The Dragon’s Path

by Abraham Daniel

  Fred stared at him for a few seconds, then came around his chair and sat down. Holden found he was tapping his fingers on his thigh nervously and forced himself to stop. Fred’s eyes flicked down at Holden’s hand and then back up. He continued to stare.

  Holden cleared his throat.

  “Look, you’re the big dog here. Even if I didn’t know who you used to be, you’d scare the shit out of me, so don’t feel the need to prove it. But no matter how scared I am, I’m not backing down on this.”

  Fred’s hoped-for laughter didn’t come. Holden tried to swallow without gulping.

  “I bet every captain you ever flew under thought you were a gigantic pain in the ass,” Fred said finally.

  “I believe my record reflects that,” Holden said, trying to hide his relief.

  “I need to fly to Eros and find a man named Lionel Polanski, and then bring him back to Tycho.”

  “That’s only a week out if we push,” Holden said, doing the math in his head.

  “The fact that Lionel doesn’t actually exist complicates the mission.”

  “Yeah, okay. Now I’m confused,” Holden agreed.

  “You wanted in?” Fred said, the words taking on a quiet ferocity. “Now you’re in. Lionel Polanski exists only on paper, and owns things that Mr. Tycho doesn’t want to own. Including a courier ship called the Scopuli.”

  Holden leaned forward in his chair, his face intense.

  “You now have my undivided attention,” he said.

  “The nonexistent owner of the Scopuli checked into a flophouse on one of the shit levels of Eros. We only just got the message. We have to work on the assumption that whoever got the room knows our operations intimately, needs help, and can’t ask for it openly.”

  “We can leave in an hour,” Holden said breathlessly.

  Fred held up his hands in a gesture that was surprisingly Belter for an Earth man.

  “When,” Fred asked, “did this turn into you leaving?”

  “I won’t loan my ship, but I’ll definitely rent it out. My crew and I were talking about getting jobs, actually. Hire us. Deduct whatever’s fair for services you’ve already rendered.”

  “No,” Fred said. “I need you.”

  “You don’t,” Holden replied. “You need our depositions. And we’re not going to sit here waiting a year or two for sanity to reign. We’ll all do video depositions, sign whatever affidavits you want us to as to their authenticity, but we’re leaving to find work one way or the other. You might as well make use of it.”

  “No,” Fred said. “You’re too valuable to take risks with your lives.”

  “What if I throw in the data cube the captain of the Donnager was trying to liberate?”

  The silence was back, but it had a different feel to it.

  “Look,” Holden said, pressing on. “You need a ship like the Roci. I’ve got one. You need a crew for her. I’ve got that too. And you’re as hungry to know what’s on that cube as I am.”

  “I don’t like the risk.”

  “Your other option is to throw us in the brig and commandeer the ship. There’s some risks in that too.”

  Fred laughed. Holden felt himself relax.

  “You’ll still have the same problem that brought you here,” Fred said. “Your ship looks like a gunship, no matter what its transponder is saying.”

  Holden jumped up and grabbed a piece of paper from Fred’s desk. He started writing on it with a pen snatched from a decorative pen set.

  “I’ve been thinking about that. You’ve got full manufacturing facilities here. And we’re supposed to be a light gas freighter. So,” he said as he sketched a rough outline of the ship, “we weld on a bunch of empty compressed-gas storage tanks in two bands around the hull. Use them to hide the tubes. Repaint the whole thing. Weld on a few projections to break up the hull profile and hide us from ship-recognition software. It’ll look like shit and screw up the aerodynamics, but we won’t be near atmo anytime soon. It’ll look exactly like what it is: something a bunch of Belters slapped together in a hurry.”

  He handed the paper to Fred. Fred began laughing in earnest, either at the terrible drawing or at the absurdity of the whole thing.

  “You could give a pirate a hell of a surprise,” he said. “If I do this, you and your crew will record my depositions and hire on as an independent contractor for errands like the Eros run and appear on my behalf when the peace negotiations start.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want the right to outbid anyone else who tries to hire you. No contracts without my counteroffer.”

  Holden held out his hand, and Fred shook it.

  “Nice doing business with you, Fred.”

  As Holden left the office, Fred was already on the comm with his machine-shop people. Holden pulled out his portable terminal and called up Naomi.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Pack up the kids, we’re going to Eros.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Miller

  The people-mover to Eros was small, cheap, and overcrowded. The air recyclers had the plastic-and-resin smell of long-life industrial models that Miller associated with warehouses and fuel depots. The lights were cheap LEDs tinted a false pink that was supposed to flatter the complexion but instead made everyone look like undercooked beef. There were no cabins, only row after row of formed laminate seating and two long walls with five-stacks of bunks that the passengers could hot-swap. Miller had never been on a cheapjack transport before, but he knew how they worked. If there was a fight, the ship’s crew would pump riot gas into the cabin, knock everyone out, and put anyone who’d been in the scuffle under restraint. It was a draconian system, but it did tend to keep passengers polite. The bar was always open and the drinks were cheap. Not long ago Miller would have found that enticing.

  Instead, he sat on one of the long seats, his hand terminal open. Julie’s case file—what he had reconstructed of it—glowed before him. The picture of her, proud and smiling, in front of the Razorback, the dates and records, her jiu jitsu training. It seemed like very little, considering how large the woman had grown in his life.

  A small newsfeed crawled down the terminal’s left side. The war between Mars and the Belt escalated, incident after incident, but the secession of Ceres Station was the top news. Earth was taken to task by Martian commentators for failing to stand united with its fellow inner planet, or at least for not handing over the Ceres security contract to Mars. The scattershot reaction of the Belt ran the gamut from pleasure at seeing Earth’s influence fall back down the gravity well, to strident near-panic at the loss of Ceres’ neutrality, to conspiracy theories that Earth was fomenting the war for its own ends.

  Miller reserved judgment.

  “I always think of pews.”

  Miller looked over. The man sitting next to him was about Miller’s age; the fringe of gray hair, the soft belly. The man’s smile told Miller the guy was a missionary, out in the vacuum saving souls. Or maybe it was the name tag and Bible.

  “The seats, I mean,” the missionary said. “They always make me think of going to church, the way they’re all lined up, row after row. Only instead of a pulpit, we have bunk beds.”

  “Our Lady of Sleeping Through It,” Miller said, knowing he was getting drawn into conversation but unable to stop himself. The missionary laughed.

  “Something like that,” he said. “Do you attend church?”

  “Haven’t in years,” Miller said. “I was a Methodist when I was anything. What flavor are you selling?”

  The missionary lifted his hands in a gesture of harmlessness that went back to the African plains of the Pleistocene. I have no weapon; I seek no fight.

  “I’m just going back to Eros from a conference on Luna,” he said. “My proselytizing days are long behind me.”

  “I didn’t think those ever ended,” Miller said.

  “They don’t. Not officially. But after a few decades, you come to a place where you realize that there’s really no difference be
tween trying and not trying. I still travel. I still talk to people. Sometimes we talk about Jesus Christ. Sometimes we talk about cooking. If someone is ready to accept Christ, it doesn’t take much effort on my part to help them. If they aren’t, no amount of hectoring them does any good. So why try?”

  “Do people talk about the war?” Miller asked.

  “Often,” the missionary said.

  “Anyone make sense of it?”

  “No. I don’t believe war ever does. It’s a madness that’s in our nature. Sometimes it recurs; sometimes it subsides.”

  “Sounds like a disease.”

  “The herpes simplex of the species?” the missionary said with a laugh. “I suppose there are worse ways to think of it. I’m afraid that as long as we’re human, it will be with us.”

  Miller looked over at the wide, moon-round face.

  “As long as we’re human?” he said.

  “Some of us believe that we shall all eventually become angels,” the missionary said.

  “Not the Methodists.”

  “Even them, eventually,” the man said, “but they probably won’t go first. And what brings you to Our Lady of Sleeping Through It?”

  Miller sighed, sitting back against the unyielding chair. Two rows down, a young woman shouted at two boys to stop jumping on the seats and was ignored. A man behind them coughed. Miller took a long breath and let it out slowly.

  “I was a cop on Ceres,” he said.

  “Ah. The change of contract.”

  “That,” Miller said.

  “Taking up work on Eros, then?”

  “More looking up an old friend,” Miller said. Then, to his own surprise, he went on. “I was born on Ceres. Lived there my whole life. This is the… fifth? Yeah, fifth time I’ve been off station.”

  “Do you plan to go back?”

  “No,” Miller said. He sounded more certain that he’d known. “No, I think that part of my life is pretty much over.”

  “That must be painful,” the missionary said.

  Miller paused, letting the comment settle. The man was right; it should have been painful. Everything he’d ever had was gone. His job, his community. He wasn’t even a cop anymore, his checked-in-luggage handgun notwithstanding. He would never eat at the little East Indian cart at the edge of sector nine again. The receptionist at the station would never nod her greeting to him as he headed in for his desk again. No more nights at the bar with the other cops, no more off-color stories about busts gone weird, no more kids flying kites in the high tunnels. He probed himself like a doctor searching for inflammation. Did it hurt here? Did he feel the loss there?

  He didn’t. There was only a sense of relief so profound it approached giddiness.

  “I’m sorry,” the missionary said, confused. “Did I say something funny?”

  Eros supported a population of one and a half million, a little more than Ceres had in visitors at any given time. Roughly the shape of a potato, it had been much more difficult to spin up, and its surface velocity was considerably higher than Ceres’ for the same internal g. The old shipyards protruded from the asteroid, great spiderwebs of steel and carbon mesh studded with warning lights and sensor arrays to wave off any ships that might come in too tight. The internal caverns of Eros had been the birthplace of the Belt. From raw ore to smelting furnace to annealing platform and then into the spines of water haulers and gas harvesters and prospecting ships. Eros had been a port of call in the first generation of humanity’s expansion. From there, the sun itself was only a bright star among billions.

  The economics of the Belt had moved on. Ceres Station had spun up with newer docks, more industrial backing, more people. The commerce of shipping moved to Ceres, while Eros remained a center of ship manufacture and repair. The results were as predictable as physics. On Ceres, a longer time in dock meant lost money, and the berth fee structure reflected that. On Eros, a ship might wait for weeks or months without impeding the flow of traffic. If a crew wanted a place to relax, to stretch, to get away from one another for a while, Eros was the port of call. And with the lower docking fees, Eros Station found other ways to soak money from its visitors: Casinos. Brothels. Shooting galleries. Vice in all its commercial forms found a home in Eros, its local economy blooming like a fungus fed by the desires of Belters.

  A happy accident of orbital mechanics put Miller there half a day ahead of the Rocinante. He walked through the cheap casinos, the opioid bars and sex clubs, the show fight areas where men or women pretended to beat one another senseless for the pleasure of the crowds. Miller imagined Julie walking with him, her sly smile matching his own as he read the great animated displays. RANDOLPH MAK, HOLDER OF THE BELT FREEFIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP FOR SIX YEARS, AGAINST MARTIAN KIVRIN CARMICHAEL IN A FIGHT TO THE DEATH!

  Surely not fixed, Julie said drily in his mind.

  Wonder which one’s going to win, he thought, and imagined her laughing.

  He’d stopped at a noodle cart, two new yens’ worth of egg noodles in black sauce steaming in their cone, when a hand clapped on his shoulder.

  “Detective Miller,” a familiar voice said. “I think you’re outside your jurisdiction.”

  “Why, Inspector Sematimba,” Miller said. “As I live and breathe. You give a girl the shakes, sneaking up like that.”

  Sematimba laughed. He was a tall man, even among Belters, with the darkest skin Miller had ever seen. Years before, Sematimba and Miller had coordinated on a particularly ugly case. A smuggler with a cargo of designer euphorics had broken with his supplier. Three people on Ceres had been caught in the crossfire, and the smuggler had shipped out for Eros. The traditional competitiveness and insularity of the stations’ respective security forces had almost let the perp slip away. Only Miller and Sematimba had been willing to coordinate outside the corporate channels.

  “What brings you,” Sematimba said, leaning against a thin steel railing and gesturing at the tunnel, “to the navel of the Belt, the glory and power that is Eros?”

  “Following up on a lead,” Miller said.

  “There’s nothing good here,” Sematimba said. “Ever since Protogen pulled out, things have been going from bad to worse.”

  Miller sucked up a noodle.

  “Who’s the new contract?” he asked.

  “CPM,” Sematimba said.

  “Never heard of them.”

  “Carne Por la Machina,” Sematimba said, and pulled a face: exaggerated bluff masculinity. He thumped his breast and growled, then let the imitation go and shook his head. “New corporation out of Luna. Mostly Belters on the ground. Make themselves out to be all hard core, but they’re mostly amateurs. All bluster, no balls. Protogen was inner planets, and that was a problem, but they were serious as hell. They broke heads, but they kept the peace. These new assholes? Most corrupt bunch of thugs I’ve ever worked for. I don’t think the board of governors is going to renew when the contract’s up. I didn’t say that, but it’s true.”

  “I’ve got an old partner signed up with Protogen,” Miller said.

  “They’re not bad,” Sematimba said. “Almost wish I’d picked them in the divorce, you know?”

  “Why didn’t you?” Miller asked.

  “You know how it is. I’m from here.”

  “Yeah,” Miller said.

  “So. You didn’t know who was running the playhouse? You aren’t here looking for work.”

  “Nope,” Miller said. “I’m on sabbatical. Doing some travel for myself these days.”

  “You’ve got money for that?”

  “Not really. But I don’t mind going on the cheap. For a while, you know. You heard anything about a Juliette Mao? Goes by Julie?”

  Sematimba shook his head.

  “Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile,” Miller said. “Came up the well and went native. OPA. It was an abduction case.”

  “Was?”

  Miller leaned back. His imagined Julie raised her eyebrows.

  “It’s changed a little since I got it,” Miller sai
d. “May be connected to something. Kind of big.”

  “How big are we talking about?” Sematimba said. All trace of jocularity had vanished from his expression. He was all cop now. Anyone but Miller would have found the man’s empty, almost angry face intimidating.

  “The war,” Miller said. Sematimba folded his arms.

  “Bad joke,” he said.

  “Not joking.”

  “I consider us friends, old man,” Sematimba said. “But I don’t want any trouble around here. Things are unsettled as it stands.”

  “I’ll try to stay low-profile.”

  Sematimba nodded. Down the tunnel, an alarm blared. Only security, not the earsplitting ditone of an environmental alert. Sematimba looked down the tunnel as if squinting would let him see through the press of people, bicycles, and food carts.

  “I’d better go look,” he said with an air of resignation. “Probably some of my fellow officers of the peace breaking windows for the fun of it.”

  “Great to be part of a team like that,” Miller said.

  “How would you know?” Sematimba said with a smile. “If you need something… ”

  “Likewise,” Miller said, and watched the cop wade into the sea of chaos and humanity. He was a large man, but something about the passing crowd’s universal deafness to the alarm’s blare made him seem smaller. A stone in the ocean, the phrase went. One star among millions.

  Miller checked the time, then pulled up the public docking records. The Rocinante showed as on schedule. The docking berth was listed. Miller sucked down the last of his noodles, tossed the foam cone with the thin smear of black sauce into a public recycler, found the nearest men’s room, and when he was done there, trotted toward the casino level.