The Dragon’s Path

by Abraham Daniel

  “Here,” Naomi replied, and hit something on her panel. The screen began displaying long lists of data in text. “Lots of EM and light spectrum stuff, some leakage from damaged—”

  Holden yelped. Naomi looked up at him.

  “I’m such an idiot,” Holden said.

  “Granted. Elaborate?”

  Holden touched the screen and began scrolling up and down through the data. He tapped one long list of numbers and letters and leaned back with a grin.

  “There, that’s it,” he said.

  “That’s what?”

  “Hull structure isn’t the only recognition metric. It’s the most accurate, but it’s also got the shortest range and”—he gestured around him at the Rocinante—“is the easiest to fool. The next best method is drive signature. Can’t mask your radiation and heat patterns. And they’re easy to spot even from really far away.”

  Holden turned on the screen next to his chair and pulled up the ship’s friend/foe database, then linked it to the data on Naomi’s screen.

  “That’s what this message is, Naomi. It’s telling Mars who killed the Donnager by showing them what the drive signature was.”

  “Then why not just say, ‘So-and-so killed us,’ in a nice easy-to-read text file?” Naomi asked, a skeptical frown on her face.

  Holden leaned forward and paused, opened his mouth, then closed it and sat back again with a sigh.

  “I don’t know.”

  A hatch banged open with a hydraulic whine; then Naomi looked past Holden to the ladder and said, “Miller’s coming up.”

  Holden turned to watch the detective finish the slow climb up from the sick bay deck. He looked like a plucked chicken, pink-gray skin stippled with gooseflesh. His paper gown went poorly with the hat.

  “Uh, there’s a lift,” Holden said.

  “Wish I’d known that,” Miller replied, then dragged himself up onto the ops deck with a gasp. “We there yet?”

  “Trying to figure out a mystery,” Holden said.

  “I hate mysteries,” Miller said, then hauled himself to his feet and made his way to a chair.

  “Then solve this one for us. You find out who murdered someone. You can’t arrest them yourself, so you send the information to your partner. But instead of just sending the perp’s name, you send your partner all the clues. Why?”

  Miller coughed and scratched his chin. His eyes were fixed on something, like he was reading a screen Holden couldn’t see.

  “Because I don’t trust myself. I want my partner to arrive at the same conclusion I did, without my biasing him. I give him the dots, see what it looks like when he connects ’em.”

  “Especially if guessing wrong has consequences,” Naomi said.

  “You don’t like to screw up a murder charge,” Miller said with a nod. “Looks unprofessional.”

  Holden’s panel beeped at him.

  “Shit, I know why they were careful,” he said after reading his screen. “The Roci thinks those were standard light-cruiser engines built by the Bush Shipyards.”

  “They were Earth ships?” Naomi said. “But they weren’t flying any colors, and… Son of a bitch!”

  It was the first time Holden had ever heard her yell, and he understood. If UNN black ops ships had killed the Donnager, then that meant Earth was behind the whole thing. Maybe even killing the Canterbury in the first place. It would mean that Martian warships were killing Belters for no reason. Belters like Naomi.

  Holden leaned forward and called up the comm display, then tapped out a general broadcast. Miller caught his breath.

  “That button you just pressed doesn’t do what I think it does, does it?” he said.

  “I finished Kelly’s mission for him,” Holden said.

  “I have no idea who the fuck Kelly is,” Miller said, “but please tell me that his mission wasn’t broadcasting that data to the solar system at large.”

  “People need to know what’s going on,” Holden said.

  “Yes, they do, but maybe we should actually know what the hell is going on before we tell them,” Miller replied, all the weariness gone from his voice. “How gullible are you?”

  “Hey,” Holden said, but Miller got louder.

  “You found a Martian battery, right? So you told everyone in the solar system about it and started the single largest war in human history. Only turns out the Martians maybe weren’t the ones that left it there. Then, a bunch of mystery ships kill the Donnager, which Mars blames on the Belt, only, dammit, the Belt didn’t even know it was capable of killing a Martian battle cruiser.”

  Holden opened his mouth, but Miller grabbed a bulb of coffee Amos had left behind on the console and threw it at his head.

  “Let me finish! And now you find some data that implicates Earth. First thing you do is blab it to the universe, so that Mars and the Belt drag Earth into this thing, making the largest war of all time even bigger. Are you seeing a pattern here?”

  “Yes,” Naomi said.

  “So what do you think’s going to happen?” Miller said. “This is how these people work! They made the Canterbury look like Mars. It wasn’t. They made the Donnager look like the Belt. It wasn’t. Now it looks like the whole damn thing’s Earth? Follow the pattern. It probably isn’t! You never, never put that kind of accusation out there until you know the score. You look. You listen. You’re quiet, fercrissakes, and when you know, then you can make your case.”

  The detective sat back, clearly exhausted. He was sweating. The deck was silent.

  “You done?” Holden said.

  Miller nodded, breathing heavily. “Think I might have strained something.”

  “I haven’t accused anyone of doing anything,” Holden said. “I’m not building a case. I just put the data out there. Now it’s not a secret. They’re doing something on Eros. They don’t want it interrupted. With Mars and the Belt shooting at each other, everyone with the resources to help is busy elsewhere.”

  “And you just dragged Earth into it,” Miller said.

  “Maybe,” Holden said. “But the killers did use ships that were built, at least in part, at Earth’s orbital shipyards. Maybe someone will look into that. And that’s the point. If everyone knows everything, nothing stays secret.”

  “Yeah, well,” Miller said. Holden ignored him

  “Eventually, someone’ll figure out the big picture. This kind of thing requires secrecy to function, so exposing all the secrets hurts them in the end. It’s the only way this really, permanently stops.”

  Miller sighed, nodded to himself, took off his hat, and scratched his scalp.

  “I was just going to put ’em out an airlock,” Miller said.

  BA834024112 wasn’t much of an asteroid. Barely thirty meters across, it had long ago been surveyed and found completely devoid of useful or valuable minerals. It existed in the registry only to warn ships not to run into it. Julie had left it tethered to wealth measured in the billions when she flew her small shuttle to Eros.

  Up close, the ship that had killed the Scopuli and stolen its crew looked like a shark. It was long and lean and utterly black, almost impossible to see against the backdrop of space with the naked eye. Its radar-deflecting curves gave it an aerodynamic look almost always lacking in space-going vessels. It made Holden’s skin crawl, but it was beautiful.

  “Motherfucker,” Amos said under his breath as the crew clustered in the cockpit of the Rocinante to look at it.

  “The Roci doesn’t even see it, Cap,” Alex said. “I’m pourin’ ladar into it, and all we see is a slightly warmer spot on the asteroid.”

  “Like Becca saw just before the Cant died,” Naomi said.

  “Her shuttle’s been launched, so I’m guessin’ this is the right stealth ship someone left tied to a rock,” Alex added. “Case there’s more than one.”

  Holden tapped his fingers on the back of Alex’s chair for a moment as he floated over the pilot’s head.

  “It’s probably full of vomit zombies,” Holden finally
said.

  “Want to go see?” said Miller.

  “Oh yeah,” Holden said.

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Miller

  The environment suit was better than Miller was used to. He’d only done a couple walks outside during his years on Ceres, and the Star Helix equipment had been old back then: thick corrugated joints, separable air-supply unit, gloves that left his hands thirty degrees colder than the rest of his body. The Rocinante’s suits were military and recent, no bulkier than standard riot gear, with integrated life support that could probably keep fingers warm after a hand got shot off. Miller floated, one hand on a strap in the airlock, and flexed his fingers, watching the sharkskin pattern of the knuckle joints.

  It didn’t feel like enough.

  “All right, Alex,” Holden said. “We’re in place. Have the Roci knock for us.”

  A deep, rumbling vibration shook them. Naomi put a hand against the airlock’s curved wall to steady herself. Amos shifted forward to take point, a reactionless automatic rifle in his hands. When he bent his neck, Miller could hear the vertebrae cracking through his radio. It was the only way he could have heard it; they were already in vacuum.

  “Okay, Captain,” Alex said. “I’ve got a seal. The standard security override isn’t working, so give me a second… to… ”

  “Problem?” Holden said.

  “Got it. I’ve got it. We have a connection,” Alex said. Then, a moment later: “Ah. It doesn’t look like there’s much to breathe over there.”

  “Anything?” Holden asked.

  “Nope. Hard vacuum,” Alex said. “Both her lock doors are open.”

  “All right, folks,” Holden said, “keep an eye on your air supply. Let’s go.”

  Miller took a long breath. The external airlock went from soft red to soft green. Holden slid it open, and Amos launched forward, the captain just behind him. Miller gestured to Naomi with a nod. Ladies first.

  The connecting gantry was reinforced, ready to deflect enemy lasers or slow down slugs. Amos landed on the other ship as the hatch to the Rocinante closed behind them. Miller had a moment’s vertigo, the ship before them suddenly clicking from ahead to down in his perception, as if they were falling into something.

  “You all right?” Naomi asked.

  Miller nodded, and Amos passed into the other ship’s hatch. One by one, they went in.

  The ship was dead. The lights coming off their environment suits played over the soft, almost streamlined curves of the bulkheads, the cushioned walls, the gray suit lockers. One locker was bent out of shape, like someone or something had forced its way out from within. Amos pushed off slow. Under normal circumstances, hard vacuum would have been assurance enough that nothing was about to jump out at them. Right now, Miller figured it was only even money.

  “Whole place is shut down,” Holden said.

  “Might be backups in the engine room,” Amos said.

  “So the ass end of the ship from here,” Holden said.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Let’s be careful,” Holden said.

  “I’m heading up to ops,” Naomi said. “If there’s anything running off battery, I can—”

  “No, you aren’t,” Holden said. “We aren’t splitting up the group until we know what we’re looking at. Stay together.”

  Amos moved down, sinking into the darkness. Holden pushed off after him. Miller followed. He couldn’t tell from Naomi’s body language whether she was annoyed or relieved.

  The galley was empty, but signs of struggle showed here and there. A chair with a bent leg. A long, jagged scratch down the wall where something sharp had flaked the paint. Two bullet holes set high along one bulkhead where a shot had gone wide. Miller put a hand out, grabbed one of the tables, and swung slowly.

  “Miller?” Holden said. “Are you coming?”

  “Look at this,” Miller said.

  The dark spill was the color of amber, flaky and shining like glass in his flashlight beam. Holden hovered closer.

  “Zombie vomit?” Holden said.

  “Think so.”

  “Well. I guess we’re on the right ship. For some value of right.”

  The crew quarters hung silent and empty. They went through each of them, but there were no personal markings—no terminals, no pictures, no clues to the names of the men and women who had lived and breathed and presumably died on the ship. Even the captain’s cabin was indicated only by a slightly larger bunk and the face of a locked safe.

  There was a massive central compartment as high and wide as the hull of the Rocinante, the darkness dominated by twelve huge cylinders encrusted with narrow catwalks and scaffolds. Miller saw Naomi’s expression harden.

  “What are they?” Miller asked.

  “Torpedo tubes,” she said.

  “Torpedo tubes?” he said. “Jesus Christ, how many are they packing? A million?”

  “Twelve,” she said. “Just twelve.”

  “Capital-ship busters,” Amos said. “Built to pretty much kill whatever you’re aiming at with the first shot.”

  “Something like the Donnager?” Miller asked.

  Holden looked back at him, the glow of his heads-up display lighting his features.

  “Or the Canterbury,” he said.

  The four of them passed between the wide black tubes in silence.

  In the machine and fabrication shops, the signs of violence were more pronounced. There was blood on the floor and walls, along with wide swaths of the glassy gold resin that had once been vomit. A uniform lay in a ball. The cloth had been wadded and soaked in something before the cold of space had frozen it. Habits formed from years of walking through crime scenes put a dozen small things in place: the pattern of scratches on the floor and lift doors, the spatter of blood and vomit, the footprints. They all told the story.

  “They’re in engineering,” Miller said.

  “Who?” Holden said.

  “The crew. Whoever was on the ship. All except that one,” he said, gesturing at half a footprint that led toward the lift. “You see how her footprints are over the top of everything else. And there, where she stepped in that blood, it was already dry. Flaked instead of smearing.”

  “How you know it was a girl?” Holden asked.

  “Because it was Julie,” Miller said.

  “Well, whoever’s in there, they’ve been sucking vacuum for a long time,” Amos said. “Want to go see?”

  No one said yes, but they all floated forward. The hatch stood open. If the darkness beyond it seemed more solid, more ominous, more personal than the rest of the dead ship had, it was only Miller’s imagination playing tricks. He hesitated, trying to summon up the image of Julie, but she wouldn’t come.

  Floating into the engineering deck was like swimming into a cave. Miller saw the other flashlights playing over walls and panels, looking for live controls, or else controls that could come alive. He aimed his own beam into the body of the room, the dark swallowing it.

  “We got batteries, Cap’n,” Amos said. “And… looks like the reactor got shut down. Intentional.”

  “Think you can get it back up?”

  “Want to run some diagnostics,” Amos said. “There could be a reason they shut it off, and I don’t want to find out the hard way.”

  “Good point.”

  “But I can at least get us… some… come on, you bastard.”

  All around the deck, blue-white lights flared up. The sudden brilliance blinded Miller for a half second. His vision returned with a sense of growing confusion. Naomi gasped, and Holden yelped. Something in the back of Miller’s own mind started to shriek, and he forced it into silence. It was just a crime scene. They were only bodies.

  Except they weren’t.

  The reactor stood before him, quiescent and dead. All around it, a layer of human flesh. He could pick out arms, hands with fingers splayed so wide they hurt to look at. The long snake of a spine curved, ribs fanning out like the legs of some perverse insect. He tried to make what
he was seeing make sense. He’d seen men eviscerated before. He knew that the long, ropy swirl to the left of the thing were intestines. He could see where the small bowel widened to become a colon. The familiar shape of a skull looked out at him.

  But then, among the familiar anatomy of death and dismemberment, there were other things: nautilus spirals, wide swaths of soft black filament, a pale expanse of something that might have been skin cut by a dozen gill-like vents, a half-formed limb that looked equally like an insect and a fetus without being either one. The frozen, dead flesh surrounded the reactor like the skin of an orange. The crew of the stealth ship. Maybe of the Scopuli as well.

  All but Julie.

  “Yeah,” Amos said. “This could take a little longer than I was thinking, Cap.”

  “It’s okay,” Holden said. His voice on the radio sounded shaky. “You don’t have to.”

  “It’s no trouble. As long as none of that freaky shit broke the containment, reactor should boot up just fine.”

  “You don’t mind being around… it?” Holden said.

  “Honest, Cap’n, I’m not thinking about it. Give me twenty minutes, I’ll tell you if we got power or if we have to patch a line over from the Roci.”

  “Okay,” Holden said. And then again, his voice more solid: “Okay, but don’t touch any of that.”

  “Wasn’t going to,” Amos said.

  They floated back out through the hatch, Holden and Naomi and Miller coming last.

  “Is that… ” Naomi said, then coughed and started again. “Is that what’s happening on Eros?”

  “Probably,” Miller said.

  “Amos,” Holden said. “Do you have enough battery power to light up the computers?”

  There was a pause. Miller took a deep breath, the plastic-and-ozone scent of the suit’s air system filling his nose.

  “I think so,” Amos said dubiously. “But if we can get the reactor up first… ”

  “Bring up the computers.”

  “You’re the captain, Cap’n,” Amos said. “Have it to you in five.”

  In silence, they floated up—back—to the airlock, and past it to the operations deck. Miller hung back, watching the way Holden’s trajectory kept him near Naomi and then away from her.