Chapter 25: EROS
The docking bay was wrong.
Not damaged, not destroyed—wrong. The kind of empty that shouldn't exist on a station housing over a hundred thousand people. Emergency lighting painted everything in red-amber tones, and the silence pressed against my ears like physical weight.
"Where is everyone?" Alex's voice came through the comm from the Rocinante, still locked to the external dock. "Station this size should have traffic control, dock workers, customs..."
"Should have." I stepped off the boarding tube, weapon drawn, scanning the space that should have been crowded with people and cargo. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. "Stay with the ship. Keep engines hot."
"Copy that. You see anything, you call it in."
The others followed me out—Holden, Naomi, Amos, and Miller. We moved in a loose formation, covering angles, the kind of tactical discipline that came from too many situations where relaxing got people killed.
Naomi had her hand terminal out, scanning for signals. "Station comms are down. Not jammed—just... nothing. No traffic, no automated systems, no emergency broadcasts."
"That's not possible," Holden said. "A station doesn't just go silent. There are redundancies, backup systems—"
"There are a lot of things that aren't possible." Miller's voice was flat, his eyes scanning the shadows with cop instincts that had survived everything else being stripped away. "Until they happen."
I felt it then. Something I couldn't name—a pressure against my senses, alien and cold, like standing at the edge of a vast darkness that was aware of me. My skin prickled. My heartbeat slowed instead of quickening, which was wrong, which didn't make sense.
The proto-resistance. Stirring for the first time since I'd discovered it existed.
I didn't mention it. Couldn't explain it. Filed it away and kept moving.
We found the first bodies in the main corridor leading from the docks.
They weren't dead from violence. They were changed.
Blue filaments spread under their skin like frozen lightning, visible through flesh that had become partially translucent. Their eyes were milky, unfocused, staring at something none of us could see. Their bodies were contorted—not in pain exactly, but in positions that suggested transformation interrupted, processes halted mid-execution.
"Jesus Christ," Holden breathed.
Miller knelt beside one of the bodies, his detective instincts overriding his horror. "No hazmat protocols. No quarantine barriers. Whatever happened here, it happened fast."
"Or it was planned to happen this way," I said.
Everyone looked at me.
"Protogen." The word tasted like ash. "They didn't just experiment with the protomolecule. They deployed it. This is a test case."
"A hundred thousand people," Naomi said quietly. "They infected a hundred thousand people."
"They're not infected." I moved closer to the bodies, feeling that strange pressure intensify. My body responded differently than it should—warmth instead of revulsion, curiosity instead of fear. "They're being rewritten. The protomolecule doesn't kill. It repurposes."
"How do you know that?" Miller's eyes were sharp despite his exhaustion. "How do you know any of this?"
"Research. Observation. The Scopuli files." Lies layered on partial truths. "It doesn't matter how I know. What matters is what we do about it."
Miller held my gaze for a long moment. Then he stood, dusting off his knees. "Julie was here. If she survived the Scopuli, she might have survived this too."
"Miller—" Holden started.
"I'm not leaving without answers." The detective's voice was steel wrapped in exhaustion. "You can come with me or you can stay here, but I'm going deeper."
The smell hit me even through the suit filters.
Not rot—something else. Organic and wrong, like a chemical compound that shouldn't exist, like life twisted into shapes that violated its own principles. I catalogued it automatically, filed it away with all the other impossible things I'd experienced since waking up in this universe.
Another new sense I didn't understand. Another piece of a puzzle I couldn't see the edges of.
"Suit up properly," I said. "Full hazmat protocols. Whatever this is, we're not taking chances."
Naomi was already distributing the equipment from our emergency supplies—sealed suits, independent air, the kind of gear designed for environments that wanted to kill you. We'd brought it expecting radiation or chemical contamination. This was worse.
"The casino level," Miller said as he sealed his helmet. "That's where Julie's transponder last pinged. If she's anywhere, she's there."
"If she's alive at all," Holden said.
"Then I'll find her body and bring it home." Miller's voice was flat. "Either way, I finish this."
I looked at Holden—the question in his eyes, the uncertainty about whether we should be following a man driven by obsession into a nightmare we didn't understand.
"We came for answers," I said. "They're inside. We go together, we stay together, we leave together."
Holden nodded slowly. "Together."
The airlock cycled, and we entered Eros Station properly.
The darkness swallowed us whole.
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