One of the pillars was also a figure—a mech, an insect, or something else entirely. He had the flashbulb memory of a Martian Marine destroying something like it with a grenade, and then being destroyed himself, broken down to complex molecules and used to repair the damage he’d done. He turned his mic back on.
“Um,” he said. “Try not to break anything in here if you can help it.”
He expected Tanaka to snap at him, but Teresa was the one who spoke. “I thought there wasn’t a breathable atmosphere. That’s what the reports said. Noble gas with some volatiles. That’s not what this is.”
Jim checked his suit. She was right. Neon, and more of it than had been here before, and the same trace benzene, but also oxygen. In the suit’s opinion, he could take off his helmet right now and be fine. He didn’t.
“It’s him,” Tanaka said. “The high consul didn’t pack a vac suit, and if there wasn’t something like it in that . . . ship he brought”— she nodded at the air, the walls, the station in general—“he’d make this support him.”
“He didn’t have food and water either,” Teresa said.
Tanaka scowled behind her faceplate. “I think he did. The same way. He’s in here. Holden? Which way to him?”
Jim blinked and turned to Miller.
“No idea,” Miller said. “If Duarte’s a new, well-tuned racing ship, you and me are a couple shipping containers strapped to the top of a reactor. You can say we do the same thing and not be technically wrong, but it’s not like we’re in the same weight class.”
“I don’t know,” Jim said. “I thought you were the tracker.”
Tanaka didn’t answer. Instead she gestured for them to stay back, and used her thrusters to move toward the center of the chamber. Taking point.
Once she was well away, Tanaka went still, as if she was listening to something. Maybe she was. There was enough atmosphere for sound waves to carry, and Jim didn’t know what her suit was capable of. The cathedral shifted with lines of energy and complex electromagnetic fields that he wasn’t sure Tanaka could see, and passageways led out of it in a hundred different directions. For a moment, Jim saw it all as a gargantuan heart that was just about to squeeze down on them. His head spun like he was falling, and a wave of awe swept over him like he was hearing the voice of God, but whispering.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Miller said. “Hold it together. It’s early in the game for you to start getting euphoric attacks on me.”
Jim’s sense of the utter majesty of the station dialed back, and he turned off his mic. “You make it sound like there’s a later in the game.”
Miller’s smile was enigmatic, and it looked a little like sorrow by the time it reached his eyes. “Until death all is life.”
“I feel like I should know who said that.”
“Take a couple deep breaths and rein your head back in. I think we’re leaking a little.”
His gaze cut toward Teresa, and Jim looked over to see her looking back at him with a worried expression.
“Everything’s fine. I’m fine,” he said, then turned his mic back on and repeated it. Teresa nodded, but she didn’t say anything.
“Not sure you sold her,” Miller said.
Tanaka’s voice came back over the open channel. “Heading out. You two come with me. Stay. Close.”
She was already maneuvering across the chamber. Teresa oriented herself more quickly, and jetted off after her, leaving Jim to bring up the rear.
To Jim’s right, something huge shifted. A buzz filled his ears like a swarm of hornets that didn’t register on the suit’s instruments, and something that was like light but also wasn’t flowed through the walls. Adrenaline hit his system, and his heart started tapping anxiously against his ribs. Whatever it was shifted, faded, and moved on without quite entering the chamber. Jim had never seen a whale breaching, but he thought he understood something of how it would feel to be next to one when it did. Neither Tanaka nor Teresa seemed to have noticed anything. He checked his medical stats. According to the suit, he was running a little over thirty-eight degrees. A fever, but not high enough to generate hallucinations.
“No, that was real,” Miller said. “Just a little reminder that we’re out of our depth here.”
“Didn’t need it. Was clear,” Jim said.
“What?” Tanaka answered.
“Nothing,” Jim said. “Just talking to myself.”