“Hey,” Miller said gently. “I just killed your buddy.”
“And that’s his third today,” Holden said. “I saw him.”
Miller could see it in the man’s eyes: the cunning, the shift, the move from one strategy to another. It was old and familiar and as predictable as water moving down.
“Hey,” Ko said, “it’s just a job. They told us about a year ago how we were making a big move, right? But no one knows what it is. So a few months back, they start moving guys over. Training us up like we were cops, you know?”
“Who was training you?” Miller said.
“The last guys. The ones who were working the contract before us,” Ko said.
“Protogen?”
“Something like that, yeah,” he said. “Then they took off, and we took over. Just muscle, you know. Some smuggling.”
“Smuggling what?”
“All kinds of shit,” Ko said. He was starting to feel safe, and it showed in the way he held himself and the way he spoke. “Surveillance equipment, communication arrays, serious-as-fuck servers with their own little gel software wonks already built in. Scientific equipment too. Stuff for checking the water and the air and shit. And these ancient remote-access robots like you’d use in a vacuum dig. All sorts of shit.”
“Where was it going to?” Holden asked.
“Here,” Ko said, gesturing to the air, the stone, the station. “It’s all here. They were like months installing it all. And then for weeks, nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?” Miller asked.
“Nothing nothing. All this buildup and then we sat around with our thumbs up our butts.”
Something had gone wrong. The Phoebe bug hadn’t made its rendezvous, but then Julie had come, Miller thought, and the game had turned back on. He saw her again as if he were in her apartment. The long, spreading tendrils of whatever the hell it was, the bone spurs pressing out against her skin, the black froth of filament pouring from her eyes.
“The pay’s good, though,” Ko said philosophically. “And it was kind of nice taking some time off.”
Miller nodded in agreement, leaned close, tucking the barrel of his gun through the interleaving of armor at Ko’s belly, and shot him.
“What the f**k!” Holden said as Miller put his gun into his jacket pocket.
“What did you think was going to happen?” Miller said, squatting down beside the gut-shot man. “It’s not like he was going to let us go.”
“Yeah, okay,” Holden said. “But… ”
“Help me get him up,” Miller said, hooking an arm behind Ko’s shoulder. Ko shrieked when Miller lifted him.
“What?”
“Get his other side,” Miller said. “Man needs medical attention, right?”
“Um. Yes,” Holden said.
“So get his other side.”
It wasn’t as far back to the radiation shelters as Miller had expected, which had its good points and its bad ones. On the upside, Ko was still alive and screaming. The chances were better that he’d be lucid, which wasn’t what Miller had intended. But as they came near the first group of guards, Ko’s babbling seemed scattered enough to work.
“Hey!” Miller shouted. “Some help over here!”
At the head of the ramp, four of the guards looked at one another and then started moving toward them, curiosity winning out over basic operating procedures. Holden was breathing hard. Miller was too. Ko wasn’t that heavy. It was a bad sign.
“What the hell is this?” one of the guards said.
“There’s a bunch of people holed up back there,” Miller said. “Resistance. I thought you people swept this level.”
“That wasn’t our job,” the guy said. “We’re just making sure the groups from the casino get to the shelters.”
“Well, someone screwed up,” Miller snapped. “You have transport?”
The guards looked at each other again.
“We can call for one,” a guy at the back said.
“Never mind,” Miller said. “You boys go find the shooters.”
“Wait a minute,” the first guy said. “Exactly who the hell are you?”
“The installers from Protogen,” Holden said. “We’re replacing the sensors that failed. This guy was supposed to help us.”
“I didn’t hear about that,” the leader said.
Miller dug a finger under Ko’s armor and squeezed. Ko shrieked and tried to writhe away from him.
“Talk to your boss about it on your own time,” Miller said. “Come on. Let’s get this ass**le to a medic.”
“Hold on!” the first guard said, and Miller sighed. Four of them. If he dropped Ko and jumped for cover… but there wasn’t much cover. And who the hell knew what Holden would do?
“Where are the shooters?” the guard asked. Miller kept himself from smiling.
“There’s a hole about a quarter klick anti-spinward,” Miller said. “The other one’s body’s still there. You can’t miss it.”
Miller turned down the ramp. Behind him, the guards were talking among themselves, debating what to do, who to call, who to send.
“You’re completely insane,” Holden said over Ko’s semiconscious weeping.
Maybe he was right.
When, Miller wondered, does someone stop being human? There had to be a moment, some decision that you made, and before it, you were one person, and after it, someone else. Walking down through the levels of Eros, Ko’s bleeding body slung between him and Holden, Miller reflected. He was probably dying of radiation damage. He was lying his way past half a dozen men who were only letting him by because they were used to people being scared of them and he wasn’t. He had killed three people in the last two hours. Four if he counted Ko. Probably safer to say four, then.
The analytical part of his mind, the small, still voice he had cultivated for years, watched him move and replayed all his decisions. Everything he’d done had made perfect sense at the time. Shooting Ko. Shooting the other three. Leaving the safety of the crew’s hideout to investigate the evacuation. Emotionally, it had all been obvious at the time. It was only when he considered it from outside that it seemed dangerous. If he’d seen it in someone else—Muss, Havelock, Sematimba—he wouldn’t have taken more than a minute to realize they’d gone off the rails. Since it was him, he had taken longer to notice. But Holden was right. Somewhere along the line, he’d lost himself.