Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, #1)

by James S.A. Corey

“That wasn’t a threat,” Miller replied. “No? What would you call it?” “An accurate report of the world,” Miller said.

He tried to take some comfort in the thought. As if it would make up for the lifetimes of dreams and labor he was taking away.

Now that he was running security ops for the OPA, the irregular nature of the group was clearer to him than ever. There had been a time when he’d thought the OPA might be something that could take on Earth or Mars when it came to a real war. Certainly, they had more money and resources than he’d thought. They had Fred Johnson. They had Ceres now, for as long as they could hold it. They’d taken on Thoth Station and won. And yet the same kids he’d gone on the assault with had been working crowd control at the Nauvoo, and more than half of them would be on the demolitions ship when it left for Eros. It was the thing that Havelock would never understand. For that matter, it was the thing Holden would never understand. Maybe no one who had lived with the certainty and support of a natural atmosphere would ever completely accept the power and fragility of a society based in doing what needed doing, in becoming fast and flexible, the way the OPA had. In becoming articulated. If Fred couldn’t build himself a peace treaty, the OPA would never win against the discipline and unity of an inner planet navy. But they would also never lose. War without end. Well, what was history if not that? And how would having the stars change anything?

Miller smiled, knowing that Fred would be just as unsure if his was genuine.

“Tu sabez?” Diogo said. “They’re on our side now. They get it. Mars-OPA alliance.” “You don’t really think that,” Miller said. “Nah,” Diogo said, just as pleased with himself in admitting that the hope was fragile at best and probably false. “But don’t hurt to dream, que no?”

“The Belt is a network,” Naomi said. “It’s like one big distributed ship. We have nodes that make air, or water, or power, or structural materials. Those nodes may be separated by millions of kilometers of space, but that doesn’t make them any less interconnected.”

The OPA was responding to a thousand angry accusations from Earth and Mars and, in the true and permanent style, factions within the OPA itself.

She had just spoken directly to the half-articulated fear he’d been harboring since Eros had jumped sideways: that this was magic, that the protomolecule didn’t have to obey the laws of physics. Because if that was true, humans didn’t stand a chance.

Their efficiency is still off the charts, but it isn’t perfect. Which means the laws of physics still hold. Which means it isn’t magic.”

“Captain,” she said, “I believe my superiors would want me to keep an eye on you. We’ll be coming along for the ride while the brains figure this out.”

“One thing, though,” Miller said. “You’re talking about deflecting this sonofabitch? Just keep in mind it’s not a rock anymore. It’s a ship.”

Eros Station had moved of its own free will and by mechanisms he couldn’t begin to imagine. He didn’t know how many years it had been since he’d been overwhelmed by awe. He’d forgotten the feeling. He raised his arms to his sides, reaching out as if he could embrace the endless dark vacuum below him. Then, with a sigh, he turned back toward the ship.

The hand terminal chirped, announcing the new file. Miller accepted it, ran it. It was easy as keying in a door code. Somehow he felt that arming fusion bombs to detonate around him should have been more difficult.

A gesture and, Miller thought, maybe even heartfelt. Trying to save everyone, right to the last.

The drugs had the contradictory effect of making his brain run at double speed while not allowing him to actually think.

Mars would survive, for a while. Pockets of the Belt would hold out even longer, probably. They had a culture of making do, surviving on scraps, living on the bleeding edge of their resources. But in the end, without Earth, everything would eventually die. Humans had been out of the gravity well a long time. Long enough to have developed the technology to cut that umbilical cord, but they’d just never bothered to do it. Stagnant. Humanity, for all its desire to fling itself into every livable pocket it could reach, had become stagnant. Satisfied to fly around in ships built half a century before, using technology that hadn’t changed in longer than that. Earth had been so focused on her own problems that she’d ignored her far-flung children, except when asking for her share of their labors. Mars had bent her entire population to the task of remaking the planet, changing its red face to green. Trying to make a new Earth to end their reliance on the old. And the Belt had become the slums of the solar system. Everyone too busy trying to survive to spend any time creating something new.

And it had been so long since anything was a real threat to humanity outside of itself that no one was even smart enough to be scared.

An hour after that, the largest swarm of interplanetary nuclear weapons in the history of humanity had been fired and were winging their way toward Eros.

Pachinko machines stood in their rows, half melted or exploded or, like a few, still glittering and asking for the financial information that would unlock the gaudy lights and festive, celebratory sound effects.

As if in response, the sound in his suit changed, the Eros feed fluting up through a hundred different frequencies before exploding in a harsh flood of what he thought was Hindi. Human voices. Till human voices wake us, he thought, without quite being able to recall where the phrase came from.

For something that had been expecting prokaryotic anaerobes, it was doing a bang-up job of making do.

It was funny, he thought, how the ruins of the past shaped everything that came after. It seemed to work on all levels; one of the truths of the universe. Back in the ancient days, when humanity still lived entirely down a well, the paths laid down by Roman legions had become asphalt and later ferroconcrete without ever changing a curve or a turn. On Ceres, Eros, Tycho, the bore of the standard corridor had been determined by mining tools built to accommodate the trucks and lifts of Earth, which had in turn been designed to go down tracks wide enough for a mule cart’s axle. And now the alien—the thing from out in the vast dark—was growing along the corridors, ducts, tube routes, and water pipes laid out by a handful of ambitious primates. He wondered what it would have been like if the protomolecule hadn’t been captured by Saturn, had actually found its way into the soup of primordial Earth. No fusion reactors, no navigation drives, no complex flesh to appropriate. What would it have done differently if it hadn’t had to build around some other evolution’s design choices?

Miller paused. Every now and then, all through his career, some daydreamed witness would say something, use some phrase, laugh at the wrong thing, and he’d know that the back of his mind had a new angle on the case. This was that moment.

It had kept the information and languages and complex cognitive structures, building itself on them like asphalt over the roads the legions built.

Holden whistled, the entire situation doing a flip-flop in his head. The new perspective was dizzying.

She’s about as independent as a person can be, and she loves us.” “Us?” Holden asked. “People. She loves humans. She gave up being the little rich girl and joined the OPA. She backed the Belt because it was the right thing to do. No way she kills us if she knows that’s what’s happening. I just need to find a way to explain.

“Maybe give Miller a chance to head off the first interspecies war.”

“You told me once that Miller was right, even when I thought he was wrong.”

He’d never even met me, and he knew me well enough from researching me to know I’d like naming my ship after Don Quixote’s horse.” Naomi laughed. “Really? Is that where that comes from?”

Fred shook his head a third time. Holden saw his face go hard. He wasn’t going to buy it. Before he could say no, Holden said, “Remember that box with the protomolecule samples, and all the lab notes? Want to know what my price is for it?”

“Want to buy it or what?” Holden replied. “You want the magic ticket to a seat at the table? You know my price now. Give Miller his chance, and the sample’s yours.”

If we live. If I can save her. If the miracle is true.

The station around him creaked the way he imagined an old sailing ship might have, timbers bent by waves of salt water and the great tidal tug-of-war between earth and moon. Here, it was stone, and Miller couldn’t guess what forces were acting on it.

He’d even gone through the evidence room, bin after plastic bin of contraband drugs and confiscated weapons scattered on the floor like oak leaves in one of the grand parks. It had all meant something once. Each one had been part of a small human drama, waiting to be brought out into the light, part of a trial or at least a hearing.

He didn’t notice that he was weeping until he tried to wipe the tears away, batting his helmet with a gloved hand. He had to make do with blinking hard until his sight cleared. All this time. All this way. And here was what he’d come for.

If he needed to, he could dose her with adrenaline or amphetamines. Instead, he rocked her gently, like he had Candace on a sleepy Sunday morning, back when she’d still been his wife, back in some distant, near-forgotten lifetime.

Miller saw it in her face when she made the decision.

Juliette Andromeda Mao. OPA pilot. Heir to the Mao-Kwikowski corporate throne. The seed crystal of a future beyond anything he’d ever dreamed.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “No one ever does. And, look, you don’t have to do this alone,” he said.

“Hooray for bloated Martian defense budgets,” Holden replied.

“Unintended consequences,” Naomi sighed. “Always with the unintended consequences.”

Eros crashing into Venus was the most widely broadcast and recorded event in history. By the time the asteroid reached the sun’s second planet, several hundred ships had taken up orbits there. Military vessels tried to keep the civilian ships away, but it was no use. They were just outnumbered. The video of Eros’ descent was captured by military gun cameras, civilian ship telescopes, and the observatories on two planets and five moons.

The political rift between Earth and Mars was probably irreparable; the Earth forces loyal to Protogen had engineered a betrayal too deep for apologies, and too many lives had been lost on both sides for the coming peace to look anything like it had been before. The naive among the OPA thought this was a good thing: an opportunity to play one planet against the other. Fred knew better. Unless all three forces—Earth, Mars, and the Belt—could reach a real peace, they would inevitably fall back into a real war.

But in truth, anti-Mars sentiment on Earth was higher now than it had been during the shooting war, and Martian elections were only four months away. A significant shift in the Martian polity could ease the tensions or make things immeasurably worse.

“It would be best if he felt he was part of the effort, sir. He has a track record of amateur press releases.”

Only a little hesitation in the way he walked spoke of the deep joint pain, cartilage still on its way back to its natural form. Acceleration swagger, they’d called it, back when Fred had been a different man.

“I know it’s hard, but we don’t need a real man with a complex life. We need a symbol of the Belt. An icon.”

“He was a good man,” Holden said. “He wasn’t,” Fred said. “But he did his job. And now I’ve got to go do mine.”

The conference halls had been designed for smaller things. Petty ones. Hydroponics scientists getting away from their husbands and wives and children to get drunk and talk about raising bean sprouts. Miners coming together to lecture each other about waste minimization and tailings disposal. High school band competitions. And instead, these work carpets and brushed-stone walls were going to have to bear the fulcrum of history. It was Holden’s fault that the shabby, small surroundings reminded him of the dead detective. They hadn’t before.

There was a scattering of polite applause. A few smiles, and a few frowns. Fred grinned. He wasn’t a man anymore. He was a symbol, an icon. A narrative about himself and about the forces at play in the solar system. And for a moment, he was tempted. In that hesitation between drawing breath and speaking, part of him wondered what would happen if he shed the patterns of history and spoke about himself as a man, about the Joe Miller who he’d known briefly, about the responsibility they all shared to tear down the images they held of one another and find the genuine, flawed, conflicted people they actually were. It would have been a noble way to fail.