Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, #1)

by James S.A. Corey

The Martian navy, spread throughout the system, was turning home under heavy burn.

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.

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.

“Everything that’s happening out there right now has been building up for a hundred years. If it hadn’t been there to start with, this couldn’t have happened.”

“This time is different,” Holden said. “All the crap that’s going on out there is what happens when you have imperfect information. Mars and the Belt wouldn’t have been going after each other in the first place if they’d known what we know now. Earth and Mars wouldn’t be shooting each other if everyone knew the fight was being engineered. The problem isn’t that people know too much, it’s that they don’t know enough.”

Holden frowned, angry lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes. Miller watched a little piece of the man’s idealism die and was sorry that it gave him joy.

“You ask yourself what happens,” Miller said. “Ask yourself what Naomi’d do.”

The feed cut to the head of security. Captain Shaddid looked older. Harder. “We regret the necessity of this action,” she said to everyone everywhere. “But in the cause of freedom, there can be no compromise.” That’s what it’s come to, Miller thought, rubbing a hand across his chin. Pogroms after all. Cut off just a hundred more heads, just a thousand more heads, just ten thousand more heads, and then we’ll be free.

“I’m going to Tycho Station. There’s someone there I… trust.” “Trust?” “Don’t actively distrust.” “Naomi think it’s the right thing?” “I don’t know. I didn’t ask her. But I think so.” “Close enough,” Miller said. Holden looked up from the monitor for the first time. “You know the right thing?” Holden said. “Yeah.” “What is it?” “Throw that safe into a long collision course with the sun and find a way to make sure no one ever, ever goes to Eros or Phoebe again,” Miller said. “Pretend none of this ever happened.” “So why aren’t we doing that?” Miller nodded slowly. “How do you throw away the holy grail?”

The smell in the galley was not entirely unlike actual food.

They looked like friends. That both made Holden happy and filled him with jealousy. He wondered if Naomi would ever be his friend again. She caught him looking and gave him a conspiratorial wink that probably would have made a lot of sense if he’d been able to hear what Alex was saying. He smiled and winked back, grateful just to be included in the moment.

The story was amusing enough, and the detective’s dry delivery suited it well, but Holden only half listened. He watched his crew, saw the tension falling from their faces and shoulders. He and Amos were both from Earth, though if he had to guess, he’d say Amos had forgotten about his home world the first time he’d shipped out. Alex was from Mars and clearly still loved it. One bad mistake on either side and both planets might be radioactive rubble by the end of dinner. But right now they were just friends having a meal together. It was right. It was what Holden had to keep fighting for.

“So maybe the issue is that the protomolecule isn’t smart enough yet. You can compress a lot of data down pretty small, but unless it’s a quantum computer, processing takes space. The easiest way to get that processing in tiny machines is through distribution. Maybe the protomolecule isn’t finishing its job because it just isn’t smart enough to. Yet.” “Not enough of them,” Alex said. “Right,” Naomi said, dropping the towel into a bin under the sink. “So you give them a lot of biomass to work with, and see what it is they are ultimately made to do.”

Looking at the station on the ops screens while Alex finished up docking procedures, Holden felt something like relief.

The detective kept one hand on the console, making the micro adjustments necessary to remain still even as the pilot’s maneuvers threw unexpected bursts of gravity at them from every direction. Holden was strapped into his chair. Even concentrating, he couldn’t handle zero g and intermittent thrust half that well. His brain just couldn’t be trained out of the twenty-odd years he’d spent with gravity as a constant.

Maybe that was why they were taxed to subsistence level. The bird was out of the cage, but you couldn’t let it stretch its wings too far or it might forget it belonged to you.

But Fred’s the best shot we have. Least wrong.”

Fred sat behind his large wooden desk, reading the notes Holden had written about Eros, the search for Julie, and the discovery of the stealth ship.

Fred finished reading and threw his hand terminal down on the desk, then rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands for several seconds. To Holden, he looked older than the last time they’d seen each other.

Fred knew. He just wanted to hear them say it out loud.

“You are too honest,” Fred said.

He couldn’t tell if she didn’t trust this Fred that Holden had given them over to, or just needed to feel like the investigation was still hers. He considered telling her to back off it for a while, to let the others carry it, but he didn’t see he had the moral authority to make that one stick.

A bunch of religious zealots were going to load themselves into that massive ship, that small self-sustaining world, and launch themselves into the darkness between the stars. Generations would live and die in it, and if they were mind-bendingly lucky enough to find a planet worth living on the end of the journey, the people who came out of it would never have known Earth or Mars or the Belt. They’d be aliens already. And if whatever had made the protomolecule was out there to greet them, then what?

He laughed to himself when he realized that was exactly what Holden would say.

Holden, for all his faults and Miller’s complaints, was a decent guy. In over his head and only half aware of the fact, but Miller could think of more than one person who fit that bill.

Then, as Miller moved past him toward the lift: “So assuming we all actually live through this, where should we meet up?”

After we get this thing done, I want the whole crew together. Just in case we need to get out in a hurry.”

Something painful happened under Miller’s sternum. Not a sharp pain, just a sudden ache. His throat felt thick. He coughed to clear it. “As soon as we get the place secure, I’ll get in touch,” Miller said.

Miller opened his mouth, closed it, and tried again. “Aye, aye, Captain,” he said, forcing a lightness into his voice. “Be careful,” Holden said. Miller left, pausing in the passageway between ship and station until he was sure he’d stopped weeping, and then making his way to the cargo ship and the assault.

As soon as they launched their first missile, their anonymity was lost forever. With the war going on, monitors would pick up the fusion torch trails and wonder what was up.

Moving through unfamiliar metal hallways without cover while the enemy ambushed you at every intersection was a good way to get a lot of people killed. In training simulations back in the Earth navy, Holden had never seen the marines do better than 60 percent casualties. And these weren’t inner planet marines with years of training and state-of-the-art equipment. They were OPA cowboys with whatever gear they could scrape together at the last minute.

The stealth frigates were a strategic weapon, he’d said, not a tactical one. Holden hadn’t said, Then why do they have one here?

But the chair pulled him into a soft gel-filled embrace, and the drugs kept his heart beating and his brain processing. He didn’t black out. If the high-g maneuvering killed him, he’d be wide awake and lucid for the entire thing.

“Alex,” he said. “We didn’t pay for this ship. Feel free to use it up. If I get killed so you can save ammo, I am going to put a reprimand in your permanent file.”

He’d seen thousands. He’d arrested hundreds. He’d watched a few dozen picked up in hazmat bags.

But he knew his way around a gun, and he probably knew more about corridor-to-corridor fighting than nine-tenths of the OPA rock jumpers and ore hogs like Diogo who were about to go in. It would have to be good enough.

She would have been here, he knew. Along with Diogo and Fred and all the other OPA militia, patriots of the vacuum, she’d have been in a crash couch, wearing borrowed armor, heading into the station to get herself killed for the greater good.

“Team three! Gas it!” Fred snapped in all their ears, and half a dozen blooms of thick white anti-laser smoke burst into the close air. The next time a defense laser fired, the walls flashed with mad iridescence, and the smoke of burning plastic filled the air, but no one died.

These weren’t troops. They weren’t even cops. They were a Belter irregular militia; discipline and respect for authority weren’t natural to them. They slowed.

“All locked down, sir,” the tech said. “The station’s yours.” Miller had almost never been present to witness another man’s moment of absolution. It was such a rare thing, and so utterly private that it approached the spiritual. Decades ago, this man—younger, fitter, not as much gray in his hair—had taken a space station, wading up to his knees in the gore and death of Belters, and Miller saw the barely perceptible relaxation in his jaw, the opening of his chest that meant that burden had lifted. Maybe it wasn’t gone, but it was near enough. It was more than most people managed in a lifetime. He wondered what it would feel like if he ever got the chance.

The min-max point came forty hours later, and it was time to go. The OPA had skeletonized the station, and it was time to get out before anyone came along with vengeance in mind.

Holden guessed that her appearance combined with her chosen profession had led to a lot of people underestimating her in the past. He didn’t want to make that mistake.

Aliens that had tried to take over the Earth two billion years ago, and failed because Saturn got in the way. Can’t forget the aliens. His brain still hadn’t figured out a way to process that, so it kept trying to pretend it didn’t exist.

He knew the story of Moses seeing a promised land he would never enter. Miller wondered how the old prophet would have felt if he’d been ushered in for a moment—a day, a week, a year—and then dropped back out in the desert. Kinder never to leave the wastelands. Safer.

He knew as well as anyone that the Belt offered a harder, more dangerous life than Mars or Earth provided. And yet it called these people—the best people—out of humanity’s gravity wells to cast themselves into the darkness. The impulse to explore, to stretch, to leave home. To go as far as possible out into the universe.

“It needed to happen.” “I’m not sure it did,” Fred replied, but his voice was careful. Testing. Miller smiled, a little sadly. “That’s why it needed to happen,” he said.

You can argue I knew too much. That I was too valuable to let go.” “Or too dangerous.” “Sure. Or that.”

I’m too dirty for the OPA, Miller thought with a glow of amusement.

And the goo thrived on radiation; simply cooking the station might hurry the thing along its occult path rather than end it.

Maybe she had been climbing through tight spaces in the engine room when the ship maneuvered unexpectedly. A competent plastic surgeon could have made it invisible in one visit. That she hadn’t bothered and clearly didn’t care was another thing he had learned about her tonight.