The Dragon’s Path (111 page)

Holden gave him permission by shooting first. He targeted one of the mafia thugs without a helmet and shot him in the face, then continued firing at the group until his gun’s slide locked open when the magazine was empty. Miller had begun firing a split second after Holden’s first shot and also fired until his gun was
empty. When it was over, all four thugs were lying facedown in the corridor. Holden let out a long breath that turned into a sigh, and sat down on the floor.

Miller walked to the fallen men and nudged each one in turn with his foot as he replaced the magazine in his gun. Holden didn’t bother reloading his. He was done with gunfights. He put the empty pistol in his pocket and got up to join the cop. He bent down and began unbuckling the least damaged armor he could find. Miller raised an eyebrow but didn’t move to help.

“We’re making a run for it,” Holden said, swallowing back the vomit-and-blood taste in his throat as he pulled the chest and back armor free of the first man. “But maybe if we wear this stuff, it will help.”

“Might,” Miller said with a nod, then knelt down to help strip a second man.

Holden put on the dead man’s armor, working hard to believe that the pink trail down the back was absolutely not part of the man’s brain. Undoing the straps was exhausting. His fingers felt numb and awkward. He picked up the thigh armor, then put it down again. He’d rather run fast. Miller had finished buckling his on too and picked up one of the undamaged helmets. Holden found one with just a dent in it and slipped it onto his head. It felt greasy inside, and he was glad he had no sense of smell. He suspected that its previous occupant hadn’t bathed often.

Miller fiddled with the side of his helmet until the radio came on. The cop’s voice was echoed a split second later over the helmet’s tinny speakers as he said, “Hey, we’re coming out into the corridor! Don’t shoot! We’re coming to join up!”

Thumbing off the mic, he turned to Holden and said, “Well, maybe one side won’t be shooting at us now.”

They moved back down the corridor and stopped ten meters from the intersection. Holden counted down from three and then took off at the best run he could manage. It was dishearteningly slow; his legs felt like they were filled with lead. Like he was running in a pool of water. Like he was in a nightmare. He could hear
Miller just behind him, his shoes slapping on the concrete floor, his breath coming in ragged gasps.

Then he heard only the sound of gunfire. He couldn’t tell if Miller’s plan had worked. Couldn’t tell which direction the gunfire was coming from. It was constant and deafening and started the instant he entered the cross corridor. When he was three meters from the other side, he lowered his head and jumped forward. In Eros’ light gravity, he seemed to fly, and he was nearly to the other side when a burst of bullets caught him in the armor over his ribs and slammed him into the corridor wall with a spine-jarring crack. He dragged himself the rest of the way as bullets continued to hit all around his legs, one of them passing through the meaty part of his calf.

Miller tripped over him, flying a few feet farther down the hall and then collapsing in a heap. Holden crawled to his side.

“Still alive?”

Miller nodded. “Got shot. Arm’s broke. Keep moving,” he gasped out.

Holden climbed to his feet, his left leg feeling like it was on fire as the muscle in his calf clenched around his gaping wound. He pulled Miller up and then leaned on him as they limped toward the elevator. Miller’s left arm was dangling boneless at his side, and blood was pouring off his hand.

Holden punched the button to call the lift, and he and Miller leaned on each other while they waited. He hummed the
Misko and Marisko
theme to himself, and after a few seconds, Miller started too.

Holden punched the button for the
Rocinante
’s berth and waited for the elevator to stop at a blank gray airlock door with no ship beyond it. That would be when he finally had permission to lie down on the floor and die. He looked forward to that moment when his exertions could end with a relief that would have surprised him if he’d still been capable of surprise. Miller let go of him and slid down the lift wall, leaving a blood trail on the shiny metal and ending in a pile on the floor. The man’s eyes were closed.
He could almost have been sleeping. Holden watched the detective’s chest rise and fall in ragged, painful breaths that grew smoother and more shallow.

Holden envied him, but he had to see that closed airlock door before he could lie down. He began to feel faintly angry with the elevator for taking so long.

It stopped, lift doors sliding open with a cheerful ding.

Amos stood in the airlock on the other side, an assault rifle in each hand and two belts of magazines for the rifles slung on his shoulders. He looked Holden up and down once, then glanced over to Miller and back again.

“Jesus, Captain, you look like shit.”

M
iller’s mind reassembled slowly and with several false starts. In his dreams, he was fitting a puzzle together as the pieces kept changing shape, and each time, just as he was on the verge of slipping the whole mechanism together, the dream began again. The first thing he became aware of was the ache at the small of his back, then the heaviness of his arms and legs, then the nausea. The nearer he came to consciousness, the more he tried to postpone it. Imaginary fingers tried to complete the puzzle, and before he could make it all fit, his eyes opened.

He couldn’t move his head. Something was in his neck: a thick bundle of black tubes reaching out of him and up past the limits of his vision. He tried to lift his arms, to push the invading, vampiric thing away, but he couldn’t.

It got me,
he thought with a thrill of fear.
I’m infected.

The woman appeared from his left. He was surprised she wasn’t
Julie. Deep brown skin, dark eyes with just a hint of an epicanthic fold. She smiled at him. Black hair draped down the side of her face.

Down. There was a
down.
There was gravity. They were under thrust. That seemed very important, but he didn’t know why.

“Hey, Detective,” Naomi said. “Welcome back.”

Where am I?
he tried to say. His throat felt solid. Crowded like too many people in a tube station.

“Don’t try to get up or talk or anything,” she said. “You’ve been under for about thirty-six hours. Good news is we have a sick bay with a military-grade expert system and supplies for fifteen Martian soldiers. I think we burned half of what we’ve got on you and the captain.”

The captain. Holden. That was right. They’d been in a fight. There had been a corridor and people shooting. And someone had been sick. He remembered a woman, covered in brown vomit, with vacant eyes, but he didn’t know whether it was part of a nightmare.

Naomi was still talking. Something about full plasma flushes and cell damage. He tried to lift a hand, to reach out to her, but a strap restrained him. The ache in his back was his kidneys, and he wondered what exactly was getting filtered out of his blood. Miller closed his eyes, asleep before he could decide whether to rest.

No dreams troubled him this time. He roused again when something deep in his throat shifted, pulled at his larynx, and retreated. Without opening his eyes, he rolled to his side, coughed, puked, and rolled back.

When he woke, he was breathing on his own. His throat felt sore and abused, but his hands weren’t tied down. Drainage tubes ran out of his belly and side, and there was a catheter the size of a pencil coming out his penis. Nothing particularly hurt, so he had to assume he was on pretty nearly all the narcotics there were. His clothes were gone, his modesty preserved only by a thin paper gown and a cast that held his left arm stony and immovable. Someone had put his hat on the next bed over.

The sick bay, now that he could see it, looked like a ward on a high-production entertainment feed. It wasn’t a hospital; it was the matte-black-and-silver idea of what a hospital was supposed to be. The monitors hung suspended in the air on complex armatures, reporting his blood pressure, nucleic acid concentrations, oxygenation, fluid balance. There were two separate countdowns running, one to the next round of autophagics, the other for pain medication. And across the aisle, at another station, Holden’s statistics looked more or less the same.

Holden looked like a ghost. His skin was pale and his sclera were red with a hundred little hemorrhages. His face was puffy from steroids.

“Hey,” Miller said.

Holden lifted a hand, waving gently.

“We made it,” Miller said. His voice sounded like it had been dragged down an alley by its ankles.

“Yeah,” Holden said.

“That was ugly.”

“Yeah.”

Miller nodded. That had taken all the energy he had. He lay back down and fell, if not asleep, at least unconscious. Just before his mind flickered back into forgetfulness, he smiled. He’d made it. He was on Holden’s ship. And they were going to find whatever Julie had left behind for them.

Voices woke him.

“Maybe you shouldn’t, then.”

It was the woman. Naomi. Part of Miller cursed her for disturbing him, but there was a buzz in her voice—not fear or anger, but close enough to be interesting. He didn’t move, didn’t even swim all the way back to awareness. But he listened.

“I need to,” Holden said. He sounded phlegmy, like someone who needed to cough. “What happened on Eros… it’s put a lot of things in perspective. I’ve been a holding something back.”

“Captain—”

“No, hear me out. When I was in there thinking that all I was
going to have left was half an hour of rigged pachinko games and then death… when that happened, I knew what my regrets were. You know? I felt all the things that I wished I’d done and never had the courage for. Now that I know, I can’t just ignore it. I can’t pretend it isn’t there.”

“Captain,” Naomi said again, and the buzz in her voice was stronger.

Don’t say it, you poor bastard,
Miller thought.

“I’m in love with you, Naomi,” Holden said.

The pause lasted no longer than a heartbeat.

“No, sir,” she said. “You aren’t.”

“I am. I know what you’re thinking. I’ve been through this big traumatic experience and I’m doing the whole thing where I want to affirm life and make connections, and maybe some of that’s part of it. But you have to believe that I know what I feel. And when I was down there, I knew that the thing that I wanted the most was to get back to you.”

“Captain. How long have we served together?”

“What? I don’t know exactly… ”

“Ballpark estimate.”

“Eight and a half runs makes it almost five years,” Holden said. Miller could hear the confusion in his voice.

“All right. And in that time, how many of the crew did you share bunks with?”

“Does it matter?”

“Only a little.”

“A few.”

“More than a dozen?”

“No,” he said, but he didn’t sound sure.

“Let’s call it ten,” Naomi said.

“Okay. But this is different. I’m not talking about having a little shipboard romance to pass the time. Ever since—”

Miller imagined the woman holding up her hand or taking Holden’s or maybe just glaring at him. Something to stop the flow of words.

“And do you know when I fell for you, sir?”

Sorrow. That was what the strain in her voice was. Sorrow. Disappointment. Regret.

“When… when you… ”

“I can tell you the day,” Naomi said. “You were about seven weeks into that first run. I was still smarting that some Earther had come in from out of the ecliptic and taken my XO job. I didn’t like you much right at the start. You were too charming, too pretty, and too damn comfortable in my chair. But there was a poker game in the engine room. You and me and those two Luna boys out of engineering and Kamala Trask. You remember Trask?”

“She was the comm tech. The one who was… ”

“Built like a refrigerator? Face like a bulldog puppy?”

“I remember her.”

“She had the biggest crush on you. Used to cry herself to sleep at night all through that run. She wasn’t in that game because she cared about poker. She just wanted to breathe some of your air, and everyone knew it. Even you. And all that night, I watched you and her, and you never once led her along. You never gave her any reason to think she had a chance with you. And you still treated her with respect. That was the first time I thought you might be a decent XO, and it was the first time I wished that I could be the girl in your bunk at shift’s end.”

“Because of Trask?”

“That and you’ve got a great ass, sir. My point is we flew together for four years and more. And I would have come along with you any day of that if you’d asked me.”

“I didn’t know,” Holden said. He sounded a little strangled.

“You didn’t ask. You always had your sights set someplace else. And, honestly, I think Belter women just put you off. Until the
Cant
… Until it was just the five of us. I’ve seen you looking at me. I know exactly what those looks mean, because I spent four years on the other side of them. But I only got your attention when I was the only female on board, and that’s not good enough for me.”