“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. “And… 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 us… some… 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 around… 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 that… ” 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 first… ”

“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.”

Holden made a low agreeing grunt.

“Makes you wonder what they were planning to do with the crew of the Scopuli,” Naomi said. The tone of her voice meant she didn’t wonder at all.

“I don’t think they were,” Miller said slowly. “This whole thing… they were improvising.”

“Improvising?” Naomi said.

“Ship was carrying an infectious something or other without enough containment to contain it. Taking on prisoners without a brig to hold ’em in. They were making this up as they went along.”

“Or they had to hurry,” Holden said. “Something happened that made them hurry. But what they did on Eros must have taken months to arrange. Maybe years. So maybe something happened at the last minute?”

“Be interesting to know what,” Miller said.

Compared to the rest of the ship, the ops deck looked peaceful. Normal. The computers had finished their diagnostics, screens glowing placidly. Naomi went to one, holding the back of the chair with one hand so the gentle touch of her fingers against the screen wouldn’t push her backward.

“I’ll do what I can here,” she said. “You can check the bridge.”

There was a pause that carried weight.

“I’ll be fine,” Naomi said.

“All right. I know you’ll… I… C’mon, Miller.”

Miller let the captain float ahead into the bridge. The screens there were spooling through diagnostics so standard Miller recognized them. It was a wider space than he’d imagined, with five stations with crash couches customized for other people’s bodies. Holden strapped in at one. Miller took a slow turn around the deck. Nothing seemed out of place here-no blood, no broken chairs or torn padding. When it happened, the fight had been down near the reactor. He wasn’t sure yet what that meant. He sat at what, under a standard layout, would have been the security station, and opened a private channel to Holden.

“Anything you’re looking for in particular?”

“Briefings. Overviews,” Holden said shortly. “Whatever’s useful. You?”

“See if I can get into the internal monitors.”

“Hoping to find…?”

“What Julie found,” Miller said.

The security assumed that anyone sitting at the console had access to the low-level feeds. It still took half an hour to parse the command structure and query interface. Once Miller had that down, it wasn’t hard. The time stamp on the log listed the feed as the day the Scopulihad gone missing. The security camera in the airlock bay showed the crew-Belters, most of them-being escorted in. Their captors were in armor, with faceplates lowered. Miller wondered if they’d meant to keep their identities secret. That would almost have suggested they were planning to keep the crew alive. Or maybe they were just wary of some last-minute resistance. The crew of the Scopuliweren’t wearing environment suits or armor. A couple of them weren’t even wearing uniforms.