The Dragon’s Path

by Abraham Daniel

  She held up her drink, sloshing a good half of it onto the table, then threw the other half back all at once.

  “Whadja think?” Naomi asked, waving at the bartender for another.

  “It was terrible,” Holden replied.

  “No, really.”

  “It was truly one of the most awful renditions of one of the most awful songs I’ve ever heard.”

  Naomi shook her head, blowing an exasperated raspberry at him. Her dark hair fell across her face and, when the bartender brought her a second brightly colored martini, foiled all her attempts at drinking. She finally grabbed her hair and held it above her head in a clump while she drank.

  “You don’t get it,” she said. “It’s supposed to be awful. That’s the point.”

  “Then it was the best version of that song I’ve ever heard,” Holden said.

  “Damn straight.” Naomi looked around the bar. “Where’re Amos and Alex?”

  “Amos found what I’m pretty sure was the most expensive hooker I’ve ever seen. Alex is in the back playing darts. He made some claims about the superiority of Martian darts players. I assume they’re going to kill him and throw him out an airlock.”

  A second singer was onstage, crooning out some sort of Vietnamese power ballad. Naomi watched the singer for a while, sipping her drink, then said, “Maybe we should go save him.”

  “Which one?”

  “Alex. Why would Amos need saving?”

  “Because I’m pretty sure he told the expensive hooker he was on Fred’s expense account.”

  “Let’s mount a rescue mission; we can save them both,” Naomi said, then drank the rest of her cocktail. “I need more rescue fuel, though.”

  She started waving at the bartender again, but Holden reached out and grabbed her hand and held it on the table.

  “Maybe we should take a breather instead,” he said.

  A flush of anger as intense as it was brief lit her face. She pulled back her hand.

  “You take a breather. I’ve just had two ships and a bunch of friends shot out from underneath me, and spent three weeks of dead time flying to get here. So, no. I’m getting another drink, and then doing another set. The crowd loves me,” Naomi said.

  “What about our rescue mission?”

  “Lost cause. Amos will be murdered by space hookers, but at least he’ll die the way he lived.”

  Naomi pushed her way up from the table, grabbed her martini off the bar, and headed toward the karaoke stage. Holden watched her go, then finished off the scotch he’d been nursing for the past two hours and got up.

  For a moment there, he’d had a vision of the two of them staggering back to the room together, then falling into bed. He’d have hated himself in the morning for taking advantage, but he’d still have done it. Naomi was looking at him from the stage, and he realized he’d been staring. He gave a little wave, then headed out the door with only ghosts—Ade, Captain McDowell, Gomez and Kelly and Shed—to keep him company.

  The suite was comfortable and huge and depressing. He’d lain on the bed less than five minutes before he was up and out the door again. He walked the corridor for half an hour, finding the big intersections that led to other parts of the ring. He found an electronics store and a teahouse and what on closer inspection turned out to be a very expensive brothel. He declined the video menu of services the desk clerk offered and wandered out again, wondering if Amos was somewhere inside.

  He was halfway down a corridor he hadn’t seen before when a small knot of teenage girls passed him. Their faces looked no older than fourteen, but they were already as tall as he was. They got quiet as he walked by, then burst out laughing when he was behind them, and hurried away. Tycho was a city, and he suddenly felt very much like a foreigner, unsure of where to go or what to do.

  It was no surprise to him when he looked up from his wanderings and discovered he’d come to the elevator to the docking area. He punched the button and climbed inside, remembering to turn on his boot mags just in time to avoid being flung off his feet when the gravity twisted sideways and vanished.

  Even though he’d only had possession of the ship for three weeks, climbing back onto the Rocinante felt like going home. Using gentle touches on the keel ladder, he made his way up to the cockpit. He pulled himself into the copilot’s couch, strapped in, and closed his eyes.

  The ship was silent. With the reactor off-line, and no one aboard, nothing was moving at all. The flexible docking tube that connected the Roci to the station transmitted very little vibration to the ship. Holden could close his eyes and drift in the straps and disconnect from everything around him.

  It would have been peaceful except that every time he’d closed his eyes for the past month, the fading ghost lights behind his eyelids had been Ade winking and blowing away like dust. The voice at the back of his head was McDowell’s as he tried to save his ship right up to the very last second. He wondered if he’d have them for the rest of his life, coming out to haunt him every time he found a moment of quiet.

  He remembered the old-timers from his navy days. Grizzled lifers who could soundly sleep while two meters away their shipmates played a raucous game of poker or watched the vids with the volume all the way up. Back then he’d assumed it was just learned behavior, the body adapting so it could get enough rest in an environment that never really had downtime. Now he wondered if those vets found the constant noise preferable. A way to keep their lost shipmates away. They probably went home after their twenty and never slept again. He opened his eyes and watched a small green telltale blink on the pilot’s console.

  It was the only light in the room, and it illuminated nothing. But its slow fade in and out was somehow comforting. A quiet heartbeat for the ship.

  He told himself that Fred was right; a trial was the right thing to hope for. But he wanted that stealth ship in Alex’s gun sights. He wanted that unknown crew to live through the terrifying moment when all the countermeasures have failed, the torpedoes are seconds from impact, and absolutely nothing can stop them.

  He wanted them to have that same last gasp of fear he’d heard through Ade’s mic.

  For a time, he displaced the ghosts in his head with violent vengeance fantasies. When they stopped working, he floated down to the personnel deck, strapped into his cot, and tried to sleep. The Rocinante sang him a lullaby of air recyclers and silence.

  Chapter Twenty: Miller

  Miller sat at an open café, the tunnel wide above him. Grass grew tall and pale in the public commons, and the ceiling glowed full-spectrum white. Ceres Station had come unmoored. Orbital mechanics and inertia kept it physically where it had always been, but the stories about it had changed. The point defenses were the same. The tensile strength of the port blast doors was the same. The ephemeral shield of political status was all they’d lost, and it was everything.

  Miller leaned forward and sipped his coffee.

  There were children playing on the commons. He thought of them as children, though he remembered thinking of himself as an adult at that age. Fifteen, sixteen years old. They wore OPA armbands. The boys spoke in loud, angry voices about tyranny and freedom. The girls watched the boys strut. The ancient, animal story, the same whether it was on a spinning rock surrounded by hard vacuum or the stamp-sized chimpanzee preserves on Earth. Even in the Belt, youth brought invulnerability, immortality, the unshakable conviction that for you, things would be different. The laws of physics would cut you a break, the missiles would never hit, the air would never hiss out into nothing. Maybe for other people—the patched-together fighting ships of the OPA, the water haulers, the Martian gunships, the Scopuli, the Canterbury, the Donnager, the hundred other ships that had died in small actions since the system had turned itself into a battlefield—but not you. And when youth was lucky enough to survive its optimism, all Miller had left was a little fear, a little envy, and the overwhelming sense of life’s fragility. But he had three month’s worth of company script in his account and a lot of f
ree time, and the coffee wasn’t bad.

  “You need anything, sir?” the waiter asked. He didn’t look any older than the kids on the grass. Miller shook his head.

  Five days had passed since Star Helix pulled its contract. The governor of Ceres was gone, smuggled out on a transport before the news had gone wide. The Outer Planets Alliance had announced the inclusion of Ceres among official OPA-held real estate, and no one had said otherwise. Miller had spent the first day of his unemployment drunk, but his bender had an oddly pro forma feel. He’d descended into the bottle because it was familiar, because it was what you did when you’d lost the career that defined you.

  The second day, he’d gotten through the hangover. The third, he’d gotten bored. All through the station, security forces were making the kind of display he’d expected, preemptive peacekeeping. The few political rallies and protests ended fast and hard, and the citizens of Ceres didn’t much care. Their eyes were on their monitors, on the war. A few locals with busted heads getting thrown into prison without charges were beneath notice. And Miller was personally responsible for none of it.

  The fourth day, he’d checked his terminal and discovered that 80 percent of his docking log requests had come through before Shaddid had shut his access down. Over a thousand entries, any one of which could be the only remaining lead to Julie Mao. So far, no Martian nukes were on their way to crack Ceres. No demands of surrender. No boarding forces. It could all change in a moment, but until it did, Miller was drinking coffee and auditing ship records, about one every fifteen minutes. Miller figured that if Holden was the last ship in the log, he’d find him in about six weeks.

  The Adrianopole, a third-gen prospector, had docked at Pallas within the arrival window. Miller checked the open registration, frustrated again at how little information was there compared to the security databases. Owned by Strego Anthony Abramowitz. Eight citations for substandard maintenance, banned from Eros and Ceres as a danger to the port. An idiot and an accident waiting to happen, but the flight plan seemed legitimate, and the history of the ship was deep enough not to smell new-minted. Miller deleted the entry.

  The Badass Motherfucker, a freight hauler doing a triangle between Luna, Ganymede, and the Belt. Owned by MYOFB Corporation out of Luna. A query to the public bases at Ganymede showed it had left the port there at the listed time and just hadn’t bothered to file a flight plan. Miller tapped the screen with a fingernail. Not exactly how he’d fly under the radar. Anyone with authority would roust that ship just for the joy of doing it. He deleted the entry.

  His terminal chimed. An incoming message. Miller flipped over to it. One of the girls on the commons shrieked and the others laughed. A sparrow flew past, its wings humming in the constant recycler-driven breeze.

  Havelock looked better than when he’d been on Ceres. Happier. The dark circles were gone from his eyes, and the shape of his face had subtly softened, as if the need to prove himself in the Belt had changed his bones and now he was falling back into his natural form.

  “Miller!” the recording said. “I heard about Earth cutting Ceres just before I got your message. Bad luck. I’m sorry to hear Shaddid fired you. Between the two of us, she’s a pompous idiot. The rumor I’ve heard is Earth is doing everything it can to stay out of the war, including giving up any station that it’s expecting to be a point of contention. You know how it is. You’ve got a pit bull on one side of you and a rottweiler on the other, first thing you do is drop your steak.”

  Miller chuckled.

  “I’ve signed on with Protogen security, big-company private army bullshit. But the pay is worth putting up with their delusions of grandeur. The contract’s supposed to be on Ganymede, but with the crap going on right now, who knows how it’ll really play out? Turns out Protogen’s got a training base in the Belt. I’d never heard about it, but it’s supposed to be quite the gymnasium. I know they’re hiring on, and I’d be happy to put in a word for you. Just let me know, and I’ll get you together with the induction recruiter, get you off that damned rock.”

  Havelock smiled.

  “Take care of yourself, partner,” the Earther said. “Keep in touch.”

  Protogen. Pinkwater. Al Abbiq. Small corporate security forces that the big transorbital companies used as private armies and mercenary forces to rent out as needed. AnnanSec had the Pallas security contract, and had for years, but it was Mars-based. The OPA was probably hiring, but probably not him.

  It had been years since he’d tried to find work. He’d assumed that particular struggle was behind him, that he was going to die working the Ceres Station security contract. Now that events had thrown him out, everything had an odd floating feeling. Like the gap between getting hit and feeling the pain. He needed to find another job. He needed to do more than send a couple messages out to his old partners. There were employment firms. There were bars on Ceres that would hire an ex-cop for a bouncer. There were gray markets that would take anyone capable of giving them a veneer of legality.

  The last thing that made sense was to sit around, ogling girls in the park and chasing down leads on a case that he hadn’t been meant to follow up on in the first place.

  The Dagon had come into Ceres just a little ahead of the arrival window. Owned by the Glapion Collective, who were, he was pretty sure, an OPA front. That made it a good fit. Except the flight plan had been put in just a few hours after the Donnager blew, and the exit record from Io looked solid. Miller shifted it into a file he was keeping for ships that earned a second look.

  The Rocinante, owned by Silencieux Courant Holdings out of Luna, was a gas hauler that had landed at Tycho just hours before the end of the arrival window. Silencieux Courant was a medium-sized corporate entity with no obvious ties to the OPA, and the flight plan from Pallas was plausible. Miller put his fingertip over the delete key, then paused. He sat back.

  Why was a gas hauler going between Pallas and Tycho? Both stations were gas consumers. Flying from consumer to consumer without hitting a supply in the middle was a good way to not cover your docking fees. He put in a request for the flight plan that had taken the Rocinante to Pallas from wherever it had been before, then sat back to wait. If the records were cached in the Ceres servers, the request shouldn’t take more than a minute or two. The notification bar estimated an hour and a half, so that meant the request was getting forwarded to the docking systems at Pallas. It hadn’t been in the local backup.

  Miller stroked his chin; five days of stubble had almost reached the beginning of a beard. He felt a smile starting. He did a definition search on Rocinante. Literally meaning “no longer a workhorse,” its first entry was as the name of Don Quixote’s horse.

  “That you, Holden?” Miller said to the screen. “You out tilting at windmills?”

  “Sir?” the waiter said, but Miller waved him away.

  There were hundreds of entries still to be looked at and dozens at least in his second-look folder. Miller ignored them, staring at the entry from Tycho as if by sheer force of will he could make more information appear on the screen. Then, slowly, he pulled up the message from Havelock, hit the respond key, and looked into the tiny black pinprick of the terminal’s camera.

  “Hey, partner,” he said. “Thanks for the offer. I may take you up on it, but I’ve got some kinks I need to work out before I jump. You know how it is. If you can do me a favor, though… I need to keep track of a ship, and I’ve only got the public databases to work from, plus which Ceres may be at war with Mars by now. Who knows, you know? Anyway, if you can put a level one watch on any flight plans for her, drop me a note if anything comes up… I’d buy you a drink sometime.”

  He paused. There had to be something more to say.

  “Take care of yourself, partner.”

  He reviewed the message. On-screen, he looked tired, the smile a little fake, the voice a little higher than it sounded in his head. But it said what it needed to say. He sent it.

  This was what he’d been reduced to. Access gon
e, service gun confiscated—though he still had a couple of drops in his hole—money running out. He had to play the angles, call in favors for things that should have been routine, outthink the system for any scrap. He’d been a cop, and they’d turned him into a mouse. Still, he thought, sitting back in the chair. Pretty good work for a mouse.

  The sound of detonation came from spinward, then voices raised in anger. The kids on the commons stopped their games of touch-me touch-you and stared. Miller stood up. There was smoke, but he couldn’t see flames. The breeze picked up as the station air cleaners raised the flow to suck away particulates so the sensors didn’t think there was a risk of fanning a fire. Three gunshots rang out in fast succession, and the voices came together in a rough chant. Miller couldn’t make words out of it, but the rhythm told him all he needed to know. Not a disaster, not a fire, not a breach. Just a riot.

  The kids were walking toward the commotion. Miller caught one by the elbow. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, her eyes near black, her face a perfect heart shape.

  “Don’t go over there,” he said. “Get your friends together and walk the other way.”

  The girl looked at him, his hand on her arm, the distant commotion.

  “You can’t help,” he said.

  She pulled her arm free.

  “Gotta try, yeah?” she said. “Podría intentar, you know.” You could too.

  “Just did,” Miller said as he put his terminal in its case and walked away. Behind him, the sounds of the riot grew. But he figured the police could take care of it.

  Over the next fourteen hours, the system net reported five riots on the station, some minor structural damage. Someone he’d never heard of announced a tri-phase curfew; people out of their holes more than two hours before or after their work shifts would be subject to arrest. Whoever was running the show now thought they could lock down six million people and create stability and peace. He wondered what Shaddid thought about that.