The Dragon's Path

by Daniel Abraham

  “What the hell is this?” one of the guards said.

  “There’s a bunch of people holed up back there,” Miller said. “Resistance. I thought you people swept this level.”

  “That wasn’t our job,” the guy said. “We’re just making sure the groups from the casino get to the shelters.”

  “Well, someone screwed up,” Miller snapped. “You have transport?”

  The guards looked at each other again.

  “We can call for one,” a guy at the back said.

  “Never mind,” Miller said. “You boys go find the shooters.”

  “Wait a minute,” the first guy said. “Exactly who the hell are you?”

  “The installers from Protogen,” Holden said. “We’re replacing the sensors that failed. This guy was supposed to help us.”

  “I didn’t hear about that,” the leader said.

  Miller dug a finger under Ko’s armor and squeezed. Ko shrieked and tried to writhe away from him.

  “Talk to your boss about it on your own time,” Miller said. “Come on. Let’s get this asshole to a medic.”

  “Hold on!” the first guard said, and Miller sighed. Four of them. If he dropped Ko and jumped for cover… but there wasn’t much cover. And who the hell knew what Holden would do?

  “Where are the shooters?” the guard asked. Miller kept himself from smiling.

  “There’s a hole about a quarter klick anti-spinward,” Miller said. “The other one’s body’s still there. You can’t miss it.”

  Miller turned down the ramp. Behind him, the guards were talking among themselves, debating what to do, who to call, who to send.

  “You’re completely insane,” Holden said over Ko’s semiconscious weeping.

  Maybe he was right.

  When, Miller wondered, does someone stop being human? There had to be a moment, some decision that you made, and before it, you were one person, and after it, someone else. Walking down through the levels of Eros, Ko’s bleeding body slung between him and Holden, Miller reflected. He was probably dying of radiation damage. He was lying his way past half a dozen men who were only letting him by because they were used to people being scared of them and he wasn’t. He had killed three people in the last two hours. Four if he counted Ko. Probably safer to say four, then.

  The analytical part of his mind, the small, still voice he had cultivated for years, watched him move and replayed all his decisions. Everything he’d done had made perfect sense at the time. Shooting Ko. Shooting the other three. Leaving the safety of the crew’s hideout to investigate the evacuation. Emotionally, it had all been obvious at the time. It was only when he considered it from outside that it seemed dangerous. If he’d seen it in someone else—Muss, Havelock, Sematimba—he wouldn’t have taken more than a minute to realize they’d gone off the rails. Since it was him, he had taken longer to notice. But Holden was right. Somewhere along the line, he’d lost himself.

  He wanted to think it had been finding Julie, seeing what had happened to her body, knowing he hadn’t been able to save her, but that was only because it seemed like the sentimental moment. The truth was his decisions before then—leaving Ceres to go on a wild hunt for Julie, drinking himself out of a career, remaining a cop for even a day after that first kill all those years earlier—none of them seemed to make sense, viewed objectively. He’d lost a marriage to a woman he’d loved once. He’d lived hip deep in the worst humanity had to offer. He’d learned firsthand that he was capable of killing another human being. And nowhere along the line could he say that there, at that moment, he had been a sane, whole man, and that afterward, he hadn’t.

  Maybe it was a cumulative process, like smoking cigarettes. One didn’t do much. Five didn’t do much more. Every emotion he’d shut down, every human contact he’d spurned, every love and friendship and moment of compassion from which he’d turned had taken him a degree away from himself. Until now, he’d been able to kill men with impunity. To face his impending death with a denial that let him make plans and take action.

  In his mind, Julie Mao tilted her head, listening to his thoughts. In his mind, she held him, her body against his in a way that was more comforting than erotic. Consoling. Forgiving.

  This was why he had searched for her. Julie had become the part of him that was capable of human feeling. The symbol of what he could have been if he hadn’t been this. There was no reason to think his imagined Julie had anything in common with the real woman. Meeting her would have been a disappointment for them both.

  He had to believe that, the same way he’d had to believe everything that had cut him off from love before.

  Holden stopped, the body—corpse now—of Ko tugging Miller back to himself.

  “What?” Miller said.

  Holden nodded at the access panel in front of them. Miller looked at it, uncomprehending, and then recognized it. They’d made it. They were back at the hideout.

  “Are you all right?” Holden said.

  “Yeah,” Miller said. “Just woolgathering. Sorry.”

  He dropped Ko, and the thug slid to the floor with a sad thud. Miller’s arm had fallen asleep. He shook it, but the tingling didn’t go away. A wave of vertigo and nausea passed through him. Symptoms, he thought.

  “How’d we do for time?” Miller asked.

  “We’re a little past deadline. Five minutes. It’ll be fine,” Holden said, and slid the door open.

  The space beyond, where Naomi and Alex and Amos had been, was empty.

  “Fuck me,” Holden said.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Holden

  Fuck me,” Holden said. And a moment later: “They left us.”

  No. She had left him. Naomi had said she would, but confronted with the reality of it, Holden realized that he hadn’t really believed her. But here it was—the proof. The empty space where she used to be. His heart hammered and his throat tightened, breath coming in gasps. The sick feeling in his gut was either despair or his colon sloughing off its lining. He was going to die sitting outside a cheap hotel on Eros because Naomi had done exactly what she’d said she would. What he himself had ordered her to do. His resentment refused to listen to reason.

  “We’re dead,” he said, and sat down on the edge of a fern-filled planter.

  “How long do we have?” Miller asked, looking up and down the corridor while he fidgeted with his gun.

  “No idea,” Holden replied, gesturing vaguely at his terminal’s flashing red radiation symbol. “Hours before we really start to feel it, I think, but I don’t know. God, I wish Shed was still here.”

  “Shed?”

  “Friend of mine,” Holden said, not feeling up to elaborating. “Good med tech.”

  “Call her,” Miller said.

  Holden looked at his terminal and tapped the screen a few times.

  “Network’s still down,” he said.

  “All right,” Miller said. “Let’s go to your ship. See if it’s still in dock.”

  “They’ll be gone. Naomi’s keeping the crew alive. She warned me, but I—”

  “So let’s go anyway,” Miller said. He was shifting from one foot to the other and looking down the corridor as he spoke.

  “Miller,” Holden said, then stopped. Miller was clearly on edge, and he’d shot four people. Holden was increasingly frightened of the former cop. As if reading his mind, Miller stepped close, the two-meter man towering over him where he sat. Miller smiled ruefully, his eyes unnervingly gentle. Holden would almost have preferred they be threatening.

  “Way I see it, there’s three ways this can go,” Miller said. “One, we find your ship still in dock, get the meds we need, and maybe we live. Two, we try to get to the ship, and along the way we run into a bunch of mafia thugs. Die gloriously in a hail of bullets. Three, we sit here and leak out of our eyes and assholes.”

  Holden said nothing; he just stared up at the cop and frowned.

  “I’m liking the first two better than the last one,” Miller said. His voice made it sound
like an apology. “How about you come with?”

  Holden laughed before he could catch himself, but Miller didn’t look like he was taking offense.

  “Sure,” Holden said. “I just needed to feel sorry for myself for a minute. Let’s go get killed by the mafia.”

  He said it with much more bravado than he felt. The truth was he didn’t want to die. Even during his time in the navy, the idea of dying in the line of duty had always seemed distant and unreal. His ship would never be destroyed, and if it was, he would make it to the escape shuttle. The universe without him in it didn’t make any sense at all. He’d taken risks; he’d seen other people die. Even people he loved. Now, for the first time, his own death was a real thing.

  He looked at the cop. He’d known the man less than a day, didn’t trust him, and wasn’t sure he much liked him. And this was who he’d die with. Holden shuddered and stood up, pulling his gun out of his waistband. Under the panic and fear, there was a deep feeling of calm. He hoped it would last.

  “After you,” Holden said. “If we make it, remind me to call my mothers.”

  The casinos were a powder keg waiting for a match. If the evacuation sweeps had been even moderately successful, there were probably a million or more people crammed into three levels of the station. Hard-looking men in riot gear moved through the crowds, telling everyone to stay put until they were taken to the radiation shelters, keeping the crowd frightened. Every now and then, a small group of citizens would be led away. Knowing where they were going made Holden’s stomach burn. He wanted to yell out that cops were fake, that they were killing people. But a riot with this many people in such a confined space would be a meat grinder. Maybe that was inevitable but he wasn’t going to be the one to start it.

  Someone else did.

  Holden could hear raised voices, the angry rumble of the mob, followed by the electronically amplified voice of someone in a riot helmet yelling for people to get back. And then a gunshot, a brief pause, then a fusillade. People screamed. The entire crowd around Holden and Miller surged in two opposing directions, some of the people rushing toward the sound of the conflict, but many more of them running away from it. Holden spun in the current of bodies; Miller reached out and grabbed the back of his shirt, gripping it in his fist and yelling for Holden to stay close.

  About a dozen meters down the corridor, in a coffee shop seating area separated by a waist-high black iron fence, one of the mafia thugs had been cut off from his group by a dozen citizens. Gun drawn, he was backing up and yelling at them to move aside. They kept advancing, their faces wild with the drunken frenzy of mob violence.

  The mafia thug fired once, and one small body staggered forward, then fell to the ground at the thug’s feet. Holden couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, but they couldn’t be more than thirteen or fourteen years old. The thug moved forward, looking down at the small thin figure at his feet, and pointed his gun at them again.

  It was too much.

  Holden found himself running down the corridor toward the thug, gun drawn and screaming for people to get out of the way. When he was about seven meters away, the crowd split apart enough for him to begin firing. Half his shots went wild, hitting the coffee shop counter and walls, one round blowing a stack of ceramic plates into the air. But a few of them hit the thug, staggering him back.

  Holden vaulted the waist-high metal fence and came to a sliding halt about three meters from the fake cop and his victim. Holden’s gun fired one last time and then the slide locked in the open position to let him know it was empty.

  The thug didn’t fall down. He straightened up, looked down at his torso, and then looked up and pointed his gun at Holden’s face. Holden had time to count the three bullets that were smashed against the heavy chest armor of the thug’s riot gear. Die gloriously in a hail of bullets, he thought.

  The thug said, “Stupid mother fu—” and his head snapped back in a spray of red. He slumped to the floor.

  “Gap at the neck, remember?” Miller said from behind him. “Chest armor’s too thick for a pistol.”

  Suddenly dizzy, Holden bent over at the waist, gasping for air. He tasted lemon at the back of his throat and swallowed twice to stop himself from throwing up. He was afraid it would be full of blood and stomach lining. He didn’t need to see that.

  “Thanks,” he gasped out, turning his head toward Miller.

  Miller just nodded vaguely in his direction, then walked over to the guard and nudged him with one foot. Holden stood up and looked around the corridor, waiting for the inevitable wave of vengeful mafia enforcers to come crashing down on them. He didn’t see any. He and Miller were standing in a quiet island of calm in the midst of Armageddon. All around them, tendrils of violence were whipping into high gear. People were running in every direction; the mafia goons were yelling in booming amplified voices and punctuating the threats with periodic gunfire. But there were only hundreds of them, and there were many thousands of angry and panicked civilians. Miller gestured at the chaos.

  “This is what happens,” he said. “Give a bunch of yahoos the equipment, and they think they know what they’re doing.”

  Holden crouched beside the fallen child. It was a boy, maybe thirteen, with Asian features and dark hair. His chest had a gaping wound in it, blood trickling out instead of gushing. He didn’t have a pulse that Holden could find. Holden picked him up anyway, looking around for someplace to take him.

  “He’s dead,” Miller said as he replaced the cartridge he’d fired.

  “Go to hell. We don’t know. If we can get him to the ship, maybe… ”

  Miller shook his head, a sad but distant expression on his face as he looked at the child in Holden’s arms.

  “He took high-caliber round to the center of mass,” Miller said. “He’s gone.”

  “Fuck me,” Holden said.

  “You keep saying that.”

  A bright neon sign flashed above the corridor that led out of the casino levels and onto the ramps down to the docks. THANK YOU FOR PLAYING, it read. And YOU’RE ALWAYS A WINNER ON EROS. Below it, two ranks of men in heavy combat armor blocked the way. They might have given up on crowd control in the casinos, but they weren’t letting anyone go.

  Holden and Miller crouched behind an overturned coffee cart a hundred meters from the soldiers. As they watched, a dozen or so people made a dash toward the guards and were summarily mowed down by machine gun fire, then fell to the deck beside those who had tried before.

  “I count thirty-four of them,” Miller said. “How many can you handle?”

  Holden spun to look at him in surprise, but Miller’s face told him the former cop was joking.

  “Kidding aside, how do we get past that?” Holden said.

  “Thirty men with machine guns and a clear line of sight. No cover to speak of for the last twenty meters or so,” Miller said. “We don’t get past that.”

  Chapter Thirty: Miller

  They sat on the floor with their backs to a bank of pachinko machines no one was playing, watching the ebb and flow of the violence around them like it was a soccer game. Miller’s hat was perched on his bent knee. He felt the vibration against his back when one of the displays cycled through its dupe-call. The lights glittered and glowed. Holden, beside him, was breathing hard, like he’d run a race. Out beyond them, like something from Hieronymous Bosch, the casino levels of Eros prepared for death.

  The riot’s momentum had spent itself for now. Men and women gathered together in small groups. Guards strode through, threatening and scattering any bunch that got too large or unruly. Something was burning fast enough that the air scrubbers couldn’t get out the smell of melting plastic. The bhangra Muzak mixed with weeping and screaming and wails of despair. Some idiot was shouting at one of the so-called cops: he was a lawyer; he was getting all of this on video; whoever was responsible was going to be in big trouble. Miller watched a bunch of people start to gather around the confrontation. The guy in the riot gear listened, nodded, a
nd shot the lawyer once in the kneecap. The crowd dispersed except for one woman, the lawyer’s wife or girlfriend, bent down over him screaming. And in the privacy of Miller’s skull, everything slowly fell apart.

  He was aware of having two different minds. One was the Miller he was used to, familiar with. The one who was thinking about what was going to happen when he got out, what the next step would be in connecting the dots between Phoebe Station, Ceres, Eros, and Juliette Mao, how to work the case. That version of him was scanning the crowd the way he might have watched the line at a crime scene, waiting for some detail, some change to catch his attention. Send him in the right direction to solve the mystery. It was the shortsighted, idiotic part of him that couldn’t conceive of his own personal extinction, and it thought surely, surely there was going to be an after.

  The other Miller was different. Quieter. Sad, maybe, but at peace. He’d read a poem many years before called “The Death-Self,” and he hadn’t understood the term until now. A knot at the middle of his psyche was untying. All the energy he’d put into holding things together—Ceres, his marriage, his career, himself—was coming free. He’d shot and killed more men in the past day than in his whole career as a cop. He’d started—only started—to realize that he’d actually fallen in love with the object of his search after he knew for certain that he’d lost her. He’d seen unequivocally that the chaos he’d dedicated his life to holding at bay was stronger and wider and more powerful than he would ever be. No compromise he could make would be enough. His death-self was unfolding in him, and the dark blooming took no effort. It was a relief, a relaxation, a long, slow exhale after decades of holding it in.

  He was in ruins, but it was okay, because he was dying.

  “Hey,” Holden said. His voice was stronger than Miller had expected it might be.