The Dragon’s Path

by Abraham Daniel

  The ops console chair next to Naomi had a hole in it; green gel slowly leaked into small balls that floated away in the zero g. Holden looked at the hole in the chair, and the matching hole in the bulkhead across the room, and realized that the round must have passed within centimeters of Naomi’s leg. A shudder swept through him, leaving him nauseated in its wake.

  “What the fuck was that?” Amos asked quietly. “And how about we don’t do it anymore?”

  “Alex?” Holden said.

  “Still here, Cap,” the pilot replied, his voice eerily calm.

  “My panel’s dead,” Holden said. “Did we kill that son of a bitch?”

  “Yeah, Cap, he’s dead. About half a dozen of his rounds actually hit the Roci. Looks like they went through us from bow to stern. That anti-spalling webbing on the bulkheads really keeps the shrapnel down, doesn’t it?”

  Alex’s voice had started shaking. He meant We should all be dead.

  “Open a channel to Fred, Naomi,” Holden said.

  She didn’t move.

  “Naomi?”

  “Right. Fred,” she said, then tapped on her screen.

  Holden’s helmet was filled with static for a second, then with Fred’s voice.

  “Guy Molinari here. Glad you guys are still alive.”

  “Roger that. Begin your run. Let us know when we can limp over to one of the station’s docks.”

  “Roger,” Fred replied. “We’ll find you a nice place to land. Fred out.”

  Holden pulled the quick release on his chair’s restraints and floated toward the ceiling, his body limp.

  Okay, Miller. Your turn.

  Chapter Forty: Miller

  Oi, Pampaw,” the kid in the crash couch to Miller’s right said. “Popped seal, you and bang, hey?”

  The kid’s combat armor was gray-green, articulated pressure seals at the joints and stripes across the front plates where a knife or flechette round had scraped the finish. Behind the face mask, the kid could have been fifteen. His hand gestures spoke of a childhood spent in vacuum suits, and his speech was pure Belt creole.

  “Yeah,” Miller said, raising his arm. “Saw some action recently. I’ll be fine.”

  “Fine’s fine as fine,” the kid said. “But you hold to the foca, and neto can pass the air out to you, hey?”

  No one on Mars or Earth would have the first clue what you’re saying, Miller thought. Shit, half the people on Ceres would be embarrassed by an accent that thick. No wonder they don’t mind killing you.

  “Sounds good to me,” Miller said. “You go first, and I’ll try to keep anyone from shooting you in the back.”

  The kid grinned. Miller had seen thousands like him. Boys in the throes of adolescence, working through the normal teenage drive to take risks and impress girls, but at the same time they lived in the Belt, where one bad call meant dead. He’d seen thousands. He’d arrested hundreds. He’d watched a few dozen picked up in hazmat bags.

  He leaned forward to look down the long rows of close-packed gimbaled crash couches that lined the gut of the Guy Molinari. Miller’s rough estimate put the count at between ninety and a hundred of them. So by dinner, chances were good he’d have seen a couple dozen more die.

  “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Diogo.”

  “Miller,” he said, and gave the kid his hand to shake. The high-quality Martian battle armor Miller had taken from the Rocinante let his fingers flex a lot more than the kid’s.

  The truth was Miller was in no shape for the assault. He was still getting occasional waves of inexplicable nausea, and his arm ached whenever the medication level in his blood started thinning out. But he knew his way around a gun, and he probably knew more about corridor-to-corridor fighting than nine-tenths of the OPA rock jumpers and ore hogs like Diogo who were about to go in. It would have to be good enough.

  The ship’s address system clicked once.

  “This is Fred. We’ve had word from air support, and we’re green for breach in ten minutes. Final checks start now, people.”

  Miller sat back in his couch. The clicking and chattering of a hundred suits of armor, a hundred sidearms, a hundred assault weapons filled the air. He’d been over his own enough times now; he didn’t feel the urge to do it again.

  In a few minutes, the burn would come. The cocktail of high-g drugs was kept on the ragged edge, since they’d be going straight from the couches into a firefight. No point having your assault force more doped than necessary.

  Julie sat on the wall beside him, her hair swirling around her like she was underwater. He imagined the dappled light flashing across her face. Portrait of the young pinnace racer as a mermaid. She smiled at the idea, and Miller smiled back. She would have been here, he knew. Along with Diogo and Fred and all the other OPA militia, patriots of the vacuum, she’d have been in a crash couch, wearing borrowed armor, heading into the station to get herself killed for the greater good. Miller knew he wouldn’t have. Not before her. So in a sense, he’d taken her place. He’d become her.

  They made it, Julie said, or maybe only thought. If the ground attack was going forward, it meant the Rocinante had survived—at least long enough to knock out the defenses. Miller nodded, acknowledging her and letting himself feel a moment’s pleasure at the idea, and then thrust gravity pushed him into his couch so hard that his consciousness flickered, and the hold around him dimmed. He felt it when the braking burn came, all the crash couches spinning to face the new up. Needles dug into Miller’s flesh. Something deep and loud happened, the Guy Molinari ringing like a gigantic bell. The breaching charge. The world pulled hard to the left, the couch swinging for the last time as the assault ship matched the station’s spin.

  Someone was shouting at him. “Go go go!” Miller lifted his assault rifle, tapped the sidearm strapped to his thigh, and joined the press of bodies making for the exit. He missed his hat.

  The service corridor they’d cut into was narrow and dim. The schematics the Tycho engineers had worked up suggested they wouldn’t see any real resistance until they got into the manned parts of the station. That had been a bad guess. Miller staggered in with the other OPA soldiers in time to see an automatic defense laser cut the first rank in half.

  “Team three! Gas it!” Fred snapped in all their ears, and half a dozen blooms of thick white anti-laser smoke burst into the close air. The next time a defense laser fired, the walls flashed with mad iridescence, and the smoke of burning plastic filled the air, but no one died. Miller pressed forward and up a red metal ramp. A welding charge flared, and a service door swung open.

  The corridors of Thoth station were wide and roomy, with long swaths of ivy grown in carefully tended spirals, niches every few feet with tastefully lit bonsai. Soft light the pure white of sunlight made the place feel like a spa or a rich man’s private residence. The floors were carpet.

  The HUD in his armor flickered, marking the path the assault was meant to take. Miller’s heart stepped up to a fast, constant flutter, but his mind seemed to grow perfectly still. At the first intersection, a riot barrier was manned by a dozen men in Protogen security uniforms. The OPA troops hung back, using the curve of the ceiling as cover. What suppressing fire there was came in kneecap low.

  The grenades were perfectly round, not even a hole where the pin had been pulled. They didn’t roll as well on the soft industrial carpet as they would have on stone or tiling, so one of the three went off before it reached the barrier. The concussion was like being hit in the ears with a hammer; the narrow, sealed corridors channeled the blast back at them almost as much as at the enemy. But the riot barrier shattered, and the Protogen security men fell back.

  As they all rushed forward, Miller heard his new, temporary compatriots whooping with the first taste of victory. The sound was muffled, as if they were a long way away. Maybe his earpieces hadn’t dampened the blast as much as they were supposed to. Making the rest of the assault with blown eardrums wouldn’t be easy.

  But the
n Fred came on, and his voice was clear enough.

  “Do not advance! Hold back!”

  It was almost enough. The OPA ground force hesitated, Fred’s orders pulling at them like a leash. These weren’t troops. They weren’t even cops. They were a Belter irregular militia; discipline and respect for authority weren’t natural to them. They slowed. They got careful. So rounding the corner, they didn’t walk into the trap.

  The next corridor was long and straight, leading—the HUD suggested—to a service ramp up toward the control center. It looked empty, but a third of the way to the curve horizon, the carpeting started to fly apart in ragged tufts. One of the boys beside Miller grunted and went down.

  “They are using low-shrapnel rounds and bouncing them off the curve,” Fred said into all their ears at once. “Bank-shot ricochet. Stay low, and do exactly as I say.”

  The calm in the Earther’s voice had more effect than his shouting had. Miller thought he might have been imagining it, but there also seemed to be a deeper tone. A certainty. The Butcher of Anderson Station doing what he did best, leading his troops against the tactics and strategies he’d helped create back when he’d been the enemy.

  Slowly, the OPA forces moved forward, up one level, and then the next, then the next. The air grew hazy with smoke and ablated paneling. The wide corridors opened into broad plazas and squares, as airy as prison yards, with the Protogen forces in the guard towers. The side corridors were locked down, local security trying to channel them into situations where they could be caught in crossfire.

  It didn’t work. The OPA forced open the doors, taking cover in display-rich rooms, something between lecture halls and manufacturing complexes. Twice, unarmored civilians, still at their work despite the ongoing assault, attacked them when they entered. The OPA boys mowed them down. Part of Miller’s mind—the part that was still a cop and not a soldier—twitched at that. They were civilians. Killing them was, at the very least, bad form. But then Julie whispered in the back of his mind, No one here is innocent, and he had to agree.

  The operations center was a third of the way up the station’s slight gravity well, defended better than anything they had seen so far. Miller and five others, directed by the all-knowing voice of Fred, took cover in a narrow service corridor, keeping a steady suppressing fire up the main corridor toward ops, and making sure no Protogen counterattack would go unanswered. Miller checked his assault weapon and was surprised to see how much ammunition was left.

  “Oi, Pampaw,” the kid next to him said, and Miller smiled, recognizing Diogo’s voice behind the face mask. “Day’s the day, passa?”

  “I’ve seen worse,” Miller agreed, then paused. He tried to scratch his injured elbow, but the armor plates kept anything satisfying from happening.

  “Beccas tu?” Diogo asked.

  “No, I’m fine. It’s just… this place. I don’t get it. It looks like a spa, and it’s built like a prison.”

  The boy’s hands shifted in query. Miller shook his fist in response, thinking through the ideas as he spoke.

  “It’s all long sight lines and locked-down side passages,” Miller said. “If I was going to build a place like this, I’d—”

  The air sang, and Diogo went down, his head snapping back as he fell. Miller yelped and wheeled. Behind them in the side corridor, two figures in Protogen security uniform dove for cover. Something hissed through the air by Miller’s left ear. Something else bounced off the breastplate of his fancy Martian armor like a hammer blow. He didn’t think about raising his assault weapon; it was just there, coughing out return fire like an extension of his will. The other three OPA soldiers turned to help.

  “Get back,” Miller barked. “Keep your fucking eyes on the main corridor! I’m on this.”

  Stupid, Miller told himself, stupid to let them get behind us. Stupid to stop and talk in the middle of a firefight. He should have known better, and now, because he’d lost focus, the boy was…

  Laughing?

  Diogo sat up, lifted his own assault weapon, and peppered the side corridor with rounds. He got unsteadily to his feet, then whooped like a child who’d just gotten off a thrill ride. A wide streak of white goo stretched from his collarbone up across the right side of his face mask. Behind it, Diogo was grinning. Miller shook his head.

  “What the hell are they using crowd suppression rounds for?” he said to himself as much as the boy. “They think this a riot?”

  “Forward teams,” Fred said in Miller’s ear, “get ready. We’re moving in five. Four. Three. Two. Go!”

  We don’t know what we’re getting into here, Miller thought as he joined the sprint down the corridor, pressing toward the assault’s final target. A wide ramp led up to a set of blast doors done in wood-grain veneer. Something detonated behind them, but Miller kept his head low and didn’t look back. The press of bodies jostling in their ragtag armor grew thicker, and Miller stumbled on something soft. A body in Protogen uniform.

  “Give us some room!” a woman at the front shouted. Miller pushed toward her, cutting through the crowd of OPA soldiers with his shoulder and elbow. The woman shouted again as he reached her.

  “What’s the problem?” Miller shouted.

  “I can’t cut through this bitch with all these dick-lickers pushing me,” she said, lifting a cutting torch already glowing white at the edge. Miller nodded and slid his assault rifle into the sling on his back. He grabbed two of the nearest shoulders, shook the men until they noticed him, and then locked his elbows with theirs.

  “Just need to give the techs some room,” Miller said, and together they waded into their own men, pushing them back. How many battles, all through history, fell apart at moments like this? he wondered. The victory all but delivered until allied forces started tripping over each other. The welder popped to life behind him, the heat pressing at his back like a hand even in armor.

  At the edge of the crowd, automatic weapons gurgled and choked.

  “How’s it going back there?” Miller shouted over his shoulder.

  The woman didn’t answer. Hours seemed to pass, though it couldn’t have been more than five minutes. The haze of hot metal and aerosolized plastic filled the air.

  The welding torch turned off with a pop. Over his shoulder, Miller saw the bulkhead sag and shift. The tech placed a card-thin jack into the gap between plates, activated it, and stood back. The station around them groaned as a new set of pressures and strains reshaped the metal. The bulkhead opened.

  “Come on,” Miller shouted, then tucked his head and moved through the new passageway, up a carpeted ramp, and into the ops center. A dozen men and women looked up from their stations, eyes wide with fear.

  “You’re under arrest!” Miller shouted as the OPA soldiers boiled in around him. “Well, no you’re not, but… shit. Put your hands up and back away from the controls!”

  One of the men—tall as a Belter, but built solid as a man in full gravity—sighed. He wore a good suit, linen and raw silk, without the lines and folds that spoke of computer tailoring.

  “Do what they say,” the linen suit said. He sounded peeved, but not frightened.

  Miller’s eyes narrowed.

  “Mr. Dresden?”

  The suit raised a carefully shaped eyebrow, paused, and nodded.

  “Been looking for you,” Miller said.

  Fred walked into the ops center like he belonged there. With a tighter set of the shoulders and a degree’s shift of the spine, the master engineer of Tycho Station was gone, and the general was in his place. He looked over the ops center, sucking in every detail with a flicker of his eyes, then nodded at one of the senior OPA techs.

  “All locked down, sir,” the tech said. “The station’s yours.”

  Miller had almost never been present to witness another man’s moment of absolution. It was such a rare thing, and so utterly private that it approached the spiritual. Decades ago, this man—younger, fitter, not as much gray in his hair—had taken a space station, wading up to
his knees in the gore and death of Belters, and Miller saw the barely perceptible relaxation in his jaw, the opening of his chest that meant that burden had lifted. Maybe it wasn’t gone, but it was near enough. It was more than most people managed in a lifetime.

  He wondered what it would feel like if he ever got the chance.

  “Miller?” Fred said. “I hear you’ve got someone we’d like to talk to.”

  Dresden unfolded from his chair, ignoring the sidearms and assault weapons as if such things didn’t apply to him.

  “Colonel Johnson,” Dresden said. “I should have expected that a man of your caliber would be behind all this. My name is Dresden.”

  He handed Fred a matte black business card. Fred took it as if by reflex but didn’t look at it.

  “You’re the one responsible for this?”

  Dresden gave him a chilly smile and looked around before he answered.

  “I’d say you’re responsible for at least part of it,” Dresden said. “You’ve just killed quite a few people who were simply doing their jobs. But maybe we can dispense with the moral finger-pointing and get down to what actually matters?”

  Fred’s smile reached all the way to his eyes.

  “And what exactly would that be?”

  “Negotiating terms,” Dresden replied. “You are a man of experience. You understand that your victory here puts you in an untenable position. Protogen is one of the most powerful corporations on Earth. The OPA has attacked it, and the longer you try to hold it, the worse the reprisals will be.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Of course it is,” Dresden said, waving Fred’s tone away with a dismissing hand. Miller shook his head. The man genuinely didn’t understand what was going on. “You’ve taken your hostages. Well, here we are. We can wait until Earth sends a few dozen battleships and negotiate while you look down the barrels, or we can end this now.”

  “You’re asking me… how much money I want to take my people and just leave,” Fred said.