It was all going to hell. The pirate casts from the OPA calling for war. The burgeoning guerrilla actions. All of it. The time was coming that Mars wasn’t going to ignore them anymore. And when Mars took action, it wouldn’t matter if Earth followed suit. It would be the first real war in the Belt. The catastrophe was coming, and neither side seemed to understand how vulnerable they were. And there was nothing—not one single goddamned thing—that he could do to stop it. He couldn’t even slow it down.
Julie Mao grinned at him from the still frame, her pinnace behind her. Attacked, the man had said. There was nothing about it in her record. Might have been a mugging. Might have been something worse. Miller had known a lot of victims, and he put them into three categories. First there were the ones who pretended nothing had happened, or that whatever it was didn’t really matter. That was well over half the people he talked to. Then there were the professionals, people who took their victimization as permission to act out any way they saw fit. That ate most of the rest.
Maybe 5 percent, maybe less, were the ones who sucked it up, learned the lesson, and moved on. The Julies. The good ones.
His door chimed three hours after his official shift was over. Miller stood up, less steady on his feet than he’d expected. He counted the bottles on the table. There were more than he’d thought. He hesitated for a moment, torn between answering the door and throwing the bottles into the recycler. The door chimed again. He went to open it. If it was someone from the station, they expected him to be drunk, anyway. No reason to disappoint.
The face was familiar. Acne-pocked, controlled. The OPA armband from the bar. The one who’d had Mateo Judd killed.
The cop.
“Evening,” Miller said.
“Detective Miller,” the pocked man said. “I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. I was hoping we could try again.”
“Right.”
“May I come in?”
“I try not to take strange men home,” Miller said. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Anderson Dawes,” the pocked man said. “I’m the Ceres liaison for the Outer Planets Alliance. I think we can help each other. May I come in?”
Miller stood back, and the pocked man—Dawes—stepped inside. Dawes took in the hole for the space of two slow breaths, then sat as if the bottles and the stink of old beer were nothing to comment on. Silently cursing himself and willing a sobriety he didn’t feel, Miller sat across from him.
“I need a favor from you,” Dawes said. “I’m willing to pay for it. Not money, of course. Information.”
“What do you want?” Miller asked.
“Stop looking for Juliette Mao.”
“No sale.”
“I’m trying to keep the peace, Detective,” Dawes said. “You should hear me out.”
Miller leaned forward, elbows on the table. Mr. Serene Jiu Jitsu Instructor was working for the OPA? The timing of Dawes’ visit seemed to be saying so. Miller filed that possibility away but said nothing.
“Mao worked for us,” Dawes said. “But you’d guessed that.”
“More or less. You know where she is?”
“We don’t. We are looking for her. And we need to be the ones to find her. Not you.”
Miller shook his head. There was a response, the right thing to say. It was rattling in the back of his head, and if he just didn’t feel quite so fuzzy…
“You’re one of them, Detective. You may have lived your whole life out here, but your salary is paid by an inner planet corporation. No, wait. I don’t blame you. I understand how it is. They were hiring and you needed the work. But… we’re walking on a bubble right now. The Canterbury. The fringe elements in the Belt calling for war.”
“Phoebe Station.”
“Yes, they’ll blame us for that too. Add a Luna corporation’s prodigal daughter… ”
“You think something’s happened to her.”
“She was on the Scopuli,” Dawes said, and when Miller didn’t immediately respond, he added, “The freighter that Mars used as bait when they killed the Canterbury.”
Miller thought about that for a long moment, then whistled low.
“We don’t know what happened,” Dawes said. “Until we do, I can’t have you stirring up the water. It’s muddy enough now.”
“And what information are you offering?” Miller asked. “That’s the trade, right?”
“I’ll tell you what we find. After we find her,” Dawes said. Miller chuckled, and the OPA man went on. “It’s a generous offer, considering who you are. Employee of Mars. Partner of an Earther. Some people would think that was enough to make you the enemy too.”
“But not you,” Miller said.
“I think we’ve got the same basic goals, you and I. Stability. Safety. Strange times make for strange alliances.”
“Two questions.”
Dawes spread his arms, welcoming them.
“Who took the riot gear?” Miller asked.
“Riot gear?”
“Before the Canterbury died, someone took our riot gear. Maybe they wanted to arm soldiers for crowd control. Maybe they didn’t want our crowds controlled. Who took it? Why?”
“It wasn’t us,” Dawes said.
“That’s not an answer. Try this one. What happened to the Golden Bough Society?”
Dawes looked blank.
“Loca Greiga?” Miller asked. “Sohiro?”
Dawes opened his mouth, closed it. Miller dropped his beer bottle into the recycler.
“Nothing personal, friend,” he said, “but your investigative techniques aren’t impressing me. What makes you think you can find her?”
“It’s not a fair test,” Dawes said. “Give me a few days, I’ll get answers for you.”
“Talk to me then. I’ll try not to start an all-out war while you do, but I’m not letting go of Julie. You can go now.”
Dawes rose. He looked sour.
“You’re making a mistake,” he said.
“Won’t be my first.”
After the man left, Miller sat at his table. He’d been stupid. Worse, he’d been self-indulgent. Drinking himself into a stupor instead of doing the work. Instead of finding Julie. But he knew more now. The Scopuli. The Canterbury. More lines between the dots.
He cleaned away his bottles, took a shower, and pulled up his terminal, searching what there was about Julie’s ship. After an hour, a new thought occurred to him, a small fear that grew the more he looked at it. Near midnight, he put a call through to Havelock’s hole.
His partner took two full minutes to answer. When he did, his image was wild-haired and bleary-eyed.
“Miller?”
“Havelock. You have any vacation time saved up?”
“A little.”
“Sick leave?”
“Sure,” Havelock said.
“Take it,” Miller said. “Take it now. Get off station. Someplace safe if you can find it. Someplace they’re not going to start killing Earthers for shits and giggles if things go pear-shaped.”
“I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”
“I had a little visit with an OPA agent tonight. He was trying to talk me into dropping my kidnap job. I think… I think he’s nervous. I think he’s scared.”
Havelock was silent for a moment while the words filtered into his sleep-drunk mind.
“Jesus,” he said. “What scares the OPA?”
Chapter Thirteen: Holden
Holden froze, watching the blood pump from Shed’s neck, then whip away like smoke into an exhaust fan. The sounds of combat began to fade as the air was sucked out of the room. His ears throbbed and then hurt like someone had put ice picks in them. As he fought with his couch restraints, he glanced over at Alex. The pilot was yelling something, but it didn’t carry through the thin air. Naomi and Amos had gotten out of their couches already, kicked off, and were flying across the room to the two holes. Amos had a plastic dinner tray in one hand. Naomi, a white three-ring binder. Holden stared at them for the half second it took to understand what they were doing. The world narrowed, his peripheral vision all stars and darkness.
By the time he’d gotten free, Amos and Naomi had already covered the holes with their makeshift patches. The room was filled with a high-pitched whistle as the air tried to force its way out through the imperfect seals. Holden’s sight began to return as the air pressure started to rise. He was panting hard, gasping for breath. Someone slowly turned the room’s volume knob back up and Naomi’s yells for help became audible.
“Jim, open the emergency locker!” she screamed.
She was pointing at a small red-and-yellow panel on the bulkhead near his crash couch. Years of shipboard training made a path through the anoxia and depressurization, and he yanked the tab on the locker’s seal and pulled the door open. Inside were a white first aid kit marked with the ancient red-cross symbol, half a dozen oxygen masks, and a sealed bag of hardened plastic disks attached to a glue gun. The emergency-seal kit. He snatched it.
“Just the gun,” Naomi yelled at him. He wasn’t sure if her voice sounded distant because of the thin air or because the pressure drop had blown his eardrums.
Holden yanked the gun free from the bag of patches and threw it at her. She ran a bead of instant sealing glue around the edge of her three-ring binder. She tossed the gun to Amos, who caught it with an effortless backhand motion and put a seal around his dinner tray. The whistling stopped, replaced by the hiss of the atmosphere system as it labored to bring the pressure back up to normal. Fifteen seconds.
Everyone looked at Shed. Without the vacuum, his blood was pouring out into a floating red sphere just above his neck, like a hideous cartoon replacement for his head.
“Jesus Christ, Boss,” Amos said, looking away from Shed to Naomi. He snapped his teeth closed with an audible click and shook his head. “What… ”