“I don’t know what that means.”
Miller leaned close. His breath smelled like acetate fumes. His eyes locked on Holden, eyebrows raised, asking him if he understood.
“You’ve got to help me,” Miller said. The blood vessels in his eyes were almost black. “They know I find things. They know you help me.”
“You’re dead,” Holden said, the words coming out of him without consideration or planning.
“Everyone’s dead,” Miller said. He took his hand from Holden’s shoulder and turned away. Confusion troubled his brow. “Almost. Almost.”
Holden’s terminal buzzed at him, and he took it out of his pocket. Naomi had sent did you fall in? Holden began typing out a reply, then stopped when he realized he’d have no idea what to say.
When Miller spoke, his voice was small, almost childlike with wonder and amazement.
“Fuck. It happened,” Miller said.
“What happened?” Holden said.
A door banged as someone else went into a neighboring stall, and Miller was gone. The smell of ozone and some rich organic volatiles like a spice shop gone rancid were all the evidence that he had been there. And that might only have been in Holden’s imagination.
Holden stood for a moment, waiting for the coppery taste to leave his mouth. Waiting for his heartbeat to slow back down to normal. Doing what he always did in the aftermath. When the worst had passed, he rinsed his face with cold water and dried it with a soft towel. The distant, muffled sound of the gambling decks rose to a frenzy. A jackpot.
He wouldn’t tell them. Naomi, Alex, Amos. They deserved to have their pleasure without the thing that had been Miller intruding on it. Holden recognized that the impulse to keep it from them was irrational, but it felt so powerfully like protecting them that he didn’t question it much. Whatever Miller had become, Holden was going to stand between it and the Roci.
He studied his reflection until it was perfect. The carefree, slightly drunk captain of a successful independent ship on shore leave. Easy. Happy. He went back out to the pandemonium of the casino.
For a moment, it was like stepping back in time. The casinos on Eros. The death box. The lights felt a little too bright, the noises sounded a little too loud. Holden made his way back to the table and poured himself another shot. He could nurse this one for a while. He’d enjoy the flavor and the night. Someone behind him shrieked their laughter. Only laughter.
A few minutes later, Naomi appeared, stepping out of the bustle and chaos like serenity in a female form. The half-drunken, expansive love he’d felt earlier came back as he watched her make her way toward him. They’d shipped together on the Canterbury for years before he’d found himself falling in love with her. Looking back, every morning he’d woken up with someone else had been a lost opportunity to breathe Naomi’s air. He couldn’t imagine what he’d been thinking. He shifted to the side, making room for her.
“They cleaned you out?” he asked.
“Alex,” she said. “They cleaned Alex out. I gave him my chips.”
“You are a woman of tremendous generosity,” he said with a grin.
Naomi’s dark eyes softened into a sympathetic expression.
“Miller showed up again?” she asked, leaning close to be heard over the noise.
“It’s a little unsettling how easily you see through me.”
“You’re pretty legible. And this wouldn’t be Miller’s first bathroom ambush. Did he make any more sense this time?”
“No,” Holden said. “He’s like talking to an electrical problem. Half the time I’m not sure he even knows I’m there.”
“It can’t really be Miller, can it?”
“If it’s the protomolecule wearing a Miller suit, I think that’s actually creepier.”
“Fair point,” Naomi said. “Did he say anything new, at least?”
“A little bit, maybe. He said something happened.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. He just said, ‘It happened,’ and blinked out.”
They sat together for a few minutes, a private silence within the riot, her fingers interlaced with his. She leaned over, kissing his right eyebrow, and then pulled him up off the chair.
“Come on,” she said.
“Where are we going?”
“I’m going to teach you how to play poker,” she said.
“I know how to play poker.”
“You think you do,” she said.
“Are you calling me a fish?”
She smiled and tugged at him.
Holden shook his head. “If you want to, let’s go back to the ship. We can get a few people together and have a private game. It doesn’t make sense to do it here. The house always wins.”
“We aren’t here to win,” Naomi said, and the seriousness in her voice made the words carry more than the obvious meaning. “We’re here to play.”
The news came two days later.
Holden was in the galley, eating takeout from one of the dockside restaurants: garlic sauce over rice, three kinds of legumes, and something so similar to chicken, it might as well have been the real thing. Amos and Naomi were overseeing the loading of nutrients and filters for the air recycling systems. Alex, in the pilot’s seat, was asleep. On the other ships Holden had served aboard, having the full crew back on ship before departure required it was almost unheard of, and they’d all spent a couple of nights in dockside hotels before they’d come home. But they were home now.
Holden ran through the local feeds on his hand terminal, sipping news and entertainment from throughout the system. A security flaw in the new Bandao Solice game meant that financial and personal information from six million people had been captured on a pirate server orbiting Titan. Martian military experts were calling for increased spending to address the losses suffered in the battle around Ganymede. On Earth, an African farming coalition was defying the ban on a nitrogen-fixing strain of bacteria. Protesters on both sides of the issue were taking to the streets in Cairo.
Holden was flipping back and forth, letting his mind float on the surface of the information, when a red band appeared on one of the newsfeeds. And then another. And then another. The image above the article chilled his blood. The Ring, they called it. The gigantic alien structure that had left Venus and traveled to a point a little less than 2 AU outside Uranus’ orbit, then stopped and assembled itself.
Holden read the news carefully as dread pulled at his gut. When he looked up, Naomi and Amos were in the doorway. Amos had his own hand terminal out. Holden saw the same red bands on that display.