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“She didn’t have a heartbeat,” Holden said. “No brain activity, no metabolism. That’s pretty much the definition of dead.”
“How do we know what dead looks like to the protomolecule?”
“We—” Holden started, then stopped. “We don’t, I guess. But no heartbeat, that’s a pretty good start.”
Miller laughed.
“We’ve both seen the feeds, Holden. Those rib cages equipped with one arm that drag themselves around, think they have a heartbeat? This shit hasn’t been playing by our rules since day one, you expect it to start now?”
Holden smiled to himself. Miller was right.
“Okay, so what makes you think Julie isn’t just a rib cage and a mass of tentacles?”
“She might be, but it’s not her body I’m talking about,” Miller said. “She’s in here. Her mind. It’s like she’s flying her old racing pinnace. The Razorback. She’s been babbling about it on the radio for hours now, and I just didn’t put it together. But now that I have, it’s pretty goddamn clear.”
“Why is she headed toward Earth?”
“I don’t know,” Miller said. He sounded excited, interested. More alive than Holden had ever heard him. “Maybe the protomolecule wants to get there and it’s messing with her. Julie wasn’t the first person to get infected, but she’s the first one that survived long enough to get somewhere. Maybe she’s the seed crystal and everything that the protomolecule’s doing is built on her. I don’t know that, but I can find out. I just need to find her. Talk to her.”
“You need to get that bomb to wherever the controls are and set it off.”
“I can’t do that,” Miller said. Because of course he couldn’t.
It doesn’t matter, Holden thought. In a little less than thirty hours, you’re both radioactive dust.
“All right. Can you find your girl in less than”—Holden had the Roci do a revised time of impact for the incoming missiles—“twenty-seven hours?”
“Why? What happens in twenty-seven hours?”
“Earth fired her entire interplanetary nuclear arsenal at Eros a few hours ago. We just turned the transponders on in the five freighters you parked on the surface. The missiles are targeting them. The Roci is guessing twenty-seven hours to impact based on the current acceleration curve. The Martian and UN navies are on their way to sterilize the area after detonation. Make sure nothing survives or slips the net.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah,” Holden said with a sigh. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I’ve had a lot going on, and it sort of slipped my mind.”
There was another long silence on the line.
“You can stop them,” Miller said. “Shut down the transponders.”
Holden spun his chair around to face Naomi. Her face had the same what did he just say? look that he knew was on his own. She pulled the suit’s medical data over to her console, then called up the Roci’s medical expert system and began running a full medical diagnostic. The implication was clear. She thought something was wrong with Miller that wasn’t immediately apparent from the data they were getting. If the protomolecule had infected him, used him as a last-ditch misdirection…
“Not a chance, Miller. This is our last shot. If we blow this one, Eros can orbit the Earth, spraying brown goo all over it. No way we take that risk.”
“Look,” Miller said, his tone alternating between the earlier pleading and a growing frustration. “Julie is in here. If I can find her, a way to talk to her, I can stop this without the nukes.”
“What, ask the protomolecule to pretty please not infect the Earth, when that was what it was designed to do? Appeal to its better nature?”
Miller paused for a moment before speaking again.
“Look, Holden, I think I know what’s going on here. This thing was intended to infect single-celled organisms. The most basic forms of life, right?”
Holden shrugged, then remembered there was no video feed and said, “Okay.”
“That didn’t work, but it’s a smart bastard. Adaptive. It got into a human host, a complex multicelled organism. Aerobic. Huge brain. Nothing like what it was built for. It’s been improvising ever since. That mess on the stealth ship? That was its first try. We saw what it was doing with Julie in that Eros bathroom. It was learning how to work with us.”
“Where are you going with this?” Holden said. There was no time pressure yet, with the missiles still more than a day away, but he couldn’t quite keep the impatience out of his voice.
“All I’m saying is Eros now isn’t what the protomolecule’s designers planned on. It’s their original plan laid over the top of billions of years of our evolution. And when you improvise, you use what you’ve got. You use what works. Julie’s the template. Her brain, her emotions are all over this thing. She sees this run to Earth as a race, and she’s crowing about winning. Laughing at you because you can’t keep up.”
“Wait,” Holden said.
“She’s not attacking Earth, she’s going home. For all we know, she’s not heading for Earth at all. Luna, maybe. She grew up there. The protomolecule piggybacked on her structure, her brain. And so she infected it as much as it infected her. If I can make her understand what’s really going on, then maybe I can negotiate with her.”
“How do you know that?”
“Call it a hunch,” Miller said. “I’m good with hunches.”
Holden whistled, the entire situation doing a flip-flop in his head. The new perspective was dizzying.
“But the protomolecule still wants to obey its program,” Holden said. “And we have no idea what that is.”
“I can damn sure tell you it isn’t wiping humans out. The things that shot Phoebe at us two billion years ago didn’t know what the hell humans were. Whatever it wants to do needed biomass, and it’s got that now.”
Holden couldn’t stop himself from snorting at that.
“So, what? They don’t mean us any harm? Seriously? You think if we explain that we’d rather not have it land on Earth, then it will just agree and go somewhere else?”
“Not it,” Miller said. “Her.”
Naomi looked up at Holden, shaking her head. She wasn’t seeing anything organic wrong with Miller either.
“I’ve been working this case for, shit, almost a year,” Miller said. “I’ve climbed into her life, read her mail, met her friends. I know her. She’s about as independent as a person can be, and she loves us.”
