The Dragon’s Path (124 page)

The truth was Miller was in no shape for the assault. He was still getting occasional waves of inexplicable nausea, and his arm ached whenever the medication level in his blood started thinning out. But he knew his way around a gun, and he probably knew more about corridor-to-corridor fighting than nine-tenths of the OPA rock jumpers and ore hogs like Diogo who were about to go in. It would have to be good enough.

The ship’s address system clicked once.

“This is Fred. We’ve had word from air support, and we’re green for breach in ten minutes. Final checks start now, people.”

Miller sat back in his couch. The clicking and chattering of a hundred suits of armor, a hundred sidearms, a hundred assault weapons filled the air. He’d been over his own enough times now; he didn’t feel the urge to do it again.

In a few minutes, the burn would come. The cocktail of high-g drugs was kept on the ragged edge, since they’d be going straight
from the couches into a firefight. No point having your assault force more doped than necessary.

Julie sat on the wall beside him, her hair swirling around her like she was underwater. He imagined the dappled light flashing across her face. Portrait of the young pinnace racer as a mermaid. She smiled at the idea, and Miller smiled back. She would have been here, he knew. Along with Diogo and Fred and all the other OPA militia, patriots of the vacuum, she’d have been in a crash couch, wearing borrowed armor, heading into the station to get herself killed for the greater good. Miller knew he wouldn’t have. Not before her. So in a sense, he’d taken her place. He’d become her.

They made it,
Julie said, or maybe only thought. If the ground attack was going forward, it meant the
Rocinante
had survived—at least long enough to knock out the defenses. Miller nodded, acknowledging her and letting himself feel a moment’s pleasure at the idea, and then thrust gravity pushed him into his couch so hard that his consciousness flickered, and the hold around him dimmed. He felt it when the braking burn came, all the crash couches spinning to face the new up. Needles dug into Miller’s flesh. Something deep and loud happened, the
Guy Molinari
ringing like a gigantic bell. The breaching charge. The world pulled hard to the left, the couch swinging for the last time as the assault ship matched the station’s spin.

Someone was shouting at him. “Go go go!” Miller lifted his assault rifle, tapped the sidearm strapped to his thigh, and joined the press of bodies making for the exit. He missed his hat.

The service corridor they’d cut into was narrow and dim. The schematics the Tycho engineers had worked up suggested they wouldn’t see any real resistance until they got into the manned parts of the station. That had been a bad guess. Miller staggered in with the other OPA soldiers in time to see an automatic defense laser cut the first rank in half.

“Team three! Gas it!” Fred snapped in all their ears, and half a
dozen blooms of thick white anti-laser smoke burst into the close air. The next time a defense laser fired, the walls flashed with mad iridescence, and the smoke of burning plastic filled the air, but no one died. Miller pressed forward and up a red metal ramp. A welding charge flared, and a service door swung open.

The corridors of Thoth station were wide and roomy, with long swaths of ivy grown in carefully tended spirals, niches every few feet with tastefully lit bonsai. Soft light the pure white of sunlight made the place feel like a spa or a rich man’s private residence. The floors were carpet.

The HUD in his armor flickered, marking the path the assault was meant to take. Miller’s heart stepped up to a fast, constant flutter, but his mind seemed to grow perfectly still. At the first intersection, a riot barrier was manned by a dozen men in Protogen security uniforms. The OPA troops hung back, using the curve of the ceiling as cover. What suppressing fire there was came in kneecap low.

The grenades were perfectly round, not even a hole where the pin had been pulled. They didn’t roll as well on the soft industrial carpet as they would have on stone or tiling, so one of the three went off before it reached the barrier. The concussion was like being hit in the ears with a hammer; the narrow, sealed corridors channeled the blast back at them almost as much as at the enemy. But the riot barrier shattered, and the Protogen security men fell back.

As they all rushed forward, Miller heard his new, temporary compatriots whooping with the first taste of victory. The sound was muffled, as if they were a long way away. Maybe his earpieces hadn’t dampened the blast as much as they were supposed to. Making the rest of the assault with blown eardrums wouldn’t be easy.

But then Fred came on, and his voice was clear enough.

“Do not advance! Hold back!”

It was almost enough. The OPA ground force hesitated, Fred’s orders pulling at them like a leash. These weren’t troops. They
weren’t even cops. They were a Belter irregular militia; discipline and respect for authority weren’t natural to them. They slowed. They got careful. So rounding the corner, they didn’t walk into the trap.

The next corridor was long and straight, leading—the HUD suggested—to a service ramp up toward the control center. It looked empty, but a third of the way to the curve horizon, the carpeting started to fly apart in ragged tufts. One of the boys beside Miller grunted and went down.

“They are using low-shrapnel rounds and bouncing them off the curve,” Fred said into all their ears at once. “Bank-shot ricochet. Stay low, and do exactly as I say.”

The calm in the Earther’s voice had more effect than his shouting had. Miller thought he might have been imagining it, but there also seemed to be a deeper tone. A certainty. The Butcher of Anderson Station doing what he did best, leading his troops against the tactics and strategies he’d helped create back when he’d been the enemy.

Slowly, the OPA forces moved forward, up one level, and then the next, then the next. The air grew hazy with smoke and ablated paneling. The wide corridors opened into broad plazas and squares, as airy as prison yards, with the Protogen forces in the guard towers. The side corridors were locked down, local security trying to channel them into situations where they could be caught in crossfire.

It didn’t work. The OPA forced open the doors, taking cover in display-rich rooms, something between lecture halls and manufacturing complexes. Twice, unarmored civilians, still at their work despite the ongoing assault, attacked them when they entered. The OPA boys mowed them down. Part of Miller’s mind—the part that was still a cop and not a soldier—twitched at that. They were civilians. Killing them was, at the very least, bad form. But then Julie whispered in the back of his mind,
No one here is innocent,
and he had to agree.

The operations center was a third of the way up the station’s
slight gravity well, defended better than anything they had seen so far. Miller and five others, directed by the all-knowing voice of Fred, took cover in a narrow service corridor, keeping a steady suppressing fire up the main corridor toward ops, and making sure no Protogen counterattack would go unanswered. Miller checked his assault weapon and was surprised to see how much ammunition was left.

“Oi, Pampaw,” the kid next to him said, and Miller smiled, recognizing Diogo’s voice behind the face mask. “Day’s the day, passa?”

“I’ve seen worse,” Miller agreed, then paused. He tried to scratch his injured elbow, but the armor plates kept anything satisfying from happening.

“Beccas tu?” Diogo asked.

“No, I’m fine. It’s just… this place. I don’t get it. It looks like a spa, and it’s built like a prison.”

The boy’s hands shifted in query. Miller shook his fist in response, thinking through the ideas as he spoke.

“It’s all long sight lines and locked-down side passages,” Miller said. “If I was going to build a place like this, I’d—”

The air sang, and Diogo went down, his head snapping back as he fell. Miller yelped and wheeled. Behind them in the side corridor, two figures in Protogen security uniform dove for cover. Something hissed through the air by Miller’s left ear. Something else bounced off the breastplate of his fancy Martian armor like a hammer blow. He didn’t think about raising his assault weapon; it was just there, coughing out return fire like an extension of his will. The other three OPA soldiers turned to help.

“Get back,” Miller barked. “Keep your fucking eyes on the main corridor! I’m
on
this.”

Stupid,
Miller told himself,
stupid to let them get behind us. Stupid to stop and talk in the middle of a firefight.
He should have known better, and now, because he’d lost focus, the boy was…

Laughing?

Diogo sat up, lifted his own assault weapon, and peppered the
side corridor with rounds. He got unsteadily to his feet, then whooped like a child who’d just gotten off a thrill ride. A wide streak of white goo stretched from his collarbone up across the right side of his face mask. Behind it, Diogo was grinning. Miller shook his head.

“What the hell are they using crowd suppression rounds for?” he said to himself as much as the boy. “They think this a riot?”

“Forward teams,” Fred said in Miller’s ear, “get ready. We’re moving in five. Four. Three. Two. Go!”

We don’t know what we’re getting into here,
Miller thought as he joined the sprint down the corridor, pressing toward the assault’s final target. A wide ramp led up to a set of blast doors done in wood-grain veneer. Something detonated behind them, but Miller kept his head low and didn’t look back. The press of bodies jostling in their ragtag armor grew thicker, and Miller stumbled on something soft. A body in Protogen uniform.

“Give us some room!” a woman at the front shouted. Miller pushed toward her, cutting through the crowd of OPA soldiers with his shoulder and elbow. The woman shouted again as he reached her.

“What’s the problem?” Miller shouted.

“I can’t cut through this bitch with all these dick-lickers pushing me,” she said, lifting a cutting torch already glowing white at the edge. Miller nodded and slid his assault rifle into the sling on his back. He grabbed two of the nearest shoulders, shook the men until they noticed him, and then locked his elbows with theirs.

“Just need to give the techs some room,” Miller said, and together they waded into their own men, pushing them back.
How many battles, all through history, fell apart at moments like this?
he wondered.
The victory all but delivered until allied forces started tripping over each other.
The welder popped to life behind him, the heat pressing at his back like a hand even in armor.

At the edge of the crowd, automatic weapons gurgled and choked.

“How’s it going back there?” Miller shouted over his shoulder.

The woman didn’t answer. Hours seemed to pass, though it couldn’t have been more than five minutes. The haze of hot metal and aerosolized plastic filled the air.

The welding torch turned off with a pop. Over his shoulder, Miller saw the bulkhead sag and shift. The tech placed a card-thin jack into the gap between plates, activated it, and stood back. The station around them groaned as a new set of pressures and strains reshaped the metal. The bulkhead opened.

“Come on,” Miller shouted, then tucked his head and moved through the new passageway, up a carpeted ramp, and into the ops center. A dozen men and women looked up from their stations, eyes wide with fear.

“You’re under arrest!” Miller shouted as the OPA soldiers boiled in around him. “Well, no you’re not, but… shit. Put your hands up and back away from the controls!”

One of the men—tall as a Belter, but built solid as a man in full gravity—sighed. He wore a good suit, linen and raw silk, without the lines and folds that spoke of computer tailoring.

“Do what they say,” the linen suit said. He sounded peeved, but not frightened.

Miller’s eyes narrowed.

“Mr. Dresden?”

The suit raised a carefully shaped eyebrow, paused, and nodded.

“Been looking for you,” Miller said.

Fred walked into the ops center like he belonged there. With a tighter set of the shoulders and a degree’s shift of the spine, the master engineer of Tycho Station was gone, and the general was in his place. He looked over the ops center, sucking in every detail with a flicker of his eyes, then nodded at one of the senior OPA techs.

“All locked down, sir,” the tech said. “The station’s yours.”