The Dragon's Path

by Daniel Abraham

  Miller whispered, “Let’s ask him to let us in.”

  “Follow my lead,” Holden replied, then stood up and began walking toward the guard.

  “Hey, shithead, you supposed to be in a shelter or in the casino, so get the fuck back to your group,” the guard said, his hand on the butt of his gun.

  Holden held up his hands placatingly, smiled, and kept walking. “Hey, I lost my group. Got mixed up somehow. I’m not from here, you know,” he said.

  The guard pointed down the corridor with the stun baton in his left hand.

  “Go that way till you hit the ramps down,” he said.

  Miller seemed to appear out of nowhere in the dimly lit corridor, his gun already out and pointed at the guard’s head. He thumbed off the safety with an audible click.

  “How about we just join the group already inside?” he said. “Open it up.”

  The guard looked at Miller out of the corners of his eyes, not turning his head at all. His hands went up, and he dropped the baton.

  “You don’t want to do that, man,” the fake cop said.

  “I kind of think he does,” Holden said. “You should do what he says. He’s not a very nice person.”

  Miller pushed the barrel of his gun against the guard’s head and said, “You know what we used to call a ‘no-brainer’ back at the station house? It’s when a shot to the head actually blows the entire brain out of someone’s skull. It usually happens when a gun is pressed to the victim’s head right about here. The gas’s got nowhere to go. Pops the brain right out through the exit wound.”

  “They said not to open these up once they’d been sealed, man,” the guard said, speaking so fast he ran all the words together. “They were pretty serious about that.”

  “This is the last time I ask,” Miller said. “Next time I just use the card I took off your body.”

  Holden turned the guard around to face the door and pulled the handgun out of the man’s belt holster. He hoped all Miller’s threats were just threats. He suspected they weren’t.

  “Just open the door, and we’ll let you go, I promise,” Holden said to the guard.

  The guard nodded and moved up to the door, then slid his card through it and punched in a number on the keypad. The heavy blast door slid open. Beyond it, the room was even darker than the corridor outside. A few emergency LEDs glowed a sullen red. In the faint illumination, Holden could see dozens… hundreds of bodies scattered across the floor, unmoving.

  “Are they dead?” Holden asked.

  “I don’t know nothing about—” the guard said, but Miller cut him off.

  “You go in first,” Miller said, and pushed the guard forward.

  “Hold on,” Holden said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to just charge in here.”

  Three things happened at once. The guard took four steps forward and then collapsed on the floor. Miller sneezed once, loudly, and then started to sway drunkenly. And both Holden’s and Miller’s hand terminals began an angry electric buzzing.

  Miller staggered back and said, “The door… ”

  Holden hit the button and the door slid shut again.

  “Gas,” Miller said, then coughed. “There’s gas in there.”

  While the ex-cop leaned against the corridor wall and coughed, Holden took out his terminal to shut off the buzzing. But the alarm flashing on its screen wasn’t an air-contamination alert. It was the venerable three wedge shapes pointing inward. Radiation. As he watched, the symbol, which should have been white, shifted through an angry orange color to dark red.

  Miller was looking at his too, his expression unreadable.

  “We’ve been dosed,” Holden said.

  “I’ve never actually seen the detector activate,” Miller said, his voice rough and faint after his coughing fit. “What does it mean when the thing is red?”

  “It means we’ll be bleeding from our rectums in about six hours,” Holden said. “We have to get to the ship. It’ll have the meds we need.”

  “What,” Miller said, “the fuck… is going on?”

  Holden grabbed Miller by the arm and led him back down the corridor toward the ramps. Holden’s skin felt warm and itchy. He didn’t know if it was radiation burn or psychosomatic. With the amount of radiation he’d just taken, it was a good thing he had sperm tucked away in Montana and on Europa.

  Thinking that made his balls itch.

  “They nuke the station,” Holden said. “Hell, maybe they just pretend to nuke it. Then they drag everyone down here and toss them into radiation shelters that are only radioactive on the inside. Gas them to keep them quiet.”

  “There are easier ways to kill people,” Miller said, his breathing coming in ragged gasps as they ran down the corridor.

  “So it has to be more than that,” Holden said. “The bug, right? The one that killed that girl. It… fed on radiation.”

  “Incubators,” Miller said, nodding in agreement.

  They arrived at one of the ramps to the lower levels, but a group of citizens led by two fake riot cops were coming up. Holden grabbed Miller and pulled him to one side, where they could hide in the shadow of a closed noodle shop.

  “So they infected them, right?” Holden said in a whisper, waiting for the group to pass. “Maybe fake radiation meds with the bug in it. Maybe that brown goo just spread around on the floor. Then whatever was in the girl, Julie—”

  He stopped when Miller walked away from him straight at the group that had just come up the ramp.

  “Officer,” said Miller to one of the fake cops.

  They both stopped, and one of them said, “You supposed to be—”

  Miller shot him in the throat, right below his helmet’s faceplate. Then he swiveled smoothly and shot the other guard in the inside of the thigh, just below the groin. When the man fell backward, yelling in pain, Miller walked up and shot him again, this time in the neck.

  A couple of the citizens started screaming. Miller pointed his gun at them and they got quiet.

  “Go down a level or two and find someplace to hide,” he said. “Do not cooperate with these men, even though they’re dressed like police. They do not have your best interests at heart. Go.”

  The citizens hesitated, then ran. Miller took a few cartridges out of his pocket and began replacing the three he’d fired. Holden started to speak, but Miller cut him off.

  “Take the throat shot if you can. Most people, the faceplate and chest armor don’t quite cover that gap. If the neck is covered, then shoot the inside of the thigh. Very thin armor there. Mobility issue. Takes most people down in one shot.”

  Holden nodded, as though that all made sense.

  “Okay,” Holden said. “Say, let’s get back to the ship before we bleed to death, right? No more shooting people if we can help it.” His voice sounded calmer than he felt.

  Miller slapped the magazine back into his gun and chambered a round.

  “I’m guessing there’s a lot more people need to be shot before this is over,” he said. “But sure. First things first.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Miller

  The first time Miller killed anyone was in his third year working security. He’d been twenty-two, just married, talking about having kids. As the new guy on the contract, he’d gotten the shit jobs: patrolling levels so high the Coriolis made him seasick, taking domestic disturbance calls in holes no wider than a storage bin, standing guard on the drunk tank to keep predators from raping the unconscious. The normal hazing. He’d known to expect it. He’d thought he could take it.

  The call had been from an illegal restaurant almost at the mass center. At less than a tenth of a g, gravity had been little more than a suggestion, and his inner ear had been confused and angered by the change in spin. If he thought about it, he could still remember the sound of raised voices, too fast and slurred for words. The smell of bathtub cheese. The thin haze of smoke from the cheap electric griddle.

  It had happened fast. The perp had come out of the hole with a
gun in one hand, dragging a woman by the hair with the other. Miller’s partner, a ten-year veteran named Carson, had shouted out the warning. The perp had turned, swinging the gun out at arm’s length like a stuntman in a video.

  All through training, the instructors had said that you couldn’t know what you’d do until the moment came. Killing another human being was hard. Some people couldn’t. The perp’s gun came around; the gunman dropped the woman and shouted. It turned out that, for Miller at least, it wasn’t all that hard.

  Afterward, he’d been through mandatory counseling. He’d cried. He’d suffered the nightmares and the shakes and all the things that cops suffered quietly and didn’t talk about. But even then, it seemed to be happening at a distance, like he’d gotten too drunk and was watching himself throw up. It was just a physical reaction. It would pass.

  The important thing was he knew the answer to the question. Yes, if he needed to, he could take a life.

  It wasn’t until now, walking through the corridors of Eros, that he’d taken joy in it. Even taking down the poor bastard in that first firefight had felt like the sad necessity of work. Pleasure in killing hadn’t come until after Julie, and it wasn’t really pleasure as much as a brief cessation of pain.

  He held the gun low. Holden started down the ramp, and Miller followed, letting the Earther take point. Holden walked faster than he did and with the uncommented athleticism of someone who lived in a wide variety of gravities. Miller had the feeling he’d made Holden nervous, and he regretted that a little. He hadn’t intended to, and he really needed to get aboard Holden’s ship if he was going to find Julie’s secrets.

  Or, for that matter, not die of radiation sickness in the next few hours. That seemed a finer point than it probably was.

  “Okay,” Holden said at the bottom of the ramp. “We need to get back down, and there are a lot of guards between us and Naomi that are going to be really confused by two guys walking the wrong direction.”

  “That’s a problem,” Miller agreed.

  “Any thoughts?”

  Miller frowned and considered the flooring. The Eros floors were different than Ceres’. Laminate with flecks of gold.

  “Tubes aren’t going to be running,” he said. “If they are, it’ll be in lockdown mode, where it only stops at the holding pen down in the casino. So that’s out.”

  “Maintenance corridor again?”

  “If we can find one that goes between levels,” Miller said. “Might be a little tricky, but it seems like a better bet than shooting our way past a couple dozen assholes in armor. How long have we got before your friend takes off?”

  Holden looked at his hand terminal. The radiation alarm was still deep red. Miller wondered how long those took to reset.

  “A little more than two hours,” Holden said. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Let’s see what we can find,” Miller said.

  The corridors nearest the radiation shelters—the death traps, the incubators—had been emptied. Wide passages built to accommodate the ancient construction equipment that had carved Eros into a human habitation were eerie with only Holden’s and Miller’s footsteps and the hum of the air recyclers. Miller hadn’t noticed when the emergency announcements had stopped, but the absence of them now seemed ominous.

  If it had been Ceres, he would have known where to go, where everything led, how to move gracefully from one stage to another. On Eros, all he had was an educated guess. That wasn’t so bad.

  But he could tell it was taking too long, and worse than that—they weren’t talking about it; neither one spoke—they were walking more slowly than normal. It wasn’t up to the threshold of consciousness, but Miller knew that both of their bodies were starting to feel the radiation damage. It wasn’t going to get better.

  “Okay,” Holden said. “Somewhere around here there has to be a maintenance shaft.”

  “Could also try the tube station,” Miller said. “The cars run in vacuum, but there might be some service tunnels running parallel.”

  “Don’t you think they’d have shut those down as part of the big roundup?”

  “Probably,” Miller said.

  “Hey! You two! What the fuck you think you’re doing up here?”

  Miller looked back over his shoulder. Two men in riot gear were waving at them menacingly. Holden said something sharp under his breath. Miller narrowed his eyes.

  The thing was these men were amateurs. The beginning of an idea moved in the back of Miller’s mind as he watched the two approach. Killing them and taking their gear wouldn’t work. There was nothing like scorch marks and blood to make it clear something had happened. But…

  “Miller,” Holden said, a warning in his voice.

  “Yeah,” Miller said. “I know.”

  “I said what the fuck are you two doing here?” one of the security men said. “The station’s on lockdown. Everyone goes down to the casino level or up to the radiation shelters.”

  “We were just looking for a way to… ah… get down to the casino level,” Holden said, smiling and being nonthreatening. “We’re not from around here, and—”

  The closer of the two guards jabbed the butt of his rifle neatly into Holden’s leg. The Earther staggered, and Miller shot the guard just below the faceplate, then turned to the one still standing, mouth agape.

  “You’re Mikey Ko, right?” Miller said.

  The man’s face went even paler, but he nodded. Holden groaned and stood.

  “Detective Miller,” Miller said. “Busted you on Ceres about four years ago. You got a little happy in a bar. Tappan’s, I think? Hit a girl with a pool cue?”

  “Oh, hey,” the man said with a frightened smile. “Yeah, I remember you. How you been doing?”

  “Good and bad,” Miller said. “You know how it is. Give the Earther your gun.”

  Ko looked from Miller to Holden and back, licking his lips and judging his chances. Miller shook his head.

  “Seriously,” Miller said. “Give him the gun.”

  “Sure, yeah. No problem.”

  This was the kind of man who’d killed Julie, Miller thought. Stupid. Shortsighted. A man born with a sense for raw opportunity where his soul should have been. Miller’s mental Julie shook her head in disgust and sorrow, and Miller found himself wondering if she meant the thug now handing his rifle to Holden or himself. Maybe both.

  “What’s the deal here, Mikey?” Miller asked.

  “What do you mean?” the guard said, playing stupid, like they were in an interrogation cell. Stalling for time. Walking through the old script of cop and criminal as if it still made sense. As if everything hadn’t changed. Miller was surprised by a tightness in his throat. He didn’t know what it was there for.

  “The job,” he said. “What’s the job?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Hey,” Miller said gently. “I just killed your buddy.”

  “And that’s his third today,” Holden said. “I saw him.”

  Miller could see it in the man’s eyes: the cunning, the shift, the move from one strategy to another. It was old and familiar and as predictable as water moving down.

  “Hey,” Ko said, “it’s just a job. They told us about a year ago how we were making a big move, right? But no one knows what it is. So a few months back, they start moving guys over. Training us up like we were cops, you know?”

  “Who was training you?” Miller said.

  “The last guys. The ones who were working the contract before us,” Ko said.

  “Protogen?”

  “Something like that, yeah,” he said. “Then they took off, and we took over. Just muscle, you know. Some smuggling.”

  “Smuggling what?”

  “All kinds of shit,” Ko said. He was starting to feel safe, and it showed in the way he held himself and the way he spoke. “Surveillance equipment, communication arrays, serious-as-fuck servers with their own little gel software wonks already built in. Scientific equipment too. Stuff for checki
ng the water and the air and shit. And these ancient remote-access robots like you’d use in a vacuum dig. All sorts of shit.”

  “Where was it going to?” Holden asked.

  “Here,” Ko said, gesturing to the air, the stone, the station. “It’s all here. They were like months installing it all. And then for weeks, nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?” Miller asked.

  “Nothing nothing. All this buildup and then we sat around with our thumbs up our butts.”

  Something had gone wrong. The Phoebe bug hadn’t made its rendezvous, but then Julie had come, Miller thought, and the game had turned back on. He saw her again as if he were in her apartment. The long, spreading tendrils of whatever the hell it was, the bone spurs pressing out against her skin, the black froth of filament pouring from her eyes.

  “The pay’s good, though,” Ko said philosophically. “And it was kind of nice taking some time off.”

  Miller nodded in agreement, leaned close, tucking the barrel of his gun through the interleaving of armor at Ko’s belly, and shot him.

  “What the fuck!” Holden said as Miller put his gun into his jacket pocket.

  “What did you think was going to happen?” Miller said, squatting down beside the gut-shot man. “It’s not like he was going to let us go.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Holden said. “But… ”

  “Help me get him up,” Miller said, hooking an arm behind Ko’s shoulder. Ko shrieked when Miller lifted him.

  “What?”

  “Get his other side,” Miller said. “Man needs medical attention, right?”

  “Um. Yes,” Holden said.

  “So get his other side.”

  It wasn’t as far back to the radiation shelters as Miller had expected, which had its good points and its bad ones. On the upside, Ko was still alive and screaming. The chances were better that he’d be lucid, which wasn’t what Miller had intended. But as they came near the first group of guards, Ko’s babbling seemed scattered enough to work.

  “Hey!” Miller shouted. “Some help over here!”

  At the head of the ramp, four of the guards looked at one another and then started moving toward them, curiosity winning out over basic operating procedures. Holden was breathing hard. Miller was too. Ko wasn’t that heavy. It was a bad sign.