The Dragon’s Path (96 page)

“Right now everyone is still playing nice, and only shooting at ships. Very gentlemanly. But sooner or later, one side or the other will be pressed to do something desperate.”

Holden leaned forward, the slick surface of his environment suit making an embarrassing squeak on the leather textured chair. No one laughed.

“I agree. What does that have to do with us?” he asked.

“Too much blood has already been shed,” Fred said.

Shed.

Holden winced at the bleak, unintentional pun but said nothing.

“The
Canterbury,
” Fred continued. “The
Donnager.
People aren’t just going to forget about those ships, and those thousands of innocent people.”

“Seems like you just crossed off the only two options, Chief,” Alex said. “No war, no peace.”

“There’s a third alternative. Civilized society has another way of dealing with things like this,” Fred said. “A criminal trial.”

Amos’ snort shook the air. Holden had to fight not to smile himself.

“Are you fucking serious?” Amos asked. “And how do you put a goddamn Martian stealth ship on trial? Do we go question all the stealth ships about their whereabouts, double-check their alibis?”

Fred held up a hand.

“Stop thinking of the
Canterbury
’s destruction as an act of war,” he said. “It was a crime. Right now, people are overreacting, but once the situation sinks in, heads will cool. People on both sides will see where this road goes and look for another way out. There is a window where the saner elements can investigate events, negotiate jurisdiction, and assign blame to some party or parties that both sides can agree to. A trial. It’s the only outcome that doesn’t involve millions of deaths and the collapse of human infrastucture.”

Holden shrugged, a gesture barely visible in his heavy environment suit.

“So it goes to a trial. You still aren’t answering my question.”

Fred pointed at Holden, then at each of the crew in turn.

“You’re the ace in the hole. You four people are the only eyewitnesses to the destruction of
both
ships. When the trial comes, I need you and your depositions. I have influence already through our political contacts, but you can buy me a seat at the table. It will be a whole new set of treaties between the Belt and the inner planets. We can do in months what I’d dreamed of doing in decades.”

“And you want to use our value as witnesses to force your way into the process so you can make those treaties look the way you want them to,” Holden said.

“Yes. And I’m willing to give you protection, shelter, and run of my station for as long as it takes to get there.”

Holden took a long, deep breath, got up, and started unzipping his suit.

“Yeah, okay. That’s just self-serving enough I believe it,” he said. “Let’s get settled in.”

Naomi was singing karaoke. Just thinking about it made Holden’s head spin. Naomi. Karaoke. Even considering everything that had happened to them over the past month, Naomi up onstage with a mic in one hand and some sort of fuchsia martini in the other, screaming out an angry Belt-punk anthem by the Moldy Filters, was the strangest thing he’d ever seen. She finished to scattered applause and a few catcalls, then staggered off the stage and collapsed across from him in the booth.

She held up her drink, sloshing a good half of it onto the table, then threw the other half back all at once.

“Whadja think?” Naomi asked, waving at the bartender for another.

“It was terrible,” Holden replied.

“No, really.”

“It was truly one of the most awful renditions of one of the most awful songs I’ve ever heard.”

Naomi shook her head, blowing an exasperated raspberry at him. Her dark hair fell across her face and, when the bartender brought her a second brightly colored martini, foiled all her attempts at drinking. She finally grabbed her hair and held it above her head in a clump while she drank.

“You don’t get it,” she said. “It’s
supposed
to be awful. That’s the point.”

“Then it was the best version of that song I’ve ever heard,” Holden said.

“Damn straight.” Naomi looked around the bar. “Where’re Amos and Alex?”

“Amos found what I’m pretty sure was the most expensive hooker I’ve ever seen. Alex is in the back playing darts. He made some claims about the superiority of Martian darts players. I assume they’re going to kill him and throw him out an airlock.”

A second singer was onstage, crooning out some sort of Vietnamese power ballad. Naomi watched the singer for a while, sipping her drink, then said, “Maybe we should go save him.”

“Which one?”

“Alex. Why would Amos need saving?”

“Because I’m pretty sure he told the expensive hooker he was on Fred’s expense account.”

“Let’s mount a rescue mission; we can save them both,” Naomi said, then drank the rest of her cocktail. “I need more rescue fuel, though.”

She started waving at the bartender again, but Holden reached out and grabbed her hand and held it on the table.

“Maybe we should take a breather instead,” he said.

A flush of anger as intense as it was brief lit her face. She pulled back her hand.

“You take a breather. I’ve just had two ships and a bunch of friends shot out from underneath me, and spent three weeks of dead time flying to get here. So, no. I’m getting another drink, and then doing another set. The crowd loves me,” Naomi said.

“What about our rescue mission?”

“Lost cause. Amos will be murdered by space hookers, but at least he’ll die the way he lived.”

Naomi pushed her way up from the table, grabbed her martini off the bar, and headed toward the karaoke stage. Holden watched her go, then finished off the scotch he’d been nursing for the past two hours and got up.

For a moment there, he’d had a vision of the two of them staggering back to the room together, then falling into bed. He’d have hated himself in the morning for taking advantage, but he’d still have done it. Naomi was looking at him from the stage, and he realized he’d been staring. He gave a little wave, then headed out the door with only ghosts—Ade, Captain McDowell, Gomez and Kelly and Shed—to keep him company.

The suite was comfortable and huge and depressing. He’d lain on the bed less than five minutes before he was up and out the door again. He walked the corridor for half an hour, finding the big intersections that led to other parts of the ring. He found an electronics store and a teahouse and what on closer inspection turned out to be a very expensive brothel. He declined the video menu of services the desk clerk offered and wandered out again, wondering if Amos was somewhere inside.

He was halfway down a corridor he hadn’t seen before when a small knot of teenage girls passed him. Their faces looked no older than fourteen, but they were already as tall as he was. They got quiet as he walked by, then burst out laughing when he was behind them, and hurried away. Tycho was a city, and he suddenly felt very much like a foreigner, unsure of where to go or what to do.

It was no surprise to him when he looked up from his wanderings and discovered he’d come to the elevator to the docking area. He punched the button and climbed inside, remembering to turn on his boot mags just in time to avoid being flung off his feet when the gravity twisted sideways and vanished.

Even though he’d only had possession of the ship for three weeks, climbing back onto the
Rocinante
felt like going home. Using gentle touches on the keel ladder, he made his way up to the cockpit. He pulled himself into the copilot’s couch, strapped in, and closed his eyes.

The ship was silent. With the reactor off-line, and no one aboard, nothing was moving at all. The flexible docking tube that connected the
Roci
to the station transmitted very little vibration to the ship. Holden could close his eyes and drift in the straps and disconnect from everything around him.

It would have been peaceful except that every time he’d closed his eyes for the past month, the fading ghost lights behind his eyelids had been Ade winking and blowing away like dust. The voice at the back of his head was McDowell’s as he tried to save his ship right up to the very last second. He wondered if he’d have them
for the rest of his life, coming out to haunt him every time he found a moment of quiet.

He remembered the old-timers from his navy days. Grizzled lifers who could soundly sleep while two meters away their shipmates played a raucous game of poker or watched the vids with the volume all the way up. Back then he’d assumed it was just learned behavior, the body adapting so it could get enough rest in an environment that never really had downtime. Now he wondered if those vets found the constant noise preferable. A way to keep their lost shipmates away. They probably went home after their twenty and never slept again. He opened his eyes and watched a small green telltale blink on the pilot’s console.

It was the only light in the room, and it illuminated nothing. But its slow fade in and out was somehow comforting. A quiet heartbeat for the ship.

He told himself that Fred was right; a trial was the right thing to hope for. But he wanted that stealth ship in Alex’s gun sights. He wanted that unknown crew to live through the terrifying moment when all the countermeasures have failed, the torpedoes are seconds from impact, and absolutely nothing can stop them.

He wanted them to have that same last gasp of fear he’d heard through Ade’s mic.

For a time, he displaced the ghosts in his head with violent vengeance fantasies. When they stopped working, he floated down to the personnel deck, strapped into his cot, and tried to sleep. The
Rocinante
sang him a lullaby of air recyclers and silence.

M
iller sat at an open café, the tunnel wide above him. Grass grew tall and pale in the public commons, and the ceiling glowed full-spectrum white. Ceres Station had come unmoored. Orbital mechanics and inertia kept it physically where it had always been, but the stories about it had changed. The point defenses were the same. The tensile strength of the port blast doors was the same. The ephemeral shield of political status was all they’d lost, and it was everything.

Miller leaned forward and sipped his coffee.

There were children playing on the commons. He thought of them as children, though he remembered thinking of himself as an adult at that age. Fifteen, sixteen years old. They wore OPA armbands. The boys spoke in loud, angry voices about tyranny and freedom. The girls watched the boys strut. The ancient, animal story, the same whether it was on a spinning rock surrounded
by hard vacuum or the stamp-sized chimpanzee preserves on Earth. Even in the Belt, youth brought invulnerability, immortality, the unshakable conviction that for you, things would be different. The laws of physics would cut you a break, the missiles would never hit, the air would never hiss out into nothing. Maybe for other people—the patched-together fighting ships of the OPA, the water haulers, the Martian gunships, the
Scopuli,
the
Canterbury,
the
Donnager,
the hundred other ships that had died in small actions since the system had turned itself into a battlefield—but not you. And when youth was lucky enough to survive its optimism, all Miller had left was a little fear, a little envy, and the overwhelming sense of life’s fragility. But he had three month’s worth of company script in his account and a lot of free time, and the coffee wasn’t bad.