The Dragon’s Path (82 page)

Colonel Johnson came out of nowhere and talked the metalworkers down; he talked the Coalition commanders into holding back the marines until the station could be handed over peacefully. He spent more than a year negotiating with the Coalition governor to improve working conditions in the refineries. And suddenly, the Butcher of Anderson Station was a Belt hero and an icon.

An icon who was beaming private messages to the
Knight.

Holden hit the play button, and
that
Fred Johnson said, “Mr. Holden, I think you’re being played. Let me say straight out that I am speaking to you as an official representative of the Outer Planets Alliance. I don’t know what you’ve heard, but we aren’t all a bunch of cowboys itching for a chance to shoot our way to
freedom. I’ve spent the last ten years working to make life for the Belters better without
anyone
getting shot. I believe in this idea so deeply that I gave up my Earth citizenship when I came out here.

“I tell you that so you’ll know how invested I am. I may be the one person in the solar system who wants war the least, and my voice is loud in OPA councils.

“You may have heard some of the broadcasts beating on the war drums and calling for revenge against Mars for what happened to your ship. I’ve talked to every OPA cell leader I know, and no one’s claiming responsibility.

“Someone is working very hard to start a war. If it’s Mars, then when you get on that ship, you’ll never say another word in public that isn’t fed to you by Martian handlers. I don’t want to think it
is
Mars. I can’t see how they would get anything out of a war. So my hope is that even after the
Donnager
picks you up, you can still be a player in what follows.

“I am sending you a keyword. Next time you broadcast publicly, use the word
ubiquitous
within the first sentence of the broadcast to signal that you’re not being coerced. Don’t use it, and I’ll assume you are. Either way, I want you to know you have allies in the Belt.

“I don’t know who or what you were before, but your voice matters now. If you want to use that voice to make things better, I will do anything I can to help you do it. If you get free, contact me at the address that follows. I think maybe you and I have a lot to talk about.

“Johnson out.”

The crew sat in the galley drinking a bottle of ersatz tequila Amos had scrounged from somewhere. Shed was politely sipping from a small cup of it and trying to hide his grimace each time. Alex and Amos drank like sailors: a finger full in the bottom of the cup, tossed back all at once. Alex had a habit of saying “Hooboy!” after each shot. Amos just used a different profanity each time.
He was up to his eleventh shot and so far had not repeated himself.

Holden stared at Naomi. She swirled the tequila in her cup and stared back. He found himself wondering what sort of genetic mashup had produced her features. Definitely some African and South American in there. Her last name hinted at Japanese ancestry, which was only barely visible, as a slight epicanthic fold. She’d never be conventionally pretty, but from the right angle she was actually fairly striking.

Shit, I’m drunker than I thought.

To cover, he said, “So… ”

“So Colonel Johnson is calling you now. Quite the important man you’ve become, sir,” Naomi replied.

Amos put down his cup with exaggerated care.

“Been meaning to ask about that, sir. Any chance we might take up his offer of help and just head back to the Belt?” he said. “Don’t know about you, but with the Martian battleship in front, and the half dozen mystery ships behind, it’s starting to feel pretty fuckin’ crowded out here.”

Alex snorted. “Are you kidding? If we flipped now, we’d be just about stopped by the time the
Donnager
caught up to us. She’s burnin’ the furniture to catch us before the Belter ships do. If we start headin’ their direction, the
Donnie
might take that as a sign we’ve switched teams, frag the whole lot of us.”

“I agree with Mr. Kamal,” Holden said. “We’ve picked our course and we’re going to see it through. I won’t be losing Fred’s contact information anytime soon. Speaking of which, have you deleted his message yet, Naomi?”

“Yes, sir. Scrubbed it from the ship’s memory with steel wool. The Martians will never know he talked to us.”

Holden nodded and unzipped his jumpsuit a little further. The galley was starting to feel very hot with five drunk people in it. Naomi raised an eyebrow at his days-old T-shirt. Embarrassed, he zipped back up.

“Those ships don’t make any sense to me, Boss,” Alex said. “A
half dozen ships flyin’ kamikaze missions with nukes strapped to their hulls
might
make a dent in a battlewagon like the
Donnie,
but not much else would. She opens up with her point defense network and rail guns, she can create a no-fly zone a thousand klicks across. They could be killin’ those six ships with torpedoes already, ’cept I think they’re as confused about who they are as we are.”

“They’ll know they can’t catch us before the
Donnager
picks us up,” Holden said. “And they can’t take her in a fight. So I don’t know what they’re up to.”

Amos poured the last of the tequila into everyone’s cups and held his up in a toast.

“I guess we’ll fucking find out.”

C
aptain Shaddid tapped the tip of her middle finger against her thumb when she started getting annoyed. It was a small sound, soft as a cat’s paws, but ever since Miller first noticed her habit, it had seemed louder. Quiet as it was, it could fill her office.

“Miller,” she said, smiling as if she meant it. “We’re all on edge these days. These have been hard, hard times.”

“Yes, sir,” Miller said, lowering his head like a fullback determined to muscle his way through all defenders, “but I think this is important enough to deserve closer—”

“It’s a favor for a shareholder,” Shaddid said. “Her father got jumpy. There’s no reason to think he meant Mars blasting the
Canterbury.
Tariffs are going up again. There was a mine blowout on one of the Red Moon operations. Eros is having trouble with their yeast farm. We don’t go through a day without something
happening in the Belt that would make a daddy scared for his precious little flower.”

“Yes, sir, but the timing—”

Her fingers upped tempo. Miller bit his lips. The cause was lost.

“Don’t go chasing conspiracies,” Shaddid said. “We’ve got a full board of crimes we know are real. Politics, war, system-wide cabals of inner planet bad guys searching for ways to screw us over? Not our mandate. Just get me a report that says you’re looking, I’ll send it back up the line, and we can get back to our jobs.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Anything else?”

“No, sir.”

Shaddid nodded and turned back to her terminal. Miller plucked his hat from the corner of her desk and headed out. One of the station house air filters had gone bad over the weekend, and the replacement gave the rooms a reassuring smell of new plastic and ozone. Miller sat at his desk, fingers laced behind his head, and stared at the light fixture above him. The knot that had tied itself in his gut hadn’t loosened up. That was too bad.

“Not so good, then?” Havelock asked.

“Could have gone better.”

“She pull the job?”

Miller shook his head. “No, it’s still mine. She just wants me to do it half-assed.”

“Could be worse. At least you get to find out what happened. And if you maybe spend a little time after hours digging into it just for practice, you know?”

“Yeah,” Miller said. “Practice.”

Their desks were unnaturally clean, his and Havelock’s both. The barrier of paperwork Havelock had created between himself and the station had eroded away, and Miller could tell from his partner’s eyes and the way his hands moved that the cop in Havelock wanted to get back into the tunnels. He couldn’t tell if it was to prove himself before his transfer went through, or just to break
a few heads. Maybe those were two ways of saying the same thing.

Just don’t get yourself killed before you get out of here,
Miller thought. Aloud, he said, “What have we got?”

“Hardware shop. Sector eight, third level in,” Havelock said. “Extortion complaint.”

Miller sat for a moment, considering his own reluctance as if it belonged to someone else. It was like Shaddid had given a dog just one bite of fresh meat, then pointed it back toward kibble. The temptation to blow off the hardware shop bloomed, and for a moment he almost gave in. Then he sighed, swung his feet down to the decking, and stood.

“All right, then,” he said. “Let’s go make the station safe for commerce.”

“Words to live by,” Havelock said, checking his gun. He’d been doing that a lot more recently.

The shop was an entertainment franchise. Clean white fixtures offering up custom rigs for interactive environments: battle simulations, exploration games, sex. A woman’s voice ululated on the sound system, somewhere between an Islamic call to prayer and orgasm with a drumbeat. Half the titles were in Hindi with Chinese and Spanish translations. The other half were English with Hindi as the second language. The clerk was hardly more than a boy. Sixteen, seventeen years old with a weedy black beard he wore like a badge.

“Can I help you?” the boy said, eying Havelock with disdain just short of contempt. Havelock pulled his ID, making sure the kid got a good long look at his gun when he did it.

“We’d like to talk to”—Miller glanced at the complaint form on his terminal screen—“Asher Kamamatsu. He here?”

The manager was a fat man, for a Belter. Taller than Havelock, the man carried fat around his belly and thick muscles through the shoulders, arms, and neck. If Miller squinted, he could see the seventeen-year-old boy he had been under the layers of time and disappointment, and it looked a lot like the clerk out front. The
office was almost too small for the three of them and stacked with boxes of pornographic software.

“You catch them?” the manager said.

“No,” Miller said. “Still trying to figure out who they are.”

“Dammit, I already told you. There’s pictures of them off the store camera. I gave you his fucking name.”

Miller looked at his terminal. The suspect was named Mateo Judd, a dockworker with an unspectacular criminal record.

“You think it’s just him, then,” Miller said. “All right. We’ll just go pick him up, throw him in the can. No reason for us to find out who he’s working for. Probably no one who’ll take it wrong, anyway. My experience with these protection rackets, the purse boys get replaced whenever one goes down. But since you’re sure this guy’s the
whole
problem… ”

The manager’s sour expression told Miller he’d made his point. Havelock, leaning against a stack of boxes marked
, smiled.

“Why don’t you tell me what he wanted,” Miller said.

“I already told the last cop,” the manager said.

“Tell me.”

“He was selling us a private insurance plan. Hundred a month, same as the last guy.”

“Last guy?” Havelock said. “So this happened before?”

“Sure,” the manager said. “Everyone has to pay some, you know. Price of doing business.”

Miller closed his terminal, frowning. “Philosophical. But if it’s the price of doing business, what’re we here for?”