Leviathan Wakes e-1

by James S. A. Corey

  Now, as he escorted a dozen captives in Protogen uniforms to a docked transport heading God-knew-where, the word was taking on new meaning.

  Are you even human anymore?

  All posthuman meant, literally speaking, was what you were when you weren’t human anymore. Protomolecule aside, Protogen aside, Dresden and his Mengele-as-Genghis-Khan self-righteous fantasies aside, Miller thought that maybe he’d been ahead of the curve all along. Maybe he’d been posthuman for years.

  The min-max point came forty hours later, and it was time to go. The OPA had skeletonized the station, and it was time to get out before anyone came along with vengeance in mind. Miller sat in a crash couch, his blood dancing with spent amphetamines and his mind slipping into and out of exhaustion psychosis. The thrust gravity was like a pillow over his face. He was vaguely aware that he was weeping. It didn’t mean anything.

  In Miller’s haze, Dresden was talking again, pouring out promises and lies, half-truths and visions. Miller could see the words themselves like a dark smoke, coalescing into the spilling black filament of the protomolecule. The threads of it were reaching toward Holden, Amos, Naomi. He tried to find his gun, to stop it, to do the obvious thing. His despairing shout woke him, and he remembered he’d already won.

  Julie sat beside him, her hand cool against his forehead. Her smile was gentle, understanding. Forgiving.

  Sleep, she said, and his mind fell into the deep black.

  “Oi, Pampaw,” Diogo said. “Acima and out, sabez?”

  It was Miller’s tenth morning back on Tycho, his seventh hot-bunking in Diogo’s closet-sized apartment. He could tell from the buzz in the boy’s voice it would have to be one of the last. Fish and company start to smell after three days. He rolled off the thin bed, ran fingers through his hair, and nodded. Diogo stripped down and crawled into the bed without speaking. He stank of liquor and cheap tub-grown marijuana.

  Miller’s terminal told him that the second shift had ended two hours before, the third shift halfway into its morning. He gathered his things in his suitcase, turned off the lights on Diogo’s already snoring form, and trundled out to the public showers to spend a few of his remaining credits trying to look less homeless.

  The pleasant surprise of his return to Tycho Station was the boost of money in his account. The OPA, meaning Fred Johnson, had paid him for his time on Thoth. He hadn’t asked for it, and there was part of him that wanted to turn the payment down. If there had been an alternative, he might have. Since there wasn’t, he tried to stretch the funds out as far as they would go and appreciate the irony. He and Captain Shaddid were on the same payroll after all.

  For the first few days after his return to Tycho, Miller had expected to see the attack on Thoth in the newsfeeds. EARTH CORPORATION LOSES RESEARCH STATION TO CRAZED BELTERS, or some such. He should have been finding a job or a place to sleep that wasn’t charity. He meant to. But the hours seemed to dissolve as he sat in the bar or the lounges, watching the screens for just a few more minutes.

  The Martian navy had suffered a series of harassing attacks by Belters. A half ton of super-accelerated gravel had forced two of their battleships to change course. A slowdown in water harvesting on Saturn’s rings was either an illegal work stoppage, and therefore treasonous, or the natural response to increased security needs. Two Earth-owned mining operations had been attacked by either Mars or the OPA. Four hundred people were dead. Earth’s blockade of Mars was entering its third month. A coalition of scientists and terraforming specialists were screaming that the cascading processes were in danger, and that while the war would be over in a year or two, the loss of supplies would set the terraforming effort back generations. Everyone blamed everyone else for Eros. Thoth station didn’t exist.

  It would, though.

  With most of the Martian navy still in the outer planets, Earth’s siege was a brittle thing. Time was getting short. Either the Martians would go home and try facing down the somewhat older, somewhat slower, but more numerous ships of Earth, or they’d go straight for the planet itself. Earth was still the source of a thousand things that couldn’t be grown elsewhere, but if someone got happy or cocksure or desperate, it wouldn’t take much to start dropping rocks down the gravity wells.

  All of it as a distraction.

  There was an old joke. Miller didn’t remember where he’d heard it. Girl’s at her own father’s funeral, meets this really cute guy. They talk, hit it off, but he leaves before she can get his number. Girl doesn’t know how to track the guy down.

  So a week later, she kills her mom.

  Big laugh.

  It was the logic of Protogen, of Dresden, of Thoth. Here is the problem, they said to themselves, and there is the solution. That it was drowned in innocent blood was as trivial as the font the reports were printed in. They had disconnected themselves from humanity. Shut off the cell clusters in their brains that made life besides their own sacred. Or valuable. Or worth saving. All it had cost them was every human connection.

  Funny how familiar that sounded.

  The guy who walked into the bar and nodded to Miller was one of Diogo’s friends. Twenty years old or maybe a little south of that. A veteran of Thoth Station, just like Miller. He didn’t remember the kid’s name, but he’d seen him around often enough to know that the way he held himself was different than usual. Tight-wound. Miller tapped the mute on his terminal’s newsfeed and made his way over.

  “Hey,” he said, and the kid looked up sharply. The face was tense, but a softer, intentional ease tried to mask it. It was just Diogo’s old grandpa. The one, everyone on Thoth knew, who’d killed the biggest dick in the universe. It won Miller some points, so the kid smiled and nodded to the stool beside him.

  “All pretty fucked up, isn’t it?” Miller said.

  “You don’t know the half,” the kid said. He had a clipped accent. Belter by his height, but educated. Technician, probably. The kid tabbed in a drink order, and the bar offered up a glass of clear fluid so volatile Miller could watch it evaporate. The kid drank it down with a gulp.

  “Doesn’t work,” Miller said.

  The kid looked over. Miller shrugged.

  “They say drinking helps, but it doesn’t,” Miller said.

  “No?”

  “Nope. Sex sometimes, if you’ve got a girl who’ll talk to you after. Or target practice. Working out, sometimes. Liquor doesn’t make you feel better. Just makes you not so worried about feeling bad.”

  The kid laughed and shook his head. He was on the edge of talking, so Miller sat back and let the quiet do his work for him. He figured the kid had killed someone, probably on Thoth, and it was sneaking up on him. But instead of telling the story, the kid took Miller’s terminal, keyed in a few local codes, and handed it back. A huge menu of feeds appeared-video, audio, air pressure and content, radiological. It took Miller half a second to understand what he was seeing. They’d cracked the encryption on the Eros feeds.

  He was looking at the protomolecule in action. He was seeing Juliette Andromeda Mao’s corpse writ large. For a moment, his imagined Julie flickered beside him.

  “If you ever wonder if you did the right thing shooting that guy,” the kid said, “look at that.”

  Miller opened a feed. A long corridor, wide enough for twenty people to walk abreast. The flooring was wet and undulating like the surface of a canal. Something small rolled awkwardly through the mush. When Miller zoomed in, it was a human torso-rib cage, spine, trailing lengths of what used to be intestines and were now the long black threads of the protomolecule-pushing itself along on the stump of an arm. There was no head. The feed output bar showed there was sound, and Miller undid the mute. The high, mindless piping reminded him of mentally ill children singing to themselves.

  “It’s all like that,” the kid said. “Whole station’s crawling with… shit like that.”

  “What’s it doing?”

  “Building something,” the kid said, and shuddered. “I thought you should see
it.”

  “Yeah?” Miller said, his gaze nailed to the screen. “What did I ever do to you?”

  The kid laughed.

  “Everyone thinks you’re a hero for killing that guy,” the kid said. “Everyone thinks we should push every last prisoner we took off that station out an airlock.”

  Probably should, Miller thought, if we can’t make them human again. He switched the feed. The casino level where he and Holden had been, or else a section very like it. A webwork of something like bones linked ceiling and roof. Black sluglike things a yard long slithered up and between them. The sound was a hushing, like the recordings he’d heard of surf against a beach. He switched again. The port, with bulkheads closed and encrusted with huge nautilus spirals that seemed to shift while he watched them.

  “Everyone thinks you’re a fucking hero,” the kid said, and this time, it bit a little. Miller shook his head.

  “Nah,” he said. “Just a guy who used to be a cop.”

  Why should going into a firefight, charging into an enemy station filled with people and automatic systems built to kill you, seem less frightening than talking to people who you shipped with for weeks?

  And still.

  It was third shift, and the bar at the observation platform was set to imitate night. The air was scented with something smoky that wasn’t smoke. A piano and bass dueled lazily with each other while a man’s voice lamented in Arabic. Dim lights glowed at the bases of the tables, casting soft shadows up across faces and bodies, emphasizing the customers’ legs and bellies and breasts. The shipyards beyond the windows were busy as always. If he went close, he could pick out the Rocinante, still recovering from its wounds. Not dead, and being made stronger.

  Amos and Naomi were at a table in a corner. No sign of Alex. No sign of Holden. That made it easier. Not easy, but closer. He made his way toward them. Naomi saw him first, and Miller read the discomfort in her expression, covered over as quickly as it appeared. Amos turned to see what she’d been reacting to, and the corners of his mouth and eyes didn’t shift into a frown or a smile. Miller scratched his arm even though it didn’t itch.

  “Hey,” he said. “Buy you folks a round?”

  The silence lasted a beat longer than it should have, and then Naomi forced a smile.

  “Sure. Just one. We’ve got… that thing. For the captain.”

  “Oh yeah,” Amos said, lying even more awkwardly than Naomi had, making his awareness of the fact part of the message. “The thing. That’s important.”

  Miller sat, lifted a hand for the waiter to see, and, when the man nodded, leaned forward with his elbows on the table. It was the seated version of a fighter’s crouch, bent forward with his arms protecting the soft places in his neck and belly. It was the way a man stood when he expected injury.

  The waiter came, and then beers all around. Miller paid for them with the OPA’s money and took a sip.

  “How’s the ship?” he asked at last.

  “Coming together,” Naomi said. “They really banged the hell out of her.”

  “She’ll still fly,” Amos said. “She’s one tough bitch.”

  “That’s good. When-” Miller said, then tripped on his words and had to start again. “When are you folks shipping out?”

  “Whenever the captain says,” Amos said with a shrug. “We’re airtight now, so could go tomorrow, if he’s got someplace he wants to be.”

  “And if Fred lets us,” Naomi said, and then grimaced like she wished she’d kept silent.

  “That an issue?” Miller asked. “Is the OPA leaning on Holden?”

  “It’s just something I was thinking about,” Naomi said. “It’s nothing. Look, thanks for the drink, Miller. But I really think we’d better be going.”

  Miller took a long breath and let it out slow.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

  “You head out,” Amos said to Naomi. “I’ll catch up.”

  Naomi shot a confused look at the big man, but Amos only gave back a smile. It could have meant anything.

  “Okay,” Naomi said. “But don’t be long, okay? The thing.”

  “For the captain,” Amos said. “No worries.”

  Naomi rose and walked away. Her effort not to look back over her shoulder was visible. Miller looked at Amos. The lights gave the mechanic a slightly demonic appearance.

  “Naomi’s a good person,” Amos said. “I like her, you know? Like my kid sister, only smart and I’d do her if she let me. You know?”

  “Yeah,” Miller said. “I like her too.”

  “She’s not like us,” Amos said, and the warmth and humor were gone.

  “That’s why I like her,” Miller said. It was the right thing to say. Amos nodded.

  “So here’s the thing. As far as the captain goes, you’re dipped in shit right now.”

  The scrim of bubbles where his beer touched the glass glowed white in the dim light. Miller gave the glass a quarter turn, watching them closely.

  “Because I killed someone who needed it?” Miller asked. The bitterness in his voice wasn’t surprising, but it was deeper than he’d intended. Amos didn’t hear it or else didn’t care.

  “Because you’ve got a habit of that,” Amos said. “Cap’n’s not like that. Killing people without talking it over first makes him jumpy. You did a lot of it on Eros, but… you know.”

  “Yeah,” Miller said.

  “Thoth Station wasn’t Eros. Next place we go won’t be Eros either. Holden doesn’t want you around.”

  “And the rest of you?” Miller asked.

  “We don’t want you around either,” Amos said. His voice wasn’t hard or gentle. He was talking about the gauge of a machine part. He was talking about anything. The words hit Miller in the belly, just where he’d expected it. He couldn’t have blocked them.

  “Here’s the thing,” Amos went on. “You and me, we’re a lot the same. Been around. I know what I am, and my moral compass? I’ll tell you, it’s fucked. A few things fell different when I was a kid. I could have been those ass-bandits on Thoth. I know that. Captain couldn’t have been. It’s not in him. He’s as close to righteous as anyone out here gets. And when he says you’re out, that’s just the way it is, because the way I figure it, he’s probably right. Sure as hell has a better chance than I do.”

  “Okay,” Miller said.

  “Yeah,” Amos said. He finished his beer. Then he finished Naomi’s. And then he walked away, leaving Miller to himself and his empty gut. Outside, the Nauvoo fanned a glittering array of sensors, testing something or else just preening. Miller waited.

  Beside him, Julie Mao leaned on the table, just where Amos had been.

  So, she said. Looks like it’s just you and me now.

  “Looks like,” he said.

  Chapter Forty-Three: Holden

  A Tycho worker in blue coveralls and a welding mask sealed up the hole in one of the galley bulkheads. Holden watched with his hand shielding his eyes from the harsh blue glare of the torch. When the plate steel was secured in place, the welder flipped her mask up to check the bead. She had blue eyes and a small mouth in a heart-shaped pixie face and a mop of red hair pulled into a bun. Her name was Sam, and she was the team leader on the Rocinante repair project. Amos had been chasing her for two weeks now with no success. Holden was glad, because the pixie had turned out to be one of the best mechanics he’d ever met, and he’d hate for her to focus on anything other than his ship.

  “It’s perfect,” he said to her as she ran one gloved hand over the cooling metal.

  “It’s okay,” she said with a shrug. “We’ll grind this down smooth enough, paint it nice, then you’ll never even know your ship had a boo-boo.” She had a surprisingly deep voice that contrasted with her looks and her habit of using mockingly childlike phrases. Holden guessed that her appearance combined with her chosen profession had led to a lot of people underestimating her in the past. He didn’t want to make that mistake.

  “You’ve done amazing work, Sam,�
� he said. He guessed Sam was short for something, but he’d never asked and she’d never volunteered. “I keep telling Fred how happy we are to have you in charge of this job.”

  “Maybe I’ll get a gold star in my next report card,” she said while she put her torch away and stood up. Holden tried to think of something to say to that and failed.

  “Sorry,” she said, turning to face him. “I appreciate your praise to the boss. And to be honest, it’s been a lot of fun working on your little girl. She’s quite a ship. The beating she took would have blown anything we own into scrap.”

  “It was a close thing, even for us,” Holden replied.

  Sam nodded, then began putting the rest of her gear away. As she worked, Naomi climbed down the crew ladder from the upper decks, her gray coveralls hung with electrician’s tools.

  “How are things up there?” Holden asked.

  “Ninety percent,” Naomi said as she crossed the galley to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of juice. “Give or take.” She took out a second bottle and tossed it to Sam, who caught it one-handed.

  “Naomi,” Sam said, raising the bottle in mock toast before downing half of it in one swallow.

  “Sammy,” Naomi said in return with a grin.

  The two of them had hit it off right away, and now Naomi was spending a lot of her off time with Sam and her Tycho crowd. Holden hated to admit it, but he missed being the only social circle Naomi had. When he did admit it to himself, like now, it made him feel like a creep.

  “Golgo comp in rec, tonight?” Sam said after she’d gulped down the last of her drink.

  “Think those C7 chumps are tired of getting their asses handed to them?” Naomi said in return. To Holden, it sounded like they were speaking in code.

  “We can throw the first one,” Sam said. “Get ’em hooked tight before we drop the hammer and wipe their roll.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Naomi said, then tossed her empty bottle into the recycling bin and started back up the ladder. “See you at eight, then.” She tossed a little wave at Holden. “Later, Captain.”