Holden shrugged. “All right. It was the first contested colony. I went out there to try to mediate between the different claimants, and it all pretty much turned to shit. People shooting each other. Old artifacts coming to life and blowing up the ocean. Local ecosystem trying to mine us for fresh water. And there were death slugs. It wasn’t great.”
“Artifacts coming to life?”
“Yeah,” Holden said, shifting on his little stool. “We had a trace of active protomolecule on the ship. We didn’t know about it. It was trying to report in about the Sol gate being complete, but everything it wanted to report to was dead or turned off. So it started turning things on. Only part of it was this guy I used to know, and … It’s kind of a weird story. Why do you want to know about Ilus?”
“What about the other artifact?”
Holden shook his head, opened his hands. What other artifact?
Singh pulled up the image from the Tempest on his monitor. A bright-black nothingness. He enlarged it and held it out for Holden to see.
“Yeah, the bullet,” Holden said. “It was the thing that turned everything off again. Deactivated the protomolecule.”
Singh felt a chill in his heart. The calmness and innocence of the way Holden said the words was deeper than any threat.
“It did what?”
“The guy I used to know? The dead one? He was a detective, and it was using him to look for where to report in. Only he—the reconstructed version of him—noticed that there was this place that killed off protomolecule activity. He said it was like a bullet that someone had fired to kill off the … the civilization … that … Bring that where I can see it better?”
Singh enlarged the image. Holden blinked. The weariness seemed to fall away from him, the pain of his injuries forgotten. When he spoke, his voice had a firmness and command Singh hadn’t heard there before. “That’s not Ilus. Where is that?”
“It appeared in Sol system. On one of our ships.”
“Oh. Fuck that,” Holden said. “All right, listen. There’s a woman you need to find. Her name’s Elvi Okoye. She was a scientist on Ilus. I don’t know where she is now, but she spent years researching the artifacts there, including that one. She went through it.”
“Went through it to where?”
“Not like a door. Like she carried part of the protomolecule’s network into it, and it killed off the sample. Turned it all inert. And she said it turned her sort of off while it did.”
“Turned her off. Like she lost consciousness?” Singh said. “Lost time?”
“Something like that,” Holden said. “I don’t know. I didn’t go through it. But I did see the thing on the station. I saw what happened to them.”
Singh found he was leaning forward. His blood felt like it was fizzing. And what was more, he saw the same feelings echoed in Holden’s battered face.
“There was a station on Ilus?” he asked.
“No. The one here. The station that controls the ring space. The first time anyone came though the ring, that same dead guy took me to the station. It was part of how the rings turned on. But I saw things there. Like a record of the old civilization? My friend, the dead guy, was looking through it for something, and because he was using me to do it, I saw it all too. Whatever made this? All of this? They were wiped out a long time before you and me got here. Billions of years, maybe. I saw whole systems going dark. I saw them trying to stop it by burning away entire solar systems. And it didn’t work. Whatever they tried to do, it failed, and they were all just wiped away with just their roads and their old machines left for us to stumble across. That thing that showed up on your ship? That’s them. The other them. That’s the thing that killed everything before Earth and Mars were part of the gate network.”
“But why would it appear now?”
Holden choked on a laugh. “Well, I don’t know. Have you people been doing anything different recently?”
Singh felt a little stab of embarrassment. It was a fair point. For the first time, the Tempest had employed the magnetic-field generator in an uncontrolled environment both here and in Sol system. Maybe this was a side effect. Or something else about the battleships built on the platforms. Or …
“Look,” Holden said. “You and me? We’re not friends. We aren’t going to be friends. I will oppose you and your empire to my dying breath. But right now, none of that matters. Whatever built the gates and the protomolecule and all these ruins we’re living in? They were wiped out. And the thing that wiped them out just took a shot at you.”
Singh couldn’t sleep that night. He was exhausted, but whenever he closed his eyes, Holden was there, squinting through his injured eyes, pointing with his broken hand. And the enigma of the bullet, the threat and mystery it represented. They defied him to sleep.
In the middle of his sleep shift, he gave up, put on a robe, and ordered a pot of tea delivered from the commissary. When it arrived, he was already searching through the station records for other documentation of Holden’s ravings. He was hoping to find something to suggest that the man was either insane or playing a game to deflect attention from his terrorism. But file after file, report after report, confirmed him. Even when there was no other witness to what he’d seen, there was at least a history to show that his claims had been consistent.
It would have been so much easier if James Holden were only a madman.
Your empire’s hands look a lot cleaner when you get to dictate where history begins, and what parts of it don’t count.
He knew the story of Laconia’s founding. He’d been there for it, though he’d been a child at the time. The gates to the thirteen hundred worlds had opened, and the probes had gone through. They’d brought back reports of the different systems, the stars and planets, and the stranger things that they’d seen. All humanity had seen the opportunity of new lands, of new worlds to inhabit, but alone of them all Winston Duarte had recognized the terrible danger that expansion would bring. The chaos and violence as humanity pressed out past the limits of civilization. The choke point of the slow zone and the endless wars it would generate. The unanticipated environmental collapses made worse by the lack of a central response. And he alone had the will to solve the problem.
From among all the planets on the far sides of the gates, he chose Laconia because of the orbital construction platforms. He found the live culture of the protomolecule that he could use to harness Laconia’s power. He found Dr. Cortazár to lead the research and development. And he took a third of the Martian Navy as the seed that would grow to become the world tree. The fraction of humanity that would rebuild on Laconia and come forth to bring order to humanity’s chaos. To bring the peace that would last forever. The end of all wars. Singh doubted none of it. Holden’s version wasn’t incompatible, even if it chose a different emphasis. Holden himself had used the protomolecule on Ilus—or been used by it—to turn on the ancient mechanisms. Only he had done it haphazardly, and with terrible results. Duarte had done it carefully, and to glorious effect.
He sipped his tea. It hadn’t quite gone cold, but it wasn’t as warm as he’d expected. Holden was a problem. He was the key to breaking the terrorist network on Medina. He was also the key to the mystery of the thing that had appeared on the Tempest. His was the only report on the visions from the ring station. He was singular in all humanity because he’d bumbled into being in so many of the right places at so many of the right times. If there was one thing Laconia’s history taught, it was the power of the right person at the right moment.
Singh had always known that the history of Laconia and the history of Sol system were connected. He’d never felt those common roots more deeply than now. The sense that his world and Holden’s were part of a single, much vaster story. The makers of the protomolecule were also a part of that larger frame. The things that had killed them, and then vanished.
The things that had returned.
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Amos
I was thinking about the recyclers,” Peaches said. She sounded tired. She always sounded a little tired, but this was more.
“Yeah?” he said.
They were alone in the bunk. She was sitting up, paring her toenails with a little knife he’d found for her. Something about her meds made them thicker and yellow. He knew it was important to her to keep them short, even though she never said anything.
His hands imagined what it would feel like to snap her neck. The tension first, then the grinding feeling of cartilage ripping as it gave way. He saw the look of betrayal in her eyes as the life went out of them. It was as clear as if he’d actually done it.
“The returns aren’t as good as they ought to be,” she said. “We’ve been able to get eighty-eight, ninety percent recovery, but I don’t think we broke eighty-five on the Freehold run.”
“Worth looking at,” Amos said. “You got any suspects?”