The Dragon’s Path

by Abraham Daniel

  The story was amusing enough, and the detective’s dry delivery suited it well, but Holden only half listened. He watched his crew, saw the tension falling from their faces and shoulders. He and Amos were both from Earth, though if he had to guess, he’d say Amos had forgotten about his home world the first time he’d shipped out. Alex was from Mars and clearly still loved it. One bad mistake on either side and both planets might be radioactive rubble by the end of dinner. But right now they were just friends having a meal together. It was right. It was what Holden had to keep fighting for.

  “I actually remember that cheese shortage,” Naomi said once Miller had stopped talking. “Belt-wide. That was your fault?”

  “Yeah, well, if they’d only been sneaking cheese past the government auditors, we wouldn’t have had a problem,” Miller said. “But they had this habit of shooting the other cheese smugglers. Makes the cops notice. Bad business.”

  “Over fucking cheese?” Amos said, tossing his fork onto his plate with a clack. “Are you serious? I mean, drugs or gambling or something. But cheese?”

  “Gambling’s legal, most places,” Miller said. “And a chemistry class dropout can cook up just about any drug you like in his bathroom. No way to control supply.”

  “Real cheese comes from Earth, or Mars,” Naomi added. “And after they tack on shipping costs and the Coalition’s fifty percent in taxes, it costs more than fuel pellets.”

  “We wound up with one hundred and thirty kilos of Vermont Cheddar in the evidence lockup,” Miller said. “Street value that would have probably bought someone their own ship. It had disappeared by the end of the day. We wrote it up as lost to spoilage. No one said a word, as long as everyone went home with a brick.”

  The detective leaned back in his chair with a distant look on his face.

  “My God, that was good cheese,” he said with a smile.

  “Yeah, well, this fake stuff does taste like shit,” Amos said, then added in a hurry, “No offense, Boss, you did a real good job whipping it up. But that’s still weird to me, fighting over cheese.”

  “It’s why they killed Eros,” Naomi said.

  Miller nodded but said nothing.

  “How do you figure that?” Amos said.

  “How long have you been flying?” Naomi asked.

  “I dunno,” Amos replied, his lips compressing as he did the mental math. “Twenty-five years, maybe?”

  “Fly with a lot of Belters, right?”

  “Yeah,” Amos said. “Can’t get better shipmates than Belters. ’Cept me, of course.”

  “You’ve flown with us for twenty-five years, you like us, you’ve learned the patois. I bet you can order a beer and a hooker on any station in the Belt. Heck, if you were a little taller and a lot skinnier, you could pass for one of us by now.”

  Amos smiled, taking it as a compliment.

  “But you still don’t get us,” Naomi said. “Not really. No one who grew up with free air ever will. And that’s why they can kill a million and a half of us to figure out what their bug really does.”

  “Hey now,” Alex interjected. “You serious ’bout that? You think the inners and outers see themselves as that different?”

  “Of course they do,” Miller said. “We’re too tall, too skinny, our heads look too big, and our joints too knobby.”

  Holden noticed Naomi glancing across the table at him, a speculative look on her face. I like your head, Holden thought at her, but the radiation hadn’t given him telepathy either, because her expression didn’t change.

  “We’ve practically got our own language now,” Miller said. “Ever see an Earther try to get directions in the deep dig?”

  “ ‘Tu run spin, pow, Schlauch tu way acima and ido,’ ” Naomi said with a heavy Belter accent.

  “Go spinward to the tube station, which will take you back to the docks,” Amos said. “The fuck’s so hard about that?”

  “I had a partner wouldn’t have known that after two years on Ceres,” Miller said. “And Havelock wasn’t stupid. He just wasn’t… from there.”

  Holden listened to them talk and pushed cold pasta around on his plate with a chunk of bread.

  “Okay, we get it,” he said. “You’re weird. But to kill a million and a half people over some skeletal differences and slang… ”

  “People have been getting tossed into ovens for less than that ever since they invented ovens,” Miller said. “If it makes you feel better, most of us think you’re squat and microcephalic.”

  Alex shook his head.

  “Don’t make a lick of sense to me, turnin’ that bug loose, even if you hated every single human on Eros personally. Who knows what that thing’ll do?”

  Naomi walked to the galley sink and washed her hands, the running water drawing everyone’s attention.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” she said, then turned around, wiping her hands on a towel. “The point of it, I mean.”

  Miller started to speak, but Holden hushed him with a quick gesture and waited for Naomi to continue.

  “So,” she said. “I’ve been thinking of it as a computing problem. If the virus or nanomachine or protomolecule or whatever was designed, it has a purpose, right?”

  “Definitely,” Holden said.

  “And it seems like it’s trying to do something—something complex. It doesn’t make sense to go to all that trouble just to kill people. Those changes it makes look intentional, just… not complete, to me.”

  “I can see that,” Holden said. Alex and Amos nodded along with him but stayed quiet.

  “So maybe the issue is that the protomolecule isn’t smart enough yet. You can compress a lot of data down pretty small, but unless it’s a quantum computer, processing takes space. The easiest way to get that processing in tiny machines is through distribution. Maybe the protomolecule isn’t finishing its job because it just isn’t smart enough to. Yet.”

  “Not enough of them,” Alex said.

  “Right,” Naomi said, dropping the towel into a bin under the sink. “So you give them a lot of biomass to work with, and see what it is they are ultimately made to do.”

  “According to that guy in the video, they were made to hijack life on Earth and wipe us out,” Miller said.

  “And that,” Holden said, “is why Eros is perfect. Lots of biomass in a vacuum-sealed test tube. And if it gets out of hand, there’s already a war going on. A lot of ships and missiles can be used for nuking Eros into glass if the threat seems real. Nothing to make us forget our differences like a new player butting in.”

  “Wow,” Amos said. “That is really, really fucked up.”

  “Okay. But even though that’s probably what’s happened,” Holden said, “I still can’t believe that there are enough evil people all in one place to do it. This isn’t a one-man operation. This is the work of dozens, maybe hundreds, of very smart people. Does Protogen just go around recruiting every potential Stalin and Jack the Ripper it runs across?”

  “I’ll make sure to ask Mr. Dresden,” Miller said, an unreadable expression on his face, “when we finally meet.”

  Tycho’s habitat rings spun serenely around the bloated zero-g factory globe in the center. The massive construction waldoes that sprouted from the top were maneuvering an enormous piece of hull plating onto the side of the Nauvoo. Looking at the station on the ops screens while Alex finished up docking procedures, Holden felt something like relief. So far, Tycho was the one place no one had tried to shoot them, or blow them up, or vomit goo on them, and that practically made it home.

  Holden looked at the research safe clamped securely to the deck and hoped that he hadn’t just killed everyone on the station by bringing it there.

  As if on cue, Miller pulled himself through the deck hatch and drifted over to the safe. He gave Holden a meaningful look.

  “Don’t say it. I’m already thinking it,” Holden said.

  Miller shrugged and drifted over to the ops station.

  “Big,” he said, noddi
ng at the Nauvoo, on Holden’s screen.

  “Generation ship,” Holden said. “Something like that will give us the stars.”

  “Or a lonely death on a long trip to nowhere,” Miller replied.

  “You know,” Holden said, “some species’ version of the great galactic adventure is shooting virus-filled bullets at their neighbors. I think ours is pretty damn noble in comparison.”

  Miller seemed to consider that, nodded, and watched Tycho Station swell on the monitor as Alex brought them closer. The detective kept one hand on the console, making the micro adjustments necessary to remain still even as the pilot’s maneuvers threw unexpected bursts of gravity at them from every direction. Holden was strapped into his chair. Even concentrating, he couldn’t handle zero g and intermittent thrust half that well. His brain just couldn’t be trained out of the twenty-odd years he’d spent with gravity as a constant.

  Naomi was right. It would be so easy to see Belters as alien. Hell, if you gave them time to develop some really efficient implantable oxygen storage and recycling and kept trimming the environment suits down to the minimum necessary for heat, you might wind up with Belters who spent more time outside their ships and stations than in.

  Maybe that was why they were taxed to subsistence level. The bird was out of the cage, but you couldn’t let it stretch its wings too far or it might forget it belonged to you.

  “You trust this Fred?” Miller asked.

  “Sort of,” Holden said. “He treated us well last time, when everyone else wanted us dead or locked up.”

  Miller grunted, as if that proved nothing.

  “He’s OPA, right?”

  “Yeah,” Holden said. “But I think maybe the real OPA. Not the cowboys who want to shoot it out with the inners. And not those nuts on the radio calling for war. Fred’s a politician.”

  “What about the ones keeping Ceres in line?”

  “I don’t know,” Holden said. “I don’t know about them. But Fred’s the best shot we have. Least wrong.”

  “Fair enough,” Miller said. “We won’t find a political solution to Protogen, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Holden said, then began unbuckling his harness as the Roci slid into its berth with a series of metallic bangs. “But Fred isn’t just a politician.”

  Fred sat behind his large wooden desk, reading the notes Holden had written about Eros, the search for Julie, and the discovery of the stealth ship. Miller sat across from him, watching Fred like an entomologist might watch a new species of bug, guessing if it was likely to sting. Holden was a little farther away on Fred’s right, trying not to keep looking at the clock on his hand terminal. On the huge screen behind the desk, the Nauvoo drifted by like the metal bones of some dead and decaying leviathan. Holden could see the tiny spots of brilliant blue light where workers used welding torches on the hull and frame. To occupy himself, he started counting them.

  He’d reached forty-three when a small shuttle appeared in his field of view, a load of steel beams clutched in a pair of heavy manipulator arms, and flew toward the half-built generation ship. The shuttle shrank to a point no larger than the tip of a pen before it stopped. The Nauvoo suddenly shifted in Holden’s mind from a large ship relatively nearby, to a gigantic ship farther away. It gave him a short rush of vertigo.

  His hand terminal beeped at almost the same instant that Miller’s did. He didn’t even look at it; he just tapped the face to shut it up. He knew this routine by now. He pulled out a small bottle, took out two blue pills, and swallowed them dry. He could hear Miller pouring pills out of his bottle as well. The ship’s expert medical system dispensed them for him every week with a warning that failing to take them on schedule would lead to horrific death. He took them. He would for the rest of his life. Missing a few would just mean that wasn’t very long.

  Fred finished reading and threw his hand terminal down on the desk, then rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands for several seconds. To Holden, he looked older than the last time they’d seen each other.

  “I have to tell you, Jim, I have no idea what to make of this,” he finally said.

  Miller looked at Holden and mouthed, Jim, at him with a question on his face. Holden ignored him.

  “Did you read Naomi’s addition at the end?” Holden asked.

  “The bit with the networked nanobugs for increased processing power?”

  “Yeah, that bit,” Holden said. “It makes sense, Fred.”

  Fred laughed without humor, then stabbed one finger at his terminal.

  “That,” he said. “That only makes sense to a psychopath. No one sane could do that. No matter what they thought they might get out of it.”

  Miller cleared his throat.

  “You have something to add, Mr. Muller?” Fred asked.

  “Miller,” the detective replied. “Yes. First—and all respect here—don’t kid yourself. Genocide’s old-school. Second, the facts aren’t in question. Protogen infected Eros Station with a lethal alien disease, and they’re recording the results. Why doesn’t matter. We need to stop them.”

  “And,” Holden said, “we think we can track down where their observation station is.”

  Fred leaned back in his chair, the fake leather and metal frame creaking under his weight even in the one-third g.

  “Stop them how?” he asked. Fred knew. He just wanted to hear them say it out loud. Miller played along.

  “I’d say we fly to their station and shoot them.”

  “Who is ‘we’?” Fred asked.

  “There are a lot of OPA hotheads looking to shoot it out with Earth and Mars,” Holden said. “We give them some real bad guys to shoot at instead.”

  Fred nodded in a way that didn’t mean he agreed to anything.

  “And your sample? The captain’s safe?” Fred said.

  “That’s mine,” Holden said. “No negotiation on that.”

  Fred laughed again, though there was some humor in it this time. Miller blinked in surprise and then stifled a grin.

  “Why would I agree to that?” Fred asked.

  Holden lifted his chin and smiled.

  “What if I told you that I’ve hidden the safe on a planetesimal booby-trapped with enough plutonium to break anyone who touches it into their component atoms even if they could find it?” he said.

  Fred stared at him for a moment, then said, “But you didn’t.”

  “Well, no,” Holden said. “But I could tell you I did.”

  “You are too honest,” Fred said.

  “And you can’t trust anyone with something this big. You already know what I’m going to do with it. That’s why, until we can agree on something better, you’re leaving it with me.”

  Fred nodded.

  “Yes,” he said, “I guess I am.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Miller

  The observation deck looked out over the Nauvoo as the behemoth slowly came together. Miller sat on the edge of a soft couch, his fingers laced over his knee, his gaze on the immense vista of the construction. After his time on Holden’s ship and, before that, in Eros, with its old-style closed architecture, a view so wide seemed artificial. The deck itself was wider than the Rocinante and decorated with soft ferns and sculpted ivies. The air recyclers were eerily quiet, and even though the spin gravity was nearly the same as Ceres’, the Coriolis felt subtly wrong.

  He’d lived in the Belt his whole life, and he’d never been anywhere that was designed so carefully for the tasteful display of wealth and power. It was pleasant as long as he didn’t think about it too much.

  He wasn’t the only one drawn to the open spaces of Tycho. A few dozen station workers sat in groups or walked through together. An hour before, Amos and Alex had gone by, deep in their own conversation, so he wasn’t entirely surprised when, standing up and walking back toward the docks, he saw Naomi sitting by herself with a bowl of food cooling on a tray at her side. Her gaze was fixed on her hand terminal.

  “Hey,” he said.

  Naomi lo
oked up, recognized him, and smiled distractedly.

  “Hey,” she said.

  Miller nodded toward the hand terminal and shrugged a question.

  “Comm data from that ship,” she said. It was always that ship, Miller noticed. The same way people would call a particularly godawful crime scene that place. “It’s all tightbeam, so I thought it wouldn’t be so hard to triangulate. But… ”

  “Not so much?”

  Naomi lifted her eyebrows and sighed.

  “I’ve been plotting orbits,” she said. “But nothing’s fitting. There could be relay drones, though. Moving targets the ship system was calibrated for that would send the message on to the actual station. Or another drone, and then the station, or who knows?”

  “Any data coming off Eros?”

  “I assume so,” Naomi said, “but I don’t know that it would be any easier to make sense of than this.”

  “Can’t your OPA friends do something?” Miller asked. “They’ve got more processing power than one of these handhelds. Probably have a better activity map of the Belt too.”

  “Probably,” she said.

  He couldn’t tell if she didn’t trust this Fred that Holden had given them over to, or just needed to feel like the investigation was still hers. He considered telling her to back off it for a while, to let the others carry it, but he didn’t see he had the moral authority to make that one stick.

  “What?” Naomi said, an uncertain smile on her lips.

  Miller blinked.

  “You were laughing a little,” Naomi said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you laugh before. I mean, not when something was funny.”

  “I was just thinking about something a partner of mine told me about letting cases go when you got pulled from them.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That it’s like taking half a shit,” Miller said.