The Dragon’s Path (135 page)

The line went silent again, only the hiss of background radiation letting him know his headset hadn’t died.

When his answer came, it came on the shipwide comms.

Alex said, “They’re stoppin’, Captain. They just started hard brakin’. Tracking says they’ll be relative stopped about two million klicks out. Want me to keep flyin’ toward ’em?”

“No, bring us back to our stationary position over Eros,” Holden replied.

“Roger that.”

“Naomi,” Holden said, spinning his chair around to face her. “Are they doing anything else?”

“Not that I can see through the clutter of their exhaust. But they could be tightbeaming messages the other direction and we’d never know,” she said.

Holden flipped the shipwide comm off. He scratched his head for a minute, then unbuckled his restraints.

“Well, we stopped them for now. I’m going to hit the head and then grab a drink. Want anything?”

“He’s not wrong, you know,” Naomi said later that night.

Holden was floating in zero g on the ops deck, his station a few feet away. He’d turned down the deck lights, and the cabin was as dim as a moonlit night. Alex and Amos were sleeping two decks below. They might as well have been a million light-years away. Naomi was floating near her own station, two meters away, her hair unbound and drifting around her like a black cloud. The panel behind her lit her face in profile: the long forehead, flat nose, large lips. He could tell that her eyes were closed. He felt like they were the only two people in the universe.

“Who’s not wrong?” he said, just to be saying something.

“Miller,” she replied as though it were obvious.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Naomi laughed, then swatted with one hand to rotate her body and face him in the air. Her eyes were open now, though with the panel lights behind her, they were visible only as black pools in her face.

“I’ve been thinking about Miller,” she said. “I treated him badly on Tycho. Ignored him because you were angry. I owed him better than that.”

“Why?”

“He saved your life on Eros.”

Holden snorted, but she kept going anyway.

“When you were in the navy,” she finally said, “what were you supposed to do when someone went crazy on the ship? Started doing things that endangered everyone?”

Thinking they were talking about Miller, Holden said, “You restrain him and remove him as a danger to the ship and crew. But Fred didn’t—”

Naomi cut him off.

“What if it’s wartime?” she said. “The middle of a battle?”

“If he can’t be easily restrained, the chief of the watch has an obligation to protect the ship and crew by whatever means necessary.”

“Even shooting him?”

“If that’s the only way to do it,” Holden replied. “Sure. But it would only be in the most pressing circumstances.”

Naomi nodded with her hand, sending her body slowly twisting the other way. She stopped her motion with one unconscious gesture. Holden was pretty good in zero g, but he’d never be that good.

“The Belt is a network,” Naomi said. “It’s like one big distributed ship. We have nodes that make air, or water, or power, or structural materials. Those nodes may be separated by millions of kilometers of space, but that doesn’t make them any less interconnected.”

“I see where this is going,” Holden said with a sigh. “Dresden
was a madman on the ship, Miller shot him to protect the rest of us. He gave me that speech back on Tycho. Didn’t buy it then either.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Holden said. “Dresden wasn’t an immediate threat. He was just an evil little man in an expensive suit. He didn’t have a gun in his hand, or his finger on a bomb trigger. And I will never trust a man who believes he has the right to unilaterally execute people.”

Holden put his foot against the bulkhead and tapped off just hard enough to float a few feet closer to Naomi, close enough to see her eyes, read her reaction to him.

“If that science ship starts flying toward Eros again, I will throw every torpedo we have at it, and tell myself I was protecting the rest of the solar system from what’s on Eros. But I won’t just start shooting at it now, on the idea that it
might
decide to head to Eros again, because that’s murder. What Miller did was murder.”

Naomi smiled at him, then grabbed his flight suit and pulled him close enough for a kiss.

“You might be the best person I know. But you’re totally uncompromising on what you think is right, and that’s what you hate about Miller.”

“I do?”

“Yes,” she said. “He’s totally uncompromising too, but he has different ideas on how things work. You hate that. To Miller, Dresden was an active threat to the ship. Every second he stayed alive endangered everyone else around him. To Miller, it was self-defense.”

“But he’s wrong. The man was helpless.”

“The man talked the UN Navy into giving his company state-of-the-art ships,” she said. “He talked his company into murdering a million and a half people. Everything Miller said about why the protomolecule is better off with us was just as true about Dresden. How long is he in an OPA lockup before he finds the jailer who can be bought?”

“He was a prisoner,” Holden said, feeing the argument slipping away from him.

“He was a monster with power, access, and allies who would have paid any price to keep his science project going,” Naomi said. “And I’m telling you as a Belter, Miller wasn’t wrong.”

Holden didn’t answer; he just continued to float next to Naomi, keeping himself in her orbit. Was he angrier about the killing of Dresden or about Miller’s making a decision that disagreed with him?

And Miller had known. When Holden had told him to find his own ride back to Tycho, he’d seen it in the detective’s sad basset hound face. Miller had known it was coming, and had made no attempt to fight or argue. That meant that Miller had made his choice fully cognizant of the cost and ready to pay it. That meant something. Holden wasn’t sure exactly what, but something.

A red telltale began flashing on the wall, and Naomi’s panel woke up and began throwing data onto the screen. She pulled herself down to it using the back of her chair, then tapped out several quick commands.

“Shit,” she said.

“What is it?”

“The corvette or science ship must have called for help,” Naomi said, pointing at her screen. “We’ve got ships on their way from all over the system.”

“How many are coming?” Holden asked, trying to get a better look at her screen.

Naomi made a small sound in the back of her throat, halfway between a chuckle and a cough.

“At a guess? All of them.”

Y
ou are, and you aren’t,” the Eros feed said through a semi-random drumming of static. “You are, and you aren’t. You are, and you aren’t.”

The little ship shuddered and bumped. From a crash couch, one of the OPA techs called out a string of obscenities remarkable more for inventiveness than actual rancor. Miller closed his eyes, trying to keep the micro-g adjustments of their nonstandard docking from nauseating him. After days of joint-aching acceleration and an equally bruising braking routine, the small shifts and movements felt arbitrary and strange.

“You are, are, are, are,
are, are, are
… ”

He’d spent some time listening to the newsfeeds. Three days after they’d left Tycho, the news of Protogen’s involvement with Eros broke. Amazingly, Holden hadn’t been the one to do it. Since then, the corporation had gone from total denial, to blaming a
rogue subcontractor, to claiming immunity under an Earth defense secrets statute. It didn’t sound good for them. Earth’s blockade of Mars was still in place, but attention had shifted to the power struggle within Earth, and the Martian navy had slowed its burn, giving the Earth forces a little more breathing room before any permanent decisions had to be made. It looked like they’d postponed Armageddon for a few weeks, anyway. Miller found he could take a certain joy in that. It also left him tired.

More often, he listened to the voice of Eros. Sometimes he watched the video feeds too, but usually, he just listened. Over the hours and days, he began to hear, if not patterns, at least common structures. Some of the voices spooling out of the dying station were consistent—broadcasters and entertainers who were overrepresented in the audio files archives, he guessed. There seemed to be some specific tendencies in, for want of a better term, the music of it too. Hours of random, fluting static and snatched bits of phrases would give way, and Eros would latch on to some word or phrase, fixating on it with greater and greater intensity until it broke apart and the randomness poured back in.

“… are, are, are, ARE, ARE, ARE… ”

Aren’t,
Miller thought, and the ship suddenly shoved itself up, leaving Miller’s stomach about half a foot from where it had been. A series of loud clanks followed, and then the brief wail of a Klaxon.

“Dieu! Dieu!” someone shouted. “Bombs son vamen roja! Going to fry it! Fry us toda!”

There was the usual polite chuckle that the same joke had occasioned over the course of the trip, and the boy who’d made it—a pimply Belter no more than fifteen years old—grinned with pleasure at his own wit. If he didn’t stop that shit, someone was going to beat him with a crowbar before they got back to Tycho. But Miller figured that someone wasn’t him.

A massive jolt forward pushed him hard into the couch, and then gravity was back, the familiar 0.3 g. Maybe a little more. Except that with the airlocks pointing toward ship’s down, the pilot had to grapple the spinning skin of Eros’ belly first. The spin
gravity made what had been the ceiling the new floor; the lowest rank of couches was now the top; and while they rigged the fusion bombs to the docks, they were all going to have to climb up onto a cold, dark rock that was trying to fling them off into the vacuum.

Such were the joys of sabotage.

Miller suited up. After the military-grade suits of the
Rocinante,
the OPA’s motley assortment of equipment felt like third-hand clothes. His suit smelled of someone else’s body, and the Mylar faceplate had a deformation where it had cracked and been repaired. He didn’t like thinking about what had happened to the poor bastard who’d been wearing it. The magnetic boots had a thick layer of corroded plastic and old mud between the plates and a triggering mechanism so old that Miller could feel it click on and off even before he moved his foot. He had the image of the suit locking on to Eros and never letting go.

The thought made him smile.
You belong with me,
his own private Julie had said. It was true, and now that he was here, he felt perfectly certain that he wasn’t going to leave. He’d been a cop for too long, and the idea of trying to reconnect to humanity again filled him with the presentiment of exhaustion. He was here to do the last part of his job. And then he was done.

“Oi! Pampaw!”

“I’m coming,” Miller said. “Hold your damn horses. It’s not like the station’s going anyplace.”

“A rainbow is a circle you can’t see. Can’t see. Can’t see,” Eros said in a child’s singsong voice. Miller turned down the volume of his feed.

The rocky surface of the station had no particular purchase for the suits and control waldoes. Two other ships had made polar landings where there was no spin gravity to fight against, but the Coriolis would leave everyone with a subliminal nausea. Miller’s team had to keep to the exposed metal plates of the dock, clinging like flies looking down into the starlit abyss.

Engineering the placement of the fusion bombs wasn’t trivial work. If the bombs didn’t pump enough energy into the station,
the surface might cool enough to give someone another chance to put a science team on it before the penumbra of the sun swallowed it and whatever parts of the
Nauvoo
were still clinging to it. Even with the best minds of Tycho, there was still the chance that the detonations wouldn’t sync up. If the pressure waves traveling through the rock amplified in ways they hadn’t anticipated, the station could crack open like an egg, spreading the protomolecule through the wide, empty track of the solar system like scattering a handful of dust. But the difference between success and disaster might be literally a question of meters.