Leviathan Wakes

It was getting more and more clear that he couldn’t cover the whole station. He’d known that from the start. If Julie had gotten herself someplace obscure — hidden in some niche or hole like a dying cat — he wouldn’t find her. He’d become a gambler, betting against all hope on drawing the inside straight. The voice of Eros shifted, different voices now, singing something in Hindi. A child’s round, Eros harmonizing with itself in a growing richness of voices. Now that he knew to listen for it, he heard Julie’s voice threading its way among the others. Maybe it had always been there. His frustration verged on physical pain. She was so close, but he couldn’t quite reach her.

He pulled himself back into the main corridor complex. The hospital bays had been a good place to look for her too. Plausible. Fruitless. He’d looked at the two mercantile bio-labs. Nothing. He’d tried the morgue, the police holding tanks. He’d even gone through the evidence room, bin after plastic bin of contraband drugs and confiscated weapons scattered on the floor like oak leaves in one of the grand parks. It had all meant something once. Each one had been part of a small human drama, waiting to be brought out into the light, part of a trial or at least a hearing. Some small practice for judgment day, postponed now forever. All points were moot.

Something silver flew above him, faster than a bird, and then another, and then a flock, streaming by overhead. Light glittered off the living metal, bright as fish scales. Miller watched the alien molecule improvising in the space above him.

You can’t stop here, Holden said. You have to stop running and get on the right road.

Miller looked over his shoulder. The captain stood, real and not, where his inner Julie would have been.

Well, that’s interesting, Miller thought.

“I know,” he said. “It’s just… I don’t know where she went. And… well, look around. Big place, you know?”

You can stop her or I will, his imaginary Holden said.

“If I just knew where she went,” Miller said.

She didn’t, Holden said. She never went.

Miller turned to look at him. The swarm of silver roiled overhead, chittering like insects or a badly tuned drive. The captain looked tired. Miller’s imagination had put a surprising swath of blood at the corner of the man’s mouth. And then it wasn’t Holden anymore; it was Havelock. The other Earther. His old partner. And then it was Muss, her eyes as dead as his own.

Julie didn’t go anyplace. Miller had seen her in the hotel room, back when he still hadn’t believed that anything but a bad smell could rise from the grave. Back before. She’d been taken away in a body bag. And then taken somewhere else. The Protogen scientists had recovered her, harvested the protomolecule, and spread Julie’s remade flesh through the station like bees pollinating a field of wildflowers. They’d given her the station, but before they’d done it, they’d put her someplace they thought they would be safe.

Safe room. Until they were ready to distribute the thing, they’d want to contain it. To pretend it could be contained. It wasn’t likely they’d have gone to the trouble of cleaning up after they’d gotten what they needed. It wasn’t as if anyone else was going to be around to use the space, so chances were good she was still there. That narrowed things.

There would be isolation wards in the hospital, but Protogen wouldn’t have been likely to use facilities where non-Protogen doctors and nurses might wonder what was happening. Unnecessary risk.

All right.

They could have set up in one of the manufacturing plants down by the port. There were plenty of places there that required all-waldo work. But again, it would have been at the risk of being discovered or questioned before the trap was ready to spring.

It’s a drug house, Muss said in his mind. You want privacy, you want control. Extracting the bug from the dead girl and extracting the good shit from the poppy seeds might have different chemistry, but it’s still crime.

“Good point,” Miller said. “And near the casino level… No, that’s not right. The casino was the second stage. The first was the radiation scare. They put a bunch of people in the radiation shelters and cooked them to get the protomolecule good and happy, then they infected the casino level.”

So where would you put a drug kitchen that was close to the rad shelters? Muss asked.

The roiling silver stream overhead veered left and then right, pouring through the air. Tiny curls of metal began to rain down, drawing thin trails of smoke behind them as they did.