Persepolis Rising полностью

“The guy I used to know? The dead one? He was a detective, and it was using him to look for where to report in. Only he—the reconstructed version of him—noticed that there was this place that killed off protomolecule activity. He said it was like a bullet that someone had fired to kill off the … the civilization … that … Bring that where I can see it better?”

Singh enlarged the image. Holden blinked. The weariness seemed to fall away from him, the pain of his injuries forgotten. When he spoke, his voice had a firmness and command Singh hadn’t heard there before. “That’s not Ilus. Where is that?”

“It appeared in Sol system. On one of our ships.”

“Oh. Fuck that,” Holden said. “All right, listen. There’s a woman you need to find. Her name’s Elvi Okoye. She was a scientist on Ilus. I don’t know where she is now, but she spent years researching the artifacts there, including that one. She went through it.”

“Went through it to where?”

“Not like a door. Like she carried part of the protomolecule’s network into it, and it killed off the sample. Turned it all inert. And she said it turned her sort of off while it did.”

“Turned her off. Like she lost consciousness?” Singh said. “Lost time?”

“Something like that,” Holden said. “I don’t know. I didn’t go through it. But I did see the thing on the station. I saw what happened to them.”

Singh found he was leaning forward. His blood felt like it was fizzing. And what was more, he saw the same feelings echoed in Holden’s battered face.

“There was a station on Ilus?” he asked.

“No. The one here. The station that controls the ring space. The first time anyone came though the ring, that same dead guy took me to the station. It was part of how the rings turned on. But I saw things there. Like a record of the old civilization? My friend, the dead guy, was looking through it for something, and because he was using me to do it, I saw it all too. Whatever made this? All of this? They were wiped out a long time before you and me got here. Billions of years, maybe. I saw whole systems going dark. I saw them trying to stop it by burning away entire solar systems. And it didn’t work. Whatever they tried to do, it failed, and they were all just wiped away with just their roads and their old machines left for us to stumble across. That thing that showed up on your ship? That’s them. The other them. That’s the thing that killed everything before Earth and Mars were part of the gate network.”

“But why would it appear now?”

Holden choked on a laugh. “Well, I don’t know. Have you people been doing anything different recently?”

Singh felt a little stab of embarrassment. It was a fair point. For the first time, the Tempest had employed the magnetic-field generator in an uncontrolled environment both here and in Sol system. Maybe this was a side effect. Or something else about the battleships built on the platforms. Or …

“Look,” Holden said. “You and me? We’re not friends. We aren’t going to be friends. I will oppose you and your empire to my dying breath. But right now, none of that matters. Whatever built the gates and the protomolecule and all these ruins we’re living in? They were wiped out. And the thing that wiped them out just took a shot at you.”

Singh couldn’t sleep that night. He was exhausted, but whenever he closed his eyes, Holden was there, squinting through his injured eyes, pointing with his broken hand. And the enigma of the bullet, the threat and mystery it represented. They defied him to sleep.

In the middle of his sleep shift, he gave up, put on a robe, and ordered a pot of tea delivered from the commissary. When it arrived, he was already searching through the station records for other documentation of Holden’s ravings. He was hoping to find something to suggest that the man was either insane or playing a game to deflect attention from his terrorism. But file after file, report after report, confirmed him. Even when there was no other witness to what he’d seen, there was at least a history to show that his claims had been consistent.

It would have been so much easier if James Holden were only a madman.

Your empire’s hands look a lot cleaner when you get to dictate where history begins, and what parts of it don’t count.