“Whole place is shut down,” Holden said.

“Might be backups in the engine room,” Amos said.

“So the ass end of the ship from here,” Holden said.

“Pretty much.”

“Let’s be careful,” Holden said.

“I’m heading up to ops,” Naomi said. “If there’s anything running off battery, I can—”

“No, you aren’t,” Holden said. “We aren’t splitting up the group until we know what we’re looking at. Stay together.”

Amos moved down, sinking into the darkness. Holden pushed off after him. Miller followed. He couldn’t tell from Naomi’s body language whether she was annoyed or relieved.

The galley was empty, but signs of struggle showed here and there. A chair with a bent leg. A long, jagged scratch down the wall where something sharp had flaked the paint. Two bullet holes set high along one bulkhead where a shot had gone wide. Miller put a hand out, grabbed one of the tables, and swung slowly.

“Miller?” Holden said. “Are you coming?”

“Look at this,” Miller said.

The dark spill was the color of amber, flaky and shining like glass in his flashlight beam. Holden hovered closer.

“Zombie vomit?” Holden said.

“Think so.”

“Well. I guess we’re on the right ship. For some value of right.”

The crew quarters hung silent and empty. They went through each of them, but there were no personal markings—no terminals, no pictures, no clues to the names of the men and women who had lived and breathed and presumably died on the ship. Even the captain’s cabin was indicated only by a slightly larger bunk and the face of a locked safe.

There was a massive central compartment as high and wide as the hull of the Rocinante,the darkness dominated by twelve huge cylinders encrusted with narrow catwalks and scaffolds. Miller saw Naomi’s expression harden.

“What are they?” Miller asked.

“Torpedo tubes,” she said.

“ Torpedotubes?” he said. “Jesus Christ,how many are they packing? A million?”

“Twelve,” she said. “Just twelve.”

“Capital-ship busters,” Amos said. “Built to pretty much kill whatever you’re aiming at with the first shot.”

“Something like the Donnager?” Miller asked.

Holden looked back at him, the glow of his heads-up display lighting his features.

“Or the Canterbury,” he said.

The four of them passed between the wide black tubes in silence.

In the machine and fabrication shops, the signs of violence were more pronounced. There was blood on the floor and walls, along with wide swaths of the glassy gold resin that had once been vomit. A uniform lay in a ball. The cloth had been wadded and soaked in something before the cold of space had frozen it. Habits formed from years of walking through crime scenes put a dozen small things in place: the pattern of scratches on the floor and lift doors, the spatter of blood and vomit, the footprints. They all told the story.

“They’re in engineering,” Miller said.

“Who?” Holden said.

“The crew. Whoever was on the ship. All except that one,” he said, gesturing at half a footprint that led toward the lift. “You see how her footprints are over the top of everything else. And there, where she stepped in that blood, it was already dry. Flaked instead of smearing.”

“How you know it was a girl?” Holden asked.

“Because it was Julie,” Miller said.

“Well, whoever’s in there, they’ve been sucking vacuum for a long time,” Amos said. “Want to go see?”

No one said yes, but they all floated forward. The hatch stood open. If the darkness beyond it seemed more solid, more ominous, more personalthan the rest of the dead ship had, it was only Miller’s imagination playing tricks. He hesitated, trying to summon up the image of Julie, but she wouldn’t come.

Floating into the engineering deck was like swimming into a cave. Miller saw the other flashlights playing over walls and panels, looking for live controls, or else controls that could come alive. He aimed his own beam into the body of the room, the dark swallowing it.

“We got batteries, Cap’n,” Amos said. “Andc looks like the reactor got shut down. Intentional.”

“Think you can get it back up?”

“Want to run some diagnostics,” Amos said. “There could be a reason they shut it off, and I don’t want to find out the hard way.”

“Good point.”

“But I can at least get usc somec come on,you bastard.”

All around the deck, blue-white lights flared up. The sudden brilliance blinded Miller for a half second. His vision returned with a sense of growing confusion. Naomi gasped, and Holden yelped. Something in the back of Miller’s own mind started to shriek, and he forced it into silence. It was just a crime scene. They were only bodies.

Except they weren’t.

The reactor stood before him, quiescent and dead. All around it, a layer of human flesh. He could pick out arms, hands with fingers splayed so wide they hurt to look at. The long snake of a spine curved, ribs fanning out like the legs of some perverse insect. He tried to make what he was seeing make sense. He’d seen men eviscerated before. He knew that the long, ropy swirl to the left of the thing were intestines. He could see where the small bowel widened to become a colon. The familiar shape of a skull looked out at him.

But then, among the familiar anatomy of death and dismemberment, there were other things: nautilus spirals, wide swaths of soft black filament, a pale expanse of something that might have been skin cut by a dozen gill-like vents, a half-formed limb that looked equally like an insect and a fetus without being either one. The frozen, dead flesh surrounded the reactor like the skin of an orange. The crew of the stealth ship. Maybe of the Scopulias well.

All but Julie.

“Yeah,” Amos said. “This could take a little longer than I was thinking, Cap.”

“It’s okay,” Holden said. His voice on the radio sounded shaky. “You don’t have to.”

“It’s no trouble. As long as none of thatfreaky shit broke the containment, reactor should boot up just fine.”

“You don’t mind being aroundc it?” Holden said.

“Honest, Cap’n, I’m not thinking about it. Give me twenty minutes, I’ll tell you if we got power or if we have to patch a line over from the Roci.”

“Okay,” Holden said. And then again, his voice more solid: “Okay, but don’t touch any of that.”

“Wasn’t going to,” Amos said.

They floated back out through the hatch, Holden and Naomi and Miller coming last.

“Is thatc ” Naomi said, then coughed and started again. “Is that what’s happening on Eros?”

“Probably,” Miller said.

“Amos,” Holden said. “Do you have enough battery power to light up the computers?”

There was a pause. Miller took a deep breath, the plastic-and-ozone scent of the suit’s air system filling his nose.

“I think so,” Amos said dubiously. “But if we can get the reactor up firstc ”

“Bring up the computers.”

“You’re the captain, Cap’n,” Amos said. “Have it to you in five.”

In silence, they floated up—back—to the airlock, and past it to the operations deck. Miller hung back, watching the way Holden’s trajectory kept him near Naomi and then away from her.

Protective and head-shy both, Miller thought. Bad combination.

Julie was waiting in the airlock. Not at first, of course. Miller slid back into the space, his mind churning through everything he’d seen, just like it was a case. A normal case. His gaze drifted toward the broken locker. There was no suit in it. For a moment, he was back on Eros, in the apartment where Julie had died. There had been an environment suit there. And then Julie was there with him, pushing her way out of the locker.

What were you doing there?he thought.

“No brig,” he said.

“What?” Holden said.

“I just noticed,” Miller said. “Ship’s got no brig. They aren’t built to carry prisoners.”