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Ceres didn’t have laws. It had police.
Of all his crew, Holden was almost certainly the only one who had grown up in a house with real wooden furniture and fixtures. Amos had grown up in Baltimore. They hadn’t seen a tree there in more than a century.
Einstein was right. We will be fighting the next war with rocks.
Tycho was a city, and he suddenly felt very much like a foreigner, unsure of where to go or what to do.
Ceres Station had come unmoored. Orbital mechanics and inertia kept it physically where it had always been, but the stories about it had changed. The point defenses were the same. The tensile strength of the port blast doors was the same. The ephemeral shield of political status was all they’d lost, and it was everything.
Small corporate security forces that the big transorbital companies used as private armies and mercenary forces to rent out as needed.
He thought that everything he’d lived through should have added up to more, and then changed his mind. It was probably about right.
But it hadn’t happened yet, and the universe wasn’t stable enough anymore to make long-range planning more than a sour joke.
“Nope,” he said. “Having a plan makes all the difference. Downtime’s easier to enjoy when I know it’ll end.”
“What if I throw in the data cube the captain of the Donnager was trying to liberate?” The silence was back, but it had a different feel to it.
Eros had been a port of call in the first generation of humanity’s expansion. From there, the sun itself was only a bright star among billions. The economics of the Belt had moved on. Ceres Station had spun up with newer docks, more industrial backing, more people. The commerce of shipping moved to Ceres, while Eros remained a center of ship manufacture and repair.
The architecture of Eros had changed since its birth. Where once it had been like Ceres—webworked tunnels leading along the path of widest connection—Eros had learned from the flow of money: All paths led to the casino level.
I think it’ll be fine. It occurred to him that he was treating the situation like he was still on the inside, a part of the machine. That wasn’t true anymore, and pretending it was might have consequences.
“Every rock in the Belt is mapped. You want to hide something, put it in a stable orbit next to one and you can always find it later.”
Jim Holden and his XO exchanged a glance, one of those tiny human burst communications that said more than words could have. Miller didn’t know either of them well enough to decode all of it, but he guessed they were skeptical.
Miller shook his head. Something about the chain of logic felt wrong. He was missing something.
And the equipment—armor, batons, riot guns—also looked hauntingly familiar. Dawes had been wrong. Miller had been able to find his own missing equipment after all.
Naomi had to duck to enter, her frame about four centimeters too tall for the ceiling. She put her back to the wall and slid down onto her haunches. “You’d think they’d make the maintenance corridors tall enough for Belters to work in,” she said irritably. Holden touched the wall almost reverently, tracing a corridor identification number carved right into the stone. “The Belters who built this place weren’t tall,” he said. “These are some of the main power lines. This tunnel goes back to the first Belt colony. The people who carved it grew up in gravity.”
This was why he had searched for her. Julie had become the part of him that was capable of human feeling. The symbol of what he could have been if he hadn’t been this. There was no reason to think his imagined Julie had anything in common with the real woman. Meeting her would have been a disappointment for them both.
had ordered her to do. His resentment refused to listen to reason. “We’re dead,” he said, and sat down on the edge of a fern-filled planter.
Holden laughed before he could catch himself, but Miller didn’t look like he was taking offense.
“This is what happens,” he said. “Give a bunch of yahoos the equipment, and they think they know what they’re doing.”
He’d shot and killed more men in the past day than in his whole career as a cop.
Holden glanced over at him. The pachinko machines lit them blue and green and shrieked in artificial delight.
These were the outer levels, filled with warehouse space and ship repair and resupply depots. They didn’t see a lot of foot traffic at the best of times. Now the corridor echoed like a mausoleum with their footsteps.
Holden didn’t turn around, but he could hear the man Miller had almost shot crying in the corridor behind him for a long time. To cover up the sound, which probably existed only in his head once they’d made a couple more turns in the corridor, he began humming the theme to Misko and Marisko again.
Holden punched the button to call the lift, and he and Miller leaned on each other while they waited. He hummed the Misko and Marisko theme to himself, and after a few seconds, Miller started too.
Holden leaned forward and called up the comm display, then tapped out a general broadcast.
“People need to know what’s going on,” Holden said.
“I haven’t accused anyone of doing anything,” Holden said. “I’m not building a case. I just put the data out there. Now it’s not a secret.
Maybe someone will look into that. And that’s the point. If everyone knows everything, nothing stays secret.”
“Eventually, someone’ll figure out the big picture. This kind of thing requires secrecy to function, so exposing all the secrets hurts them in the end. It’s the only way this really, permanently stops.”
The security assumed that anyone sitting at the console had access to the low-level feeds. It still took half an hour to parse the command structure and query interface.
In motion, she looked a little different from the imaginary version he’d built of her—the way she pulled her shoulders back, the habit of reaching her toes toward the floor even in null g—but the basic image was the same. He felt like he was filling in blanks with the new details rather than reimagining the woman.
The corporate logo of Protogen, with a slogan Miller hadn’t seen before. First. Fastest. Furthest.
While my team has been point man, as it were, Protogen’s tireless commitment to the advancement of science has made our work possible.
Please understand that I have thought about this carefully and chosen my words: Protogen can become the most important and powerful entity in the history of the human race. But it will require initiative, ambition, and bold action.” “He’s talking about killing people,” Miller said. “You’ve seen this already?” Holden said. Miller shook his head.
The animation zoomed in toward Saturn, rings and planet flying past in a triumph of graphic design over accuracy. “A small ice moon, the assumption was that Phoebe would eventually be mined for water, much like the rings themselves. The Martian government commissioned a scientific survey more out of a sense of bureaucratic completeness than from expectation of economic gain.
Specifically, a weapon designed to carry its payload through the depths of interplanetary space and deliver it safely onto Earth two and one third billion years ago, when life itself was in its earliest stages.
“The initial implication of this,” the sociopath went on, “is that a larger biosphere exists, of which our solar system is only a part, and that the protomolecule is an artifact of that environment.
Moving quickly to understand the programming, mechanism, and intent of the protomolecule, as well as its direct application to human beings, will mark the difference between a Protogen-led future and being left behind.
“So you take a company that seems to be lacking an institutional conscience, that has enough government research contracts to almost be a privately run branch of the military. How far will they go for the holy grail?” “First, fastest, furthest,” Miller replied. “Yeah.”
A week earlier she’d have been fine with a simple gesture of affection like that, and he wouldn’t have been afraid of her reaction. He regretted the new distance between them only slightly less than he would have regretted not saying anything at all. He wanted to tell her that.
The big mechanic’s ability just to ignore anything that he didn’t want to notice probably came in handy while he was crawling around in tight and greasy engine compartments.
When something stopped working on the water hauler, he’d tell Naomi to fix it, and then never think of it again. Sometimes she’d claim not to be able to fix something, but it was always a negotiating tactic. A short conversation would lead to a request for spare parts or an additional crewman hired on at the next port, and that would be that. There was no problem that involved electronics or spaceship parts she couldn’t solve.
“I hear Mars is nice if you’re rich.”
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But it sure feels nice to have choices again.”
“It isn’t rocket science,” Holden said with a laugh. “What?” Amos asked, ready to be angry if he was being mocked. “You know, ‘it isn’t rocket science,’” Holden said. “Like ‘it isn’t hard.’ You’re a rocket scientist, Amos. For real. You work on fusion reactors and starship drives for a living.
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.
The war between Mars and the Belt—the biggest, most dangerous conflict in the history of mankind—was suddenly a sideshow.
