thank God you came,” the doctor said. “Oh, thank God you came. I was stalling her as long as I could. Dr. Meng, I can’t imagine how hard this has been for you. I am so, so sorry.”
Prax stepped forward. The woman took another jerking breath, her nervous system firing at random now. Strickland smiled at him, the same reassuring smile he recognized from any number of doctor’s visits over the previous years. Prax found the transport’s control pad and knelt to open it. The side panel clicked as the magnetic locks gave up their grip. The panel rolled up, disappearing into the cart’s frame.
For a terrible, breathless moment, it was the wrong girl. She had the black, lustrous hair, the egg-brown skin. She could have been Mei’s older sister. And then the child moved. It wasn’t much more than shifting her head, but it was all that his brain needed to see his baby in this older girl’s body. All the months on Ganymede, all the weeks to Tycho and back, she’d been growing up without him.
“She’s so big,” he said. “She’s grown so much.”
Mei frowned, tiny ridges popping into being just above her brow. It made her look like Nicola. And then her eyes opened. They were blank and empty. Prax yanked at the release on his helmet and lifted it off. The station air smelled vaguely of sulfur and copper.
Mei’s gaze fastened on him and she smiled.
“Da,” she said again, and put out one hand. When he reached for her, she took his finger in her fist and pulled herself into his arms. He held her to his chest; the warmth and mass of her small body-no longer tiny, only small-was overwhelming. The void between the stars was smaller than Mei was at that moment.
“She’s sedated,” Strickland said. “But her health is perfect. Her immune system has been performing at peak.”
“My baby,” Prax said. “My perfect girl.”
Mei’s eyes were closed, but she smiled and made a small, animal grunt of satisfaction.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am for all this,” Strickland said. “If I had any way of reaching you, of telling you what was happening, I swear to you I would have. This has been beyond a nightmare.”
“So you’re saying they kept you prisoner here?” Amos asked.
“Almost all the technical staff was here against their will,” Strickland said. “When we signed on, we were promised resources and freedom of a kind most of us had only dreamed about. When I started, I thought I could make a real difference. I was terribly, terribly wrong, and I will never be able to apologize enough.”
Prax’s blood was singing. A warmth spread from the center of his body, radiating out to his hands and feet. It was like being dosed with the most perfect euphoric in the history of pharmacy. Her hair smelled like the cheap lab shampoo he’d used to wash dogs in the laboratories of his youth. He stood too quickly, and her mass and momentum pulled him a few centimeters off the floor. His knees and feet were slick, and it took him a moment to realize he’d been kneeling in blood.
“What happened to these kids? Are there others somewhere else?” Amos asked.
“These are the only ones I was able to save. They’ve all been sedated for evacuation,” Strickland said. “But right now, we need to leave. Get off the station. I have to get to the authorities.”
“And why do you need to do that?” Amos asked.
“I have to tell them what’s been going on here,” Strickland said. “I have to tell everyone about the crimes that were committed here.”
“Yeah, okay,” Amos said. “Hey, Prax? You think you could get that?” He pointed his shotgun at something on a nearby crate.
Prax turned to look at Amos. It was almost a struggle to remember where he was and what they were doing.
“Oh,” he said. “Sure.”
Holding Mei against him with one arm, he took Strickland’s gun and trained it on the man.
“No,” Strickland said. “You don’t… you don’t understand. I’m the victim here. I had to do all this. They forced me. She forced me.”
“You know,” Amos said, “maybe I’m coming across as what a guy like you might call working class. Doesn’t mean I’m stupid. You’re one of Protogen’s pet sociopaths, and I ain’t buying any damn thing you’re trying to sell.”
Strickland’s face turned to cold rage like a mask had fallen away.
“Protogen’s dead,” he said. “There is no Protogen.”
“Yeah,” Amos said. “I got the brand name wrong. That’s the problem here.”
Mei murmured something, her hand reaching up behind Prax’s ear to grip his hair. Strickland stepped back, his hands in fists.
“I saved her,” he said. “That girl’s alive because of me. She was slated for the second-generation units, and I pulled her off the project. I pulled all of them. I
f it wasn’t for me, every child here would be worse than dead right now. Worse than dead.”
“It was the broadcast, wasn’t it?” Prax said. “You saw that we might find out, so you wanted to make sure that you had the girl from the screen. The one everyone was looking for.”
“You’d rather I hadn’t?” Strickland said. “It was still me that saved her.”
“Actually, I think that makes it Captain Holden,” Prax said. “But I take your point.”
Strickland’s pistol had a simple thumb switch on the back. He pressed it to turn the safety on.
“My home is gone,” Prax said, speaking slowly. “My job is gone. Most of the people I’ve ever known are either dead or scattered through the system. A major government is saying I abuse women and children. I’ve had more than eighty explicit death threats from absolute strangers in the last month. And you know what? I don’t care.”
Strickland licked his lips, his eyes shifting from Prax to Amos and back again.
“I don’t need to kill you,” Prax said. “I have my daughter back. Revenge isn’t important to me.”
Strickland took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Prax could see the man’s body relax, and something on the dividing line of relief and pleasure appeared at the corners of his mouth. Mei twitched once when Amos’ auto-shotgun fired, but she lay back down against Prax’s shoulder without crying or looking around. Strickland’s body drifted slowly to the ground, the arms falling to the sides. The space where the head had been gouted bright arterial blood against the walls, each pulse smaller than the one before.
Amos shrugged.
“Or that,” Prax said.
“So you got any ideas how we-”
The hatch behind them opened and a man ran in.
“What happened? I heard-”
Amos raised the auto-shotgun. The new man backpedaled, a thin whine of fear escaping from him as he retreated. Amos cleared his throat.
“Any idea how we get these kids out of here?”
Putting Mei back in the transport cart was one of the hardest things Prax had ever done. He wanted to carry her against him, to press his face against hers. It was a primate reaction, the deepest centers of his brain longing for the reassurance of physical contact. But his suit wouldn’t protect her from the radiation or near vacuum of Io’s sulfuric atmosphere, and the transport would. He nestled her gently against two other children while Amos put the other four in a second cart. The smallest of them was still in newborn diapers. Prax wondered if she had come from Ganymede too. The carts glided against the station flooring, only rattling when they crossed the built-in tracks.
“You remember how to get back to the surface?” Amos asked.
“I think so,” Prax said.
“Uh, Doc? You really want to put your helmet back on.”
“Oh! Right. Thank you.”
At the T intersection, half a dozen men in security uniforms had built a barricade, preparing to defend the lab against attack. Because Amos tossed in his grenades from the rear, the cover was less effective than the locals had anticipated, but it still took a few minutes to clear the bodies and the remains of the barricade to let the carts roll through.
There was a time, Prax knew, that the violence would have bothered him. Not the blood or bodies. He’d spent more than enough time doing dissections and even autonomous-limb vivisection to be able to wall off what he was seeing from any particular sense of visceral horror. But that it was something done in anger, that the men and women he’d just seen blown apart hadn’t donated their bodies or tissues, would have affected him once. The universe had taken that from him, and he couldn’t say now exactly when it had happened. Part of him was numb, and maybe it always would be. There was a feeling of loss in that, but it was intellectual. The only emotions he felt were a glowing, transforming relief that Mei was here and alive and a vicious animal protectiveness that meant he would never let her leave his sight, possibly until she left for university.
On the surface, the transports were rougher, the wheels less suited to the uneven surface of the land. Prax followed Amos’ example, turning the boxes around to pull them rather than push. Looking at the vectors, it made sense, but it wouldn’t have occurred to him if he hadn’t seen Amos doing it.
Bobbie was walking slowly toward the Rocinante. Her suit was charred and stained and moving poorly. A clear fluid was leaking down the back.
“Don’t get close to me,” she said. “I’ve got protomolecule goo all over this thing.”
“That’s bad,” Amos said. “You got a way to clean that off?”
“Not really,” she replied. “How’d the extraction go?”
“Got enough kids to start a singing group, but a little shy of a baseball team,” Amos said.
“Mei’s here,” Prax said. “She’s all right.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Bobbie said, and even though she was clearly exhausted, she sounded like she meant it.
At the airlock, Amos and Prax got in and nestled the transports against the back wall while Bobbie stood on the rough ground outside. Prax checked the transport indicators. There was enough onboard air to last another forty minutes.
“All right,” Amos said. “We’re ready.”
“Going for emergency blow,” Bobbie said, and her armored suit came apart around her. It was a strange sight, the hard curves and layers of combat plate peeling themselves back, blooming out like a flower and then falling apart, and the woman, eyes closed and mouth open, being revealed. When she put her hand out for Amos to pull her in, the gesture reminded Prax of Mei seeing him again.
“Now, Doc,” Amos said.
“Cycling,” Prax said. He closed the outer door and started fresh air coming into the lock. Ten seconds later, Bobbie’s chest started to pump like a bellows. Thirty seconds, and they were at seven-eighths of an atmosphere.
“Where do we stand, guys?” Naomi asked as Prax opened the transport. The children were all asleep. Mei was sucking on her first two fingers, the way she had when she was a baby. He couldn’t get past how much older she looked.
“We’re solid,” Amos said. “I say we get the fuck out of here and glass the place.”
“A-fucking-men,” Avasarala’s voice said in the background.
“Copy that,” Naomi said. “We’re prepping for launch. Let me know when you’ve got all our new passengers safely in.”
Prax pulled off his helmet and sat beside Bobbie. In the black sheath of her base garments, she looked like someone just coming back from the gym. She could have been anybody.
“Glad you got your kid back,” she said.
“Thank you. I’m sorry you lost the suit,” he said.
She shrugged.
“At this point, it was mostly a metaphor anyway,” she said, and the inner airlock opened.
“Cycle’s done, Naomi,” Amos said. “We’re home.”
Chapter Fifty-Two: Avasarala
It was over, except that it wasn’t. It never was.
“We’re all friends now,” Souther said. Talking to him without lag was a luxury she was going to miss. “But if we all limp back to our corners, we’re more likely to stay that way. I’m thinking it’s going to be a question of years before either of our fleets are back up to what we were. There was a lot of damage.”
“The children?”
“Processing them. My medical officer’s in communication with a list of doctors who deal with pediatric immune problems. It’s just about finding their parents and getting them all home now.”
“Good,” she said. “That’s what I like to hear. And the other thing?”
Souther nodded. He looked younger in low gravity. They both did. Skin didn’t sag when there was nothing to tug it down, and she could see what he’d looked like as a boy.
“We’ve got transponder locks on a hundred and seventy-one packages. They’re all moving sunward pretty fast, but they’re not accelerating or evading. Pretty much we’re standing back and letting them get close eno
ugh to Mars that disposal is trivial.”
“You sure that’s a good idea?”
“By ‘close,’ I mean still weeks away at current speed. Space is big.”
There was a pause that meant something other than distance.
“I wish you’d ride back on one of ours,” Souther said.
“And be stuck out here for another few weeks with the paperwork? Not going to happen. And besides, heading back with James Holden and Sergeant Roberta Draper and Mei Meng? It has all the right symbolism. Press will eat it up. Earth, Mars, the Outer Planets, and whatever the hell Holden is now.”
“Celebrity,” Souther said. “A nation of its own.”
“He’s not that bad once you get past the self-righteousness. And anyway, this is the ship I’m on, and there’s nothing it’s waiting to repair before it starts its burn. And I’ve already hired him. No one’s giving me any shit about discretionary spending right now.”
“All right,” Souther said. “Then I’ll see you back down the well.”
“See you there,” she said, and cut the connection.
She pulled herself up and launched gently across the ops deck. It would have been easy to push down the crew ladder shaft, flying the way she’d dreamed of as a child. It tempted. In practice, she figured she’d either push too hard and slam into something or else too gently and have air resistance stop her with nothing solid close enough to reach. She used the handholds and pulled herself slowly down toward the galley. Pressure doors opened at her approach and closed behind her with soft hydraulic hisses and metallic bangs. When she reached the crew deck, she heard the voices before she could make out the words, and the words before she saw the people.
“… have to shut it down,” Prax was saying. “I mean, it’s false pretenses now. You don’t think I could be sued, do you?”
“You can always be sued,” Holden said. “Chances are they wouldn’t win.”
“But I don’t want to be sued in the first place. We have to shut it down.”
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