Tanaka tapped her suit’s thrusters, pausing in midair and turning back toward him. Teresa, nearer to the wall, caught an irregularity with her fingers and used it like a handhold. Jim slowed and stopped. Miller floated unseen at Tanaka’s side until Jim glanced back, and he was there too.
“When Eros moved, it heated up,” Jim said. “Miller went in looking for a way to stop it. He looked for hot spots. If Duarte’s at the center of this the same way Juliette Mao was running Eros, he’ll be using a lot of energy. Making a lot of waste heat. Even if the map’s wrong, maybe that can help?”
He couldn’t parse Tanaka’s silence, but she paused and thought at least. The itch on Jim’s nose got worse, like something tiny biting him just beside his right nostril. A swirl of blue dots wafted out of one wall, crossed to the other, and vanished again.
“All right,” Tanaka said, and turned to the control panel at her wrist. A moment later, she shook her head. “I don’t have connection to the Falcon.”
Jim checked his system. The only options on it were local— Tanaka and Teresa. As far as his vac suit was concerned, there wasn’t anyone else in the universe.
“We’re too far in,” he said. “Or maybe this place acts like a Faraday cage along with everything else.”
Tanaka lowered her head. In the absence of gravity, it was just an expression of emotion. For the first time, Jim thought of her not as a threat or an enemy, but a person who was caught in the same meat grinder of a situation that he was. The thinness of her face made odd by the injury, the tightness of her mouth, the exhaustion in her eyes.
“Hey, it’s all right,” he said. “We can do this.”
She lifted her eyes, and the woman looking out at him was the one who’d shot Amos’ spine out. Any vulnerability or compassion was lost in a short-leashed hatred and rage. He was pretty sure if she didn’t have a helmet on, she would have spat.
“Follow me,” she said. “Stay close.”
He did.
“It was a good try,” Miller said.
Jim turned off his mic. “You know, I’m starting to think this might not have been a great plan.”
Miller barked out a laugh, and Jim smiled. The coldness in his belly and the numbness in his limbs were the only reminders that the detective was eating him alive from the inside out. Tanaka reached another junction, this time with a shaft that looked like it was the same metallic compound as the station’s exterior. It was the first one like it Jim had seen since they’d come in. She paused, and he thought he saw a thermal scan running in the subtle reflection of her helmet display.
“What happens?” he asked.
“What happens when?”
“When it gets you. The protomolecule. When it finishes taking you over, what happens?”
The detective narrowed his unreal eyes, and for a moment, Jim imagined a glimmer of unearthly blue in them. “You mean what did you let yourself in for?”
“Yeah.”
“Too late to turn back now.”
“I know. I’m just not feeling great.”
“You want bullshit happy mouth noises, or the truth.”
“Bullshit happy mouth noises.”
“It’s great,” Miller said without missing a beat. “It’s having a long, restful sleep full of interesting, vivid dreams.”
A cramp ran through Jim’s gut, sharp as a screwdriver. “You’re right. That does sound great,” he said through clenched teeth. “I really think I’m going to like that.”
“This way,” Tanaka said, going into the metal shaft. “Try to keep up.”
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.