Cibola Burn (The Expanse) by James S. A. Corey Read Free Book Online

investigator from that template, unaware that it is doing so, and tries another way of reaching out. And something answers. Something wrong and foreign and aboriginal, but there is an answer, so over the course of years it builds the investigator again and reaches out. The investigator becomes more complex.
    It will not stop until it makes that final connection, and it will never make that final connection. It stretches, tries new combinations, different ways to reach out, unaware that it is doing so. Unaware that it exists. Empty, except in the insignificant parts.
    The insectile leg will twitch forever. The scar that wails for death will wail forever. The investigator will search forever. The low voice will mutter forever.
    Nothing of him doth fade but suffers a sea change
    Into something rich and strange.
    It reaches out.

Chapter Four: Holden
    M CRN Sally Ride , this is independent vessel Rocinante , requesting permission to pass through the Ring with one ship. OPA heavy freighter Callisto’s Dream .”
    “Transmit authorization code now, Rocinante .”
    “Transmitting.” Holden tapped the screen to send the codes and stretched out his arms and legs, letting the motion pull him out of his chair in the microgravity. Several abused joints at various places on his skeleton responded with popping sounds.
    “You’re getting old,” Miller said. The detective stood in a rumpled gray suit and porkpie hat a few meters away, his feet on the deck as though there were gravity. The smarter the Miller simulation had gotten – and over the last two years it had become damned near coherent – the less it seemed to care about matching the reality around it.
    “You’re not.”
    “Of my bones are coral made,” the ghost said as if in agreement. “It’s all about the trade-offs.”
    When the Sally Ride sent the go-ahead code, Alex took them through the Ring nice and slow, the Callisto matching speed and course. The stars vanished as the ship moved into the black nothingness of the hub. Miller flickered as they passed through the gate, started to resolidify, and vanished in a puff of blue fireflies as the deck hatch banged open and Amos pulled himself through.
    “We landing?” the mechanic asked without preamble.
    “No need on this trip,” Holden said, and opened a channel to Alex up in the cockpit. “Keep us here until we see the Callisto dock, then take us back out.”
    “Sure could use a few days station-side, chief,” Amos said, pulling himself over to one of the ops stations and belting in. His gray coverall had a scorch mark on the sleeve, and he had a bandage covering half of his left hand. Holden pointed at it. Amos shrugged.
    “We’ve got a pair of soil ships waiting at Tycho Station,” Holden said.
    “No one’s had the balls to try and rip off any of the ships on this route. This many navy ships hanging around? It’d be suicide.”
    “And yet Fred pays us very well to escort his ships out to Medina Station, and I like taking his money.” Holden panned the ship’s telescopes around, zooming in on the rings. “And I don’t like being in here any longer than necessary.”
    Miller’s ghost was an artifact of the alien technology that had created the gates and a dead man. It had been following Holden around for the two years since they’d deactivated the Ring Station. It spent its time demanding, asking, and cajoling Holden to go through the newly opened gates to begin its investigation on the planets beyond them. The fact that Miller could only appear to Holden when he was alone – and on a ship the size of the Rocinante he was almost never alone – had kept him sane.
    Alex floated down from the cockpit, his thinning black hair sticking out in every direction from his brown scalp. There were dark circles under his eyes. “We’re not landin’? Could really use a couple days station-side.”
    “See?” Amos said.
    Before Holden could reply, Naomi came up through the deck hatch. “Aren’t we going