Leviathan Wakes (31 page)

The sound of detonation came from spinward, then voices raised in anger. The kids on the commons stopped their games of touch-me touch-you and stared. Miller stood up. There was smoke, but he couldn’t see flames. The breeze picked up as the station air cleaners raised the flow to suck away particulates so the sensors didn’t think there was a risk of fanning a fire. Three gunshots rang out in fast succession, and the voices came together in a rough chant. Miller couldn’t make words out of it, but the rhythm told him all he needed to know. Not a disaster, not a fire, not a breach. Just a riot.

The kids were walking toward the commotion. Miller caught one by the elbow. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, her eyes near black, her face a perfect heart shape.

“Don’t go over there,” he said. “Get your friends together and walk the other way.”

The girl looked at him, his hand on her arm, the distant commotion.

“You can’t help,” he said.

She pulled her arm free.

“Gotta try, yeah?” she said. “Podría intentar, you know.”
You could too.

“Just did,” Miller said as he put his terminal in its case and walked away. Behind him, the sounds of the riot grew. But he figured the police could take care of it.

Over the next fourteen hours, the system net reported five riots on the station, some minor structural damage. Someone he’d never heard of announced a tri-phase curfew; people out of their holes more than two hours before or after their work shifts would be subject to arrest. Whoever was running the show now thought they could lock down six million people and create stability and peace. He wondered what Shaddid thought about that.

Outside Ceres, things were getting worse. The deep astronomy labs on Triton had been occupied by a band of prospectors sympathetic to the OPA. They’d turned the array in-system and had been broadcasting the location of every Martian ship in the system along with high-definition images of the surface of Mars, down to the topless sunbathers in the dome parks. The story was that a volley of nukes was on its way to the station, and the array would be bright dust within a week. Earth’s imitation of a snail was picking up the pace as Earth- and Luna-based companies pulled back down the gravity well. Not all of them, not even half, but enough to send the Terran message:
Count us out.
Mars appealed for solidarity; the Belt appealed for justice or, more often, told the birthplace of humanity to go fuck itself.

It wasn’t out of control yet, but it was ramping up. Another few incidents and it wouldn’t matter how it had started. It wouldn’t
matter what the stakes were. Mars knew the Belt couldn’t win, and the Belt knew it had nothing to lose. It was a recipe for death on a scale humanity had never seen.

And, like Ceres, there wasn’t much Miller could do about that either. But he could find James Holden, find out what had happened to the
Scopuli,
follow the leads back to Julie Mao. He was a detective. It was what he did.

As he packed up his hole, throwing out the collected detritus that grew over decades like a crust, he talked to her. He tried to explain why he’d given up everything to find her. After his discovery of the
Rocinante,
he could hardly avoid the word
quixotic.

His imaginary Julie laughed or was touched. She thought he was a sad, pathetic little man, since just tracking her down was the nearest to a purpose in life he could find. She dressed him down as being a tool of her parents. She wept and put her arms around him. She sat with him in some almost unimaginable observation lounge and watched the stars.

He fit everything he had into a shoulder bag. Two changes of clothes, his papers, his hand terminal. A picture of Candace from back in better days. All the hard copy of Julie’s case he’d made before Shaddid wiped his partition, including three pictures of Julie. He thought that everything he’d lived through should have added up to more, and then changed his mind. It was probably about right.

He spent one last day ignoring the curfew, making his rounds of the station, saying goodbye to the few people he felt he might miss or might miss him. To his surprise, Muss, who he found at a tense and uncomfortable police bar, actually teared up and hugged him until his ribs ached from it.

He booked passage on a transport to Tycho. His bunk ran him a quarter of his remaining funds. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he had to find Julie pretty damn quick or find a job to support him through the investigation. But it hadn’t happened yet, and the universe wasn’t stable enough anymore to make long-range planning more than a sour joke.

As if to prove the point, his terminal chimed as he was in the line to board the transport.

“Hey, partner,” Havelock said. “That favor you needed? I got a bite. Your package just put in a flight plan for Eros. I’m sending the public-access data attached. I’d get you the good stuff, but these Protogen guys are tight. I mentioned you to the recruiter and she seemed interested. So let me know, right? Talk to you soon.”

Eros.

Great.

Miller nodded at the woman behind him, stepped out of line, and walked to the kiosk. By the time a screen was open, they were calling final boarding for the Tycho transport. Miller turned in his ticket, got a nominal refund, and spent a third of what he still had in his account for a ticket to Eros. Still, it could have been worse. He could have been on the way before he got word. He had to start thinking about it as good luck, not bad.

The passage confirmation came through with a chime like a gently struck triangle.

“I hope I’m right about this,” he said to Julie. “If Holden’s not there, I’m gonna feel pretty stupid.”

In his mind, she smiled ruefully.

Life is risk,
she said.

S
hips were small. Space was always at a premium, and even on a monster like the
Donnager,
the corridors and compartments were cramped and uncomfortable. On the
Rocinante,
the only rooms where Holden could spread out his arms without touching two walls were the galley and the cargo bay. No one who flew for a living was claustrophobic, but even the most hardened Belt prospector could recognize the rising tension of being ship-bound. It was the ancient stress response of the trapped animal, the subconscious knowledge that there was literally nowhere to go that you couldn’t see from where you were already standing. Getting off the ship at port was a sudden and sometimes giddying release of tension.

It often took the form of a drinking game.

Like all professional sailors, Holden had sometimes ended long flights by drinking himself into a stupor. More than once he’d
wandered into a brothel and left only when they threw him out with an emptied account, a sore groin, and a prostate as dry as the Sahara desert. So when Amos staggered into his room after three days on station, Holden knew exactly what the big mechanic felt like.

Holden and Alex were sharing the couch and watching a newsfeed. Two talking heads were discussing the Belter actions with words like
criminal,
terrorist,
and
sabotage.
The Martians were “peacekeepers.” It was a Martian news channel. Amos snorted and collapsed on the couch. Holden muted the screen.

“Having a good shore leave, sailor?” Holden asked with a grin.

“I’ll never drink again,” Amos groaned.

“Naomi’s comin’ over with some chow she got at that sushi place,” Alex said. “Nice raw fish wrapped in fake seaweed.”

Amos groaned again.

“That’s not nice, Alex,” Holden said. “Let the man’s liver die in peace.”

The door to the suite slid open again, and Naomi came in carrying a tall stack of white boxes.

“Food’s here,” she said.

Alex opened all the boxes and started handing around small disposable plates.

“Every time it’s your turn to get food, you get salmon rolls. It shows a lack of imagination,” Holden said as he began putting food on his plate.

“I like salmon,” Naomi replied.

The room got quiet as people ate; the only sounds were the clack of plastic chopsticks and the wet squish of things being dipped in wasabi and soy. When the food was gone, Holden wiped his eyes, made runny by the heat in his sinuses, and leaned his chair all the way back. Amos used one of his chopsticks to scratch under the cast on his leg.

“You guys did a pretty good job setting this,” he said. “It’s the thing on my body that hurts the least right now.”

Naomi grabbed the remote off Holden’s armrest and turned
the volume back on. She began spooling through the different feeds. Alex closed his eyes and slid down on the loveseat, lacing his fingers across his belly and sighing contentedly. Holden felt a sudden and irrational annoyance at his crew for being so comfortable.

“Everyone had enough of sucking on Fred’s teat yet?” he said. “I know I have.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Amos said, shaking his head. “I’m just getting started.”

“I mean,” Holden said, “how long are we going to hang around on Tycho, drinking and whoring and eating sushi on Fred’s expense account?”

“As long as I can?” Alex said.

“You have a better plan, then,” Naomi said.

“I don’t have a plan, but I want to get back in the game. We were full of righteous anger and dreams of vengeance when we got here, and a couple of blowjobs and hangovers later, it’s like nothing ever happened.”

“Uh, vengeance kinda requires someone to avenge upon, Cap,” Alex said. “Case you ain’t noticed, we’re lackin’ in that department.”

“That ship is still out there, somewhere. The people who ordered it to shoot are, too,” Holden said.

“So,” Alex replied slowly, “we take off and start flyin’ in a spiral until we run into it?”

Naomi laughed and threw a soy packet at him.

“I don’t know what we do,” Holden said, “but sitting here while the people who killed our ship keep doing whatever it is
they’re
doing is making me nuts.”

“We’ve been here three days,” Naomi said. “We deserve some comfortable beds and decent food and a chance to blow off steam. Don’t try to make us feel bad for taking it.”

“Besides, Fred said we’ll get those bastards at the trial,” Amos said.

“If there’s a trial,” Holden replied. “
If.
It won’t happen for months, or maybe even years. And even then, Fred’s looking
at those treaties. Amnesty might be another bargaining chip, right?”

“You were quick enough to agree to his terms, Jim,” Naomi said. “Changed your mind?”

“If Fred wants depositions in exchange for letting us patch up and rest, the price was cheap. That doesn’t mean I think a trial will fix everything, or that I want to be sidelined until it happens.”

He gestured at the faux-leather couch and huge wall screen around them.

“Besides, this can be a prison. It’s a nice one, but as long as Fred controls the purse strings, he owns us. Make no mistake.”

Naomi’s brow crinkled; her eyes grew serious.

“What’s the option, sir?” she asked. “Leave?”

Holden folded his arms, his mind turning over everything he’d said as if he was hearing it for the first time. Saying things out loud actually made them clearer.

“I’m thinking we look for work,” he said. “We’ve got a good ship. More importantly, we have a sneaky ship. It’s fast. We can run without a transponder if we need to. Lots of people will need things moved from place to place with a war on. Gives us something to do while we wait for Fred’s trial, and a way to put money in our pockets so we can get off the dole. And, as we fly from place to place, we can keep our ears and eyes open. Never know what we’ll find. And seriously, how long can you three stand to be station rats?”

There was a moment’s silence.

“I could station rat for another… week?” Amos said.

“It ain’t a bad idea, Cap,” Alex said with a nod.

“It’s your decision, Captain,” Naomi said. “I’ll stick with you, and I like the idea of getting my own money again. But I hope you’re not in a hurry. I could really use a few more days off.”

Holden clapped his hands and jumped to his feet.

“Nope,” he said. “Having a plan makes all the difference. Downtime’s easier to enjoy when I know it’ll end.”