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Then Solomon Epstein had built his little modified fusion drive, popped it on the back of his three-man yacht, and turned it on. With a good scope, you could still see his ship going at a marginal percentage of the speed of light, heading out into the big empty. The best, longest funeral in the history of mankind. Fortunately, he’d left the plans on his home computer. The Epstein Drive hadn’t given humanity the stars, but it had delivered the planets.
Once, it had been packed with people, supplies, schematics, machines, environment bubbles, and hope.
Any way you looked, the population was huge and needed a lot of water. So now the Canterbury and her dozens of sister ships in the Pur’n’Kleen Water Company made the loop from Saturn’s generous rings to the Belt and back hauling glaciers, and would until the ships aged into salvage wrecks. Jim Holden saw some poetry in that.
I checked the policy, and Paj here’s been signed on long enough to get one with force feedback, pressure and temperature sensors, fine-motor software. The whole package. It’ll be almost as good as the real thing. The inner planets have a new biogel that regrows the limb, but that isn’t covered in our medical plan.”
Except for the slightly oversized captain’s display, required by Captain McDowell’s failing eyesight and general distrust of corrective surgery, it could have been an accounting firm’s back room.
The law of the solar system was unequivocal. In an environment as hostile to life as space, the aid and goodwill of your fellow humans wasn’t optional. The emergency signal, just by existing, obligated the nearest ship to stop and render aid—which didn’t mean the law was universally followed.
But if McDowell had really intended that, he wouldn’t have called Holden up. Or made the suggestion where the crew could hear him. Holden understood the dance. The captain was going to be the one who would have blown it off except for Holden. The grunts would respect the captain for not wanting to cut into the ship’s profit. They’d respect Holden for insisting that they follow the rule.
“You’re sure of that?” “Naomi said it. That makes it true.” McDowell rose, unfolding to almost two and a quarter meters and thinner than a teenager back on Earth. Between his age and never having lived in a gravity well, the coming burn was likely to be hell on the old man.
One of the many Belter gestures that had evolved to be visible when wearing an environment suit.
“That wasn’t Belters keeping the Earth guy out,” Miller said. “That was poor folks keeping the educated guy out. And it was kind of fun, now you mention it.” Havelock laughed. He could take being teased and keep on moving. It was what made him good at team sports: soccer, basketball, politics.
Spinning it up to 0.3 g had taken the best minds at Tycho Manufacturing half a generation, and they were still pretty smug about it.
Platinum, iron, and titanium from the Belt. Water from Saturn, vegetables and beef from the big mirror-fed greenhouses on Ganymede and Europa, organics from Earth and Mars. Power cells from Io, Helium-3 from the refineries on Rhea and Iapetus. A river of wealth and power unrivaled in human history came through Ceres. Where there was commerce on that level, there was also crime. Where there was crime, there were security forces to keep it in check.
She had never quite overcome her prejudice against Havelock’s inner planet origins.
Both of them knew that Captain Shaddid would have called them in together if she’d wanted Havelock to be there. Another reason the man would never make senior detective. Miller left him alone with the playback, trying to parse the fine points of class and station, origin and race.
If Miller had ever been called upon to describe her, the phrase deceptive coloration would have figured in.
Living in the tradition of Al Capone and Hamas, the IRA and the Red Martials, the OPA was beloved by the people it helped and feared by the ones who got in its way. Part social movement, part wannabe nation, and part terrorist network, it totally lacked an institutional conscience.
Miller fumbled at his side, pulled out his own, and accepted the narrow-beam transfer. Whatever this was, Shaddid was keeping it off the common network.
Now the corporate station was independent, floating between the Belt and the inner planets with the regal majesty of an ocean liner on ancient seas.
He wondered which side Captain Shaddid would be on if the OPA attacked.
The joke was that Ceres didn’t have laws—it had police.
You spent your life in a stone bubble with your food, your water, your air shipped in from places so distant you could barely find them with a telescope, and a certain moral flexibility was necessary.
These days, he left it at the vaguely astringent smell of the station itself. Recycled air that had passed through a million lungs. Water from the tap so clean it could be used for lab work, but it had been piss and shit and tears and blood and would be again. The circle of life on Ceres was so small you could see the curve. He liked it that way.
The kids who lived two holes down—a girl of eight and her brother of four—met their father with hugs, squeals, mutual accusations, and tears.
“I like Alex. He’s ebullient,” Naomi said. “I don’t know what ebullient means, but if it means Alex, it makes me tired.”
The switches, plastic and metal made to withstand hard g and hundreds of years, clicked sharply.
The old west affectation common to everyone from the Mariner Valley annoyed Holden. There hadn’t been a cowboy on Earth in a hundred years, and Mars didn’t have a blade of grass that wasn’t under a dome, or a horse that wasn’t in a zoo. Mariner Valley had been settled by East Indians, Chinese, and a small contingent of Texans. Apparently, the drawl was viral. They all had it now.
They weren’t really stopping, of course. Nothing in space ever actually stopped; it only came into a matching orbit with some other object. They were now following CA-2216862 on its merry millennium-long trip around the sun.
CA-2216862 was a rock a half kilometer across that had wandered away from the Belt and been yanked around by Jupiter’s enormous gravity. It had eventually found its own slow orbit around the sun in the vast expanse between Jupiter and the Belt, territory empty even for space.
If the big, burly Earther mechanic was carrying a gun, it would make him feel better too, but better not to say it. Let them think the guy in charge felt confident. Holden used his officer’s key to open the weapon locker, and Amos took a high-caliber automatic that fired self-propelled rounds, recoilless and designed for use in zero g. Old-fashioned slug throwers were more reliable, but in null gravity they were also maneuvering thrusters. A traditional handgun would impart enough thrust to achieve escape velocity from a rock the size of CA-2216862.
Like everything else humans built for space travel, it was designed to be efficient, not pretty. That always made Holden a little sad. There should be room for aesthetics, even out here.
Since then, the security detective and the portside barman had traded favors. The unofficial, gray economics of civilization.
Ceres at night was indistinguishable from Ceres in the daytime. There had been a move, back when the station first opened, to dim and brighten the lights through the traditional human twenty-four-hour cycle, mimicking the spin of Earth. The affectation had lasted four months before the council killed it.
If he took the cart, he was going as a cop, and the tubes ran just fine.
They chuckled together as if it was funny.
The tube cars were round, built to fit into the evacuated passages. There were no windows. The only view would have been stone humming by three centimeters from the car.
Port bars were always volatile. Miller was careful not to bump into anyone if he could help it.
His face was a constant mild apology.
The Earth-Mars Coalition Navy often passed through Ceres on its way to Saturn, Jupiter, and the stations of the Belt, but Miller hadn’t been paying enough attention to the relative position of the planets to know where the orbits all stood.
Earth hates Mars for having a better fleet. Mars hates Earth for having a bigger one.
While he’d been careful and diplomatic at the Blue Frog, he chose a bluff masculinity here. It was just as much a pose.
Her eyes were bleary and filled with banked rage; she was the very picture of a woman of power wakened early from sleep.
Very smart boys in the naval labs have already thought of everything we are going to think of in the next eight minutes,”
Like any other ship that flew the space lanes, the Knight was hardened against radiation. You couldn’t get anywhere near Jupiter’s massive radiation belt unless you were.
The bleary look was gone. Her hair was pulled back, her uniform crisp and professional, her voice as calm as a surgeon in a battlefield hospital.
Passing the dockworkers and transport crews, he didn’t know whether to scowl or smile. He was here to scare people into behaving and also to reassure them that everything was under control. After the first three sectors, he settled on the smile. It was the kind of lie he was better at.
The mob drew back from him, making space. Miller could feel it like a current against him. It was shifting.
Momentum broken, the mob fell apart. First one and two peeling off from the edges, and then the whole knot untying itself at once.
Flying on the Cant might be the bottom of the barrel, but that meant there was nowhere else to go. People stayed, made the ship their home.
The itch at the back of his head was still Why? What does anyone gain from killing an ice hauler? Who gets paid? Someone always gets paid.
“I didn’t say anything that wasn’t entirely factual and backed up by the data I transmitted, and I engaged in no speculation about those facts.”
