The Dragon's Path

  “And now?”

  “And now nothing,” Miller said. “That’s what I don’t get. Someone took out a Golden Bough purse boy, and there’s no payback. I mean, okay, Bomie’s a bottom-feeder, but… ”

  “But once they start eating the little guys, there’s less money coming up to the big guys,” Havelock said. “So why hasn’t the Golden Bough meted out some gangster justice?”

  “I don’t like this,” Miller said.

  Havelock laughed. “Belters,” he said. “One thing goes weird and you think the whole ecosystem’s crashing. If the Golden Bough’s too weak to keep its claims, that’s a good thing. They’re the bad guys, remember?”

  “Yeah, well,” Miller said. “Say what you will about organized crime, at least it’s organized.”

  Havelock sat on the small plastic chair beside Miller’s desk and craned to watch the playback.

  “Okay,” Havelock said. “What the hell is the ‘forgotten arm’?”

  “Boxing term,” Miller said. “It’s the hit you didn’t see coming.”

  The computer chimed and Captain Shaddid’s voice came from the speakers.

  “Miller? Are you there?”

  “Mmm,” Havelock said. “Bad omen.”

  “What?” the captain asked, her voice sharp. She had never quite overcome her prejudice against Havelock’s inner planet origins. Miller held up a hand to silence his partner.

  “Here, Captain. What can I do for you?”

  “Meet me in my office, please.”

  “On my way,” he said.

  Miller stood, and Havelock slid into his chair. They didn’t speak. Both of them knew that Captain Shaddid would have called them in together if she’d wanted Havelock to be there. Another reason the man would never make senior detective. Miller left him alone with the playback, trying to parse the fine points of class and station, origin and race. Lifetime’s work, that.

  Captain Shaddid’s office was decorated in a soft, feminine style. Real cloth tapestries hung from the walls, and the scent of coffee and cinnamon came from an insert in her air filter that cost about a tenth of what the real foodstuffs would have. She wore her uniform casually, her hair down around her shoulders in violation of corporate regulations. If Miller had ever been called upon to describe her, the phrase deceptive coloration would have figured in. She nodded to a chair, and he sat.

  “What have you found?” she asked, but her gaze was on the wall behind him. This wasn’t a pop quiz; she was just making conversation.

  “Golden Bough’s looking the same as Sohiro’s crew and the Loca Greiga. Still on station, but… distracted, I guess I’d call it. They’re letting little things slide. Fewer thugs on the ground, less enforcement. I’ve got half a dozen mid-level guys who’ve gone dark.”

  He’d caught her attention.

  “Killed?” she asked. “An OPA advance?”

  An advance by the Outer Planets Alliance was the constant bogeyman of Ceres security. Living in the tradition of Al Capone and Hamas, the IRA and the Red Martials, the OPA was beloved by the people it helped and feared by the ones who got in its way. Part social movement, part wannabe nation, and part terrorist network, it totally lacked an institutional conscience. Captain Shaddid might not like Havelock because he was from down a gravity well, but she’d work with him. The OPA would have put him in an airlock. People like Miller would only rate getting a bullet in the skull, and a nice plastic one at that. Nothing that might get shrapnel in the ductwork.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “It doesn’t smell like a war. It’s… Honestly, sir, I don’t know what the hell it is. The numbers are great. Protection’s down, unlicensed gambling’s down. Cooper and Hariri shut down the underage whorehouse up on six, and as far as anyone can tell, it hasn’t started up again. There’s a little more action by independents, but that aside, it’s all looking great. It just smells funny.”

  She nodded, but her gaze was back on the wall. He’d lost her interest as quickly as he’d gotten it.

  “Well, put it aside,” she said. “I have something. New contract. Just you. Not Havelock.”

  Miller crossed his arms.

  “New contract,” he said slowly. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning Star Helix Security has accepted a contract for services separate from the Ceres security assignment, and in my role as site manager for the corporation, I’m assigning you to it.”

  “I’m fired?” he said.

  Captain Shaddid looked pained.

  “It’s additional duty,” she said. “You’ll still have the Ceres assignments you have now. It’s just that, in addition… Look, Miller, I think this is as shitty as you do. I’m not pulling you off station. I’m not taking you off the main contract. This is a favor someone down on Earth is doing for a shareholder.”

  “We’re doing favors for shareholders now?” Miller asked.

  “You are, yes,” Captain Shaddid said. The softness was gone; the conciliatory tone was gone. Her eyes were dark as wet stone.

  “Right, then,” Miller said. “I guess I am.”

  Captain Shaddid held up her hand terminal. Miller fumbled at his side, pulled out his own, and accepted the narrow-beam transfer. Whatever this was, Shaddid was keeping it off the common network. A new file tree, labeled JMAO, appeared on his readout.

  “It’s a little-lost-daughter case,” Captain Shaddid said. “Ariadne and Jules-Pierre Mao.”

  The names rang a bell. Miller pressed his fingertips onto the screen of his hand terminal.

  “Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile?” he asked.

  “The one.”

  Miller whistled low.

  Maokwik might not have been one of the top ten corporations in the Belt, but it was certainly in the upper fifty. Originally, it had been a legal firm involved in the epic failure of the Venusian cloud cities. They’d used the money from that decades-long lawsuit to diversify and expand, mostly into interplanetary transport. Now the corporate station was independent, floating between the Belt and the inner planets with the regal majesty of an ocean liner on ancient seas. The simple fact that Miller knew that much about them meant they had enough money to buy and sell men like him on open exchange.

  He’d just been bought.

  “They’re Luna-based,” Captain Shaddid said. “All the rights and privileges of Earth citizenship. But they do a lot of shipping business out here.”

  “And they misplaced a daughter?”

  “Black sheep,” the captain said. “Went off to college, got involved with a group called the Far Horizons Foundation. Student activists.”

  “OPA front,” Miller said.

  “Associated,” Shaddid corrected him. Miller let it pass, but a flicker of curiosity troubled him. He wondered which side Captain Shaddid would be on if the OPA attacked. “The family put it down to a phase. They’ve got two older children with controlling interest, so if Julie wanted to bounce around vacuum calling herself a freedom fighter, there was no real harm.”

  “But now they want her found,” Miller said.

  “They do.”

  “What changed?”

  “They didn’t see fit to share that information.”

  “Right.”

  “Last records show she was employed on Tycho Station but maintained an apartment here. I’ve found her partition on the network and locked it down. The password is in your files.”

  “Okay,” Miller said. “What’s my contract?”

  “Find Julie Mao, detain her, and ship her home.”

  “A kidnap job, then,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  Miller stared down at his hand terminal, flicking the files open without particularly looking at them. A strange knot had tied itself in his guts. He’d been working Ceres security for sixteen years, and he hadn’t started with many illusions in place. The joke was that Ceres didn’t have laws—it had police. His hands weren’t any cleaner than Captain Shaddid’s. Sometimes people fell out airlocks. Sometimes evidence vanished from the lockers. It w
asn’t so much that it was right or wrong as that it was justified. You spent your life in a stone bubble with your food, your water, your air shipped in from places so distant you could barely find them with a telescope, and a certain moral flexibility was necessary. But he’d never had to take a kidnap job before.

  “Problem, Detective?” Captain Shaddid asked.

  “No, sir,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Don’t spend too much time on it,” she said.

  “Yes, sir. Anything else?”

  Captain Shaddid’s hard eyes softened, like she was putting on a mask. She smiled.

  “Everything going well with your partner?”

  “Havelock’s all right,” Miller said. “Having him around makes people like me better by contrast. That’s nice.”

  Her smile’s only change was to become half a degree more genuine. Nothing like a little shared racism to build ties with the boss. Miller nodded respectfully and headed out.

  His hole was on the eighth level, off a residential tunnel a hundred meters wide with fifty meters of carefully cultivated green park running down the center. The main corridor’s vaulted ceiling was lit by recessed lights and painted a blue that Havelock assured him matched the Earth’s summer sky. Living on the surface of a planet, mass sucking at every bone and muscle, and nothing but gravity to keep your air close, seemed like a fast path to crazy. The blue was nice, though.

  Some people followed Captain Shaddid’s lead by perfuming their air. Not always with coffee and cinnamon scents, of course. Havelock’s hole smelled of baking bread. Others opted for floral scents or semipheromones. Candace, Miller’s ex-wife, had preferred something called EarthLily, which had always made him think of the waste recycling levels. These days, he left it at the vaguely astringent smell of the station itself. Recycled air that had passed through a million lungs. Water from the tap so clean it could be used for lab work, but it had been piss and shit and tears and blood and would be again. The circle of life on Ceres was so small you could see the curve. He liked it that way.

  He poured a glass of moss whiskey, a native Ceres liquor made from engineered yeast, then took off his shoes and settled onto the foam bed. He could still see Candace’s disapproving scowl and hear her sigh. He shrugged apology to her memory and turned back to work.

  Juliette Andromeda Mao. He read through her work history, her academic records. Talented pinnace pilot. There was a picture of her at eighteen in a tailored vac suit with the helmet off: pretty girl with a thin, lunar citizen’s frame and long black hair. She was grinning like the universe had given her a kiss. The linked text said she’d won first place in something called the Parrish/Dorn 500K. He searched briefly. Some kind of race only really rich people could afford to fly in. Her pinnace—the Razorback—had beaten the previous record and held it for two years.

  Miller sipped his whiskey and wondered what had happened to the girl with enough wealth and power to own a private ship that would bring her here. It was a long way from competing in expensive space races to being hog-tied and sent home in a pod. Or maybe it wasn’t.

  “Poor little rich girl,” Miller said to the screen. “Sucks to be you, I guess.”

  He closed the files and drank quietly and seriously, staring at the blank ceiling above him. The chair where Candace used to sit and ask him about his day stood empty, but he could see her there anyway. Now that she wasn’t here to make him talk, it was easier to respect the impulse. She’d been lonely. He could see that now. In his imagination, she rolled her eyes.

  An hour later, his blood warm with drink, he heated up a bowl of real rice and fake beans—yeast and fungus could mimic anything if you had enough whiskey first—opened the door of his hole, and ate dinner looking out at the traffic gently curving by. The second shift streamed into the tube stations and then out of them. The kids who lived two holes down—a girl of eight and her brother of four—met their father with hugs, squeals, mutual accusations, and tears. The blue ceiling glowed in its reflected light, unchanging, static, reassuring. A sparrow fluttered down the tunnel, hovering in a way that Havelock assured him they couldn’t on Earth. Miller threw it a fake bean.

  He tried to think about the Mao girl, but in truth he didn’t much care. Something was happening to the organized crime families of Ceres, and it made him jumpy as hell.

  This thing with Julie Mao? It was a sideshow.

  Chapter Three: Holden

  After nearly two full days in high gravity, Holden’s knees and back and neck ached. And his head. Hell, his feet. He walked in the crew hatch of the Knight just as Naomi was climbing up the ladder from its cargo bay. She smiled and gave him a thumbs-up.

  “The salvage mech is locked down,” she said. “Reactor is warming up. We’re ready to fly.”

  “Good.”

  “We got a pilot yet?” she asked.

  “Alex Kamal is on the ready rotation today, so he’s our man. I kind of wish Valka had been up. He’s not the pilot Alex is, but he’s quieter, and my head hurts.”

  “I like Alex. He’s ebullient,” Naomi said.

  “I don’t know what ebullient means, but if it means Alex, it makes me tired.”

  Holden started up the ladder to ops and the cockpit. In the shiny black surface of a deactivated wall panel, Naomi’s reflection smirked at his back. He couldn’t understand how Belters, thin as pencils, bounced back from high g so quickly. Decades of practice and selective breeding, he assumed.

  In ops, Holden strapped into the command console, the crash couch material silently conforming to his body. At the half g Ade put them on for the final approach, the foam felt good. He let a small groan slip out. The switches, plastic and metal made to withstand hard g and hundreds of years, clicked sharply. The Knight responded with an array of glowing diagnostic indicators and a near-subliminal hum.

  A few minutes later, Holden glanced over to see Alex Kamal’s thinning black hair appear, followed by his round cheerful face, a deep brown that years of shipboard life couldn’t pale. Martian-raised, Alex had a frame that was thicker than a Belter’s. He was slender compared to Holden, and even so, his flight suit stretched tight against his spreading waistline. Alex had flown in the Martian navy, but he’d clearly given up on the military-style fitness routine.

  “Howdy, XO,” he drawled. The old west affectation common to everyone from the Mariner Valley annoyed Holden. There hadn’t been a cowboy on Earth in a hundred years, and Mars didn’t have a blade of grass that wasn’t under a dome, or a horse that wasn’t in a zoo. Mariner Valley had been settled by East Indians, Chinese, and a small contingent of Texans. Apparently, the drawl was viral. They all had it now. “How’s the old warhorse today?”

  “Smooth so far. We need a flight plan. Ade will be bringing us to relative stop in”—he checked the time readout—“forty, so work fast. I want to get out, get it done, and get the Cant back on course to Ceres before she starts rusting.”

  “Roger that,” Alex said, climbing up to the Knight’s cockpit.

  Holden’s headset clicked; then Naomi’s voice said, “Amos and Shed are aboard. We’re all ready down here.”

  “Thanks. Just waiting on flight numbers from Alex and we’ll be ready to go.”

  The crew was the minimum necessary: Holden as command, Alex to get them there and back, Shed in case there were survivors to treat, Naomi and Amos for salvage if there weren’t.

  It wasn’t long before Alex called down, “Okay, Boss. It’ll be about a four-hour trip flyin’ teakettle. Total mass use at about thirty percent, but we’ve got a full tank. Total mission time: eleven hours.”

  “Copy that. Thanks, Alex,” Holden said.

  Flying teakettle was naval slang for flying on the maneuvering thrusters that used superheated steam for reaction mass. The Knight’s fusion torch would be dangerous to use this close to the Canterbury and wasteful on such a short trip. Torches were pre-Epstein fusion drives and far less efficient.

  “Calling for permission to leave the b
arn,” Holden said, and clicked from internal comm to the link with the Canterbury’s bridge. “Holden here. Knight is ready to fly.”

  “Okay, Jim, go ahead,” McDowell said. “Ade’s bringing her to a stop now. You kids be careful out there. That shuttle is expensive and I’ve always sort of had a thing for Naomi.”

  “Roger that, Captain,” Holden said. Back on the internal comm, he buzzed Alex. “Go ahead and take us out.”

  Holden leaned back in his chair and listened to the creaks of the Canterbury’s final maneuvers, the steel and ceramics as loud and ominous as the wood planks of a sailing ship. Or an Earther’s joints after high g. For a moment, Holden felt sympathy for the ship.

  They weren’t really stopping, of course. Nothing in space ever actually stopped; it only came into a matching orbit with some other object. They were now following CA-2216862 on its merry millennium-long trip around the sun.

  Ade sent them the green light, and Holden emptied out the hangar bay air and popped the doors. Alex took them out of the dock on white cones of superheated steam.

  They went to find the Scopuli.

  CA-2216862 was a rock a half kilometer across that had wandered away from the Belt and been yanked around by Jupiter’s enormous gravity. It had eventually found its own slow orbit around the sun in the vast expanse between Jupiter and the Belt, territory empty even for space.

  The sight of the Scopuli resting gently against the asteroid’s side, held in place by the rock’s tiny gravity, gave Holden a chill. Even if it was flying blind, every instrument dead, its odds of hitting such an object by chance were infinitesimally low. It was a half-kilometer-wide roadblock on a highway millions of kilometers in diameter. It hadn’t arrived there by accident. He scratched the hairs standing up on the back of his neck.

  “Alex, hold us at two klicks out,” Holden said. “Naomi, what can you tell me about that ship?”

  “Hull configuration matches the registry information. It’s definitely the Scopuli. She’s not radiating in the electromagnetic or infrared. Just that little distress beacon. Looks like the reactor’s shut down. Must have been manual and not damage, because we aren’t getting any radiation leakage either,” Naomi said.