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Miller nodded but said nothing.
“How do you figure that?” Amos said.
“How long have you been flying?” Naomi asked.
“I dunno,” Amos replied, his lips compressing as he did the mental math. “Twenty-five years, maybe?”
“Fly with a lot of Belters, right?”
“Yeah,” Amos said. “Can’t get better shipmates than Belters. ’Cept me, of course.”
“You’ve flown with us for twenty-five years, you like us, you’ve learned the patois. I bet you can order a beer and a hooker on any station in the Belt. Heck, if you were a little taller and a lot skinnier, you could pass for one of us by now.”
Amos smiled, taking it as a compliment.
“But you still don’t get us,” Naomi said. “Not really. No one who grew up with free air ever will. And that’s why they can kill a million and a half of us to figure out what their bug really does.”
“Hey now,” Alex interjected. “You serious ’bout that? You think the inners and outers see themselves as that different?”
“Of course they do,” Miller said. “We’re too tall, too skinny, our heads look too big, and our joints too knobby.”
Holden noticed Naomi glancing across the table at him, a speculative look on her face. I like your head, Holden thought at her, but the radiation hadn’t given him telepathy either, because her expression didn’t change.
“We’ve practically got our own language now,” Miller said. “Ever see an Earther try to get directions in the deep dig?”
“ ‘Tu run spin, pow, Schlauch tu way acima and ido,’ ” Naomi said with a heavy Belter accent.
“Go spinward to the tube station, which will take you back to the docks,” Amos said. “The f**k’s so hard about that?”
“I had a partner wouldn’t have known that after two years on Ceres,” Miller said. “And Havelock wasn’t stupid. He just wasn’t… from there.”
Holden listened to them talk and pushed cold pasta around on his plate with a chunk of bread.
“Okay, we get it,” he said. “You’re weird. But to kill a million and a half people over some skeletal differences and slang… ”
“People have been getting tossed into ovens for less than that ever since they invented ovens,” Miller said. “If it makes you feel better, most of us think you’re squat and microcephalic.”
Alex shook his head.
“Don’t make a lick of sense to me, turnin’ that bug loose, even if you hated every single human on Eros personally. Who knows what that thing’ll do?”
Naomi walked to the galley sink and washed her hands, the running water drawing everyone’s attention.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said, then turned around, wiping her hands on a towel. “The point of it, I mean.”
Miller started to speak, but Holden hushed him with a quick gesture and waited for Naomi to continue.
“So,” she said. “I’ve been thinking of it as a computing problem. If the virus or nanomachine or protomolecule or whatever was designed, it has a purpose, right?”
“Definitely,” Holden said.
“And it seems like it’s trying to do something—something complex. It doesn’t make sense to go to all that trouble just to kill people. Those changes it makes look intentional, just… not complete, to me.”
“I can see that,” Holden said. Alex and Amos nodded along with him but stayed quiet.
“So maybe the issue is that the protomolecule isn’t smart enough yet. You can compress a lot of data down pretty small, but unless it’s a quantum computer, processing takes space. The easiest way to get that processing in tiny machines is through distribution. Maybe the protomolecule isn’t finishing its job because it just isn’t smart enough to. Yet.”
“Not enough of them,” Alex said.
“Right,” Naomi said, dropping the towel into a bin under the sink. “So you give them a lot of biomass to work with, and see what it is they are ultimately made to do.”
“According to that guy in the video, they were made to hijack life on Earth and wipe us out,” Miller said.
“And that,” Holden said, “is why Eros is perfect. Lots of biomass in a vacuum-sealed test tube. And if it gets out of hand, there’s already a war going on. A lot of ships and missiles can be used for nuking Eros into glass if the threat seems real. Nothing to make us forget our differences like a new player butting in.”
“Wow,” Amos said. “That is really, really f**ked up.”
“Okay. But even though that’s probably what’s happened,” Holden said, “I still can’t believe that there are enough evil people all in one place to do it. This isn’t a one-man operation. This is the work of dozens, maybe hundreds, of very smart people. Does Protogen just go around recruiting every potential Stalin and Jack the Ripper it runs across?”
“I’ll make sure to ask Mr. Dresden,” Miller said, an unreadable expression on his face, “when we finally meet.”
Tycho’s habitat rings spun serenely around the bloated zero-g factory globe in the center. The massive construction waldoes that sprouted from the top were maneuvering an enormous piece of hull plating onto the side of the Nauvoo. Looking at the station on the ops screens while Alex finished up docking procedures, Holden felt something like relief. So far, Tycho was the one place no one had tried to shoot them, or blow them up, or vomit goo on them, and that practically made it home.
Holden looked at the research safe clamped securely to the deck and hoped that he hadn’t just killed everyone on the station by bringing it there.
As if on cue, Miller pulled himself through the deck hatch and drifted over to the safe. He gave Holden a meaningful look.
“Don’t say it. I’m already thinking it,” Holden said.
Miller shrugged and drifted over to the ops station.
“Big,” he said, nodding at the Nauvoo, on Holden’s screen.
“Generation ship,” Holden said. “Something like that will give us the stars.”
“Or a lonely death on a long trip to nowhere,” Miller replied.
“You know,” Holden said, “some species’ version of the great galactic adventure is shooting virus-filled bullets at their neighbors. I think ours is pretty damn noble in comparison.”
Miller seemed to consider that, nodded, and watched Tycho Station swell on the monitor as Alex brought them closer. The detective kept one hand on the console, making the micro adjustments necessary to remain still even as the pilot’s maneuvers threw unexpected bursts of gravity at them from every direction. Holden was strapped into his chair. Even concentrating, he couldn’t handle zero g and intermittent thrust half that well. His brain just couldn’t be trained out of the twenty-odd years he’d spent with gravity as a constant.
