“What the fu—” Amos started, but stopped when a new sun flared outside the cockpit window, then faded quickly. “See? Fucking told you it would work.”
“Never doubted it,” Holden said, then slapped Amos on one meaty shoulder and headed aft down the crew ladder.
“What the f**k was that about?” Amos asked no one in particular as Holden drifted away.
He headed through the ops deck. Naomi’s chair was empty. He’d ordered her to get some sleep. Strapped down to loops inset in the deck was the stealth ship’s safe. It looked bigger cut out of the wall. Black and imposingly solid. The kind of container in which one kept the end of the solar system.
Holden floated over to it and quietly said, “Open sesame.”
The safe ignored him, but the deck hatch opened and Miller pulled himself up into the compartment. His environment suit had been traded in for a stale-smelling blue jumpsuit and his ever-present hat. There was something about the look on his face that made Holden uncomfortable. Even more so than the detective usually made him.
“Hey,” Holden said.
Miller just nodded and pulled himself over to one of the workstations, then buckled in to one of the chairs.
“We decided on a destination yet?” he asked.
“No. I’m having Alex run the numbers on a couple of possibilities, but I haven’t made up my mind.”
“Been watching the news at all?” the detective asked.
Holden shook his head, then moved over to a chair on the other side of the compartment. Something in Miller’s face was chilling his blood.
“No,” he said. “What happened?”
“You don’t hedge, Holden. I admire that about you, I guess.”
“Just tell me,” Holden said.
“No, I mean it. A lot of people claim to believe in things. ‘Family is most important,’ but they’ll screw a fifty-dollar hooker on payday. ‘Country first,’ but they cheat on their taxes. Not you, though. You say everyone should know everything, and by God, you put your money where your mouth is.”
Miller waited for him to say something, but Holden didn’t know what. This speech had the feel of something the detective had prepared ahead of time. Might as well let him finish it.
“So Mars finds out that maybe Earth’s been building ships on the side, ones with no flag on them. Some of them might have killed a Martian flagship. I bet Mars calls up to check. I mean, it’s the Earth-Mars Coalition Navy, one big happy hegemony. Been policing the solar system together for almost a hundred years. Commanding officers are practically sleeping together. So it must be a mistake, right?”
“Okay,” Holden said, waiting.
“So Mars calls,” Miller said. “I mean, I don’t know for sure, but I bet that’s how it starts. A call from some bigwig on Mars to some bigwig on Earth.”
“Seems reasonable,” Holden said.
“What d’you think Earth says back?”
“I don’t know.”
Miller reached over and flipped on one of the screens, then pulled up a file with his name on it, date stamped from less than an hour before. A recording of video from a Martian news source, showing the night sky through a Martian dome. Streaks and flashes fill the sky. The ticker across the bottom of the feed says that Earth ships in orbit around Mars suddenly and without warning fired on their Martian counterparts. The streaks in the sky are missiles. The flashes are ships dying.
And then a massive white flare turns the Martian night into day for a few seconds, and the crawl says that the Deimos deep radar station has been destroyed.
Holden sat and watched the video display the end of the solar system in vivid color and with expert commentary. He kept waiting for the streaks of light to begin descending on the planet itself, for the domes to fly apart in nuclear fire, but it seemed someone had kept some measure of restraint, and the battle remained in the sky.
It couldn’t stay that way forever.
“You’re telling me that I did this,” Holden said. “That if I hadn’t broadcast that data, those ships would still be alive. Those people.”
“That, yeah. And that if the bad guys wanted to keep people from watching Eros, it just worked.”
Chapter Thirty-Six: Miller
The war stories flowed in. Miller watched the feeds five at a time, subscreens crowding the face of his terminal. Mars was shocked, amazed, reeling. The war between Mars and the Belt—the biggest, most dangerous conflict in the history of mankind—was suddenly a sideshow. The reactions of the talking heads of Earth security forces ran the gamut from calm, rational discussion of preemptive defense to foaming-at-the-mouth denunciations of Mars as a pack of baby-raping animals. The attack on Deimos had turned the moon into a slowly spreading ring of gravel in the moon’s old orbit, a smudge on the Martian sky, and with that, the game had changed again.
Miller watched for ten hours as the attack became the blockade. The Martian navy, spread throughout the system, was turning home under heavy burn. The OPA feeds were calling it a victory, and maybe someone thought that was true. The pictures came through from the ships, from the sensor arrays. Dead warships, their sides ripped open by high-energy explosions, spinning out into their irregular orbital graves. Medical bays like the Roci’s filled with boys and girls half his age bleeding, burning, dying. Each cycle, new footage came in, new details of death and carnage. And each time some new clip appeared, he sat forward, hand on his mouth, waiting for the word to come. The one event that would signal the end of it all.
But it hadn’t come yet, and every hour that didn’t bring it gave another sliver of hope that maybe, maybe it wasn’t going to happen.
“Hey,” Amos said. “You slept at all?”
Miller looked up, his neck stiff. Red creases of his pillow still on his cheek and forehead, the mechanic stood in the open doorway of Miller’s cabin.
“What?” Miller said. Then: “Yeah, no. I’ve been… watching.”
“Anyone drop a rock?”
“Not yet. It’s all still orbital or higher.”
“What kind of half-assed apocalypse are they running down there?” Amos said.
“Give ’em a break. It’s their first.”
The mechanic shook his broad head, but Miller could see the relief under the feigned disgust. As long as the domes were still standing on Mars, as long as the critical biosphere of Earth wasn’t in direct threat, humanity wasn’t dead. Miller had to wonder what they were hoping for out in the Belt, whether they’d managed to talk themselves into believing that the rough ecological pockets of the asteroids would sustain life indefinitely.