Cibola Burn

At first glance, it looked like a massive collection of appendages and cutting tools. It stood on six of its limbs, and waved four others in the air like a crustacean made of steel and knives. Whipping through the air around the heavier cutting arms were a dozen or more tentacles of what looked like black rubber. As he watched, two of the tentacles gripped the inside edges of the doorway and bent them out with fearsome strength.

He pulled his pistol, but didn’t point it at the thing. It felt very small and inadequate in his hand.

“Put that away,” the monster said in Miller’s voice. “You’ll put your eye out.”

Holden hadn’t thought much about the fact that every time he heard Miller’s voice over the last year, it had been a protomolecule-induced hallucination. But at the sound of the detective’s voice in the air, actual vibrations moving through the atmosphere and hitting his eardrums, the strangeness of it made him feel a little lightheaded.

“Is that you?” Holden asked in what he was pretty sure was the new universal winner for stupid questions.

“Depends what you mean,” the Miller-bot said and backed away from the opening. It was surprisingly quiet for such a huge metallic monster. “I’m able to get into the local hardware, and this thing was in pretty good shape for having missed its three-month warranty check by a thousand million years or so.”

Miller did something, and suddenly Holden could see the detective in his rumpled suit standing where the monster had been. He shrugged and smiled apologetically. But even as Holden saw a projection of Miller, superimposed over it he saw the robot. It was doing the same shrug, though instead of hands it used two massive serrated crab claws. It would have been comic if it hadn’t come with a splitting headache.

“One or the other,” Holden said, squeezing his eyes shut. “I can’t see both things. It breaks my brain.”

“Sorry. No problem,” Miller replied, and when Holden opened his eyes again only the robot was there. “Come on, we have a lot of ground to cover.”

Holden hopped out of the material transfer container and onto a flat metal floor. Various sections of the Miller-bot’s carapace glowed with a faint light, and unlike the blue light that had always accompanied the Miller ghost, it actually illuminated the space around it.

Pointing at one glowing limb, Holden said, “Can you make that brighter?”

In answer, all of the glowing sections of the robot intensified until the tunnel was as bright as noon. The reason for the material transfer cart’s stoppage became apparent. A couple dozen meters ahead, the metal tunnel was blown apart and filled with rocks and debris.

Reading his mind, Miller said, “Yeah. Not everything is handling the reboot well. Power node for the mag-lev woke up bad and blew itself up. Only it’s not exactly mag-lev. Close enough, though, you can get the picture.”

“Can we get past it?”

“Well, we can’t repair the track, but I can get you out. Making passages,” the Miller-bot said, waving one massive claw in the air, “is what this thing’s for. He used to dig and maintain these tunnels. Hop on.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“No, seriously, climb on. This guy can move faster than you can on foot.”

“Miller,” Holden said. “You are made entirely out of cutting edges and pinch points.”

One of the black tentacles twisted around, looking over the robot’s carapace carefully. “Hold on,” Miller said, and with a hum and a few metallic clanks, the torso of the robot twisted into a new configuration, leaving a wide flat spot on its back. “There you go.”

Holden hesitated for a moment, then climbed up one of the robot’s legs and onto its back. The Miller-bot trundled forward to the damaged section of tunnel and the four big forward limbs went to work, tearing out the twisted metal of the tunnel walls and clearing the earth and stone that had filled the space. The machine worked with speed, precision, and a terrifying casual strength.

“Hey Miller,” Holden said, watching the robot peel up a two-meter section of the tunnel’s metal flooring and rapidly cut it into tiny pieces. “We’re still friends, right?”

“What? Ah, I see. When I’m a ghost, you yell at me, tell me to get lost, say you’ll find a way to kill me. Now I’m wearing the shell of an invincible wrecking machine and you want to be buddies again?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Holden replied.

“Nah, we’re good.”

He punctuated the words with one last massive blow that shattered a two-ton boulder into rubble. By hunching down on his six legs, Miller was able to squeeze through a small opening in the tunnel blockage. Holden lay down flat on the robot’s back, a jagged piece of the tunnel roof passing less than three centimeters from his face.

“Clear sailing from here,” Miller said, “but the mag-lev’s dead after this. No more trains.”

“We have any better idea what we’re looking for?”