The Dragon’s Path

by Abraham Daniel

  “Which cabin did Naomi take?” he asked.

  Amos shrugged. “She’s still up in ops, fiddling with something.”

  Holden decided to put off sleep for a while and rode the keel ladder-lift—we have a lift!—up to the operations deck. Naomi was sitting on the floor, an open bulkhead panel in front of her and what looked like a hundred small parts and wires laid out around her in precise patterns. She was staring at something inside the open compartment.

  “Hey, Naomi, you should really get some sleep. What are you working on?”

  She gestured vaguely at the compartment.

  “Transponder,” she said.

  Holden moved over and sat down on the floor next to her.

  “Tell me how to help.”

  She handed him her hand terminal; Fred’s instructions for changing the transponder signal were open on the screen.

  “It’s ready to go. I’ve got the console hooked up to the transponder’s data port just like he says. I’ve got the computer program set up to run the override he describes. The new transponder code and ship registry data are ready to be entered. I put in the new name. Did Fred pick it?”

  “No, that was me.”

  “Oh. All right, then. But… ” Her voice trailed off, and she waved at the transponder again.

  “What’s the problem?” Holden asked.

  “Jim, they make these things not to be fiddled with. The civilian version of this device fuses itself into a solid lump of silicon if it thinks it’s being tampered with. Who knows what the military version of the fail-safe is? Drop the magnetic bottle in the reactor? Turn us into a supernova?”

  Naomi turned to look at him.

  “I’ve got it all set up and ready to go, but now I don’t think we should throw the switch,” she said. “We don’t know the consequences of failure.”

  Holden got up off the floor and moved over to the computer console. A program Naomi had named Trans01 was waiting to be run. He hesitated for one second, then pressed the button to execute. The ship failed to vaporize.

  “I guess Fred wants us alive, then,” he said.

  Naomi slumped down with a noisy, extended exhale.

  “See, this is why I can’t ever be in command,” she said.

  “Don’t like making tough calls with incomplete information?”

  “More I’m not suicidally irresponsible,” she replied, and began slowly reassembling the transponder housing.

  Holden punched the comm system on the wall. “Well, crew, welcome aboard the gas freighter Rocinante.”

  “What does that name even mean?” Naomi said after he let go of the comm button.

  “It means we need to go find some windmills,” Holden said over his shoulder as he headed to the lift.

  Tycho Manufacturing and Engineering Concern was one of the first major corporations to move into the Belt. In the early days of expansion, Tycho engineers and a fleet of ships had captured a small comet and parked it in stable orbit as a water resupply point decades before ships like the Canterbury began bringing ice in from the nearly limitless fields in Saturn’s rings. It had been the most complex, difficult feat of mass-scale engineering humanity had ever accomplished until the next thing they did.

  As an encore, Tycho had built the massive reaction drives into the rock of Ceres and Eros and spent more than a decade teaching the asteroids to spin. They had been slated to create a network of high-atmosphere floating cities above Venus before the development rights fell into a labyrinth of lawsuits now entering its eighth decade. There was some discussion of space elevators for Mars and Earth, but nothing solid had come of it yet. If you had an impossible engineering job that needed to be done in the Belt, and you could afford it, you hired Tycho.

  Tycho Station, the Belt headquarters of the company, was a massive ring station built around a sphere half a kilometer across, with more than sixty-five million cubic meters of manufacturing and storage space inside. The two counter-rotating habitation rings that circled the sphere had enough space for fifteen thousand workers and their families. The top of the manufacturing sphere was festooned with half a dozen massive construction waldoes that looked like they could rip a heavy freighter in half. The bottom of the sphere had a bulbous projection fifty meters across, which housed a capital-ship-class fusion reactor and drive system, making Tycho Station the largest mobile construction platform in the solar system. Each compartment within the massive rings was built on a swivel system that allowed the chambers to reorient to thrust gravity when the rings stopped spinning and the station flew to its next work location.

  Holden knew all this, and his first sight of the station still took his breath away. It wasn’t just the size of it. It was the idea that four generations of the smartest people in the solar system had been living and working here as they helped drag humanity into the outer planets almost through sheer force of will.

  Amos said, “It looks like a big bug.”

  Holden started to protest, but it did resemble some kind of giant spider: fat bulbous body and all its legs sprouting from the top of its head.

  Alex said, “Forget the station, look at that monster.”

  The vessel it was constructing dwarfed the station. Ladar returns told Holden the ship was just over two kilometers long and half a kilometer wide. Round and stubby, it looked like a cigarette butt made of steel. Framework girders exposed internal compartments and machinery at various stages of construction, but the engines looked complete, and the hull had been assembled over the bow. The name Nauvoo was painted in massive white letters across it.

  “So the Mormons are going to ride that thing all the way to Tau Ceti, huh?” Amos asked, following it up with a long whistle. “Ballsy bastards. No guarantee there’s even a planet worth a damn on the other end of that hundred-year trip.”

  “They seem pretty sure,” Holden replied. “And you don’t make the money to build a ship like that by being stupid. I, for one, wish them nothing but luck.”

  “They’ll get the stars,” Naomi said. “How can you not envy them that?”

  “Their great-grandkids’ll get maybe a star if they don’t all starve to death orbiting a rock they can’t use,” Amos said. “Let’s not get grandiose here.”

  He pointed at the impressively large comm array jutting from the Nauvoo’s flank.

  “Want to bet that’s what threw our anus-sized tightbeam message?” Amos said.

  Alex nodded. “If you want to send private messages home from a couple light-years away, you need serious beam coherence. They probably had the volume turned down to avoid cuttin’ a hole in us.”

  Holden got up from the copilot’s couch and pushed past Amos.

  “Alex, see if they’ll let us land.”

  Landing was surprisingly easy. The station control directed them to a docking port on the side of the sphere and stayed on the line, guiding them in, until Alex had married the docking tube to the airlock door. The tower control never pointed out that they had a lot of armaments for a transport and no tanks for carrying compressed gas. She got them docked, then wished them a pleasant day.

  Holden put on his atmosphere suit and made a quick trip to the cargo bay, then met the others just inside the Rocinante’s inner airlock door with a large duffel.

  “Put your suits on, that’s now standard ops for this crew anytime we go someplace new. And take one of these,” he said, pulling handguns and cartridge magazines from the bag. “Hide it in a pocket or your bag if you like, but I will be wearing mine openly.”

  Naomi frowned at him.

  “Seems a bit… confrontational, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m tired of being kicked around,” Holden said. “The Roci’s a good start toward independence, and I’m taking a little piece of her with me. Call it a good luck charm.”

  “Fuckin’ A,” said Amos, and strapped one of the guns to his thigh.

  Alex stuffed his into the pocket of his flight suit. Naomi wrinkled her nose and waved off the last gun. Holden put it back into
his duffel, led the crew into the Rocinante’s airlock, and cycled it. An older, dark-skinned man with a heavy build waited for them on the other side. As they came in, he smiled.

  “Welcome to Tycho Station,” said the Butcher of Anderson Station. “Call me Fred.”

  Chapter Eighteen: Miller

  The death of the Donnager hit Ceres like a hammer striking a gong. Newsfeeds clogged themselves with high-power telescopic footage of the battle, most if not all of it faked. The Belt chatter swam with speculation about a secret OPA fleet. The six ships that had taken down the Martian flagship were hailed as heroes and martyrs. Slogans like We did it once and we can do it again and Drop some rocks cropped up even in apparently innocuous settings.

  The Canterbury had stripped away the complacency of the Belt, but the Donnager had done something worse. It had taken away the fear. The Belters had gotten a sudden, decisive, and unexpected win. Anything seemed possible, and the hope seduced them.

  It would have scared Miller more if he’d been sober.

  Miller’s alarm had been going off for the past ten minutes. The grating buzz took on subtones and overtones when he listened to it long enough. A constant rising tone, fluttering percussion throbbing under it, even soft music hiding underneath the blare. Illusions. Aural hallucinations. The voice of the whirlwind.

  The previous night’s bottle of fungal faux bourbon sat on the bedside table where a carafe of water usually waited. It still had a couple fingers at the bottom. Miller considered the soft brown of the liquid, thought about how it would feel on his tongue.

  The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending. All the years he’d told himself that he was respected, that he was good at his job, that all his sacrifices had been made for a reason fell away and left him with the clear, unmuddied knowledge that he was a functional alcoholic who had pared away everything good in his own life to make room for anesthetic. Shaddid thought he was a joke. Muss thought he was the price she paid not to sleep with someone she didn’t like. The only one who might have any respect for him at all was Havelock, an Earther. It was peaceful, in its way. He could stop making the effort to keep up appearances. If he stayed in bed listening to the alarm drone, he was just living up to expectations. No shame in that.

  And still there was work to be done. He reached over and turned off the alarm. Just before it cut off, he heard a voice in it, soft but insistent. A woman’s voice. He didn’t know what she’d been saying. But since she was just in his head, she’d get another chance later.

  He levered himself out of bed, sucked down some painkillers and rehydration goo, stalked to the shower, and burned a day and a half’s ration of hot water just standing there, watching his legs get pink. He dressed in his last set of clean clothes. Breakfast was a bar of pressed yeast and grape sweetener. He dropped the bourbon from the bedside table into the recycler without finishing it, just to prove to himself that he still could.

  Muss was waiting at the desk. She looked up when he sat.

  “Still waiting for the labs on the rape up on eighteen,” she said. “They promised them by lunch.”

  “We’ll see,” Miller said.

  “I’ve got a possible witness. Girl who was with the vic earlier in the evening. Her deposition said she left before anything happened, but the security cameras aren’t backing her up.”

  “Want me in the questioning?” Miller asked.

  “Not yet. But if I need some theater, I’ll pull you in.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Miller didn’t watch her walk away. After a long moment staring at nothing, he pulled up his disk partition, reviewed what still needed doing, and started cleaning the place up.

  As he worked, his mind replayed for the millionth time the slow, humiliating interview with Shaddid and Dawes. We have Holden, Dawes said. You can’t even find what happened to your own riot gear. Miller poked at the words like a tongue at the gap of a missing tooth. It rang true. Again.

  Still, it might have been bullshit. It might have been a story concocted just to make him feel small. There wasn’t any proof, after all, that Holden and his crew had survived. What proof could there be? The Donnanger was gone, and all its logs along with it. There would have to have been a ship that made it out. Either a rescue vessel or one of the Martian escort ships. There was no way a ship could have gotten out and not been the singular darling of every newsfeed and pirate cast since. You couldn’t keep something like that quiet.

  Or sure you could. It just wouldn’t be easy. He squinted at the empty air of the station house. Now. How would you cover up a surviving ship?

  Miller pulled up a cheap navigation plotter he’d bought five years before—transit times had figured in a smuggling case—and plotted the date and position of the Donnager’s demise. Anything running under non-Epstein thrust would still have been out there, and Martian warships would have either picked it up or blasted it into background radiation by now. So if Dawes wasn’t just handing him bullshit, that meant an Epstein drive. He ran a couple quick calculations. With a good drive, someone could have made Ceres in just less than a month. Call it three weeks to be safe.

  He looked at the data for almost ten minutes, but the next step didn’t come to him, so he stepped away, got some coffee, and pulled up the interview he and Muss had done with a Belter ground-crew grunt. The man’s face was long and cadaverous and subtly cruel. The recorder hadn’t had a good fix on him, so the picture kept bouncing around. Muss asked the man what he’d seen, and Miller leaned forward to read the transcribed answers, checking for incorrectly recognized words. Thirty seconds later, the grunt said clip whore and the transcript read clipper. Miller corrected it, but the back of his mind kept churning.

  Probably eight or nine hundred ships came into Ceres in a given day. Call it a thousand to be safe. Give it a couple days on either side of the three-week mark, that was only four thousand entries. Pain in the ass, sure, but not impossible. Ganymede would be the other real bitch. With its agriculture, there would be hundreds of transports a day there. Still, it wouldn’t double the workload. Eros. Tycho. Pallas. How many ships docked on Pallas every day?

  He’d missed almost two minutes of the recording. He started again, forcing himself to pay attention this time, and half an hour later, he gave up.

  The ten busiest ports with two days to either side of an estimated arrival of an Epstein-drive ship that originated when and where the Donnager died totaled twenty-eight thousand docking records, more or less. But he could cut that down to seventeen thousand if he excluded stations and ports explicitly run by Martian military and research stations with all or nearly all inner planets inhabitants. So how long would it take him to check all the porting records by hand, pretending for a minute that he was stupid enough to do it? Call it 118 days—if he didn’t eat or sleep. Just working ten-hour days, doing nothing else, he could almost get through it in less than a year. A little less.

  Except no. Because there were ways to narrow it. He was only looking for Epstein drive ships. Most of the traffic at any of the ports would be local. Torch drive ships flown by prospectors and short-hop couriers. The economics of spaceflight made relatively few and relatively large ships the right answer for long flights. So take it down by, conservatively, three-quarters, and he was back in the close-to-four-thousand range again. Still hundreds of hours of work, but if he could think of some other filter that would just feed him the likely suspects… For instance, if the ship couldn’t have filed a flight plan before the Donnager got killed.

  The request interface for the port logs was ancient, uncomfortable, and subtly different from Eros to Ganymede to Pallas and on and on. Miller tacked the information requests on to seven different cases, including a month-old cold case on which he was only a consultant. Port logs were public and open, so he didn’t particularly need his detective status to hide his actions. With any luck Shaddid’s monitoring of him wouldn’t extend to low-level, public-record poking around.
And even if it did, he might get the replies before she caught on.

  Never knew if you had any luck left unless you pushed it. Besides, there wasn’t a lot to lose.

  When the connection from the lab opened on his terminal, he almost jumped. The technician was a gray-haired woman with an unnaturally young face.

  “Miller? Muss with you?”

  “Nope,” Miller said. “She’s got an interrogation.”

  He was pretty sure that was what she’d said. The tech shrugged.

  “Well, her system’s not answering. I wanted to tell you we got a match off the rape you sent us. It wasn’t the boyfriend. Her boss did it.”

  Miller nodded. “You put in for the warrant?” he asked.

  “Yep,” she said. “It’s already in the file.”

  Miller pulled it up: STAR HELIX ON BEHALF OF CERES STATION AUTHORIZES AND MANDATES THE DETENTION OF IMMANUEL CORVUS DOWD PENDING ADJUDICATION OF SECURITY INCIDENT CCS-4949231. The judge’s digital signature was listed in green. He felt a slow smile on his lips.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  On the way out of the station, one of the vice squads asked him where he was headed. He said lunch.

  The Arranha Accountancy Group had their offices in the nice part of the governmental quarter in sector seven. It wasn’t Miller’s usual stomping grounds, but the warrant was good on the whole station. Miller went to the secretary at the front desk—a good-looking Belter with a starburst pattern embroidered on his vest—and explained that he needed to speak with Immanuel Corvus Dowd. The secretary’s deep-brown skin took on an ashy tone. Miller stood back, not blocking the exit, but keeping close.