The Dragon’s Path (131 page)

“It’s a risk,” Miller said. “But I’ve been on Eros and Thoth station. I flew on the
Rocinante
with Holden and his crew. When it comes to analysis of the protomolecule and how we got into this mess, there isn’t anyone in a better position to give you information. You can argue I knew too much. That I was too valuable to let go.”

“Or too dangerous.”

“Sure. Or that.”

They were silent for a moment. On the
Nauvoo,
a bank of lights glittered in a gold-and-green test pattern and then went dark.

“Security consultant,” Fred said. “Independent. I won’t give you a rank.”

I’m too dirty for the OPA,
Miller thought with a glow of amusement.

“If it comes with my own bunk, I’ll take it,” he said. It was only until the war was over. After that, he was meat for the machine. That was fine. Fred leaned back. His chair hissed softly into its new configuration.

“All right,” Fred said. “Here’s your first job. Give me your analysis. What’s my biggest problem?”

“Containment,” Miller said.

“You think I can’t keep the information about Thoth station and the protomolecule quiet?”

“Of course you can’t,” Miller said. “For one thing, too many people already know. For another thing, one of them’s Holden, and if he hasn’t already broadcast the whole thing on every empty frequency, he will soon. And besides that, you can’t make a peace deal without explaining what the hell’s going on. Sooner or later, it has to come out.”

“And what do you advise?”

For a moment, Miller was back in the darkness, listening to the gibbers of the dying station. The voices of the dead calling to him from across the vacuum.

“Defend Eros,” he said. “All sides are going to want samples of the protomolecule. Locking down access is going to be the only way you get yourself a seat at that table.”

Fred chuckled.

“Nice thought,” he said. “But how do propose we defend something the size of Eros Station if Earth and Mars bring their navies to bear?”

It was a good point. Miller felt a tug of sorrow. Even though Julie Mao—his Julie—was dead and gone, it felt like disloyalty to say it.

“Then you have to get rid of it,” he said.

“And how would I do that?” Fred said. “Even if we studded the thing with nukes, how would we be sure that no little scrap of the thing would make its way to a colony or down a well? Blowing that thing up would be like blowing dandelion fluff into the breeze.”

Miller had never seen a dandelion, but he saw the problem. Even the smallest portion of the goo filling Eros might be enough to start the whole evil experiment over again. And the goo thrived on radiation; simply cooking the station might hurry the thing along its occult path rather than end it. To be sure that the protomolecule on Eros never spread, they’d need to break everything on the station down to its constituent atoms…

“Oh,” Miller said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. You’re not going to like this.”

“Try me.”

“Okay. You asked. You drive Eros into the sun.”

“Into the sun,” Fred said. “Do you have any idea how much mass we’re talking about here?”

Miller nodded to the wide, clear expanse of window, to the construction yards beyond it. To the
Nauvoo.

“Big engines on that thing,” Miller said. “Get some fast ships out to the station, make sure no one can get in before you get there. Run the
Nauvoo
into Eros Station. Knock it sunward.”

Fred’s gaze turned inward as he planned, calculated.

“Got to make sure no one gets into it until it hits corona. That’ll be hard, but Earth and Mars are both just as interested in keeping the other guy from having it as in getting it themselves.”

I’m sorry I couldn’t do better, Julie,
he thought.
But it’ll be a hell of a funeral.

Fred’s breath grew slow and deep, his gaze flickering as if he were reading something in the air that only he could see. Miller didn’t interrupt, even when the silence got heavy. It was almost a minute later that Fred let out a short, percussive breath.

“The Mormons are going to be pissed,” he said.

N
aomi talked in her sleep. It was one of a dozen things Holden hadn’t known about her before tonight. Even though they’d slept in crash couches a few feet apart on many occasions, he’d never heard it. Now, with her face against his bare chest, he could feel her lips move and the soft, punctuated exhalations of her words. He couldn’t hear what she was saying.

She also had a scar on her back, just above her left buttock. It was three inches long and had the uneven edges and rippling that came from a tear rather than a slice. Naomi would never get herself knifed in a bar fight, so it had to have come on the job. Maybe she had been climbing through tight spaces in the engine room when the ship maneuvered unexpectedly. A competent plastic surgeon could have made it invisible in one visit. That she hadn’t bothered and clearly didn’t care was another thing he had learned about her tonight.

She stopped murmuring and smacked her lips a few times, then said, “Thirsty.”

Holden slid out from under her and headed for the kitchen, knowing that this was the obsequiousness that always accompanied a new lover. For the next couple of weeks, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from fulfilling every whim Naomi might have. It was a behavior some men carried at the genetic level, their DNA wanting to make sure that first time wasn’t just a fluke.

Her room was laid out differently than his, and the unfamiliarity made him clumsy in the dark. He fumbled around for a few minutes in her small kitchen nook, looking for a glass. By the time he found it, filled it, and headed back into the bedroom, Naomi was sitting up in bed. The sheet lay pooled on her lap. The sight of her half nude in the dimly lit room gave him an embarrassingly sudden erection.

Naomi panned her gaze up his body, pausing at his midsection, then at the water glass, and said, “Is that for me?”

Holden didn’t know which thing she was asking about, so he just said, “Yes.”

“You asleep?”

Naomi’s face was on his belly, her breathing slow and deep, but to his surprise she said, “No.”

“Can we talk?”

Naomi rolled off him and pulled herself up until her face lay next to his on the pillow. Her hair fell across her eyes, and Holden reached out and brushed it away in a move that felt so intimate and proprietary that he had to swallow a lump in his throat.

“Are you about to get serious on me?” she asked, her eyes half lidded.

“Yeah, I am,” he said, and kissed her forehead.

“My last lover was over a year ago,” she said. “I’m a serial monogamist, so as far as I’m concerned, this is an exclusive-rights deal until one of us decides it isn’t. As long as I get advance warning that you’ve decided to end the deal, there won’t be any hard
feelings. I’m open to the idea of it being more than just sex, but in my experience that will happen on its own if it’s going to. I have eggs in storage on Europa and Luna, if that matters to you.”

She rolled up onto her elbow, her face hovering over his.

“Did I cover all the bases?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “But I agree to the conditions.”

She flopped onto her back, letting out a long contented sigh.

“Good.”

Holden wanted to hold her, but he felt too hot and sticky with sweat, so he just reached down and held her hand instead. He wanted to tell her that this meant something, that it was already more than sex for him, but all the words he tried out in his head came off sounding phony or maudlin.

“Thank you,” he said instead, but she was already snoring quietly.

They had sex again in the morning. After a long night with too little sleep, it wound up being far more effort than release for Holden, but there was a pleasure in that too, as if less than mind-blowing sex somehow meant something different and funnier and gentler than what they’d already done together. Afterward, Holden went to the kitchen and made coffee, then brought it back to bed on a tray. They drank it without talking, some of the shyness they’d avoided the night before coming now in the artificial morning of the room’s LEDs.

Naomi put her empty coffee cup down and touched the badly healed lump in his recently broken nose.

“Is it hideous?” Holden asked.

“No,” she said. “You were too perfect before. It makes you seem more substantial.”

Holden laughed. “That sounds like a word you use to describe a fat man or a history professor.”

Naomi smiled and touched his chest lightly with her fingertips. It wasn’t an attempt to arouse, just the exploration that came when satiation had removed sex from the equation. Holden tried to
remember the last time the cold sanity following sex had been this comfortable, but maybe that had been never. He was making plans to spend the remainder of the day in Naomi’s bed, running through a mental list of restaurants on the station that delivered, when his terminal began buzzing on the nightstand.

“God dammit,” he said.

“You don’t have to answer,” Naomi replied, and moved her explorations to his belly.

“You’ve been paying attention the last couple months, right?” Holden said. “Unless it’s a wrong number, then it’s probably some end-of-the-solar-system-type shit and we have five minutes to evacuate the station.”

Naomi kissed his ribs, which simultaneously tickled him and caused him to question his assumptions about his own refractory period.

“That’s not funny,” she said.

Holden sighed and picked up the terminal off the table. Fred’s name flashed as it buzzed again.

“It’s Fred,” he said.

Naomi stopped kissing him and sat up.

“Yeah, then it’s probably not good news.”

Holden tapped on the screen to accept the call and said, “Fred.”

“Jim. Come see me as soon as you get a chance. It’s important.”

“Okay,” Holden replied. “Be there in half an hour.”

He ended the call and tossed his hand terminal across the room onto the pile of clothes he’d left at the foot of the bed.

“Going to shower, then go see what Fred wants,” he said, pulling off the sheet and getting up.

“Should I come, too?” Naomi asked.

“Are you kidding? I’m never letting you out of my sight again.”

“Don’t get creepy on me,” Naomi replied, but she was smiling when she said it.