The Dragon’s Path

by Abraham Daniel

  Holden slammed into Miller’s back. The detective had stopped suddenly and now moved quickly to one side of the corridor, crouching low to keep himself in the shadows. Holden followed suit. About thirty meters ahead, the mercenary group had gotten much bigger and had split into two factions.

  “Yep,” Miller said. “Whole lot of people having really bad days today.”

  Holden nodded and wiped something wet off his face. It was blood. He didn’t think he’d hit Miller’s back hard enough to bloody his nose, and he had a suspicion it wasn’t going to stop on its own. Mucous membranes getting fragile. Wasn’t that part of radiation burning? He tore strips off his shirt and stuffed them up his nostrils while he watched the scene at the end of the corridor.

  There were two clear groups, and they did seem to be engaged in some sort of heated argument. Normally, that would have been fine. Holden didn’t care about the social lives of mercenaries. But these mercenaries numbered by this time close to a hundred, were heavily armed, and blocked the corridor that led to his ship. That made their argument worth watching.

  “Not everyone from Protogen left, I think,” Miller said quietly, pointing at one of the two groups. “Those guys on the right don’t look like the home team.”

  Holden looked at the group and nodded. They were definitely the more professional-looking soldiers. Their armor fit well. The other group looked like it was largely made up of guys dressed in police riot gear, with only a few men in combat armor.

  “Want to guess what the argument is about?” Miller asked.

  “Hey, can we have a ride too?” Holden said mockingly with a Ceres accent. “Uh, no, we need you guys to stay here and, uh, keep an eye on things, which we promise will be totally safe and absolutely not involve you turning into vomit zombies.”

  He actually got a chuckle from Miller and then the corridor erupted in a barrage of gunfire. Both sides of the discussion were firing automatic weapons at each other from point-blank range. The noise was deafening. Men screamed and flew apart, spraying the corridor and each other with blood and body parts. Holden dropped flat to the floor but continued watching the firefight.

  After the initial barrage, the survivors from both groups began falling back in opposite directions, still firing as they moved. The floor at the corridor junction was littered with bodies. Holden estimated that twenty or more men had died in that first second of the fight. The sounds of gunfire grew more distant as the two groups fired at each other down the corridor.

  In the middle of the junction, one of the bodies on the floor suddenly stirred and raised its head. Even before the wounded man could get to his feet, a bullet hole appeared in the middle of his face shield and he dropped back to the floor with limp finality.

  “Where’s your ship?” Miller asked.

  “The lift is at the end of this corridor,” Holden replied.

  Miller spat what looked like bloody phlegm on the floor.

  “And the corridor that crosses it is now a war zone, with armed camps sniping at each other from both sides,” he said. “I guess we could try just running through it.”

  “Is there another option?” Holden asked.

  Miller looked at his terminal.

  “We’re fifty-three minutes past the deadline Naomi set,” he said. “How much more time do you want to waste?”

  “Look, I was never particularly good at math,” Holden said. “But I’d guess there are as many as forty guys in either direction down that other corridor. A corridor which is a good three, maybe three and a half meters wide. Which means that we give eighty guys three meters worth of shots at us. Even dumb luck means we get hit a lot and then die. Let’s think of a plan B.”

  As if to underline his argument, another fusillade broke out in the cross corridor, gouging chunks out of the rubbery wall insulation and chewing up the bodies lying on the floor.

  “They’re still withdrawing,” Miller said. “Those shots came from farther away. I guess we can just wait them out. I mean, if we can.”

  The rags Holden had stuffed up his nose hadn’t stopped the bleeding; they had just dammed it up. He could feel a steady trickle down the back of his throat that made his stomach heave with nausea. Miller was right. They were getting down to the last of their ability to wait anyone out at this point.

  “Goddamn, I wish we could call and see if Naomi is even there,” Holden said, looking at the flashing Network Not Available on his terminal.

  “Shhh,” Miller whispered, putting one finger on his lips. He pointed back down the corridor in the direction they’d come, and now Holden could hear heavy footsteps approaching.

  “Late guests to the party,” Miller said, and Holden nodded. The two men swiveled around, pointing their guns down the corridor and waiting.

  A group of four men in police riot armor rounded the corner. They didn’t have their guns out, and two of them had their helmets off. Apparently they hadn’t heard about the new hostilities. Holden waited for Miller to fire and, when he didn’t, turned to look at him. Miller was staring back.

  “I didn’t dress real warm,” Miller said, almost apologetically. It took Holden half a second to understand what he meant.

  Holden gave him permission by shooting first. He targeted one of the mafia thugs without a helmet and shot him in the face, then continued firing at the group until his gun’s slide locked open when the magazine was empty. Miller had begun firing a split second after Holden’s first shot and also fired until his gun was empty. When it was over, all four thugs were lying facedown in the corridor. Holden let out a long breath that turned into a sigh, and sat down on the floor.

  Miller walked to the fallen men and nudged each one in turn with his foot as he replaced the magazine in his gun. Holden didn’t bother reloading his. He was done with gunfights. He put the empty pistol in his pocket and got up to join the cop. He bent down and began unbuckling the least damaged armor he could find. Miller raised an eyebrow but didn’t move to help.

  “We’re making a run for it,” Holden said, swallowing back the vomit-and-blood taste in his throat as he pulled the chest and back armor free of the first man. “But maybe if we wear this stuff, it will help.”

  “Might,” Miller said with a nod, then knelt down to help strip a second man.

  Holden put on the dead man’s armor, working hard to believe that the pink trail down the back was absolutely not part of the man’s brain. Undoing the straps was exhausting. His fingers felt numb and awkward. He picked up the thigh armor, then put it down again. He’d rather run fast. Miller had finished buckling his on too and picked up one of the undamaged helmets. Holden found one with just a dent in it and slipped it onto his head. It felt greasy inside, and he was glad he had no sense of smell. He suspected that its previous occupant hadn’t bathed often.

  Miller fiddled with the side of his helmet until the radio came on. The cop’s voice was echoed a split second later over the helmet’s tinny speakers as he said, “Hey, we’re coming out into the corridor! Don’t shoot! We’re coming to join up!”

  Thumbing off the mic, he turned to Holden and said, “Well, maybe one side won’t be shooting at us now.”

  They moved back down the corridor and stopped ten meters from the intersection. Holden counted down from three and then took off at the best run he could manage. It was dishearteningly slow; his legs felt like they were filled with lead. Like he was running in a pool of water. Like he was in a nightmare. He could hear Miller just behind him, his shoes slapping on the concrete floor, his breath coming in ragged gasps.

  Then he heard only the sound of gunfire. He couldn’t tell if Miller’s plan had worked. Couldn’t tell which direction the gunfire was coming from. It was constant and deafening and started the instant he entered the cross corridor. When he was three meters from the other side, he lowered his head and jumped forward. In Eros’ light gravity, he seemed to fly, and he was nearly to the other side when a burst of bullets caught him in the armor over his ribs and slammed him into the corr
idor wall with a spine-jarring crack. He dragged himself the rest of the way as bullets continued to hit all around his legs, one of them passing through the meaty part of his calf.

  Miller tripped over him, flying a few feet farther down the hall and then collapsing in a heap. Holden crawled to his side.

  “Still alive?”

  Miller nodded. “Got shot. Arm’s broke. Keep moving,” he gasped out.

  Holden climbed to his feet, his left leg feeling like it was on fire as the muscle in his calf clenched around his gaping wound. He pulled Miller up and then leaned on him as they limped toward the elevator. Miller’s left arm was dangling boneless at his side, and blood was pouring off his hand.

  Holden punched the button to call the lift, and he and Miller leaned on each other while they waited. He hummed the Misko and Marisko theme to himself, and after a few seconds, Miller started too.

  Holden punched the button for the Rocinante’s berth and waited for the elevator to stop at a blank gray airlock door with no ship beyond it. That would be when he finally had permission to lie down on the floor and die. He looked forward to that moment when his exertions could end with a relief that would have surprised him if he’d still been capable of surprise. Miller let go of him and slid down the lift wall, leaving a blood trail on the shiny metal and ending in a pile on the floor. The man’s eyes were closed. He could almost have been sleeping. Holden watched the detective’s chest rise and fall in ragged, painful breaths that grew smoother and more shallow.

  Holden envied him, but he had to see that closed airlock door before he could lie down. He began to feel faintly angry with the elevator for taking so long.

  It stopped, lift doors sliding open with a cheerful ding.

  Amos stood in the airlock on the other side, an assault rifle in each hand and two belts of magazines for the rifles slung on his shoulders. He looked Holden up and down once, then glanced over to Miller and back again.

  “Jesus, Captain, you look like shit.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Miller

  Miller’s mind reassembled slowly and with several false starts. In his dreams, he was fitting a puzzle together as the pieces kept changing shape, and each time, just as he was on the verge of slipping the whole mechanism together, the dream began again. The first thing he became aware of was the ache at the small of his back, then the heaviness of his arms and legs, then the nausea. The nearer he came to consciousness, the more he tried to postpone it. Imaginary fingers tried to complete the puzzle, and before he could make it all fit, his eyes opened.

  He couldn’t move his head. Something was in his neck: a thick bundle of black tubes reaching out of him and up past the limits of his vision. He tried to lift his arms, to push the invading, vampiric thing away, but he couldn’t.

  It got me, he thought with a thrill of fear. I’m infected.

  The woman appeared from his left. He was surprised she wasn’t Julie. Deep brown skin, dark eyes with just a hint of an epicanthic fold. She smiled at him. Black hair draped down the side of her face.

  Down. There was a down. There was gravity. They were under thrust. That seemed very important, but he didn’t know why.

  “Hey, Detective,” Naomi said. “Welcome back.”

  Where am I? he tried to say. His throat felt solid. Crowded like too many people in a tube station.

  “Don’t try to get up or talk or anything,” she said. “You’ve been under for about thirty-six hours. Good news is we have a sick bay with a military-grade expert system and supplies for fifteen Martian soldiers. I think we burned half of what we’ve got on you and the captain.”

  The captain. Holden. That was right. They’d been in a fight. There had been a corridor and people shooting. And someone had been sick. He remembered a woman, covered in brown vomit, with vacant eyes, but he didn’t know whether it was part of a nightmare.

  Naomi was still talking. Something about full plasma flushes and cell damage. He tried to lift a hand, to reach out to her, but a strap restrained him. The ache in his back was his kidneys, and he wondered what exactly was getting filtered out of his blood. Miller closed his eyes, asleep before he could decide whether to rest.

  No dreams troubled him this time. He roused again when something deep in his throat shifted, pulled at his larynx, and retreated. Without opening his eyes, he rolled to his side, coughed, puked, and rolled back.

  When he woke, he was breathing on his own. His throat felt sore and abused, but his hands weren’t tied down. Drainage tubes ran out of his belly and side, and there was a catheter the size of a pencil coming out his penis. Nothing particularly hurt, so he had to assume he was on pretty nearly all the narcotics there were. His clothes were gone, his modesty preserved only by a thin paper gown and a cast that held his left arm stony and immovable. Someone had put his hat on the next bed over.

  The sick bay, now that he could see it, looked like a ward on a high-production entertainment feed. It wasn’t a hospital; it was the matte-black-and-silver idea of what a hospital was supposed to be. The monitors hung suspended in the air on complex armatures, reporting his blood pressure, nucleic acid concentrations, oxygenation, fluid balance. There were two separate countdowns running, one to the next round of autophagics, the other for pain medication. And across the aisle, at another station, Holden’s statistics looked more or less the same.

  Holden looked like a ghost. His skin was pale and his sclera were red with a hundred little hemorrhages. His face was puffy from steroids.

  “Hey,” Miller said.

  Holden lifted a hand, waving gently.

  “We made it,” Miller said. His voice sounded like it had been dragged down an alley by its ankles.

  “Yeah,” Holden said.

  “That was ugly.”

  “Yeah.”

  Miller nodded. That had taken all the energy he had. He lay back down and fell, if not asleep, at least unconscious. Just before his mind flickered back into forgetfulness, he smiled. He’d made it. He was on Holden’s ship. And they were going to find whatever Julie had left behind for them.

  Voices woke him.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t, then.”

  It was the woman. Naomi. Part of Miller cursed her for disturbing him, but there was a buzz in her voice—not fear or anger, but close enough to be interesting. He didn’t move, didn’t even swim all the way back to awareness. But he listened.

  “I need to,” Holden said. He sounded phlegmy, like someone who needed to cough. “What happened on Eros… it’s put a lot of things in perspective. I’ve been a holding something back.”

  “Captain—”

  “No, hear me out. When I was in there thinking that all I was going to have left was half an hour of rigged pachinko games and then death… when that happened, I knew what my regrets were. You know? I felt all the things that I wished I’d done and never had the courage for. Now that I know, I can’t just ignore it. I can’t pretend it isn’t there.”

  “Captain,” Naomi said again, and the buzz in her voice was stronger.

  Don’t say it, you poor bastard, Miller thought.

  “I’m in love with you, Naomi,” Holden said.

  The pause lasted no longer than a heartbeat.

  “No, sir,” she said. “You aren’t.”

  “I am. I know what you’re thinking. I’ve been through this big traumatic experience and I’m doing the whole thing where I want to affirm life and make connections, and maybe some of that’s part of it. But you have to believe that I know what I feel. And when I was down there, I knew that the thing that I wanted the most was to get back to you.”

  “Captain. How long have we served together?”

  “What? I don’t know exactly… ”

  “Ballpark estimate.”

  “Eight and a half runs makes it almost five years,” Holden said. Miller could hear the confusion in his voice.

  “All right. And in that time, how many of the crew did you share bunks with?”

  “Does it matter?”
/>   “Only a little.”

  “A few.”

  “More than a dozen?”

  “No,” he said, but he didn’t sound sure.

  “Let’s call it ten,” Naomi said.

  “Okay. But this is different. I’m not talking about having a little shipboard romance to pass the time. Ever since—”

  Miller imagined the woman holding up her hand or taking Holden’s or maybe just glaring at him. Something to stop the flow of words.

  “And do you know when I fell for you, sir?”

  Sorrow. That was what the strain in her voice was. Sorrow. Disappointment. Regret.

  “When… when you… ”

  “I can tell you the day,” Naomi said. “You were about seven weeks into that first run. I was still smarting that some Earther had come in from out of the ecliptic and taken my XO job. I didn’t like you much right at the start. You were too charming, too pretty, and too damn comfortable in my chair. But there was a poker game in the engine room. You and me and those two Luna boys out of engineering and Kamala Trask. You remember Trask?”

  “She was the comm tech. The one who was… ”

  “Built like a refrigerator? Face like a bulldog puppy?”

  “I remember her.”

  “She had the biggest crush on you. Used to cry herself to sleep at night all through that run. She wasn’t in that game because she cared about poker. She just wanted to breathe some of your air, and everyone knew it. Even you. And all that night, I watched you and her, and you never once led her along. You never gave her any reason to think she had a chance with you. And you still treated her with respect. That was the first time I thought you might be a decent XO, and it was the first time I wished that I could be the girl in your bunk at shift’s end.”