Текст книги "Abaddon's Gate"
Автор книги: James S.A. Corey
Соавторы: Daniel Abraham
Жанр:
Научная фантастика
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 31 страниц)
“You! Who the hell are you?”
Melba turned. The new man wore a navy uniform. His right leg was in an inflatable pressure cast. The foot sticking out the end was a bluish purple, and his breath was labored in a way that made her think of pneumonia, of internal bleeding.
“Melba Koh. Civilian electrochemical tech off the Cerisier.”
“Who do you answer to?”
“Mikelson’s my group supervisor,” she said, struggling to remember the man’s name. She had only met him once, and he hadn’t left much of an impression on her.
“My name’s Nikos,” the broken-legged man said. “You work for me now. Come on.”
He pushed off more gracefully than should have been possible. She followed him a little too fast and had to grab a handhold to keep from running into his back. He led her through a long passageway into engineering. A huge array of thin metal and ceramic sheets stood at one wall, warnings in eight languages printed along its side. Scorch marks drew circles on the outermost plate, and the air stank of burnt plastic and something else. A hole two feet across had been punched through the center. A human body was still in it, held in place by shards of metal.
“You know what that is, Koh?”
“Air processing,” she said.
“That’s the primary atmosphere processing unit,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken. “And it’s a big damn problem. Secondary processor’s still on fire just at the moment, and the tertiary backups will get us through for about seven hours. Everyone on my team is busted or dead, so you’re about to rebuild this one. Understand?”
I can’t do that, she thought. I’m not really an electrochemical technician. I don’t know how to do this.
“I’llc get my tools.”
“Don’t let me stop you,” he said. “If I find someone can help out, I’ll send ’em your way.”
“That would be good,” she said. “What about you? Are you all right? Can you help?”
“At a guess? Crushed pelvis, maybe something worse going on in my gut. Keep passing out a little,” he said with a grin. “But I’m high as a kite on the emergency speed, and there’s work. So hop to.”
She pushed off. Her throat was tight, and she could feel her mind starting to shut down. Overstimulation. Shock. She made her way through the carnage and wreckage to the storage bay where the toolboxes from the Cerisierwere. Her card unlocked them. One had shattered, the remains of a testing deck floating in the air, green ceramic shards and bits of gold wire. Ren was there, his coffin toolbox shifted in place despite the electromagnetic clamps. For a moment, the dream of the fire washed over her. She wondered if she might still be sleeping, the wave of death just part of the same blackness in her own brain. She put her hand on Ren’s box, half expecting to feel him knocking back. A sudden vertigo washed through her, and the sense that she and the ship were falling, that it would land on her. Crush her. All the blood and all the terror, every dead person held in place to keep the corpses from floating, they all began here. Every sin she’d committed, backward and forward in time, had its center in the bones beneath her hand.
“Stop,” she said. “Just stop.”
She took her tool chest, the real one, and sped back to engineering and the shattered air processing controller. Nikos had found two other people, a man in civilian dress and an older woman in naval uniform.
“You’re Koh?” the woman said. “Good, grab his legs.”
Melba set her toolbox against the deck and activated the magnets, then pushed over to the hole in the atmosphere processor. The machine had been loosened from its housing, giving the body a little more room to move. Melba put her hands on the dead man’s thighs, wadding the cloth of his trousers in her fists. She braced herself against the metal siding of the unit.
“Ready?” the man asked.
“Ready.”
The woman counted down from three, and Melba pulled. For a long moment, she thought the corpse wouldn’t come out, but then something tore, the vibrations of it transferring through to her hands. The body slid free.
“Score one for the good guys,” Nikos said from across the bay. His face was developing an ashy gray tone. Like he was dying. She wished he would go to the medical bays, but they were probably swamped. He could die here doing his work, or there waiting for an open bay. “Clear him away. Got him out, we don’t need him drifting back.”
Melba nodded, took a firm grip, and pushed off on a trajectory that would land them on the far bulkhead. The back of the corpse’s head had been crushed almost flat, but death had come so swiftly, there was very little blood. At the wall, she secured him with a spray of foam and held him for a moment while it set. The dead man’s face was close to hers. She could see the whiskers he’d missed when he’d shaved. The brown of his empty eyes. She felt a sudden urge to kiss him and then pushed the impulse away, disgusted.
From his uniform, he’d been an officer. Lieutenant, maybe. The white identity card on the lanyard around his neck had a picture of him looking solemn. She took it in her fingers. Not lieutenant. Lieutenant commander. Lieutenant Commander Stepan Arsenau, who would never have come through the Ring if it weren’t for her. Who wouldn’t have died here. She tried to feel guilt, but there wasn’t room for him inside of her. She had too much blood already.
She was reaching out to tuck his card back in place when the small voice in the back of her mind said, I bet he could get an EVA pack with this. Melba blinked. Her mind seemed to click back into focus, and she looked around her, the last wisps of dream or delirium leaving her mind. She had access to the equipment she needed. The ship was in chaos. This was it. This was the opportunity she’d been waiting for. She plucked the card off its lanyard and slipped it in her pocket, then looked around nervously.
No one had noticed.
She licked her lips.
“I’m going to need something to crack this,” the young man was saying. “The bolt head’s sheared round. I can’t get it out.”
The older woman swore and turned to her.
“Got anything that’ll do the trick?”
“Not here,” Melba said. “I have an idea where I could get something to drill it out, though.”
“Move fast. We don’t want this place gettin’ stuffy.”
“Okay. You guys do what you can. I’ll be right back,” Melba lied.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Anna
Eschatology had always been Anna’s least favorite study of theology. When asked about Armageddon, she’d tell her parishioners that God Himself had been pretty circumspect on the topic, so it didn’t do much good to worry about it. Have faith that God will do what’s best, and avoiding His vengeance against the wicked should be the least compelling reason for worship.
But the truth was that she’d always had a deeply held disagreement with most futurist and millennialist interpretations. Not the theology itself, necessarily, since their guess at what the end times prophecies really meant was as good as anyone else’s. Her disagreement was primarily with the level of glee over the destruction of the wicked that sometimes crept into the teachings. This was especially true in some millennialist sects that filled their literature with paintings of Armageddon. Pictures of terrified people running away from some formless fiery doom that burned their world down behind them, while smug worshipers—of the correct religion, of course—watched from safety as God got with the smiting. Anna couldn’t understand how anyone could see such a depiction as anything but tragic.
She wished she could show them the Thomas Prince.
She’d been reading when it happened. Her hand terminal had been propped on her chest with a pillow behind it, her hands behind her head. A three-tone alarm had sounded a high-g alert, but it was late to the party. She was already being mashed into her crash couch so hard that she could feel the plastic of the base right through twenty centimeters of impact gel. It seemed to last forever, but it was probably just a few seconds. Her hand terminal had skidded down her chest, suddenly heavier than Nami the last time she’d picked her daughter up. It left a black-and-blue trail of bruises up her breastbone and slammed into her chin hard enough to split the skin. The pillow mashed into her abdomen like a ten-kilo sandbag, filling her mouth with the taste of stomach acid.
But worst of all was the pain in her shoulders. Both arms had snapped back flat against the bed, temporarily dislocating them. When the endless seconds of deceleration were over, both joints popped back into place with a pain even worse than when they’d come out. The gel of the couch, stressed beyond its design specifications, hadn’t gripped her the way it was meant to. Instead, it rebounded back into its prior shape and launched her in slow motion toward the ceiling of her cabin. Trying to put her hands in front of her sent bolts of agony through her shoulders, so she drifted up and hit the ceiling with her face. Her chin left a smear of blood on the fabric-covered foam.
Anna was a gentle person. She’d never in her life been in a fight. She’d never been in a major accident. The worst pain she’d ever felt before was childbirth, and the endorphins that had followed had mostly erased it from her memory. To suddenly be so hurt in so many different places at once left her dazed and with a sort of directionless anger. It wasn’t fair that a person could be hurt so much. She wanted to yell at the crash couch that had betrayed her by letting this happen, and she wanted to punch the ceiling for hitting her in the face, even though she’d never thrown a punch in her life and could barely move her arms.
When she could finally move without feeling light-headed she went looking for help and found that the corridor outside her room was worse.
Just a few meters from her door, a young man had been crushed. He looked as though a malevolent giant had stomped on him and then ground him under its heel. The boy was not only smashed, but torn and twisted in ways that barely left him recognizable as a human. His blood splashed the floor and walls and drifted around his corpse in red balls like grisly Christmas ornaments.
Anna yelled for help. Someone yelled back in a voice filled with liquid and pain. Someone from farther down the corridor. Anna carefully pushed off the doorjamb of her room and drifted toward the voice. Two rooms down, another man was half in and half out of his crash couch. He must have been in the process of getting out of bed when the deceleration happened, and everything from his pelvis down was twisted and broken. His upper torso still lay on the bed, arms waving feebly at her, his face a mask of pain.
“Help me,” he said, and then coughed up a glob of blood and mucus that drifted away in a red-and-green ball.
Anna drifted up high enough to push the comm panel on the wall without using her shoulder. It was dead. All the lights were the ones she’d been told came on in emergency power failures. Nothing else seemed to be working.
“Help me,” the man said again. His voice was weaker and filled with even more of a liquid rasp. Anna recognized him as Alonzo Guzman, a famous poet from the UN’s South American region. A favorite of the secretary-general, someone had told her.
“I will,” Anna said, not even trying to stop the tears that suddenly blinded her. She wiped her eyes on her shoulder and said, “Let me find someone. I’ve hurt my arms, but I’ll find someone.”
The man began weeping softly. Anna pushed back into the corridor with her toes, drifting past the carnage to find someone who wasn’t hurt.
This was the part the millennialists never put in their paintings.
They loved scenes of righteous Godly vengeance on sinful mankind. They loved to show God’s chosen people safe from harm, watching with happy faces as they were proved right to the world. But they never showed the aftermath. They never showed weeping humans, crushed and dying in pools of their own fluids. Young men smashed into piles of red flesh. A young woman cut in half because she was passing through a hatchway when catastrophe hit.
This was Armageddon. This is what it looked like. Blood and torn flesh and cries for help.
Anna reached an intersection of corridors and ran out of strength. Her body hurt too badly to continue. And in all four directions, the corridor floors and walls were covered with the aftermath of violent death. It was too much. Anna drifted in the empty space for a few minutes, and then she gently floated to the wall and stuck to it. Movement. The ship was moving now. Very slow, but enough to push her to the wall. She pushed away from it and floated again. Not still accelerating, then.
She recognized that her interest in the relative movements of the ship was just her mind trying to find a distraction from the scene around her, and started crying again. The idea that she might never come home from this trip crashed in on her. For the first time since coming to the Ring, she saw a future in which she never held Nami again. Never smelled her hair. Never kissed Nono, or climbed into a warm bed beside her and held her close. The pain of those things being ripped away from her was worse than anything physical she’d suffered. She didn’t wipe away the tears that came, and they blinded her. That was fine. There was nothing here she wanted to see.
When something grabbed her from behind and spun her around, she tensed, waiting for some new horror to reveal itself.
It was Tilly.
“Oh, thank God,” the woman said, hugging Anna tight enough to send new waves of pain through her shoulders. “I went to your room and there was blood on the walls and you weren’t there and someone was dead right outside your doorc”
Unable to hug back, Anna just put her cheek against Tilly’s for a moment. Tilly pushed her out to arm’s length, but didn’t let go. “Are you okay?” She was looking at the gash on Anna’s chin.
“My face is fine. Just a little cut. But my arms are hurt. I can barely move them. We need to get help. Alonzo Guzman’s in his room, and he’s hurt. Really hurt. Do you know what happened?”
“I haven’t met anyone yet who knows,” Tilly said, rotating Anna first one way, then the other, looking her over critically. “Move your hands. Okay. Bend your elbows.” She felt Anna’s shoulders. “They’re not dislocated.”
“I think they were for a second,” Anna said after the gasp of pain Tilly’s touch brought. “And everything else hurts. But we have to hurry.”
Tilly nodded and pulled a red-and-white backpack off one shoulder. When she opened it, it was filled with dozens of plastic packages with tiny black text on them. Tilly pulled a few out, read them, put them back. After several tries, she stripped the packaging off of three small injection ampules.
“What is that?” Anna said, but Tilly just jabbed her with all three in answer.
Anna felt a rush of euphoria wash over her. Her shoulders stopped hurting. Everythingstopped hurting. Even her fear about never seeing her family again seemed a distant and minor problem.
“I was sleeping when it happened,” Tilly said, tossing the empty ampules into the first aid pack. “But I woke up feeling like a forklift had run over me. I think my ribs were popped out of place. I could barely breathe. So I dug up this pack from the emergency closet in my room.”
“I didn’t think to look there,” Anna said, surprised she hadn’t. She had a vague memory of being disoriented by pain, but now she felt great. Better than ever before. And sharp. Hyper-aware. Stupid not to think of the emergency supplies. This being, after all, an emergency. She wanted to slap herself on the forehead for being so stupid. Tilly was holding her arms again. Why was she doing that? They had work to do. They had to find the medics and send them after the poet.
“Hey, kiddo,” Tilly said, “takes a second for that first rush to ease down a bit. I spent a full minute trying to resuscitate a pile of red paste before I realized how wired I was.”
“What is this?” Anna asked, moving her head from side to side, which made the edges of Tilly’s face blurry.
Tilly shrugged. “Military-grade amphetamines and painkillers, I’m guessing. I gave you an anti-inflammatory too. Because what the hell.”
“Are you a doctor?” Anna asked, marveling at how smartTilly was.
“No, but I can read the directions on the package.”
“Okay.” Anna nodded, her face serious. “Okay.”
“Let’s go find someone who knows what’s going on,” Tilly said, pulling Anna down the corridor with her.
“And after, I need to find my people,” Anna said, letting herself be pulled.
“I may have given you too much. Nono and Nami are at home, in Moscow.”
“No, my people. My congregation. Chris and that other guy and the marine. She’s angry, but I think I can talk to her. I need to find them.”
“Yeah,” Tilly said. “May have overdosed you a bit. But we’ll find them. Let’s find help first.”
Anna thought of the poet and felt her tears threatening to return. If she was sad, maybe the initial rush of the drugs was wearing off a little. She found herself regretting that for a moment.
Tilly stopped at a printed deck map on the wall. It was right next to a black and unresponsive network panel. Of course military ships would have both, Anna thought. They were built with the expectation that things would stop working when the ship got shot. That thought made Anna sad too. Some distant part of her consciousness recognized the drug-fueled emotional roller coaster she was on, but was powerless to do anything about. She started weeping again.
“Security station.” Tilly tapped on a spot on the map, then yanked Anna down the corridor after her. They made two turns and wound up at a small room filled with people, guns, and computers that seemed to still be working. A middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair and a grim expression on his face pointedly ignored them. The other four people in the room were younger, but equally uninterested in their arrival.
“Get 35C open first,” the older man said to the two young men floating to his left. He pointed at something on a map. “There were a dozen civvies in there.”
“EMT?” one of the young men asked.
“Don’t have them to spare, and that galley doesn’t have crash couches. Everyone in there is pasta sauce, but the El Tee says look anyway.”
“Roger that,” the young man replied, and he and his partner pushed out of the room past Anna and Tilly, barely glancing at them as they went.
“You two do a corridor sweep,” the older man said to the other two young sailors in the room. “Tags if you can find them, pictures and swabs if you can’t. Everything sent to OPCOM on red two one, got me?”
“Aye-aye,” one of them said, and they floated out of the room.
“The man in 295 needs help,” Anna said to the security officer. “He’s hurt badly. He’s a poet.”
He tapped something onto his desk terminal and said, “Okay, he’s in the queue. EMTs will get there as soon as they can. We’re setting up a temporary emergency area in the officers’ mess. I suggest you two ladies get there double time.”
“What happened?” Tilly asked, and gripped a handhold on the wall like she meant to stay a while. Anna grabbed on to the nearest thing she could find, which turned out to be a rack of weapons.
The security officer looked Tilly up and down once, and seemed to come to the conclusion that giving her what she wanted was the easiest solution. “Hell if I know. We decelerated to a dead stop in just a shade under five seconds. The damage and injuries are all high-g trauma. Whatever grabbed us only grabbed the skin of the ship and didn’t give a shit about the stuff inside.”
“So the slow zone changed?” Tilly was asking. Anna looked over the guns in the rack, her emotions more under control, but her mind was still racing. The rack was full of pistols of various kinds. Big blocky ones with large barrels and fat magazines. Smaller ones that looked like the kind you saw on cop shows. And in a special rack all their own, tasers like the one she’d had on Europa. Well, not really like it. These were military models. Gray and sleek and efficient-looking, with a much bigger power pack than hers. In spite of their non-lethal purpose, they managed to appear dangerous. Her old taser at home had looked like a small hair dryer.
“Don’t touch those,” the security officer said. Anna hadn’t even realized she was reaching for one until he said it.
“That could mean a damn lot of casualties,” Tilly said. Anna had the feeling she was reentering the conversation after having missed a lot of it.
“Hundreds on the Prince,” the security officer said. “And we weren’t going anywhere near the old speed limit. Some of the ships were. We get no broadcasts from those now.”
Anna looked at the various terminals working in the office around her. Damage reports and security feeds and orders. Anna couldn’t understand much of them. They used a lot of acronyms and numbers for things. Military jargon. One small monitor was displaying pictures of people. Anna recognized James Holden in one, then another version of him with a patchy beard. Wanted posters? But she didn’t recognize any of the other people until the sculpture of the girl that Naomi, Holden’s second-in-command, had blamed for the attack.
“Maybe it was the space girl,” Anna said before she’d realized she was going to. She still felt stoned, and suppressed an urge to giggle.
The security officer and Tilly were both staring at her.
Anna pointed at the screen. “Julie Mao, the girl from Eros. The one the Rocinanteblamed. Maybe she did this.”
Both the security officer and Tilly turned to look at the screen. A few seconds later the image of Julie the space girl disappeared and was replaced by someone Anna didn’t recognize.
“Someone’s going to get James Holden in an interrogation room for a few hours, and then we’ll have a much better idea of where to put the blame.”
Tilly just laughed.
“Is that who they blamed?” she said when she’d finished. “That isn’t Julie Mao. And there’s no way Claire’s out here.”
“Claire?” Anna and the officer said at the same time.
“That’s Claire. Clarissa Mao. Julie’s little sister. She’s living on Luna with her mother, last I heard. But that’s definitely not Julie.”
“Are you sure?” Anna said. “Because the executive officer from the Rocinantesaid—”
“I dandled both those girls on my knee back in the day. The Maos used to be regular guests at our house in Baja. Brought the kids out during the summers to swim and eat fish tacos. And that one is Claire, not Julie.”
“Oh,” said Anna as her drug-enhanced mind ran out the entire plot. The angry girl she’d seen in the galley, the explosion of the UN ship, the ridiculous message from Holden’s ship, followed by the protestations of innocence. “It was her. She blew up the ship.”
“Which ship?” the officer asked.
“The UN ship that blew up. The one that made the Belter ship shoot at Holden. And then we all went through the Ring and she’s here! She’s on this ship right now! I saw her in the galley and I knewthere was something wrong with her. She scared me but I should have said something but I didn’t because why would I?”
Tilly and the security man were both staring at her. She could feel her mind running away with her, and her mouth seemed to be working all on its own. They were looking at her like she’d gone insane.
“She’s here,” Anna said, clamping her mouth shut with an effort.
“Claire?” Tilly asked with a frown.
“I saw her in the galley. She threatened me. She was on this ship.”
The security man scowled and tapped something on his terminal, swore, then tapped something else. “I’ll be a sonofabitch. Shipwide face recognition says we’ve got a match in hangar B right now.”
“You have to go arrest her,” Anna shouted.
“Hangar B is a designated emergency area,” the officer said. “She’s probably there with the other survivors and broken in five different places. If it’s even her. Shitty reproduction like that makes for a lot of false positives.”
“You have software that could have found her at any time?” Tilly asked in disbelief. “You didn’t check?”
“Ma’am, we don’t ask ‘how high’ when James fucking Holden says jump,” the officer growled back.
“There’s an airlock in there,” Anna said, stabbing her hand at the display. “She could leave. She could go anywhere.”
“Like where?” the officer replied.
As if on cue, a green airlock cycling alarm appeared on the display.
“We have to go get her,” Anna said, pulling on Tilly’s arm.
“You have to go to the officers’ mess,” the security man said. “I’ll send people to pick her up for questioning as soon as we stop bleeding. Don’t worry about it. We’ve got plenty enough to sort out now. That one’ll wait.”
“But—”
A young man floated into the room. The left half of his face was covered in blood.
“Need the EMTs to six-alpha, sir. We’ve got ten civvies.”
“I’ll see who I can pry free,” the officer said. “Do we know anything about the condition of the injured?”
“Bones sticking out, but they’re not dead.”
Anna pulled Tilly into the corridor.
“We can’t wait. She’s dangerous. She’s already killed people when she blew up the other ship.”
“You’re stoned,” Tilly said, pulling her arm free and drifting across the corridor to bump into the wall. “You’re not acting rationally. What are you going to do even if Claire Mao ison this ship and has become some sort of terrorist? She blew up a ship. Gonna hit her with your Bible?”
Anna pulled the taser halfway out of her pocket. Tilly sucked in a whistling breath through her teeth. “You stolethat? Are you insane?” she asked in a loud whisper.
“I’m going to go find her,” Anna replied, the drugs singing in her blood having focused down to a fine point. She felt like if she could stop this Claire person, she could save herself from losing her family forever. She recognized this idea as utterly irrational, and gave in to its power anyway. “I have to talk to her.”
“You’re going to get killed,” Tilly said. She looked like she might start crying. “You told security. You did your part. Let it go. You’re a minister, not a cop.”
“I’ll need an EVA pack. Do you know where they keep those? Are they near the airlocks?”
“You’re insane,” Tilly said. “I can’t be part of this.”
“It’s okay,” Anna said. “I’ll be back.”
Chapter Twenty-Five: Holden
“Naomi,” Holden said again. “Come in. Please. Please respond.”
The silent radio felt like a threat. Miller had paused, his face bleak and apologetic. Holden wondered how many other people had looked at that exact expression on Miller’s face. It seemed designed to go with words like There’s been an accidentand The DNA matches your son’s. Holden could feel his hands trembling. It didn’t matter.
“ Rocinante. Naomi, come in.”
“Doesn’t mean anything,” Miller said. “She could be just fine, but the comm array went down. Or maybe she’s busy fixing something.”
“Or maybe she’s dying by centimeters,” Holden said. “I’ve got to go. I have to get back to her.”
Miller shook his head.
“It’s a longer trip back out than it was getting here. You can’t go as fast anymore. By the time you get back, she’ll have figured out whatever needed figuring.”
Or she’ll be dead, Miller didn’t say. Holden wondered what it meant that the protomolecule could put Miller on its hand like a puppet and the detective could still be thoughtful enough to leave out the possibility that everyone on the Rociwas gone.
“I have to try.”
Miller sighed. For a moment, his pupils flickered blue, like there were tiny bathypelagic fish swimming in the deep trenches of his eyeballs.
“You want to help her? You want to help all of them? Come with me. Now. You run back home, we won’t get to find out what happened. And you may not get the chance to come back here. Plus, you can bet your friends are regrouping back there, and they can still gently rip your arms off if they catch you.”
Holden felt like there were two versions of himself pulling at his mind. Naomi might be hurt. Might be dead. Alex and Amos too. He had to be there for them. But there was also a small, quiet part of himself that knew Miller was right. It was too late.
“You can tell the station that there are people on those ships,” he said. “You can ask it to help them.”
“I can tell a rock that it ought to be secretary-general. Doesn’t mean it’s gonna listen. All this?” Miller waved his hands at the dark walls. “It’s dumb. Utilitarian. No creativity or complex analysis.”
“Really?” Holden said, his curiosity peeking through the panic and anger and fear. “Why not?”
“Some things, it’s better if they’re predictable. No one wants the station coming up with its own bad ideas. We should hurry.”
“Where are we going?” Holden said, pausing for a few deep breaths. He’d been at low g for too long without taking the time for exercise. His cardio had suffered. The dangers of growing rich and lazy.
“I’m going to need you to do something for me,” Miller replied. “I need access to thec shit, I don’t know. Call ’em records.”
Holden finished his panting, then straightened and nodded for Miller to resume their walk. As they moved down the gently sloping corridor he said, “Aren’t you already plugged in?”
“I’m aware. The station is in lockdown, and they didn’t exactly give me the root password. I need you to open it up for me.”
“Not sure what I can do that you can’t,” Holden said. “Other than be a charming dinner guest.”
Miller stopped at another seeming dead end, touched the wall, and a portal irised open. He gestured Holden through, then followed and closed the door behind them. They were in another large chamber, vaguely octagonal and easily fifty meters long on each face. More of the insectile mechs littered the space, but the glass pillars were not in evidence. Instead, at the center of the chamber stood a massive construct of glowing blue metal. It was octagonal, a smaller version of the dimensions of the room, but only a few meters wide on each face. It didn’t glow any brighter than the rest of the room, but Holden could feel something coming off of it, an almost physical pressure that made walking toward it difficult. His suit said that the atmosphere had changed, that it was rich with complex organic chemicals and nitrogen.
“Sometimes, having a body at all means you’ve got a certain level of status. If you aren’t pretty damn trusted, you don’t get to walk around in the fallen world.”
