It was the only light in the room, and it illuminated nothing. But its slow fade in and out was somehow comforting. A quiet heartbeat for the ship.
He told himself that Fred was right; a trial was the right thing to hope for. But he wanted that stealth ship in Alex’s gun sights. He wanted that unknown crew to live through the terrifying moment when all the countermeasures have failed, the torpedoes are seconds from impact, and absolutely nothing can stop them.
He wanted them to have that same last gasp of fear he’d heard through Ade’s mic.
For a time, he displaced the ghosts in his head with violent vengeance fantasies. When they stopped working, he floated down to the personnel deck, strapped into his cot, and tried to sleep. The Rocinante sang him a lullaby of air recyclers and silence.
Chapter Twenty: Miller
Miller sat at an open café, the tunnel wide above him. Grass grew tall and pale in the public commons, and the ceiling glowed full-spectrum white. Ceres Station had come unmoored. Orbital mechanics and inertia kept it physically where it had always been, but the stories about it had changed. The point defenses were the same. The tensile strength of the port blast doors was the same. The ephemeral shield of political status was all they’d lost, and it was everything.
Miller leaned forward and sipped his coffee.
There were children playing on the commons. He thought of them as children, though he remembered thinking of himself as an adult at that age. Fifteen, sixteen years old. They wore OPA armbands. The boys spoke in loud, angry voices about tyranny and freedom. The girls watched the boys strut. The ancient, animal story, the same whether it was on a spinning rock surrounded by hard vacuum or the stamp-sized chimpanzee preserves on Earth. Even in the Belt, youth brought invulnerability, immortality, the unshakable conviction that for you, things would be different. The laws of physics would cut you a break, the missiles would never hit, the air would never hiss out into nothing. Maybe for other people—the patched-together fighting ships of the OPA, the water haulers, the Martian gunships, the Scopuli, the Canterbury, the Donnager, the hundred other ships that had died in small actions since the system had turned itself into a battlefield—but not you. And when youth was lucky enough to survive its optimism, all Miller had left was a little fear, a little envy, and the overwhelming sense of life’s fragility. But he had three month’s worth of company script in his account and a lot of free time, and the coffee wasn’t bad.
“You need anything, sir?” the waiter asked. He didn’t look any older than the kids on the grass. Miller shook his head.
Five days had passed since Star Helix pulled its contract. The governor of Ceres was gone, smuggled out on a transport before the news had gone wide. The Outer Planets Alliance had announced the inclusion of Ceres among official OPA-held real estate, and no one had said otherwise. Miller had spent the first day of his unemployment drunk, but his bender had an oddly pro forma feel. He’d descended into the bottle because it was familiar, because it was what you did when you’d lost the career that defined you.
The second day, he’d gotten through the hangover. The third, he’d gotten bored. All through the station, security forces were making the kind of display he’d expected, preemptive peacekeeping. The few political rallies and protests ended fast and hard, and the citizens of Ceres didn’t much care. Their eyes were on their monitors, on the war. A few locals with busted heads getting thrown into prison without charges were beneath notice. And Miller was personally responsible for none of it.
The fourth day, he’d checked his terminal and discovered that 80 percent of his docking log requests had come through before Shaddid had shut his access down. Over a thousand entries, any one of which could be the only remaining lead to Julie Mao. So far, no Martian nukes were on their way to crack Ceres. No demands of surrender. No boarding forces. It could all change in a moment, but until it did, Miller was drinking coffee and auditing ship records, about one every fifteen minutes. Miller figured that if Holden was the last ship in the log, he’d find him in about six weeks.
The Adrianopole, a third-gen prospector, had docked at Pallas within the arrival window. Miller checked the open registration, frustrated again at how little information was there compared to the security databases. Owned by Strego Anthony Abramowitz. Eight citations for substandard maintenance, banned from Eros and Ceres as a danger to the port. An idiot and an accident waiting to happen, but the flight plan seemed legitimate, and the history of the ship was deep enough not to smell new-minted. Miller deleted the entry.
The Badass Motherfucker, a freight hauler doing a triangle between Luna, Ganymede, and the Belt. Owned by MYOFB Corporation out of Luna. A query to the public bases at Ganymede showed it had left the port there at the listed time and just hadn’t bothered to file a flight plan. Miller tapped the screen with a fingernail. Not exactly how he’d fly under the radar. Anyone with authority would roust that ship just for the joy of doing it. He deleted the entry.
His terminal chimed. An incoming message. Miller flipped over to it. One of the girls on the commons shrieked and the others laughed. A sparrow flew past, its wings humming in the constant recycler-driven breeze.
Havelock looked better than when he’d been on Ceres. Happier. The dark circles were gone from his eyes, and the shape of his face had subtly softened, as if the need to prove himself in the Belt had changed his bones and now he was falling back into his natural form.
“Miller!” the recording said. “I heard about Earth cutting Ceres just before I got your message. Bad luck. I’m sorry to hear Shaddid fired you. Between the two of us, she’s a pompous idiot. The rumor I’ve heard is Earth is doing everything it can to stay out of the war, including giving up any station that it’s expecting to be a point of contention. You know how it is. You’ve got a pit bull on one side of you and a rottweiler on the other, first thing you do is drop your steak.”
Miller chuckled.
“I’ve signed on with Protogen security, big-company private army bullshit. But the pay is worth putting up with their delusions of grandeur. The contract’s supposed to be on Ganymede, but with the crap going on right now, who knows how it’ll really play out? Turns out Protogen’s got a training base in the Belt. I’d never heard about it, but it’s supposed to be quite the gymnasium. I know they’re hiring on, and I’d be happy to put in a word for you. Just let me know, and I’ll get you together with the induction recruiter, get you off that damned rock.”