The Dragon's Path

by Daniel Abraham

  And there wasn’t anything he could do.

  “And the transcripts of the James Holden interrogation?” Miller said. “Did those get out before… ”

  Before the Donnanger was destroyed, taking with it the only living witnesses to the Scopuli and plunging the system into war? Miller knew the question sounded like a whine. Shaddid’s jaw tensed. He wouldn’t have been surprised to hear teeth cracking. Dawes broke the silence.

  “I think we can make this a little easier,” he said. “Detective, if I’m hearing you right, you think we’re burying the issue. We aren’t. But it’s not in anyone’s interests that Star Helix be the one to find the answers you’re looking for. Think about it. You may be a Belter, but you’re working for an Earth corporation. Right now, Earth is the only major power without an oar in the water. The only one who can possibly negotiate with all sides.”

  “And so why wouldn’t they want to know the truth?” Miller said.

  “That isn’t the problem,” Dawes said. “The problem is that Star Helix and Earth can’t appear to be involved one way or the other. Their hands need to stay clean. And this issue leads outside your contract. Juliette Mao isn’t on Ceres, and maybe there was a time you could have jumped a ship to wherever you found her and done the abduction. Extradition. Extraction. Whatever you want to call it. But that time has passed. Star Helix is Ceres, part of Ganymede, and a few dozen warehouse asteroids. If you leave that, you’re going into enemy territory.”

  “But the OPA isn’t,” Miller said.

  “We have the resources to do this right,” Dawes said with a nod. “Mao is one of ours. The Scopuli was one of ours.”

  “And the Scopuli was the bait that killed the Canterbury,” Miller said. “And the Canterbury was the bait that killed the Donnager. So why exactly would anyone be better off having you be the only ones looking into something you might have done?”

  “You think we nuked the Canterbury,” Dawes said. “The OPA, with its state-of-the-art Martian warships?”

  “It got the Donnanger out where it could be attacked. As long as it was with the fleet, it couldn’t have been boarded.”

  Dawes looked sour.

  “Conspiracy theories, Mr. Miller,” he said. “If we had cloaked Martian warships, we wouldn’t be losing.”

  “You had enough to kill the Donnanger with just six ships.”

  “No. We didn’t. Our version of blowing up the Donnager is a whole bunch of tramp prospectors loaded with nukes going on a suicide mission. We have many, many resources. What happened to the Donnager wasn’t part of them.”

  The silence was broken only by the hum of the air recycler. Miller crossed his arms.

  “But… I don’t understand,” he said. “If the OPA didn’t start this, who did?”

  “That is what Juliette Mao and the crew of the Scopuli can tell us,” Shaddid said. “Those are the stakes, Miller. Who and why and please Christ some idea of how to stop it.”

  “And you don’t want to find them?” Miller said.

  “I don’t want you to,” Dawes said. “Not when someone else can do it better.”

  Miller shook his head. It was going too far, and he knew it. On the other hand, sometimes going too far could tell you something too.

  “I’m not sold,” he said.

  “You don’t have to be sold,” Shaddid said. “This isn’t a negotiation. We aren’t bringing you in to ask you for a goddamn favor. I am your boss. I am telling you. Do you know those words? Telling. You.”

  “We have Holden,” Dawes said.

  “What?” Miller said at the same time Shaddid said, “You’re not supposed to talk about that.”

  Dawes raised an arm toward Shaddid in the Belt’s physical idiom of telling someone to be quiet. To Miller’s surprise, she did as the OPA man said.

  “We have Holden. He and his crew didn’t die, and they are or are about to be in OPA custody. Do you understand what I’m saying, Detective? Do you see my point? I can do this investigation because I have the resources to do it. You can’t even find out what happened to your own riot gear.”

  It was a slap. Miller looked at his shoes. He’d broken his word to Dawes about dropping the case, and the man hadn’t brought it up until now. He had to give the OPA operative points for that. Added to that, if Dawes really did have James Holden, there was no chance of Miller’s getting access to the interrogation.

  When Shaddid spoke, her voice was surprisingly gentle.

  “There were three murders yesterday. Eight warehouses got broken into, probably by the same bunch of people. We’ve got six people in hospital wards around the station with their nerves falling apart from a bad batch of bathtub pseudoheroin. The whole station’s jumpy,” she said. “There’s a lot of good you can do out there, Miller. Go catch some bad guys.”

  “Sure, Captain,” Miller said. “You bet.”

  Muss leaned against his desk, waiting for him. Her arms were crossed, her eyes as bored looking at him as they had been looking at the corpse of Dos Santos pinned to the corridor wall.

  “New asshole?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’ll grow closed. Give it time. I got us one of the murders. Mid-level accountant for Naobi-Shears got his head blown off outside a bar. It looked fun.”

  Miller pulled up his hand terminal and took in the basics. His heart wasn’t in it.

  “Hey, Muss,” he said. “I got a question.”

  “Fire away.”

  “You’ve got a case you don’t want solved. What do you do?”

  His new partner frowned, tilted her head, and shrugged.

  “I hand it to a fish,” she said. “There was a guy back in crimes against children. If we knew the perp was one of our informants, we’d always give it to him. None of our guys ever got in trouble.”

  “Yeah,” Miller said.

  “For that matter, I need someone to take the shitty partner, I do the same thing,” Muss went on. “You know. Someone no one else wants to work with? Got bad breath or a shitty personality or whatever, but he needs a partner. So I pick the guy who maybe he used to be good, but then he got a divorce. Started hitting the bottle. Guy still thinks he’s a hotshot. Acts like it. Only his numbers aren’t better than anyone else’s. Give him the shit cases. The shit partner.”

  Miller closed his eyes. His stomach felt uneasy.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  “To get assigned to you?” Muss said. “One of the seniors made the moves on me and I shot him down.”

  “So you got stuck.”

  “Pretty much. Come on, Miller. You aren’t stupid,” Muss said. “You had to know.”

  He’d had to know that he was the station house joke. The guy who used to be good. The one who’d lost it.

  No, actually he hadn’t known that. He opened his eyes. Muss didn’t look happy or sad, pleased at his pain or particularly distressed by it. It was just work to her. The dead, the wounded, the injured. She didn’t care. Not caring was how she got through the day.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have turned him down,” Miller said.

  “Ah, you’re not that bad,” Muss said. “And he had back hair. I hate back hair.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Miller said. “Let’s go make some justice.”

  “You’re drunk,” the asshole said.

  “’M a cop,” Miller said, stabbing the air with his finger. “Don’t fuck with me.”

  “I know you’re a cop. You’ve been coming to my bar for three years. It’s me. Hasini. And you’re drunk, my friend. Seriously, dangerously drunk.”

  Miller looked around him. He was indeed at the Blue Frog. He didn’t remember having come here, and yet here he was. And the asshole was Hasini after all.

  “I… ” Miller began, then lost his train of thought.

  “Come on,” Hasini said, looping an arm around him. “It’s not that far. I’ll get you home.”

  “What time is it?” Miller asked.

  “Late.”

&n
bsp; The word had a depth to it. Late. It was late. All the chances to make things right had somehow passed him. The system was at war, and no one was even sure why. Miller himself was turning fifty years old the next June. It was late. Late to start again. Late to realize how many years he’d spent running down the wrong road. Hasini steered him toward an electric cart the bar kept for occasions like this one. The smell of hot grease came out of the kitchen.

  “Hold on,” Miller said.

  “You going to puke?” Hasini asked.

  Miller considered for a moment. No, it was too late to puke. He stumbled forward. Hasini laid him back in the cart and engaged the motors, and with a whine they steered out into the corridor. The lights high above them were dimmed. The cart vibrated as they passed intersection after intersection. Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe that was just his body.

  “I thought I was good,” he said. “You know, all this time, I thought I was at least good.”

  “You do fine,” Hasini said. “You’ve just got a shitty job.”

  “That I was good at.”

  “You do fine,” Hasini repeated, as if saying it would make it true.

  Miller lay on the bed of the cart. The formed plastic arch of the wheel well dug into his side. It ached, but moving was too much effort. Thinking was too much effort. He’d made it through his day, Muss at his side. He’d turned in the data and materials on Julie. He had nothing worth going back to his hole for, and no place else to be.

  The lights shifted into and out of his field of view. He wondered if that was what it would be like to look at stars. He’d never looked up at a sky. The thought inspired a certain vertigo. A sense of terror of the infinite that was almost pleasant.

  “There anyone who can take care of you?” Hasini said when they reached Miller’s hole.

  “I’ll be fine. I just… I had a bad day.”

  “Julie,” Hasini said, nodding.

  “How do you know about Julie?” Miller asked.

  “You’ve been talking about her all night,” Hasini said. “She’s a girl you fell for, right?”

  Frowning, Miller kept a hand on the cart. Julie. He’d been talking about Julie. That was what this was about. Not his job. Not his reputation. They’d taken away Julie. The special case. The one that mattered.

  “You’re in love with her,” Hasini said.

  “Yeah, sort of,” Miller said, something like revelation forcing its way through the alcohol. “I think I am.”

  “Too bad for you,” Hasini said.

  Chapter Seventeen: Holden

  The Tachi’s galley had a full kitchen and a table with room for twelve. It also had a full-size coffeepot that could brew forty cups of coffee in less than five minutes whether the ship was in zero g or under a five-g burn. Holden said a silent prayer of thanks for bloated military budgets and pressed the brew button. He had to restrain himself from stroking the stainless steel cover while it made gentle percolating noises.

  The aroma of coffee began to fill the air, competing with the baking-bread smell of whatever Alex had put in the oven. Amos was thumping around the table in his new cast, laying out plastic plates and actual honest-to-god metal silverware. In a bowl Naomi was mixing something that had the garlic scent of good hummus. Watching the crew work at these domestic tasks, Holden had a sense of peace and safety deep enough to leave him light-headed.

  They’d been on the run for weeks now, pursued the entire time by one mysterious ship or another. For the first time since the Canterbury was destroyed, no one knew where they were. No one was demanding anything of them. As far as the solar system was concerned, they were a few casualties out of thousands on the Donnager. A brief vision of Shed’s head disappearing like a grisly magic trick reminded him that at least one of his crew was a casualty. And still, it felt so good to once again be master of his own destiny that even regret couldn’t entirely rob him of it.

  A timer rang, and Alex pulled out a tray covered with thin, flat bread. He began cutting it into slices, onto which Naomi slathered a paste that did in fact look like hummus. Amos put them on the plates around the table. Holden drew fresh coffee into mugs that had the ship’s name on the side. He passed them around. There was an awkward moment when everyone stared at the neatly set table without moving, as if afraid to destroy the perfection of the scene.

  Amos solved this by saying, “I’m hungry as a fucking bear,” and then sitting down with a thump. “Somebody pass me that pepper, wouldja?”

  For several minutes, no one spoke; they only ate. Holden took a small bite of the flat bread and hummus, the strong flavors making him dizzy after weeks of tasteless protein bars. Then he was stuffing it into his mouth so fast it made his salivary glands flare with exquisite agony. He looked around the table, embarrassed, but everyone else was eating just as fast, so he gave up on propriety and concentrated on food. When he’d finished off the last scraps from his plate, he leaned back with a sigh, hoping to make the contentment last as long as possible. Alex sipped coffee with his eyes closed. Amos ate the last bits of the hummus right out of the serving bowl with his spoon. Naomi gave Holden a sleepy look through half-lidded eyes that was suddenly sexy as hell. Holden quashed that thought and raised his mug.

  “To Kelly’s marines. Heroes to the last, may they rest in peace,” he said.

  “To the marines,” everyone at the table echoed, then clinked mugs and drank.

  Alex raised his mug and said, “To Shed.”

  “Yeah, to Shed, and to the assholes who killed him roasting in hell,” Amos said in a quiet voice. “Right beside the fucker who killed the Cant.”

  The mood at the table got somber. Holden felt the peaceful moment slipping away as quietly as it had come.

  “So,” he said. “Tell me about our new ship. Alex?”

  “She’s a beaut, Cap. I ran her at twelve g for most of half an hour when we left the Donnie, and she purred like a kitten the whole time. The pilot’s chair is comfy too.”

  Holden nodded.

  “Amos? Get a chance to look at her engine room yet?” he asked.

  “Yep. Clean as a whistle. This is going to be a boring gig for a grease monkey like me,” the mechanic replied.

  “Boring would be nice,” Holden said. “Naomi? What do you think?”

  She smiled. “I love it. It’s got the nicest showers I’ve ever seen on a ship this size. Plus, there’s a truly amazing medical bay with a computerized expert system that knows how to fix broken marines. We should have found it rather than fix Amos on our own.”

  Amos thumped his cast with one knuckle.

  “You guys did a good job, Boss.”

  Holden looked around at his clean crew and ran a hand through his own hair, not pulling it away covered in grease for the first time in weeks.

  “Yeah, a shower and not having to fix broken legs sounds good. Anything else?”

  Naomi tilted her head back, her eyes moving as though she was running through a mental checklist.

  “We’ve got a full tank of water, the injectors have enough fuel pellets to run the reactor for about thirty years, and the galley is fully stocked. You’ll have to tie me up if you plan to give her back to the navy. I love her.”

  “She is a cunning little boat,” Holden said with a smile. “Have a chance to look at the weapons?”

  “Two tubes and twenty long-range torpedoes with high-yield plasma warheads,” Naomi said. “Or at least that’s what the manifest says. They load those from the outside, so I can’t physically verify without climbing around on the hull.”

  “The weapons panel is sayin’ the same thing, Cap,” Alex said. “And full loads in all the point defense cannons. You know, except… ”

  Except the burst you fired into the men who killed Gomez.

  “Oh, and, Captain, when we put Kelly in the cargo hold, I found a big crate with the letters map on the side. According to the manifest, it stands for ‘Mobile Assault Package.’ Apparently navy-speak for a big box of guns,” Naomi said.

 
; “Yeah,” Alex said. “It’s full kit for eight marines.”

  “Okay,” Holden said. “So with the fleet-quality Epstein, we’ve got legs. And if you guys are right about the weapons load out, we’ve also got teeth. The next question is what do we do with it? I’m inclined to take Colonel Johnson’s offer of refuge. Any thoughts?”

  “I’m all for that, Captain,” Amos said. “I always did think the Belters were getting the short end of the stick. I’ll go be a revolutionary for a while, I guess.”

  “Earthman’s burden, Amos?” Naomi asked with a grin.

  “What the fuck does that even mean?”

  “Nothing, just teasing,” she said. “I know you like our side because you just want to steal our women.”

  Amos grinned back, suddenly in on the joke.

  “Well, you ladies do have the legs that go all the way up,” he said.

  “Okay, enough,” Holden said, raising his hand. “So, two votes for Fred. Anyone else?”

  Naomi raised her hand.

  “I vote for Fred,” she said.

  “Alex? What do you think?” Holden asked.

  The Martian pilot leaned back in his chair and scratched his head.

  “I got nowhere in particular to be, so I’ll stick with you guys, I guess,” he said. “But I hope this don’t turn into another round of bein’ told what to do.”

  “It won’t,” Holden replied. “I have a ship with guns on it now, and the next time someone orders me to do something, I’m using them.”

  After dinner, Holden took a long, slow tour of his new ship. He opened every door, looked in every closet, turned on every panel, and read every readout. He stood in engineering next to the fusion reactor and closed his eyes, getting used to the almost subliminal vibration she made. If something ever went wrong with it, he wanted to feel it in his bones before any warning ever sounded. He stopped and touched all the tools in the well-stocked machine shop, and he climbed up to the personnel deck and wandered through the crew cabins until he found one he liked, and messed up the bed to show it was taken. He found a bunch of jumpsuits in what looked like his size, then moved them to the closet in his new room. He took a second shower and let the hot water massage knots in his back that were three weeks old. As he wandered back to his cabin, he trailed his fingers along the wall, feeling the soft give of the fire-retardant foam and anti-spalling webbing over the top of the armored steel bulkheads. When he arrived at his cabin, Alex and Amos were both getting settled into theirs.