The Dragon’s Path (99 page)

“I was enjoying the view,” Holden said, gesturing at the screen.

“I’m starting to wonder if we’ll be able to get it done on schedule.”

“Why?”

Fred sighed and leaned his chair back with a squeak.

“It’s the war between Mars and the Belt.”

“Material shortages, then?”

“Not just that. Pirate casts claiming to speak for the OPA are working into a frenzy. Belt prospectors with homemade torpedo launchers are firing on Martian warships. They get wiped out in response, but every now and then one of those torpedoes hits and kills a few Martians.”

“Which means Mars starts shooting first.”

Fred nodded and then got up and started pacing the room.

“And then even honest citizens on legitimate business start getting worried about going out of the house,” he said. “We’ve had over a dozen late shipments so far this month, and I’m worried it will stop being delays and start being cancellations.”

“You know, I’ve been thinking about the same thing,” Holden said.

Fred acted as though he hadn’t heard.

“I’ve been on that bridge,” Fred said. “Unidentified ship coming on you, and a decision to make? No one wants to press the button. I’ve watched a ship get bigger and bigger on the scope
while my finger was on the trigger. I remember begging them to stop.”

Holden said nothing. He’d seen it too. There was nothing to say. Fred let silence hang in the air for a moment, then shook his head and straightened up.

“I need to ask you a favor,” Fred said.

“You can always ask, Fred. You’ve paid for that much,” Holden replied.

“I need to borrow your ship.”

“The
Roci
?” Holden said. “Why?”

“I need to have something picked up and delivered here, and I need a ship that can stay quiet and run past Martian picket ships if it needs to.”

“The
Rocinante
is definitely the right ship, then, but that didn’t answer my question. Why?”

Fred turned his back to Holden and looked at the view screen. The nose of the
Nauvoo
was just vanishing from sight. The view turned to the flat, star-speckled black of forever.

“I need to pick someone up on Eros,” he said. “Someone important. I’ve got people who can do it, but the only ships we’ve got are light freighters and a couple of small shuttles. Nothing that can make the trip quickly enough or have a hope of running away if trouble starts.”

“Does this person have a name? I mean, you keep saying you don’t want to fight, but the other unique thing about my ship is that it’s the only one here with guns. I’m sure the OPA has a whole list of things they’d like blown up.”

“You don’t trust me.”

“Nope.”

Fred turned back around and gripped the back of his chair. His knuckles were white. Holden wondered if he’d gone too far.

“Look,” Holden said, “you talk a good game about peace and trials and all that. You disavow the pirate casts. You have a nice station filled with nice people. I have every reason to believe you are what you say you are. But we’ve been here three days, and the
first time you tell me about your plans, you ask to borrow my ship for a secret mission. Sorry. If I’m part of this, I get full access; no secrets. Even if I knew for a fact, which I don’t, that you had nothing but good intentions, I still wouldn’t go along with the cloak-and-dagger bullshit.”

Fred stared at him for a few seconds, then came around his chair and sat down. Holden found he was tapping his fingers on his thigh nervously and forced himself to stop. Fred’s eyes flicked down at Holden’s hand and then back up. He continued to stare.

Holden cleared his throat.

“Look, you’re the big dog here. Even if I didn’t know who you used to be, you’d scare the shit out of me, so don’t feel the need to prove it. But no matter how scared I am, I’m not backing down on this.”

Fred’s hoped-for laughter didn’t come. Holden tried to swallow without gulping.

“I bet every captain you ever flew under thought you were a gigantic pain in the ass,” Fred said finally.

“I believe my record reflects that,” Holden said, trying to hide his relief.

“I need to fly to Eros and find a man named Lionel Polanski, and then bring him back to Tycho.”

“That’s only a week out if we push,” Holden said, doing the math in his head.

“The fact that Lionel doesn’t actually exist complicates the mission.”

“Yeah, okay. Now I’m confused,” Holden agreed.

“You wanted in?” Fred said, the words taking on a quiet ferocity. “Now you’re in. Lionel Polanski exists only on paper, and owns things that Mr. Tycho doesn’t want to own. Including a courier ship called the
Scopuli.
”

Holden leaned forward in his chair, his face intense.

“You now have my undivided attention,” he said.

“The nonexistent owner of the
Scopuli
checked into a flophouse on one of the shit levels of Eros. We only just got the message. We
have to work on the assumption that whoever got the room knows our operations intimately, needs help, and can’t ask for it openly.”

“We can leave in an hour,” Holden said breathlessly.

Fred held up his hands in a gesture that was surprisingly Belter for an Earth man.

“When,” Fred asked, “did this turn into
you
leaving?”

“I won’t loan my ship, but I’ll definitely rent it out. My crew and I were talking about getting jobs, actually. Hire us. Deduct whatever’s fair for services you’ve already rendered.”

“No,” Fred said. “I need
you.
”

“You don’t,” Holden replied. “You need our depositions. And we’re not going to sit here waiting a year or two for sanity to reign. We’ll all do video depositions, sign whatever affidavits you want us to as to their authenticity, but we’re leaving to find work one way or the other. You might as well make use of it.”

“No,” Fred said. “You’re too valuable to take risks with your lives.”

“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.

“Look,” Holden said, pressing on. “You need a ship like the
Roci.
I’ve got one. You need a crew for her. I’ve got that too. And you’re as hungry to know what’s on that cube as I am.”

“I don’t like the risk.”

“Your other option is to throw us in the brig and commandeer the ship. There’s some risks in that too.”

Fred laughed. Holden felt himself relax.

“You’ll still have the same problem that brought you here,” Fred said. “Your ship looks like a gunship, no matter what its transponder is saying.”

Holden jumped up and grabbed a piece of paper from Fred’s desk. He started writing on it with a pen snatched from a decorative pen set.

“I’ve been thinking about that. You’ve got full manufacturing facilities here. And we’re supposed to be a light gas freighter. So,”
he said as he sketched a rough outline of the ship, “we weld on a bunch of empty compressed-gas storage tanks in two bands around the hull. Use them to hide the tubes. Repaint the whole thing. Weld on a few projections to break up the hull profile and hide us from ship-recognition software. It’ll look like shit and screw up the aerodynamics, but we won’t be near atmo anytime soon. It’ll look exactly like what it is: something a bunch of Belters slapped together in a hurry.”

He handed the paper to Fred. Fred began laughing in earnest, either at the terrible drawing or at the absurdity of the whole thing.

“You could give a pirate a hell of a surprise,” he said. “If I do this, you and your crew will record my depositions and hire on as an independent contractor for errands like the Eros run and appear on my behalf when the peace negotiations start.”

“Yes.”

“I want the right to outbid anyone else who tries to hire you. No contracts without my counteroffer.”

Holden held out his hand, and Fred shook it.

“Nice doing business with you, Fred.”

As Holden left the office, Fred was already on the comm with his machine-shop people. Holden pulled out his portable terminal and called up Naomi.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Pack up the kids, we’re going to Eros.”

T
he people-mover to Eros was small, cheap, and overcrowded. The air recyclers had the plastic-and-resin smell of long-life industrial models that Miller associated with warehouses and fuel depots. The lights were cheap LEDs tinted a false pink that was supposed to flatter the complexion but instead made everyone look like undercooked beef. There were no cabins, only row after row of formed laminate seating and two long walls with five-stacks of bunks that the passengers could hot-swap. Miller had never been on a cheapjack transport before, but he knew how they worked. If there was a fight, the ship’s crew would pump riot gas into the cabin, knock everyone out, and put anyone who’d been in the scuffle under restraint. It was a draconian system, but it did tend to keep passengers polite. The bar was always open and the drinks were cheap. Not long ago Miller would have found that enticing.

Instead, he sat on one of the long seats, his hand terminal open.
Julie’s case file—what he had reconstructed of it—glowed before him. The picture of her, proud and smiling, in front of the
Razorback,
the dates and records, her jiu jitsu training. It seemed like very little, considering how large the woman had grown in his life.

A small newsfeed crawled down the terminal’s left side. The war between Mars and the Belt escalated, incident after incident, but the secession of Ceres Station was the top news. Earth was taken to task by Martian commentators for failing to stand united with its fellow inner planet, or at least for not handing over the Ceres security contract to Mars. The scattershot reaction of the Belt ran the gamut from pleasure at seeing Earth’s influence fall back down the gravity well, to strident near-panic at the loss of Ceres’ neutrality, to conspiracy theories that Earth was fomenting the war for its own ends.

Miller reserved judgment.

“I always think of pews.”

Miller looked over. The man sitting next to him was about Miller’s age; the fringe of gray hair, the soft belly. The man’s smile told Miller the guy was a missionary, out in the vacuum saving souls. Or maybe it was the name tag and Bible.

“The seats, I mean,” the missionary said. “They always make me think of going to church, the way they’re all lined up, row after row. Only instead of a pulpit, we have bunk beds.”

“Our Lady of Sleeping Through It,” Miller said, knowing he was getting drawn into conversation but unable to stop himself. The missionary laughed.

“Something like that,” he said. “Do you attend church?”

“Haven’t in years,” Miller said. “I was a Methodist when I was anything. What flavor are you selling?”

The missionary lifted his hands in a gesture of harmlessness that went back to the African plains of the Pleistocene.
I have no weapon; I seek no fight.

“I’m just going back to Eros from a conference on Luna,” he said. “My proselytizing days are long behind me.”

“I didn’t think those ever ended,” Miller said.

“They don’t. Not officially. But after a few decades, you come to a place where you realize that there’s really no difference between trying and not trying. I still travel. I still talk to people. Sometimes we talk about Jesus Christ. Sometimes we talk about cooking. If someone is ready to accept Christ, it doesn’t take much effort on my part to help them. If they aren’t, no amount of hectoring them does any good. So why try?”

“Do people talk about the war?” Miller asked.

“Often,” the missionary said.

“Anyone make sense of it?”

“No. I don’t believe war ever does. It’s a madness that’s in our nature. Sometimes it recurs; sometimes it subsides.”

“Sounds like a disease.”

“The herpes simplex of the species?” the missionary said with a laugh. “I suppose there are worse ways to think of it. I’m afraid that as long as we’re human, it will be with us.”

Miller looked over at the wide, moon-round face.

“As long as we’re human?” he said.

“Some of us believe that we shall all eventually become angels,” the missionary said.

“Not the Methodists.”

“Even them, eventually,” the man said, “but they probably won’t go first. And what brings you to Our Lady of Sleeping Through It?”

Miller sighed, sitting back against the unyielding chair. Two rows down, a young woman shouted at two boys to stop jumping on the seats and was ignored. A man behind them coughed. Miller took a long breath and let it out slowly.

“I was a cop on Ceres,” he said.

“Ah. The change of contract.”

“That,” Miller said.

“Taking up work on Eros, then?”

“More looking up an old friend,” Miller said. Then, to his own surprise, he went on. “I was born on Ceres. Lived there my whole life. This is the… fifth? Yeah, fifth time I’ve been off station.”