“No,” Teresa said. “We can go.” Tanaka shook her head. Jim reoriented himself toward the vast and empty blueness, and found Miller already there below him.
He opened a connection to the Roci. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Naomi replied. She sounded soft and preoccupied. Jim took a quick reading to the station.
“So, we’re about a hundred meters from the surface of the station, and we’re heading in.”
“I’ve got you,” she said, and then something else that he didn’t quite catch.
“Teresa wants you to make sure Muskrat’s in her crash couch in case you have to do any tricky maneuvering.”
“I’ll see to it.”
The great blue wall grew closer. In the corner of his eye, Tanaka was activating and shutting down the gun in her suit’s forearm, extending and retracting the barrel in a combination of fidgeting and threat. Teresa was staring ahead at the station in something like hunger.
Miller, at his side, nodded. “I’ve got something. Look at this.” The blue wall suddenly wasn’t featureless. Lines ran through it, fine as string, making wide, complex spirals that came together and fell apart only to be replaced by new whorls that rose up. It was something between organic and mechanical, and it felt very familiar.
Miller blinked forward, teleporting from one spot to another the way only a hallucination could, waited until the pattern of lines had come to a moment of calm, and reached into the surface. Jim felt it as an effort in his own body, but not anyplace he could identify, like flexing a muscle in a phantom limb. As the spirals re-formed, the place where Miller was stayed empty, then widened. The blue glow darkened in a circle three meters wide as a depression formed, then deepened, then became a tunnel. Tanaka said something, but with her radio off. Jim only knew because he saw her lips move.
“Okay. We’ve got an entrance. We have a way in.”
When Naomi spoke again, her voice was despairing. “We’ll give you as much time as we can.”
“She thinks you’re all dead,” Miller said. “Her and you, and everybody in those ships. Or, I don’t know. If not dead, something worse. I’ve been a mind caught inside these fuckers and not permitted to die. It wasn’t fun. Speaking of which, have I said fuck you very much for dragging me back yet?”
Jim shook his head. He didn’t know what he could say to Naomi that would bring her any comfort. You made it without me before or If we die, we’ll die giving it our best shot or I’ll use whatever time you can give. Nothing fit what he wanted to say. “It’s going to be okay,” he said.
“Good hunting, love.”
“It won’t,” Miller added. “Be okay, I mean.”
Holden killed his mic. “Yeah, I know, fuck me for bringing you back. Now be helpful or shut up.”
And the curve of the tunnel into the station seemed to rise up around him, blotting out the Roci and the Derecho and the star-bright gates. It led deeper into the station, but the direction kept flipping in Jim’s perception between forward and down—moving through a passage or falling down a hole.
“Eyes up,” Tanaka said, back on the open channel. “Holden, what’s your condition?”
“Sorry, what?”
“Your condition. You’re my passkey in this little hellscape. If you go full protomonster on me, I need to know, and I need to know before it happens. So what’s your fucking condition?”
“So,” Miller said. “I feel like there was a conversation about who was lead on this case that you two should have had earlier.”
“I feel fine,” Jim said, then paused, considered. “A little feverish, maybe? But not bad.”
“I want an update every five minutes. Set a timer.”
“If I start feeling worse, I’ll let you know.”
“Yes, you will. Because you’ll be on a timer.”
Miller, floating between them and a half pace back, tried to conceal a grin. Jim weighed the pros and cons of pushing back against Tanaka and set a timer. He set it for seven minutes, though.
The tunnel widened. A surface like some transparent membrane marked its edge, but Jim didn’t feel anything more than the slightest resistance when he moved through it. The tunnel or hole went another ten meters and then into a cathedral-vast chamber. The lines he’d seen on the station’s skin were here too, weaving and reweaving the walls and pillars. A gentle light pulsed from the walls, too diffuse for shadows. There was movement everywhere, and Jim had the sense that if he hadn’t pumped raw protomolecule into his body, he wouldn’t have been aware of most of it. Every surface was alive, trading fluids and tiny objects smaller than sand grains. It was like watching a huge body with all its tissues busy about their individual tasks and the whole of it orchestrated into one massive, unknowable purpose.