The Dragon’s Path

by Abraham Daniel

  “I know,” he said in a quiet voice. “I’m not stupid. I just need some time.”

  “We all do. But we’re stuck in this tiny can together. I’ll be honest, I came down here because Naomi is worried about you, but now that I’m here, you’re freaking me the hell out. That’s okay, because I’m the captain now and it’s my job. But I can’t have you freaking Alex or Amos out. We’re ten days from being grabbed by a Martian battleship, and that’s scary enough without the doctor falling apart.”

  “I’m not a doctor, I’m just a tech,” Shed said, his voice very small.

  “You’re our doctor, okay? To the four of us here with you on this ship, you’re our doctor. If Alex starts having post-traumatic stress episodes and needs meds to keep it together, he’ll come to you. If you’re down here jabbering about warts, he’ll turn around and go back up to the cockpit and just do a really bad job of flying. You want to cry? Do it with all of us. We’ll sit together in the galley and get drunk and cry like babies, but we’ll do it together where it’s safe. No more hiding down here.”

  Shed nodded.

  “Can we do that?” he said.

  “Do what?” Holden asked.

  “Get drunk and cry like babies?”

  “Hell yes. That is officially on the schedule for tonight. Report to the galley at twenty hundred hours, Mr. Garvey. Bring a cup.”

  Shed started to reply when the general comm clicked on and Naomi said, “Jim, come back up to ops.”

  Holden gripped Shed’s shoulder for a moment, then left.

  In ops, Naomi had the comm screen up again and was speaking to Alex in low tones. The pilot was shaking his head and frowning. A map glowed on her screen.

  “What’s up?” Holden asked.

  “We’re getting a tightbeam, Jim. It locked on and started transmitting just a couple minutes ago,” Naomi replied.

  “From the Donnager?” The Martian battleship was the only thing he could think of that might be inside laser communications range.

  “No. From the Belt,” Naomi said. “And not from Ceres, or Eros, or Pallas either. None of the big stations.”

  She pointed at a small dot on her display.

  “It’s coming from here.”

  “That’s empty space,” Holden said.

  “Nope. Alex checked. It’s the site of a big construction project Tycho is working on. Not a lot of detail on it, but radar returns are pretty strong.”

  “Something out there has a comm array that’ll put a dot the size of your anus on us from over three AU away,” Alex said.

  “Okay, wow, that’s impressive. What is our anus-sized dot saying?” Holden asked.

  “You’ll never believe this,” Naomi said, and turned on the playback.

  A dark-skinned man with the heavy facial bones of an Earther appeared on the screen. His hair was graying, and his neck was ropy with old muscle. He smiled and said, “Hello, James Holden. My name is Fred Johnson.”

  Holden hit the pause button.

  “This guy looks familiar. Search the ship’s database for that name,” he said.

  Naomi didn’t move; she just stared at him with a puzzled look on her face.

  “What?” he said.

  “That’s Frederick Johnson,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “Colonel Frederick Lucius Johnson.”

  The pause might have been a second; it might have been an hour.

  “Jesus,” was all Holden could think to say.

  The man on the screen had once been among the most decorated officers in the UN military, and ended up one of its most embarrassing failures. To Belters, he was the Earther Sheriff of Nottingham who’d turned into Robin Hood. To Earth, he was the hero who’d fallen from grace.

  Fred Johnson started his rise to fame with a series of high-profile captures of Belt pirates during one of the periods of tension between Earth and Mars that seemed to ramp up every few decades and then fade away again. Whenever the system’s two superpowers rattled their sabers at each other, crime in the Belt rose. Colonel Johnson—Captain Johnson at the time—and his small wing of three missile frigates destroyed a dozen pirate ships and two major bases in a two-year span. By the time the Coalition had stopped bickering, piracy was actually down in the Belt, and Fred Johnson was the name on everyone’s lips. He was promoted and given command over the Coalition marine division tasked with policing the Belt, where he continued to serve with distinction.

  Until Anderson Station.

  A tiny shipping depot almost on the opposite side of the Belt from the major port Ceres, most people, including most Belters, would not have been able to find Anderson Station on a map. Its only importance was as a minor distribution station for water and air in one of the sparsest stretches of the Belt. Fewer than a million Belters got their air from Anderson.

  Gustav Marconi, a career Coalition bureaucrat on the station, decided to implement a 3-percent handling surcharge on shipments passing through the station in hopes of raising the bottom line. Less than 5 percent of the Belters buying their air from Anderson were living bottle to mouth, so just under fifty thousand Belters might have to spend one day of each month not breathing. Only a small percentage of those fifty thousand lacked the leeway in their recycling systems to cover this minor shortfall. Of those, only a small portion felt that armed revolt was the correct course.

  Which was why of the million affected, only 170 armed Belters came to the station, took over, and threw Marconi out an airlock. They demanded a government guarantee that no further handling surcharges would be added to the price of air and water coming through the station.

  The Coalition sent Colonel Johnson.

  During the Massacre of Anderson Station, the Belters kept the station cameras rolling, broadcasting to the solar system the entire time. Everyone watched as Coalition marines fought a long, gruesome corridor-to-corridor battle against men with nothing to lose and no reason to surrender. The Coalition won—it was a foregone conclusion—but it took three days of broadcast slaughter. The iconic image of the video was not one of the fighting, but the last image the station cameras caught before they were cut off: Colonel Johnson in station ops, surrounded by the corpses of the Belters who’d made their last stand there, surveying the carnage with a flat stare and hands limp at his sides.

  The UN tried to keep Colonel Johnson’s resignation quiet, but he was too much a public figure. The video of the battle dominated the nets for weeks, only displaced when the former Colonel Johnson made a public statement apologizing for the massacre and announcing that the relationship between the Belt and the inner planets was untenable and heading toward ever greater tragedy.

  Then he vanished. He was almost forgotten, a footnote in the history of human carnage, until the Pallas colony revolt four years later. This time refinery metalworkers kicked the Coalition governor off station. Instead of a tiny way station with 170 rebels, it was a major Belt rock with more than 150,000 people on it. When the Coalition ordered in the marines, everyone expected a bloodbath.

  Colonel Johnson came out of nowhere and talked the metalworkers down; he talked the Coalition commanders into holding back the marines until the station could be handed over peacefully. He spent more than a year negotiating with the Coalition governor to improve working conditions in the refineries. And suddenly, the Butcher of Anderson Station was a Belt hero and an icon.

  An icon who was beaming private messages to the Knight.

  Holden hit the play button, and that Fred Johnson said, “Mr. Holden, I think you’re being played. Let me say straight out that I am speaking to you as an official representative of the Outer Planets Alliance. I don’t know what you’ve heard, but we aren’t all a bunch of cowboys itching for a chance to shoot our way to freedom. I’ve spent the last ten years working to make life for the Belters better without anyone getting shot. I believe in this idea so deeply that I gave up my Earth citizenship when I came out here.

  “I tell you that so you’ll know how invested I am. I
may be the one person in the solar system who wants war the least, and my voice is loud in OPA councils.

  “You may have heard some of the broadcasts beating on the war drums and calling for revenge against Mars for what happened to your ship. I’ve talked to every OPA cell leader I know, and no one’s claiming responsibility.

  “Someone is working very hard to start a war. If it’s Mars, then when you get on that ship, you’ll never say another word in public that isn’t fed to you by Martian handlers. I don’t want to think it is Mars. I can’t see how they would get anything out of a war. So my hope is that even after the Donnager picks you up, you can still be a player in what follows.

  “I am sending you a keyword. Next time you broadcast publicly, use the word ubiquitous within the first sentence of the broadcast to signal that you’re not being coerced. Don’t use it, and I’ll assume you are. Either way, I want you to know you have allies in the Belt.

  “I don’t know who or what you were before, but your voice matters now. If you want to use that voice to make things better, I will do anything I can to help you do it. If you get free, contact me at the address that follows. I think maybe you and I have a lot to talk about.

  “Johnson out.”

  The crew sat in the galley drinking a bottle of ersatz tequila Amos had scrounged from somewhere. Shed was politely sipping from a small cup of it and trying to hide his grimace each time. Alex and Amos drank like sailors: a finger full in the bottom of the cup, tossed back all at once. Alex had a habit of saying “Hooboy!” after each shot. Amos just used a different profanity each time. He was up to his eleventh shot and so far had not repeated himself.

  Holden stared at Naomi. She swirled the tequila in her cup and stared back. He found himself wondering what sort of genetic mashup had produced her features. Definitely some African and South American in there. Her last name hinted at Japanese ancestry, which was only barely visible, as a slight epicanthic fold. She’d never be conventionally pretty, but from the right angle she was actually fairly striking.

  Shit, I’m drunker than I thought.

  To cover, he said, “So… ”

  “So Colonel Johnson is calling you now. Quite the important man you’ve become, sir,” Naomi replied.

  Amos put down his cup with exaggerated care.

  “Been meaning to ask about that, sir. Any chance we might take up his offer of help and just head back to the Belt?” he said. “Don’t know about you, but with the Martian battleship in front, and the half dozen mystery ships behind, it’s starting to feel pretty fuckin’ crowded out here.”

  Alex snorted. “Are you kidding? If we flipped now, we’d be just about stopped by the time the Donnager caught up to us. She’s burnin’ the furniture to catch us before the Belter ships do. If we start headin’ their direction, the Donnie might take that as a sign we’ve switched teams, frag the whole lot of us.”

  “I agree with Mr. Kamal,” Holden said. “We’ve picked our course and we’re going to see it through. I won’t be losing Fred’s contact information anytime soon. Speaking of which, have you deleted his message yet, Naomi?”

  “Yes, sir. Scrubbed it from the ship’s memory with steel wool. The Martians will never know he talked to us.”

  Holden nodded and unzipped his jumpsuit a little further. The galley was starting to feel very hot with five drunk people in it. Naomi raised an eyebrow at his days-old T-shirt. Embarrassed, he zipped back up.

  “Those ships don’t make any sense to me, Boss,” Alex said. “A half dozen ships flyin’ kamikaze missions with nukes strapped to their hulls might make a dent in a battlewagon like the Donnie, but not much else would. She opens up with her point defense network and rail guns, she can create a no-fly zone a thousand klicks across. They could be killin’ those six ships with torpedoes already, ’cept I think they’re as confused about who they are as we are.”

  “They’ll know they can’t catch us before the Donnager picks us up,” Holden said. “And they can’t take her in a fight. So I don’t know what they’re up to.”

  Amos poured the last of the tequila into everyone’s cups and held his up in a toast.

  “I guess we’ll fucking find out.”

  Chapter Ten: Miller

  Captain Shaddid tapped the tip of her middle finger against her thumb when she started getting annoyed. It was a small sound, soft as a cat’s paws, but ever since Miller first noticed her habit, it had seemed louder. Quiet as it was, it could fill her office.

  “Miller,” she said, smiling as if she meant it. “We’re all on edge these days. These have been hard, hard times.”

  “Yes, sir,” Miller said, lowering his head like a fullback determined to muscle his way through all defenders, “but I think this is important enough to deserve closer—”

  “It’s a favor for a shareholder,” Shaddid said. “Her father got jumpy. There’s no reason to think he meant Mars blasting the Canterbury. Tariffs are going up again. There was a mine blowout on one of the Red Moon operations. Eros is having trouble with their yeast farm. We don’t go through a day without something happening in the Belt that would make a daddy scared for his precious little flower.”

  “Yes, sir, but the timing—”

  Her fingers upped tempo. Miller bit his lips. The cause was lost.

  “Don’t go chasing conspiracies,” Shaddid said. “We’ve got a full board of crimes we know are real. Politics, war, system-wide cabals of inner planet bad guys searching for ways to screw us over? Not our mandate. Just get me a report that says you’re looking, I’ll send it back up the line, and we can get back to our jobs.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No, sir.”

  Shaddid nodded and turned back to her terminal. Miller plucked his hat from the corner of her desk and headed out. One of the station house air filters had gone bad over the weekend, and the replacement gave the rooms a reassuring smell of new plastic and ozone. Miller sat at his desk, fingers laced behind his head, and stared at the light fixture above him. The knot that had tied itself in his gut hadn’t loosened up. That was too bad.

  “Not so good, then?” Havelock asked.

  “Could have gone better.”

  “She pull the job?”

  Miller shook his head. “No, it’s still mine. She just wants me to do it half-assed.”

  “Could be worse. At least you get to find out what happened. And if you maybe spend a little time after hours digging into it just for practice, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Miller said. “Practice.”

  Their desks were unnaturally clean, his and Havelock’s both. The barrier of paperwork Havelock had created between himself and the station had eroded away, and Miller could tell from his partner’s eyes and the way his hands moved that the cop in Havelock wanted to get back into the tunnels. He couldn’t tell if it was to prove himself before his transfer went through, or just to break a few heads. Maybe those were two ways of saying the same thing.

  Just don’t get yourself killed before you get out of here, Miller thought. Aloud, he said, “What have we got?”

  “Hardware shop. Sector eight, third level in,” Havelock said. “Extortion complaint.”

  Miller sat for a moment, considering his own reluctance as if it belonged to someone else. It was like Shaddid had given a dog just one bite of fresh meat, then pointed it back toward kibble. The temptation to blow off the hardware shop bloomed, and for a moment he almost gave in. Then he sighed, swung his feet down to the decking, and stood.

  “All right, then,” he said. “Let’s go make the station safe for commerce.”

  “Words to live by,” Havelock said, checking his gun. He’d been doing that a lot more recently.

  The shop was an entertainment franchise. Clean white fixtures offering up custom rigs for interactive environments: battle simulations, exploration games, sex. A woman’s voice ululated on the sound system, somewhere between an Islamic call to prayer and orgasm with a drumbeat. Half t
he titles were in Hindi with Chinese and Spanish translations. The other half were English with Hindi as the second language. The clerk was hardly more than a boy. Sixteen, seventeen years old with a weedy black beard he wore like a badge.

  “Can I help you?” the boy said, eying Havelock with disdain just short of contempt. Havelock pulled his ID, making sure the kid got a good long look at his gun when he did it.

  “We’d like to talk to”—Miller glanced at the complaint form on his terminal screen—“Asher Kamamatsu. He here?”

  The manager was a fat man, for a Belter. Taller than Havelock, the man carried fat around his belly and thick muscles through the shoulders, arms, and neck. If Miller squinted, he could see the seventeen-year-old boy he had been under the layers of time and disappointment, and it looked a lot like the clerk out front. The office was almost too small for the three of them and stacked with boxes of pornographic software.

  “You catch them?” the manager said.

  “No,” Miller said. “Still trying to figure out who they are.”

  “Dammit, I already told you. There’s pictures of them off the store camera. I gave you his fucking name.”

  Miller looked at his terminal. The suspect was named Mateo Judd, a dockworker with an unspectacular criminal record.

  “You think it’s just him, then,” Miller said. “All right. We’ll just go pick him up, throw him in the can. No reason for us to find out who he’s working for. Probably no one who’ll take it wrong, anyway. My experience with these protection rackets, the purse boys get replaced whenever one goes down. But since you’re sure this guy’s the whole problem… ”

  The manager’s sour expression told Miller he’d made his point. Havelock, leaning against a stack of boxes marked , smiled.

  “Why don’t you tell me what he wanted,” Miller said.

  “I already told the last cop,” the manager said.

  “Tell me.”

  “He was selling us a private insurance plan. Hundred a month, same as the last guy.”