“What kind of harm?”
“Don’t know,” Miller said. “I know she was on station. I know she shipped out for Tycho, and after that, I’ve got nothing.”
“Her family want her back on their station?”
The man knew who her family was. Miller filed the information away without missing a beat.
“I don’t think so,” Miller said. “The last message she got from them routed through Luna.”
“Down the well.” The way he said it made it sound like a disease.
“I’m looking for anyone who knows who she was shipping with. If she’s on a run, where she was going and when she was planning to get there. If she’s in range of a tightbeam.”
“I don’t know any of that,” the man said.
“You know anyone I should ask?”
There was a pause.
“Maybe. I’ll find what I can for you.”
“Anything else you can tell me about her?”
“She started at the studio five years ago. She was… angry when she first came. Undisciplined.”
“She got better,” Miller said. “Brown belt, right?”
The man’s eyebrows rose.
“I’m a cop,” Miller said. “I find things out.”
“She improved,” her teacher said. “She’d been attacked. Just after she came to the Belt. She was seeing that it didn’t happen twice.”
“Attacked,” Miller said, parsing the man’s tone of voice. “Raped?”
“I didn’t ask. She trained hard, even when she was off station. You can tell when people let it slide. They come back weaker. She never did.”
“Tough girl,” Miller said. “Good for her. Did she have friends? People she sparred with?”
“A few. No lovers that I know of, since that’s the next question.”
“That’s strange. Girl like that.”
“Like what, Detective?”
“Pretty girl,” Miller said. “Competent. Smart. Dedicated. Who wouldn’t want to be with someone like that?”
“Perhaps she hadn’t met the right person.”
Something in the way he said it hinted at amusement. Miller shrugged, uncomfortable in his skin.
“What kind of work did she do?” he asked.
“Light freighter. I don’t know of any particular cargo. I had the impression that she shipped wherever there was a need.”
“Not a regular route, then?”
“That was my impression.”
“Whose ships did she work? One particular freighter, or whatever came to hand? A particular company?”
“I’ll find what I can for you,” the man said.
“Courier for the OPA?”
“I’ll find out,” the man said, “what I can.”
The news that afternoon was all about Phoebe. The science station there-the one that Belters weren’t allowed even to dock at-had been hit. The official report stated that half the inhabitants of the base were dead, the other half missing. No one had claimed responsibility yet, but the common wisdom was that some Belter group-maybe the OPA, maybe someone else-had finally managed an act of “vandalism” with a body count. Miller sat in his hole, watching the broadcast feed and drinking.
It was all going to hell. The pirate casts from the OPA calling for war. The burgeoning guerrilla actions. All of it. The time was coming that Mars wasn’t going to ignore them anymore. And when Mars took action, it wouldn’t matter if Earth followed suit. It would be the first real war in the Belt. The catastrophe was coming, and neither side seemed to understand how vulnerable they were. And there was nothing-not one single goddamned thing-that he could do to stop it. He couldn’t even slow it down.
Julie Mao grinned at him from the still frame, her pinnace behind her. Attacked, the man had said. There was nothing about it in her record. Might have been a mugging. Might have been something worse. Miller had known a lot of victims, and he put them into three categories. First there were the ones who pretended nothing had happened, or that whatever it was didn’t really matter. That was well over half the people he talked to. Then there were the professionals, people who took their victimization as permission to act out any way they saw fit. That ate most of the rest.
Maybe 5 percent, maybe less, were the ones who sucked it up, learned the lesson, and moved on. The Julies. The good ones.
His door chimed three hours after his official shift was over. Miller stood up, less steady on his feet than he’d expected. He counted the bottles on the table. There were more than he’d thought. He hesitated for a moment, torn between answering the door and throwing the bottles into the recycler. The door chimed again. He went to open it. If it was someone from the station, they expected him to be drunk, anyway. No reason to disappoint.
The face was familiar. Acne-pocked, controlled. The OPA armband from the bar. The one who’d had Mateo Judd killed.
The cop.
“Evening,” Miller said.
“Detective Miller,” the pocked man said. “I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. I was hoping we could try again.”
“Right.”
“May I come in?”
“I try not to take strange men home,” Miller said. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Anderson Dawes,” the pocked man said. “I’m the Ceres liaison for the Outer Planets Alliance. I think we can help each other. May I come in?”
Miller stood back, and the pocked man-Dawes-stepped inside. Dawes took in the hole for the space of two slow breaths, then sat as if the bottles and the stink of old beer were nothing to comment on. Silently cursing himself and willing a sobriety he didn’t feel, Miller sat across from him.
“I need a favor from you,” Dawes said. “I’m willing to pay for it. Not money, of course. Information.”
“What do you want?” Miller asked.
“Stop looking for Juliette Mao.”
“No sale.”
“I’m trying to keep the peace, Detective,” Dawes said. “You should hear me out.”
Miller leaned forward, elbows on the table. Mr. Serene Jiu Jitsu Instructor was working for the OPA? The timing of Dawes’ visit seemed to be saying so. Miller filed that possibility away but said nothing.
“Mao worked for us,” Dawes said. “But you’d guessed that.”
“More or less. You know where she is?”
“We don’t. We are looking for her. And we need to be the ones to find her. Not you.”
Miller shook his head. There was a response, the right thing to say. It was rattling in the back of his head, and if he just didn’t feel quite so fuzzy…
“You’re one of them, Detective. You may have lived your whole life out here, but your salary is paid by an inner planet corporation. No, wait. I don’t blame you. I understand how it is. They were hiring and you needed the work. But… we’re walking on a bubble right now. The Canterbury. The fringe elements in the Belt calling for war.”
“Phoebe Station.”
“Yes, they’ll blame us for that too. Add a Luna corporation’s prodigal daughter… ”
“You think something’s happened to her.”
“She was on the Scopuli,” Dawes said, and when Miller didn’t immediately respond, he added, “The freighter that Mars used as bait when they killed the Canterbury.”
Miller thought about that for a long moment, then whistled low.
“We don’t know what happened,” Dawes said. “Until we do, I can’t have you stirring up the water. It’s muddy enough now.”
“And what information are you offering?” Miller asked. “That’s the trade, right?”
“I’ll tell you what we find. After we find her,” Dawes said. Miller chuckled, and the OPA man went on. “It’s a generous offer, considering who you are. Employee of Mars. Partner of an Earther. Some people would think that was enough to make you the enemy too.”
“But not you,” Miller said.
“I think we’ve got the same basic goals, you and I. Stability. Safety. Strange times make
for strange alliances.”
“Two questions.”
Dawes spread his arms, welcoming them.
“Who took the riot gear?” Miller asked.
“Riot gear?”
“Before the Canterbury died, someone took our riot gear. Maybe they wanted to arm soldiers for crowd control. Maybe they didn’t want our crowds controlled. Who took it? Why?”
“It wasn’t us,” Dawes said.
“That’s not an answer. Try this one. What happened to the Golden Bough Society?”
Dawes looked blank.
“Loca Greiga?” Miller asked. “Sohiro?”
Dawes opened his mouth, closed it. Miller dropped his beer bottle into the recycler.
“Nothing personal, friend,” he said, “but your investigative techniques aren’t impressing me. What makes you think you can find her?”
“It’s not a fair test,” Dawes said. “Give me a few days, I’ll get answers for you.”
“Talk to me then. I’ll try not to start an all-out war while you do, but I’m not letting go of Julie. You can go now.”
Dawes rose. He looked sour.
“You’re making a mistake,” he said.
“Won’t be my first.”
After the man left, Miller sat at his table. He’d been stupid. Worse, he’d been self-indulgent. Drinking himself into a stupor instead of doing the work. Instead of finding Julie. But he knew more now. The Scopuli. The Canterbury. More lines between the dots.
He cleaned away his bottles, took a shower, and pulled up his terminal, searching what there was about Julie’s ship. After an hour, a new thought occurred to him, a small fear that grew the more he looked at it. Near midnight, he put a call through to Havelock’s hole.
His partner took two full minutes to answer. When he did, his image was wild-haired and bleary-eyed.
“Miller?”
“Havelock. You have any vacation time saved up?”
“A little.”
“Sick leave?”
“Sure,” Havelock said.
“Take it,” Miller said. “Take it now. Get off station. Someplace safe if you can find it. Someplace they’re not going to start killing Earthers for shits and giggles if things go pear-shaped.”
“I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”
“I had a little visit with an OPA agent tonight. He was trying to talk me into dropping my kidnap job. I think… I think he’s nervous. I think he’s scared.”
Havelock was silent for a moment while the words filtered into his sleep-drunk mind.
“Jesus,” he said. “What scares the OPA?”
Chapter Thirteen: Holden
Holden froze, watching the blood pump from Shed’s neck, then whip away like smoke into an exhaust fan. The sounds of combat began to fade as the air was sucked out of the room. His ears throbbed and then hurt like someone had put ice picks in them. As he fought with his couch restraints, he glanced over at Alex. The pilot was yelling something, but it didn’t carry through the thin air. Naomi and Amos had gotten out of their couches already, kicked off, and were flying across the room to the two holes. Amos had a plastic dinner tray in one hand. Naomi, a white three-ring binder. Holden stared at them for the half second it took to understand what they were doing. The world narrowed, his peripheral vision all stars and darkness.
By the time he’d gotten free, Amos and Naomi had already covered the holes with their makeshift patches. The room was filled with a high-pitched whistle as the air tried to force its way out through the imperfect seals. Holden’s sight began to return as the air pressure started to rise. He was panting hard, gasping for breath. Someone slowly turned the room’s volume knob back up and Naomi’s yells for help became audible.
“Jim, open the emergency locker!” she screamed.
She was pointing at a small red-and-yellow panel on the bulkhead near his crash couch. Years of shipboard training made a path through the anoxia and depressurization, and he yanked the tab on the locker’s seal and pulled the door open. Inside were a white first aid kit marked with the ancient red-cross symbol, half a dozen oxygen masks, and a sealed bag of hardened plastic disks attached to a glue gun. The emergency-seal kit. He snatched it.
“Just the gun,” Naomi yelled at him. He wasn’t sure if her voice sounded distant because of the thin air or because the pressure drop had blown his eardrums.
Holden yanked the gun free from the bag of patches and threw it at her. She ran a bead of instant sealing glue around the edge of her three-ring binder. She tossed the gun to Amos, who caught it with an effortless backhand motion and put a seal around his dinner tray. The whistling stopped, replaced by the hiss of the atmosphere system as it labored to bring the pressure back up to normal. Fifteen seconds.
Everyone looked at Shed. Without the vacuum, his blood was pouring out into a floating red sphere just above his neck, like a hideous cartoon replacement for his head.
“Jesus Christ, Boss,” Amos said, looking away from Shed to Naomi. He snapped his teeth closed with an audible click and shook his head. “What… ”
“Gauss round,” Alex said. “Those ships have rail guns.”
“Belt ships with rail guns?” Amos said. “Did they get a fucking navy and no one told me?”
“Jim, the hallway outside and the cabin on the other side are both in vacuum,” Naomi said. “The ship’s compromised.”
Holden started to respond, then caught a good look at the binder Naomi had glued over the breach. The white cover was stamped with black letters that read MCRN EMERGENCY PROCEDURES. He had to suppress a laugh that would almost certainly go manic on him.
“Jim,” Naomi said, her voice worried.
“I’m okay, Naomi,” Holden replied, then took a deep breath. “How long do those patches hold?”
Naomi shrugged with her hands, then started pulling her hair behind her head and tying it up with a red elastic band.
“Longer than the air will last. If everything around us is in vacuum, that means the cabin’s running on emergency bottles. No recycling. I don’t know how much each room has, but it won’t be more than a couple hours.”
“Kinda makes you wish we’d worn our fucking suits, don’t it?” Amos asked.
“Wouldn’t have mattered,” Alex said. “We’d come over here in our enviro suits, they’d just have taken ’em away.”
“Could have tried,” Amos said.
“Well, if you’d like to go back in time and do it over, be my guest, partner.”
Naomi sharply said, “Hey,” but then nothing more.
No one was talking about Shed. They were working hard not to look at the body. Holden cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention, then floated to Shed’s couch, drawing their eyes with him. He paused a moment, letting everyone get a good look at the decapitated body, then pulled a blanket from the storage drawer beneath the couch and strapped it down over Shed’s body with the couch’s restraints.
“Shed’s been killed. We’re in deep peril. Arguing won’t extend our lives one second,” Holden said, looking at each member of his crew in turn. “What will?”
No one spoke. Holden turned to Naomi first.
“Naomi, what will keep us alive longer that we can do right now?” he asked.
“I’ll see if I can find the emergency air. The room’s built for six, and there’re only… there are four of us. I might be able to turn the flow down and stretch it longer.”
“Good. Thank you. Alex?”
“If there’s anyone other than us, they’ll be lookin’ for survivors. I’ll start poundin’ on the bulkhead. They won’t hear it in the vacuum, but if there’re cabins with air, the sound’ll travel down the metal.”
“Good plan. I refuse to believe we’re the only ones left on this ship,” Holden said, then turned to Amos. “Amos?”
“Lemme check on that comm panel. Might be able to get the bridge or damage control or… shit, something,” Amos replied.
“Thanks. I’d love to let someone kno
w we’re still here,” Holden said.
People moved off to work while Holden floated in the air next to Shed. Naomi began yanking access panels off the bulkheads. Alex, hands pressed against a couch for leverage, lay on the deck and began to kick the bulkhead with his boots. The room vibrated slightly with each booming kick. Amos pulled a multi-tool out of his pocket and began taking the comm panel apart.
When Holden was sure everyone was busy, he put one hand on Shed’s shoulder, just below the blanket’s spreading red stain.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the body. His eyes burned and he pressed them into the back of his thumbs.
The comm unit was hanging out of the bulkhead on wires when it buzzed once, loudly. Amos yelped and pushed off hard enough to fly across the room. Holden caught him, wrenching his shoulder by trying to arrest the momentum of 120 kilos of Earther mechanic. The comm buzzed again. Holden let Amos go and floated to it. A yellow LED glowed next to the unit’s white button. Holden pressed the button. The comm crackled to life with Lieutenant Kelly’s voice.
“Move away from the hatch, we’re coming in,” he said.
“Grab something!” Holden yelled to the crew, then grabbed a couch restraint and wrapped it around his hand and forearm.
When the hatch opened, Holden expected all the air to rush out. Instead, there was a loud crack and the pressure dropped slightly for a second. Outside in the corridor, thick sheets of plastic had been sealed to the walls, creating an ad hoc airlock. The walls of the new chamber bowed out dangerously with the air pressure, but they held. Inside the newly created lock, Lieutenant Kelly and three of his marines wore heavy vacuum-rated armor and carried enough weaponry to fight several minor wars.
The marines moved quickly into the room, weapons ready, and then sealed the hatch behind them. One of them tossed a large bag at Holden.
“Five vac suits. Get them on,” Kelly said. His eyes moved to the bloody blanket covering Shed, then to the two improvised patches. “Casualty?”
“Our medic, Shed Garvey,” Holden replied.
“Yeah. What the fuck?” Amos said loudly. “Who’s out there shooting the shit out of your fancy boat?”
Naomi and Alex said nothing but started pulling the suits from the bag and handing them out.
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