Cibola Burn

Chapter Forty-Eight: Holden

Life at the naval academy had been so stressful for Holden that at the end of his first term he’d celebrated by going to a party and drinking until he passed out for twenty hours. It had been his first lesson on the difference between unconsciousness and sleep. They might seem the same, but they weren’t. After twenty hours, he’d woken feeling totally unrested, and the morning PT the next day had almost killed him.

Riding on Miller’s material transfer network, it was difficult to get any sense of the passage of time. The first time Holden came to, his hand terminal told him ten hours had passed. He could tell he’d spent it unconscious rather than sleeping because he felt exhausted and sick. His throat hurt, his eyes burned like they’d been sandpapered, and all of his muscles ached. It almost felt like a flu, except that the antivirals he took every three months made that pretty much impossible. He turned on his armor’s diagnostic system, and it gave him a series of shots. He had no idea what. He drank half the water in his canteen and closed his eyes.

It was nine hours later when he woke again, and this time he was almost rested, the soreness in his throat gone. At some point he’d passed the threshold from unconsciousness to sleep, and his body was rewarding him for it. He stretched out on the metal floor until his joints popped, then drank the rest of his water.

“Wakey wakey,” Miller said. He slowly appeared in the darkness, surrounded by a halo of blue light, as if someone were turning up his dimmer switch.

“I’m awake,” Holden replied, then rattled his empty canteen at Miller. “But you stuffed me into this cattle car so fast I wasn’t able to get supplies. Gonna get pretty thirsty if there isn’t, you know, an alien drinking fountain for something.”

“We’ll see. But that’s actually the least of our problems right now.”

“Says the guy who doesn’t drink.”

“There’s a damaged piece of the system ahead,” Miller continued, “and I’d hoped we’d be able to get around it. No such luck. We’re on foot from here.”

“Your fancy alien train is broken?”

“My fancy alien material transfer system has been sitting unused for over a billion years and half the planet just exploded. Your ship was built less than a decade ago and you can barely keep the coffee pot running.”

“You are a sad, bitter little man,” Holden said as he climbed to his feet and pushed against the train door. It didn’t open.

“Hold on,” Miller said and vanished.

Holden turned the brightness up on his terminal and spent a few minutes checking over his equipment while he waited. Miller had grabbed him right after his final patrol around the settlement, which meant he had his armor, his pistol, and quite a few magazines of ammunition, all of which was pretty likely to be useless. He also had one empty canteen, no food, and a suit medical pack that was running low on almost everything, all of which would have been much handier to have fully stocked. When his body finally woke up enough to be hungry, he expected to be quite willing to trade his gun in for a sandwich. He didn’t think the alien structures would have many vending machines.

Ten minutes passed, and his anxiety shifted to impatience. He sat down again and tried to call the Rocinante on his hand terminal, but got a failed connection message. He tried Elvi, Lucia, and Amos. All failed. Whatever the alien subway was made out of, it was blocking his signals to the hub on the Roci. It had to be that. The alternative was that the Roci wasn’t working, and that opened up too many bad scenarios. He pulled up a mindless pattern-matching game and played that for a while, until the terminal gave him a low-battery warning and he turned it off.

After an hour passed, he started to get nervous. He wasn’t claustrophobic, and he’d spent most of his adult life in tiny cabins on space ships, but that didn’t mean he relished the idea of dying alone in a small metal box deep under the earth. He kicked the container’s door a few times and shouted to Miller, but got no reply.

Which was, in its own way, fairly alarming.

The container he’d been sleeping in during the long trip north was empty. The only tools he had with him were used for repairing his armor and weapons. There was nothing that could cut through the metal or bend it. He kicked the door again, this time putting enough effort into it that it hurt his shins. It didn’t move at all.

“Huh,” he said out loud. If Miller had brought him all this way just to let him die in an abandoned train car, it was the longest prank setup in history.

Holden was doing a mental inventory of everything he was carrying, trying to figure out if any combination of things might make an explosive powerful enough to blow the door off, and carefully ignoring the fact that any such explosion would probably liquefy any biology inside the small metal compartment, when a loud metallic groan came from outside the cart that rose in pitch to a shriek. The compartment shuddered and rocked. A long series of powerful hammering sounds assaulted him. Then another metallic scream that grew to deafening levels.

The door to the compartment vanished, torn from the container in one massive blow. On the other side stood a nightmare.

At first glance, it looked like a massive collection of appendages and cutting tools. It stood on six of its limbs, and waved four others in the air like a crustacean made of steel and knives. Whipping through the air around the heavier cutting arms were a dozen or more tentacles of what looked like black rubber. As he watched, two of the tentacles gripped the inside edges of the doorway and bent them out with fearsome strength.

He pulled his pistol, but didn’t point it at the thing. It felt very small and inadequate in his hand.

“Put that away,” the monster said in Miller’s voice. “You’ll put your eye out.”

Holden hadn’t thought much about the fact that every time he heard Miller’s voice over the last year, it had been a protomolecule-induced hallucination. But at the sound of the detective’s voice in the air, actual vibrations moving through the atmosphere and hitting his eardrums, the strangeness of it made him feel a little lightheaded.

“Is that you?” Holden asked in what he was pretty sure was the new universal winner for stupid questions.

“Depends what you mean,” the Miller-bot said and backed away from the opening. It was surprisingly quiet for such a huge metallic monster. “I’m able to get into the local hardware, and this thing was in pretty good shape for having missed its three-month warranty check by a thousand million years or so.”

Miller did something, and suddenly Holden could see the detective in his rumpled suit standing where the monster had been. He shrugged and smiled apologetically. But even as Holden saw a projection of Miller, superimposed over it he saw the robot. It was doing the same shrug, though instead of hands it used two massive serrated crab claws. It would have been comic if it hadn’t come with a splitting headache.

“One or the other,” Holden said, squeezing his eyes shut. “I can’t see both things. It breaks my brain.”

“Sorry. No problem,” Miller replied, and when Holden opened his eyes again only the robot was there. “Come on, we have a lot of ground to cover.”

Holden hopped out of the material transfer container and onto a flat metal floor. Various sections of the Miller-bot’s carapace glowed with a faint light, and unlike the blue light that had always accompanied the Miller ghost, it actually illuminated the space around it.

Pointing at one glowing limb, Holden said, “Can you make that brighter?”

In answer, all of the glowing sections of the robot intensified until the tunnel was as bright as noon. The reason for the material transfer cart’s stoppage became apparent. A couple dozen meters ahead, the metal tunnel was blown apart and filled with rocks and debris.

Reading his mind, Miller said, “Yeah. Not everything is handling the reboot well. Power node for the mag-lev woke up bad and blew itself up. Only it’s not exactly mag-lev. Close enough, though, you can get the picture.”

“Can we get past it?”

“Well, we can’t repair the track, but I can get you out. Making passages,” the Miller-bot said, waving one massive claw in the air, “is what this thing’s for. He used to dig and maintain these tunnels. Hop on.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“No, seriously, climb on. This guy can move faster than you can on foot.”

“Miller,” Holden said. “You are made entirely out of cutting edges and pinch points.”

One of the black tentacles twisted around, looking over the robot’s carapace carefully. “Hold on,” Miller said, and with a hum and a few metallic clanks, the torso of the robot twisted into a new configuration, leaving a wide flat spot on its back. “There you go.”

Holden hesitated for a moment, then climbed up one of the robot’s legs and onto its back. The Miller-bot trundled forward to the damaged section of tunnel and the four big forward limbs went to work, tearing out the twisted metal of the tunnel walls and clearing the earth and stone that had filled the space. The machine worked with speed, precision, and a terrifying casual strength.

“Hey Miller,” Holden said, watching the robot peel up a two-meter section of the tunnel’s metal flooring and rapidly cut it into tiny pieces. “We’re still friends, right?”

“What? Ah, I see. When I’m a ghost, you yell at me, tell me to get lost, say you’ll find a way to kill me. Now I’m wearing the shell of an invincible wrecking machine and you want to be buddies again?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Holden replied.

“Nah, we’re good.”

He punctuated the words with one last massive blow that shattered a two-ton boulder into rubble. By hunching down on his six legs, Miller was able to squeeze through a small opening in the tunnel blockage. Holden lay down flat on the robot’s back, a jagged piece of the tunnel roof passing less than three centimeters from his face.

“Clear sailing from here,” Miller said, “but the mag-lev’s dead after this. No more trains.”

“We have any better idea what we’re looking for?”

“Only in general terms. About the time one-celled organisms on Earth were starting to think about maybe trying photosynthesis, something turned this whole damned planet off. Took it off the grid, and killed everything high enough up the food chain to have an opinion. If I’m right, the thing that did that’s not entirely gone. Every time something reaches into this one particular place, it dies.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Holden said.

“Don’t be,” Miller said. “It’s what we’re hoping for. Now buckle up. We’re going to try and make up some lost time.”

The robot bolted off down the tunnel, its six legs a blur of motion. Even moving at fairly high speed, the ride on its back was very smooth.

Holden surprised himself by falling asleep again.

He woke to something cold and rubbery touching his cheek.

“Stop it,” he said, waving one arm at the thing.

“Wake up,” Miller said, the detective’s voice rumbling though the robot’s carapace.

“Shit,” Holden said, sitting up suddenly and wiping saliva off the side of his face. “I’d forgotten I was here.”

“Yeah, I’d say a week of no sleep and too many amphetamines broke you a little,” Miller said. “You went on quite the bender.”

“Only without the fun.”

“I’ve been on a few myself,” Miller said and added a strange metallic laugh. “None of them are fun. But we’re about to hit the processing station, so get awake.”

“What should we be expecting?”

“I’ll tell you when I see it,” Miller said.

Holden pulled out his pistol and checked the magazine and chamber. It was ready to go. It felt a little like playing grown-up. Anything that the Miller-bot monstrosity couldn’t handle wasn’t going to be stopped by a few shots from his sidearm. But, like so many things in life, when you come to the spot where you’re supposed to do the rituals, you do them. Holden slid the pistol back into its holster but kept one hand on it.

It took him a minute to see it, but a point of light appeared ahead in the tunnel and then grew. Not reflected light from the robot, but something glowing. Holden felt a rush of relief. He’d traveled longer and farther than he knew in the small metal tunnels of the transfer system. He was ready to go outside.

The tunnel ended in a complex maze of new passages. A routing station, Holden guessed, where the arriving material was sent off to its various destinations. The walls were all of the same dull alloy as the tunnel. What machinery was visible in the cramped space was inset into the walls and flush with them.

The Miller-bot paused for a moment, its tentacles waving at the tunnel choices. Holden could picture Miller standing still at the junction, tapping one finger on his chin while he decided which path to take. And then, suddenly, he actually could see Miller overlapping the robot. The headache returned with a vengeance.

“That one was kind of your fault,” Miller said. “It’s an interactive system.”

“Do we have any idea where we’re going?”

Miller answered by trundling off down one of the many new tunnels. A few seconds later, they’d exited into a cavernous new space. It took Holden a few moments to realize that it was all still artificial. The room they entered felt too big to be a construct. It was like standing at the core of the world and looking up for the crust.

All around stood vast silent machines. Some were moving, twitching. They were recognizably designs that the protomolecule favored. They had the same half-mechanism, half-organic look of everything else he’d seen them build. Here, a massive system of tubes and pistons rising from a gantry twisting into whorls like a nautilus shell. There, an appendage coming from the ceiling, half again as long as the Rocinante, and ending in a nine-fingered manipulating hand the size of Miller’s robot. Light poured into the space seemingly from everywhere at once, giving the air a gentle golden hue. The ground was vibrating. Holden could feel the soft pulses through the robot’s shell.

“We’re in a lot of trouble, aren’t we?” Holden asked, breathless.

“Nah,” Miller said, rotating the robot to test the air in every direction with its tentacles. “This is just initial material sorting and reclamation. Not even to the processing center.”

“You could park a battleship in this room.”

“It’s not for show,” Miller said, then the robot began scuttling toward a distant wall. “This is the point of this planet.”

“Huh,” Holden said. He found he was missing all of his other words. “Huh.”

“Yeah. So, as far I can figure it, there are minerals native to this system that are fairly rare, galactically speaking.”

“Lithium.”

“That’s one,” Miller agreed. “This planet is a gas station. Process the ore, refine it, send it down to the power plants, then beam the collected energy out.”

“To where?”

“To wherever. There are lots of worlds like this one, and they all fed the grid. Not the rings, though. I still don’t know how they powered those.”

The robot moved with machine speed toward a distant wall, and a section of the structure slid away. It left an opening the size of a repair shuttle, and more lighted machinery beyond. Some of the giant devices were moving with articulations more biological than mechanical. They pulsed, contracted, rippled. Nothing so prosaic and common as a gear or a wheel in sight.

“Are we moving through a fusion reactor right now?” Holden asked, Naomi’s question about radiation exposure on his mind.

“Nope. This is just ore processing. The reactors are all in that chain of islands on the other side of the world. These guys built for flexibility and redundancy.”

“You know,” Holden said, “one of the geologists told me this planet has been heavily modified. All of that was done just to turn it into a power station?”

“Why not? They didn’t need it for anything else. Not a particularly good planet, rare metals aside. And be glad they did. You think you can have an underground rail system last two billion years on any planet with tectonic action?”

Holden was quiet for a moment, riding the Miller-bot through the material refining plant as it throbbed around him. “It’s too much,” he finally said. “That level of control over your environment is too much. I can’t get my brain around it. What could kill these guys?”

“Something worse.”

The Miller-bot ducked under what looked like a conveyor system made of metal mesh wrapped around a pulsing musculature. It was clicking and groaning as part of the mechanism tried to move while the rest of it remained frozen. Holden had a sudden, vivid memory of a goat he’d found as a child. It’d had one broken leg wrapped in a barbed-wire fence, the other three feebly pushing at the ground to free it.

“So there’s the thing,” the Miller-bot said, waiving its claws around at the machinery, “this right here was the point of this place. It’s why this planet exists. And right around here somewhere is a blank spot in the planetary network. A place we can’t touch.”

“So?”

“So, whatever’s in that blank spot, it’s not from around here. And if it’s a bullet, then whoever did this knew to shoot for the heart.”