“I’m not going anywhere,” Jim said. “I promise.”
“What the fuck are you two doing?” Tanaka’s voice was fuzzy compared to Teresa’s. Jim made a mental note to check the speakers in his helmet when he got back to the Roci. Probably a loose connection.
“I was having trouble with my mic. And my nose itched.”
“Teresa, put your helmet back on.”
Teresa still had his hand in hers. She looked at Tanaka with a breathtakingly false innocence and pointed to her ears. I can’t hear you. A flash of pure anger passed over Tanaka’s expression, and Jim felt a little hitch of fear. But then she popped her visor open too.
“Be ready to put that back in place on my order,” Tanaka said. Teresa nodded, but didn’t speak.
There was a warmth radiating from the metal walls. He hadn’t felt it before because his skin had been covered, but now it was like the pressure of sunlight on a hot day. Or an oven, just opened. And more than that, there was an eerie sense of pressure. He couldn’t explain it. The air was hardly over a single atmosphere, but some part of him felt an inhumanly powerful force kept in check. Like the station wasn’t floating in vacuum, but at the bottom of an ocean that was bigger than worlds.
“Well, that’s literally true,” Miller said. “That was the trick.”
“What was the trick?”
Miller gestured at the walls, the fireflies, the incomprehensible complexity and strangeness of the station. “It’s where the power comes from. They cracked the universe open, pushed their way in here, and it pushed back. A whole other universe trying to smash this place flat, and it powers the gates, the artifacts. That magnetic ray gun Duarte was playing with. They built stars with it. Broke rules that you can’t break without a different set of physics to strain it through. You can Eve-and-apple it all you want, but this shit right here? This is all made out of original sin.”
“When we find him, you make the approach,” Tanaka said, and Jim didn’t understand for a second what she meant.
“I understand,” Teresa said with a resentment that meant it wasn’t the first time she’d been told.
“I will take care of everything else.”
Teresa answered more slowly this time, but she said the same thing. “I understand.”
The heat was growing more intense, and Jim felt sweat starting to bead on his skin. The metal hall joined three others like it, each of them coming in at an acute angle, to form a single larger passage with a nearly symmetrical hexagonal shape that was disorienting somehow. Like the angles shouldn’t quite all work together. The glow was brighter, and the heat was ramping up toward unpleasant.
Tanaka checked her wristpad. “I think we’re getting close.”
“We better be,” Miller said, “or you three are all going to be lightly broiled before we find our perp.”
Something moved ahead of them. Something bright. Jim thought for a moment he was just imagining it—protomolecule hallucination or heat exhaustion—but Tanaka moved to put herself between them and whatever it was, her armored face shield slamming closed, protecting them out of instinct. The barrel at her forearm popped open.
“Oh,” Miller said. “She doesn’t want to do that.”
“Wait,” Jim said, but Tanaka was moving forward. He followed. Without his visor on, his HUD wasn’t working. His suit chimed to let him know his maneuvering thrusters were nearing half charge and he should turn back to avoid being caught on the float. In other circumstances, it would have seemed really important.
The thing was familiar, metallic blue and insectile. Half a meter taller than Tanaka, and she wasn’t short. It moved with a fast twitch like a clockwork ticking from one position to the next. Now that he thought to look, there were others like it embedded in the walls all around them, so tightly packed that there might not be structure to the walls apart from their bodies.
“Don’t do anything aggressive,” Jim said.
“This is the first thing we’ve seen that looks like a sentry,” Tanaka said, her voice booming out of the suit’s external speakers. “We’re not doubling back.”
She shifted, and it shifted to block her. A feral grin stretched the asymmetry of her cheeks. Miller leaned over beside her, staring into her visor with a look of astonishment. “She really is going to get you all killed, isn’t she?”
“Let me try,” Jim said. “I’m here. I opened the station. At least let me try just shutting it down.”