Leviathan Wakes

“If I had the access? The backup environment controls. It’s an emergency facility. No foot traffic unless someone’s running inventory. It’s got all the equipment for isolation built in already. Wouldn’t be hard.”

And since Protogen ran Eros security even before they put the disposable thugs in place, they’d be able to arrange it, Muss said, and she smiled joylessly. See? I knew you could think that through.

For less than a second, Muss was gone and Julie Mao — his Julie — was in her place. She was smiling and beautiful. Radiant. Her hair floated around her as if she were swimming in zero g. And then she was gone. His suit alarm warned him about an increasingly corrosive environment.

“Hang tight,” he said to the burning air. “I’ll be right there.”

* * *

It was just less than thirty-three hours from the moment he’d realized that Juliette Andromeda Mao wasn’t dead to the one when he cycled down the emergency seals and pulled his cart into Eros’ backup environmental control facility. The clean, simple lines and error-reducing design of the place still showed under the outgrowth of the protomolecule. Barely. Knots of dark filament and nautilus spirals softened the corners of wall and floor and ceiling. Loops hung from the ceiling like Spanish moss. The familiar LED lights still shone under the soft growth, but more illumination came from the swarm of faint blue dots glowing in the air. His first step onto the floor sank him into a thick carpet up the ankle; the bomb cart would have to stay outside. His suit reported a wild mix of exotic gases and aromatic molecules, but all he smelled was himself.

All the interior rooms had been remade. Transformed. He walked through the wastewater treatment control areas like a scuba diver in a grotto. The blue lights swirled around him as he passed, a few dozen adhering to his suit and glittering there. He almost didn’t brush them off the helmet’s faceplate, thinking they would smear like dead fireflies, but they only swirled back up into the air. The air recycling monitors still danced and glowed, the thousand alarms and incident reports silhouetting the latticework of protomolecule that covered the screens. Water was flowing somewhere close by.

She was in a hazmat analysis node, lying on a bed of the dark thread that spilled out from her spine until it was indistinguishable from a massive fairy-tale cushion of her own flowing hair. Tiny points of blue light glittered on her face, her arms, her breasts. The bone spurs that had been pressing out of her skin had grown into sweeping, almost architectural connections with the lushness around her. Her legs were gone, lost in the tangle of dark alien webs; she reminded Miller of a mermaid who had traded her fins for a space station. Her eyes were closed, but he could see them shifting and dancing under the lids. And she was breathing.

Miller stood beside her. She didn’t have quite the same face as his imagined Julie. The real woman was wider through the jaw, and her nose wasn’t as straight as he remembered it. He didn’t notice that he was weeping until he tried to wipe the tears away, batting his helmet with a gloved hand. He had to make do with blinking hard until his sight cleared.

All this time. All this way. And here was what he’d come for.

“Julie,” he said, putting his free hand on her shoulder. “Hey. Julie. Wake up. I need you to wake up now.”

He had his suit’s medical supplies. If he needed to, he could dose her with adrenaline or amphetamines. Instead, he rocked her gently, like he had Candace on a sleepy Sunday morning, back when she’d still been his wife, back in some distant, near-forgotten lifetime. Julie frowned, opened her mouth, closed it.

“Julie. You need to wake up now.”

She moaned and lifted an ineffectual arm to push him away.

“Come back to me,” he said. “You need to come back now.”

Her eyes opened. They weren’t human anymore — the sclera etched with swirls of red and black, the iris the same luminous blue as the fireflies. Not human, but still Julie. Her lips moved soundlessly. And then:

“Where am I?”

“Eros Station,” Miller said. “The place isn’t what it used to be. Not even where it used to be, but…”

He pressed the bed of filament with his hand, judging it, and then rested his hip at her side like he was sitting on her bed. His body felt achingly tired and also lighter than it should. Not like low gravity. The unreal buoyancy had nothing to do with the weary flesh.

Julie tried to talk again, struggled, stopped, tried again.

“Who are you?”

“Yeah, we haven’t officially met, have we? My name’s Miller. I used to be a detective for Star Helix Security back on Ceres. Your parents contracted with us, only it was really more a friends-in-high-places thing. I was supposed to track you down, grab you, ship you back down the well.”