Leviathan Wakes (Expanse, #1)

by James S.A. Corey

“I don’t like this,” Miller said. Havelock laughed. “Belters,” he said. “One thing goes weird and you think the whole ecosystem’s crashing. If the Golden Bough’s too weak to keep its claims, that’s a good thing. They’re the bad guys, remember?” “Yeah, well,” Miller said. “Say what you will about organized crime, at least it’s organized.”

Living on the surface of a planet, mass sucking at every bone and muscle, and nothing but gravity to keep your air close, seemed like a fast path to crazy.

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.

“When I was homicide,” Miller said, “there was this guy. Property management specialist working a contract out of Luna. Someone burned half his skin off and dropped him out an airlock. Turned out he was responsible for maintenance on sixty holes up on level thirty. Lousy neighborhood. He’d been cutting corners. Hadn’t replaced the air filters in three months. There was mold growing in three of the units. And you know what we found after that?” “What?” Havelock asked. “Not a goddamn thing, because we stopped looking. Some people need to die, and he was one. And the next guy that took the job cleaned the ducting and swapped the filters on schedule. That’s what it’s like in the Belt. Anyone who came out here and didn’t put environmental systems above everything else died young. All us still out here are the ones that cared.”

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.

“Where do we go from here, Jim?” Naomi asked. “How about Venus?” Holden said, his voice higher and tighter than he’d expected. “Nothing interesting happening on Venus.”

Quieter. Sad, maybe, but at peace. He’d read a poem many years before called “The Death-Self,” and he hadn’t understood the term until now. A knot at the middle of his psyche was untying. All the energy he’d put into holding things together—Ceres, his marriage, his career, himself—was coming free. He’d shot and killed more men in the past day than in his whole career as a cop. He’d started—only started—to realize that he’d actually fallen in love with the object of his search after he knew for certain that he’d lost her. He’d seen unequivocally that the chaos he’d dedicated his life to holding at bay was stronger and wider and more powerful than he would ever be. No compromise he could make would be enough. His death-self was unfolding in him, and the dark blooming took no effort. It was a relief, a relaxation, a long, slow exhale after decades of holding it in. He was in ruins, but it was okay, because he was dying.

Miller watched a little piece of the man’s idealism die and was sorry that it gave him joy.

“You were laughing a little,” Naomi said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you laugh before. I mean, not when something was funny.” “I was just thinking about something a partner of mine told me about letting cases go when you got pulled from them.” “What did he say?” “That it’s like taking half a shit,” Miller said. “Had a way with words, that one.” “He was all right for an Earther,” Miller said,

“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.”

Posthuman. It was a word that came up in the media every five or six years, and it meant different things every time. Neural regrowth hormone? Posthuman. Sex robots with inbuilt pseudo intelligence? Posthuman. Self-optimizing network routing? Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he’d ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of.