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“She’s not some rock hopper. She’s the flagship for the MCRN’s Jupiter fleet.
“Don’t be afraid of them. Their only power is your fear.” “Well, that and a hundred or so gunships,” Havelock said.
The footage of the Canterbury’s death was everywhere, debates raging over every frame.
He paged quickly through her professional files, letting his mind take in an overview, just as he had with the whole living space. There would be time for rigor, and a first impression was usually more useful than an encyclopedia.
Julie was the kind of woman who would sacrifice for a cause, but not the kind who’d take joy in reading the propaganda.
The navy version of this speech involves duty and honorable sacrifice and avenging fallen comrades. Doesn’t work as well when your friends have been murdered for no apparent reason and there’s essentially no chance you can do anything about it.”
To Belters, he was the Earther Sheriff of Nottingham who’d turned into Robin Hood. To Earth, he was the hero who’d fallen from grace.
If you get free, contact me at the address that follows. I think maybe you and I have a lot to talk about.
Her fingers upped tempo. Miller bit his lips. The cause was lost.
All the organized crime on Ceres suffering the same ecological collapse, and now someone new moving into the evacuated niche.
His accent made him sound more educated than Miller had expected.
Thinking about it was like watching a video that was just out of focus. The sense of it was almost there, but only almost. “Too many dots,” Miller said. “Not enough lines.”
The Donnager was ugly. Holden had seen pictures and videos of the old oceangoing navies of Earth, and even in the age of steel, there had always been something beautiful about them. Long and sleek, they had the appearance of something leaning into the wind, a creature barely held on the leash. The Donnager had none of that. Like all long-flight spacecraft, it was built in the “office tower” configuration: each deck one floor of the building, ladders or elevators running down the axis.
Holden reflected, not for the first time, on how so much of the human sense of aesthetics had been formed in a time when sleek objects cut through the air. The Donnager would never move through anything thicker than interstellar gas, so curves and angles were a waste of space. The result was ugly.
“Anyone can kill a planet from orbit,” Holden replied. “You don’t even need bombs. Just push anvils out the airlock. That thing out there could kill… Shit. Anything.”
Every inch of the Donnager was just a little sharper than any UN vessel he’d served on. Mars really does build them better than we do.
“Ain’t much to do on a long flight for most of the crew, Amos,” Alex said. “So when you aren’t doin’ somethin’ else, you clean.”
Also, he’d known enough marines to know how unpleasant it could get if they felt challenged.
It’s all fun and games till someone shoots back, Holden thought.
In the history of the Coalition, no capital ship had ever gotten into a close-quarters battle.
Havelock shook his head again, this time in mild disbelief. If he’d been a Belter, he’d have made the gesture with his hands, so you could see it when he had an environment suit on. Another of the hundred small ways someone who hadn’t grown up on the Belt betrayed himself.
“What scares the OPA?”
Years of shipboard training made a path through the anoxia and depressurization, and he yanked the tab on the locker’s seal and pulled the door open.
“The command information center,” Alex said. “It’s the holy grail. Codes, deployments, computer cores, the works.
The deck vibrated slightly from time to time beneath his feet. The enemy ships wouldn’t still be firing, not with their boarders inside. It must be small-arms fire and light explosives. But as they stood there in the perfect quiet of vacuum, everything that was happening took on a distant and surreal feeling.
People always whispered when they were hiding. Wrapped in a space suit and surrounded by vacuum, Gomez could have been lighting fireworks inside his armor and no one would have heard it, but he whispered.
Just honest folks with a rust bucket to call their own trying to keep flying. If you were going to make a poster of the Belter’s dream, it would have been the Xinglong.
The great, implacable clockwork of war ticked one step closer to open fighting.
The board was thick. The incident count was twice what it should have been. This is what it looks like, he thought. No riots. No hole-by-hole military action or marines in the corridors. Just a lot of unsolved homicides. Then he corrected himself: This is what it looks like so far.
These people were what it was all about, Miller told himself. Normal people living small lives in a bubble of rock surrounded by hard vacuum.
The OPA man, Anderson Dawes, was sitting on a cloth folding chair outside Miller’s hole, reading a book. It was a real book—onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent.
As Dawes took his seat, Miller realized he’d done the housework in anticipation of this meeting. He hadn’t realized it until now.
There was a moment of silence. Miller couldn’t decide if it was companionable or awkward. Maybe there was room for both. Dawes rose, put out his hand. Miller shook it. Dawes left. Two cops working for different sides. Maybe they had something in common. Didn’t mean Miller was uncomfortable lying to the man.
Boarding a ship was one of the riskiest maneuvers in naval combat. It was basically a race between the boarders rushing to the engine room and the collective will of those who had their fingers on the self-destruct button.
Whenever he didn’t know what to do, he handed off to Naomi. He’d been doing it for years. She was smart, capable, usually unflappable. She’d become a crutch, and she’d been through all the same trauma he had. If he didn’t start paying attention, he’d break her, and he needed not to do that.
Do something, a mentor of a decade earlier said to his young officers. It doesn’t have to be right, it just has to be something.
“This is a torpedo bomber. You think they want a nice transponder signal to lock on to when they’re makin’ runs on an enemy capital ship? Naw, there’s a handy switch up in the cockpit that says ‘transponder off.’ I flipped it before we flew out. We’re just another moving object out of a million like us.” Holden was silent for two long breaths. “Alex, that may be the single greatest thing anyone has ever done, in the history of the universe,” he said.
“It ain’t stolen,” Alex said. “It’s legitimate salvage now.” “Yeah, you make that argument to the MCRN if they catch us, but let’s try and make sure they don’t.”
Alex, you were MCRN. You know the traditions. Do it with full honors and record it in the log. He died to get us off that ship, and we’re going to accord him every respect. As soon as we land anywhere, we’ll bounce the full record to MCRN command so they can do it officially.”
“New transponder code?” Naomi said. “How does the OPA get new transponder codes?” “Hack the Earth-Mars Coalition’s security protocols or get a mole in the registry office,” Holden said. “Either way, I think we’re playing in the big league now.”
The podium was draped in black, which was a bad sign. The single star and thirty stripes of the Martian Congressional Republic hung in the background not once, but eight times. That was worse.
For weeks, Miller had known. Everyone had known. But it hadn’t actually happened, so every conversation, every joke, every chance interaction and semi-anonymous nod and polite moment of light banter on the tube had seemed like an evasion. He couldn’t fix the cancer of war, couldn’t even slow down the spread, but at least he could admit it was happening.
“And the Scopuli was the bait that killed the Canterbury,” Miller said. “And the Canterbury was the bait that killed the Donnager.
He wondered if that was what it would be like to look at stars. He’d never looked up at a sky.
He stood in engineering next to the fusion reactor and closed his eyes, getting used to the almost subliminal vibration she made. If something ever went wrong with it, he wanted to feel it in his bones before any warning ever sounded.
In the early days of expansion, Tycho engineers and a fleet of ships had captured a small comet and parked it in stable orbit as a water resupply point decades before ships like the Canterbury began bringing ice in from the nearly limitless fields in Saturn’s rings. It had been the most complex, difficult feat of mass-scale engineering humanity had ever accomplished until the next thing they did.
Holden knew all this, and his first sight of the station still took his breath away. It wasn’t just the size of it. It was the idea that four generations of the smartest people in the solar system had been living and working here as they helped drag humanity into the outer planets almost through sheer force of will.
The Canterbury had stripped away the complacency of the Belt, but the Donnager had done something worse. It had taken away the fear. The Belters had gotten a sudden, decisive, and unexpected win. Anything seemed possible, and the hope seduced them.
The request interface for the port logs was ancient, uncomfortable, and subtly different from Eros to Ganymede to Pallas and on and on.
Five hours later, the government of Ceres collapsed.
