The Dragon's Path

by Daniel Abraham

  The room was silent. Fred was frowning, his arms crossed. Holden understood the struggle going on in the man’s mind. Everything Dresden said was repulsive and eerie and rang too much of the truth.

  “Or,” Dresden said, “we can negotiate a price, you can go on your way, and I can—”

  “Okay. That’s enough,” Miller said, speaking for the first time since Dresden had begun his pitch. Holden glanced over at the detective. His flat expression had gone stony. He wasn’t tapping the barrel of his pistol against his leg.

  Oh, shit.

  Chapter Forty-Two: Miller

  Dresden didn’t see it coming. Even as Miller raised the pistol, the man’s eyes didn’t register a threat. All he saw was Miller with an object in his hand that happened to be a gun. A dog would have known to be scared, but not Dresden.

  “Miller!” Holden shouted from a great distance. “Don’t!”

  Pulling the trigger was simple. A soft click, the bounce of metal against his glove-cushioned palm, and then again two more times. Dresden’s head snapped back, blooming red. Blood spattered a wide screen, obscuring the data stream. Miller stepped close, fired two more rounds into Dresden’s chest, considered for a moment, then holstered the pistol.

  The room was silent. The OPA soldiers were all looking at each other or at Miller, surprised, even after the press of the assault, by the sudden violence. Naomi and Amos were looking at Holden, and the captain was staring at the corpse. Holden’s injured face was set as a mask; fury, outrage, maybe even despair. Miller understood that. Doing the obvious thing still wasn’t natural for Holden. There had been a time when it hadn’t come so easily for Miller either.

  Only Fred didn’t flinch or look nervous. The colonel didn’t smile or frown, and he didn’t look away.

  “What the fuck was that?” Holden said through his blood-plugged nose. “You shot him in cold blood!”

  “Yeah,” Miller said.

  Holden shook his head. “What about a trial? What about justice? You just decide, and that’s the way it goes?”

  “I’m a cop,” Miller said, surprised by the apology in his voice.

  “Are you even human anymore?”

  “All right, gentlemen!” Fred said, his voice booming out in the quiet. “Show’s over. Let’s get back to work. I want the decryption team in here. We’ve got prisoners to evacuate and a station to strip down.”

  Holden looked from Fred to Miller to the still-dying Dresden. His jaw was set with rage.

  “Hey, Miller,” Holden said.

  “Yeah?” Miller said softly. He knew what was coming.

  “Find your own ride home,” the captain of the Rocinante said, then spun and stalked out of the room, his crew following. Miller watched them walk away. Regret tapped gently at his heart, but there was nothing to be done about it. The broken bulkhead seemed to swallow them. Miller turned to Fred.

  “Hitch a lift?”

  “You’re wearing our colors,” Fred said. “We’ll get you as far as Tycho.”

  “I appreciate that,” Miller said. Then, a moment later: “You know it had to be done.”

  Fred didn’t reply. There wasn’t anything to say.

  Thoth Station was injured, but not dead. Not yet. Word of the sociopathic crew spread fast, and the OPA forces took the warning to heart. The occupation and control phase of the attack lasted forty hours instead of the twenty that it would have taken with normal prisoners. With humans. Miller did what he could with prisoner control.

  The OPA kids were well intentioned, but most of them had never worked with captive populations before. They didn’t know how to cuff someone at the wrist and elbow so that the perp couldn’t get his hands out in front to strangle them. They didn’t know how to restrain someone with a length of cord around the neck so that the prisoner couldn’t choke himself to death, by accident or intentionally. Half of them didn’t even know how to pat someone down. Miller knew all of it like a game he’d played since childhood. In five hours, he found twenty hidden blades on the science crew alone. He hardly had to think about it.

  A second wave of transport ships arrived: personnel haulers that looked ready to spill their air out into the vacuum if you spat on them, salvage trawlers already dismantling the shielding and superstructure of the station, supply ships boxing and packing the precious equipment and looting the pharmacies and food banks. By the time news of the assault reached Earth, the station would be stripped to a skeleton and its people hidden away in unlicensed prison cells throughout the Belt.

  Protogen would know sooner, of course. They had outposts much closer than the inner planets. There was a calculus of response time and possible gain. The mathematics of piracy and war. Miller knew it, but he didn’t let it worry him. Those were decisions for Fred and his attachés to make. Miller had taken more than enough initiative for one day.

  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.

  Now, as he escorted a dozen captives in Protogen uniforms to a docked transport heading God-knew-where, the word was taking on new meaning.

  Are you even human anymore?

  All posthuman meant, literally speaking, was what you were when you weren’t human anymore. Protomolecule aside, Protogen aside, Dresden and his Mengele-as-Genghis-Khan self-righteous fantasies aside, Miller thought that maybe he’d been ahead of the curve all along. Maybe he’d been posthuman for years.

  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. Miller sat in a crash couch, his blood dancing with spent amphetamines and his mind slipping into and out of exhaustion psychosis. The thrust gravity was like a pillow over his face. He was vaguely aware that he was weeping. It didn’t mean anything.

  In Miller’s haze, Dresden was talking again, pouring out promises and lies, half-truths and visions. Miller could see the words themselves like a dark smoke, coalescing into the spilling black filament of the protomolecule. The threads of it were reaching toward Holden, Amos, Naomi. He tried to find his gun, to stop it, to do the obvious thing. His despairing shout woke him, and he remembered he’d already won.

  Julie sat beside him, her hand cool against his forehead. Her smile was gentle, understanding. Forgiving.

  Sleep, she said, and his mind fell into the deep black.

  “Oi, Pampaw,” Diogo said. “Acima and out, sabez?”

  It was Miller’s tenth morning back on Tycho, his seventh hot-bunking in Diogo’s closet-sized apartment. He could tell from the buzz in the boy’s voice it would have to be one of the last. Fish and company start to smell after three days. He rolled off the thin bed, ran fingers through his hair, and nodded. Diogo stripped down and crawled into the bed without speaking. He stank of liquor and cheap tub-grown marijuana.

  Miller’s terminal told him that the second shift had ended two hours before, the third shift halfway into its morning. He gathered his things in his suitcase, turned off the lights on Diogo’s already snoring form, and trundled out to the public showers to spend a few of his remaining credits trying to look less homeless.

  The pleasant surprise of his return to Tycho Station was the boost of money in his account. The OPA, meaning Fred Johnson, had paid him for his time on Thoth. He hadn’t asked for it, and there was part of him that wanted to turn the payment down. If there had been an alternative, he might have. Since there wasn’t, he tried to stretch the funds out as far as they would go and appreciate the irony. He and Captain Shaddid were on the same payroll after all.

  For the first few days after his return to Tycho, Miller had ex
pected to see the attack on Thoth in the newsfeeds. EARTH CORPORATION LOSES RESEARCH STATION TO CRAZED BELTERS, or some such. He should have been finding a job or a place to sleep that wasn’t charity. He meant to. But the hours seemed to dissolve as he sat in the bar or the lounges, watching the screens for just a few more minutes.

  The Martian navy had suffered a series of harassing attacks by Belters. A half ton of super-accelerated gravel had forced two of their battleships to change course. A slowdown in water harvesting on Saturn’s rings was either an illegal work stoppage, and therefore treasonous, or the natural response to increased security needs. Two Earth-owned mining operations had been attacked by either Mars or the OPA. Four hundred people were dead. Earth’s blockade of Mars was entering its third month. A coalition of scientists and terraforming specialists were screaming that the cascading processes were in danger, and that while the war would be over in a year or two, the loss of supplies would set the terraforming effort back generations. Everyone blamed everyone else for Eros. Thoth station didn’t exist.

  It would, though.

  With most of the Martian navy still in the outer planets, Earth’s siege was a brittle thing. Time was getting short. Either the Martians would go home and try facing down the somewhat older, somewhat slower, but more numerous ships of Earth, or they’d go straight for the planet itself. Earth was still the source of a thousand things that couldn’t be grown elsewhere, but if someone got happy or cocksure or desperate, it wouldn’t take much to start dropping rocks down the gravity wells.

  All of it as a distraction.

  There was an old joke. Miller didn’t remember where he’d heard it. Girl’s at her own father’s funeral, meets this really cute guy. They talk, hit it off, but he leaves before she can get his number. Girl doesn’t know how to track the guy down.

  So a week later, she kills her mom.

  Big laugh.

  It was the logic of Protogen, of Dresden, of Thoth. Here is the problem, they said to themselves, and there is the solution. That it was drowned in innocent blood was as trivial as the font the reports were printed in. They had disconnected themselves from humanity. Shut off the cell clusters in their brains that made life besides their own sacred. Or valuable. Or worth saving. All it had cost them was every human connection.

  Funny how familiar that sounded.

  The guy who walked into the bar and nodded to Miller was one of Diogo’s friends. Twenty years old or maybe a little south of that. A veteran of Thoth Station, just like Miller. He didn’t remember the kid’s name, but he’d seen him around often enough to know that the way he held himself was different than usual. Tight-wound. Miller tapped the mute on his terminal’s newsfeed and made his way over.

  “Hey,” he said, and the kid looked up sharply. The face was tense, but a softer, intentional ease tried to mask it. It was just Diogo’s old grandpa. The one, everyone on Thoth knew, who’d killed the biggest dick in the universe. It won Miller some points, so the kid smiled and nodded to the stool beside him.

  “All pretty fucked up, isn’t it?” Miller said.

  “You don’t know the half,” the kid said. He had a clipped accent. Belter by his height, but educated. Technician, probably. The kid tabbed in a drink order, and the bar offered up a glass of clear fluid so volatile Miller could watch it evaporate. The kid drank it down with a gulp.

  “Doesn’t work,” Miller said.

  The kid looked over. Miller shrugged.

  “They say drinking helps, but it doesn’t,” Miller said.

  “No?”

  “Nope. Sex sometimes, if you’ve got a girl who’ll talk to you after. Or target practice. Working out, sometimes. Liquor doesn’t make you feel better. Just makes you not so worried about feeling bad.”

  The kid laughed and shook his head. He was on the edge of talking, so Miller sat back and let the quiet do his work for him. He figured the kid had killed someone, probably on Thoth, and it was sneaking up on him. But instead of telling the story, the kid took Miller’s terminal, keyed in a few local codes, and handed it back. A huge menu of feeds appeared—video, audio, air pressure and content, radiological. It took Miller half a second to understand what he was seeing. They’d cracked the encryption on the Eros feeds.

  He was looking at the protomolecule in action. He was seeing Juliette Andromeda Mao’s corpse writ large. For a moment, his imagined Julie flickered beside him.

  “If you ever wonder if you did the right thing shooting that guy,” the kid said, “look at that.”

  Miller opened a feed. A long corridor, wide enough for twenty people to walk abreast. The flooring was wet and undulating like the surface of a canal. Something small rolled awkwardly through the mush. When Miller zoomed in, it was a human torso—rib cage, spine, trailing lengths of what used to be intestines and were now the long black threads of the protomolecule—pushing itself along on the stump of an arm. There was no head. The feed output bar showed there was sound, and Miller undid the mute. The high, mindless piping reminded him of mentally ill children singing to themselves.

  “It’s all like that,” the kid said. “Whole station’s crawling with… shit like that.”

  “What’s it doing?”

  “Building something,” the kid said, and shuddered. “I thought you should see it.”

  “Yeah?” Miller said, his gaze nailed to the screen. “What did I ever do to you?”

  The kid laughed.

  “Everyone thinks you’re a hero for killing that guy,” the kid said. “Everyone thinks we should push every last prisoner we took off that station out an airlock.”

  Probably should, Miller thought, if we can’t make them human again. He switched the feed. The casino level where he and Holden had been, or else a section very like it. A webwork of something like bones linked ceiling and roof. Black sluglike things a yard long slithered up and between them. The sound was a hushing, like the recordings he’d heard of surf against a beach. He switched again. The port, with bulkheads closed and encrusted with huge nautilus spirals that seemed to shift while he watched them.

  “Everyone thinks you’re a fucking hero,” the kid said, and this time, it bit a little. Miller shook his head.

  “Nah,” he said. “Just a guy who used to be a cop.”

  Why should going into a firefight, charging into an enemy station filled with people and automatic systems built to kill you, seem less frightening than talking to people who you shipped with for weeks?

  And still.

  It was third shift, and the bar at the observation platform was set to imitate night. The air was scented with something smoky that wasn’t smoke. A piano and bass dueled lazily with each other while a man’s voice lamented in Arabic. Dim lights glowed at the bases of the tables, casting soft shadows up across faces and bodies, emphasizing the customers’ legs and bellies and breasts. The shipyards beyond the windows were busy as always. If he went close, he could pick out the Rocinante, still recovering from its wounds. Not dead, and being made stronger.

  Amos and Naomi were at a table in a corner. No sign of Alex. No sign of Holden. That made it easier. Not easy, but closer. He made his way toward them. Naomi saw him first, and Miller read the discomfort in her expression, covered over as quickly as it appeared. Amos turned to see what she’d been reacting to, and the corners of his mouth and eyes didn’t shift into a frown or a smile. Miller scratched his arm even though it didn’t itch.

  “Hey,” he said. “Buy you folks a round?”

  The silence lasted a beat longer than it should have, and then Naomi forced a smile.

  “Sure. Just one. We’ve got… that thing. For the captain.”

  “Oh yeah,” Amos said, lying even more awkwardly than Naomi had, making his awareness of the fact part of the message. “The thing. That’s important.”

  Miller sat, lifted a hand for the waiter to see, and, when the man nodded, leaned forward with his elbows on the table. It was the seated version of a fighter’s crouch, bent forward with his arms protect
ing the soft places in his neck and belly. It was the way a man stood when he expected injury.

  The waiter came, and then beers all around. Miller paid for them with the OPA’s money and took a sip.

  “How’s the ship?” he asked at last.

  “Coming together,” Naomi said. “They really banged the hell out of her.”

  “She’ll still fly,” Amos said. “She’s one tough bitch.”

  “That’s good. When—” Miller said, then tripped on his words and had to start again. “When are you folks shipping out?”

  “Whenever the captain says,” Amos said with a shrug. “We’re airtight now, so could go tomorrow, if he’s got someplace he wants to be.”

  “And if Fred lets us,” Naomi said, and then grimaced like she wished she’d kept silent.

  “That an issue?” Miller asked. “Is the OPA leaning on Holden?”

  “It’s just something I was thinking about,” Naomi said. “It’s nothing. Look, thanks for the drink, Miller. But I really think we’d better be going.”

  Miller took a long breath and let it out slow.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

  “You head out,” Amos said to Naomi. “I’ll catch up.”

  Naomi shot a confused look at the big man, but Amos only gave back a smile. It could have meant anything.

  “Okay,” Naomi said. “But don’t be long, okay? The thing.”

  “For the captain,” Amos said. “No worries.”

  Naomi rose and walked away. Her effort not to look back over her shoulder was visible. Miller looked at Amos. The lights gave the mechanic a slightly demonic appearance.

  “Naomi’s a good person,” Amos said. “I like her, you know? Like my kid sister, only smart and I’d do her if she let me. You know?”

  “Yeah,” Miller said. “I like her too.”

  “She’s not like us,” Amos said, and the warmth and humor were gone.