The Dragon's Path

  The architecture of Eros had changed since its birth. Where once it had been like Ceres—webworked tunnels leading along the path of widest connection—Eros had learned from the flow of money: All paths led to the casino level. If you wanted to go anywhere, you passed through the wide whale belly of lights and displays. Poker, blackjack, roulette, tall fish tanks filled with prize trout to be caught and gutted, mechanical slots, electronic slots, cricket races, craps, rigged tests of skill. Flashing lights, dancing neon clowns, and video screen advertisements blasted the eyes. Loud artificial laughter and merry whistles and bells assured you that you were having the time of your life. All while the smell of thousands of people packed into too small a space competed with the scent of heavily spiced vat-grown meat being hawked from carts rolling down the corridor. Greed and casino design had turned Eros into an architectural cattle run.

  Which was exactly what Miller needed.

  The tube station that arrived from the port had six wide doors, which emptied to the casino floor. Miller accepted a drink from a tired-looking woman in a G-string and bared breasts and found a screen to stand at that afforded him a view of all six doors. The crew of the Rocinante had no choice but to come through one of those. He checked his hand terminal. The docking logs showed the ship had arrived ten minutes earlier. Miller pretended to sip his drink and settled in to wait.

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Holden

  The casino level of Eros was an all-out assault on the senses. Holden hated it.

  “I love this place,” Amos said, grinning.

  Holden pushed his way through a knot of drunk middle-aged gamblers, who were laughing and yelling, to a small open space near a row of pay-by-the-minute wall terminals.

  “Amos,” he said, “we’ll be going to a less touristy level, so watch our backs. The flophouse we’re looking for is in a rough neighborhood.”

  Amos nodded. “Gotcha, Cap.”

  While Naomi, Alex, and Amos blocked him from view, Holden reached behind his back to adjust the pistol that pulled uncomfortably on his waistband. The cops on Eros were pretty uptight about people walking around with guns, but there was no way he was going to “Lionel Polanski” unarmed. Amos and Alex were both carrying too, though Amos kept his in the right pocket of his jacket and his hand never left it. Only Naomi flatly refused to carry a gun.

  Holden led the group toward the nearest escalators, with Amos, casting the occasional glance behind, in the rear. The casinos of Eros stretched for three seemingly endless levels, and even though they moved as quickly as possible, it took half an hour to get away from the noise and crowds. The first level above was a residential neighborhood and disorientingly quiet and neat after the casino’s chaos and noise. Holden sat down on the edge of a planter with a nice array of ferns in it and caught his breath.

  “I’m with you, Captain. Five minutes in that place gives me a headache,” Naomi said, and sat down next to him.

  “You kidding me?” Amos said. “I wish we had more time. Alex and I took almost a grand off those fish at the Tycho card tables. We’d probably walk out of here fucking millionaires.”

  “You know it,” Alex said, and punched the big mechanic on the shoulder.

  “Well, if this Polanski thing turns out to be nothing, you have my permission to go make us a million dollars at the card tables. I’ll wait for you on the ship,” Holden said.

  The tube system ended at the first casino level and didn’t start again until the level they were on. You could choose not to spend your money at the tables, but they made sure you were punished for doing so. Once the crew had climbed into a car and started the ride to Lionel’s hotel, Amos sat down next to Holden.

  “Somebody’s following us, Cap,” he said conversationally. “Wasn’t sure till he climbed on a couple cars down. Behind us all through the casinos too.”

  Holden sighed and put his face in his hands.

  “Okay, what’s he look like?” he said.

  “Belter. Fifties, or maybe forties with a lot mileage. White shirt and dark pants. Goofy hat.”

  “Cop?”

  “Oh yeah. But no holster I can see,” Amos said.

  “All right. Keep an eye on him, but no need to get too worried. Nothing we’re doing here is illegal,” Holden said.

  “You mean, other than arriving in our stolen Martian warship, sir?” Naomi asked.

  “You mean our perfectly legitimate gas freighter that all the paperwork and registry data says is perfectly legitimate?” Holden replied with a thin smile. “Yeah, well, if they’d seen through that, they would have stopped us at the dock, not followed us around.”

  An advertising screen on the wall displayed a stunning view of multicolored clouds rippling with flashes of lightning, and encouraged Holden to take a trip to the amazing dome resorts on Titan. He’d never been to Titan. Suddenly he wanted to go there very much. A few weeks of sleeping late, eating in fine restaurants, and lying on a hammock, watching Titan’s colorful atmosphere storm above him sounded like heaven. Hell, as long as he was fantasizing, he threw in Naomi walking over to his hammock with a couple of fruity-looking drinks in her hands.

  She ruined it by talking.

  “This is our stop,” she said.

  “Amos, watch our friend, see if he gets off the train with us,” Holden said as he got up and headed to the door.

  After they got off and walked a dozen steps down the corridor, Amos whispered, “Yep,” at his back. Shit. Well, definitely a tail, but there wasn’t really any reason not to go ahead and check up on Lionel. Fred hadn’t asked them to do anything with whoever was pretending to be the Scopuli’s owner. They couldn’t very well be arrested for knocking on a door. Holden whistled a loud and jaunty tune as he walked, to let his crew and whoever was following them know he wasn’t worried about a thing.

  He stopped when he saw the flophouse.

  It was dark and dingy and exactly the sort of place where people got mugged or worse. Broken lights created dark corners, and there wasn’t a tourist in sight. He turned to give Alex and Amos meaningful looks, and Amos shifted his hand in his pocket. Alex reached under his coat.

  The lobby was mostly empty space, with a pair of couches at one end next to a table covered with magazines. A sleepy-looking older woman sat reading one. Elevators were recessed into the wall at the far end, next to a door marked STAIRS. In the middle was the check-in desk, where, in lieu of a human clerk, a touch screen terminal let guests pay for their rooms.

  Holden stopped next to the desk and turned around to look at the woman sitting on the couch. Graying hair, but good features and an athletic build. In a flophouse like this, that probably meant a prostitute reaching the end of her shelf life. She pointedly ignored his stare.

  “Is our tail still with us?” Holden asked in a quiet voice.

  “Stopped outside somewhere. Probably just watching the door now,” Amos replied.

  Holden nodded and hit the inquiry button on the check-in screen. A simple menu would let him send a message to Lionel Polanski’s room, but Holden exited the system. They knew Lionel was still checked in, and Fred had given them the room number. If it was someone playing games, no reason to give him a heads-up before Holden knocked on the door.

  “Okay, he’s still here, so let’s—” Holden said, and then stopped when he saw the woman from the couch standing right behind Alex. He hadn’t heard or seen her approach.

  “You need to come with me,” she said in a hard voice. “Walk to the stairwell slowly, stay at least three meters ahead of me the entire time. Do it now.”

  “Are you a cop?” Holden asked, not moving.

  “I’m the person with the gun,” she said, a small weapon appearing like magic in her right hand. She pointed it at Alex’s head. “So do what I say.”

  Her weapon was small and plastic and had some kind of battery pack. Amos pulled his heavy slug thrower out and aimed it at her face.

  “Mine’s bigger,” he said.

  “Amos, don’t—” was a
ll Naomi had time to say before the stairwell door burst open and half a dozen men and women armed with compact automatic weapons came into the room, yelling at them to drop their guns.

  Holden started to put his hands up when one of them opened fire, the weapon coughing out rounds so fast it sounded like someone ripping construction paper; it was impossible to hear the separate shots. Amos threw himself to the floor. A line of bullet holes stitched across the chest of the woman with the taser, and she fell backward with a soft, final sound.

  Holden grabbed Naomi by one hand and dragged her behind the check-in desk. Someone in the other group was yelling, “Cease fire! Cease fire!” but Amos was already shooting back from his position, prone on the floor. A yelp of pain and a curse told Holden he’d probably hit someone. Amos rolled sideways to the desk, just in time to avoid a hail of slugs that tore up the floor and wall and made the desk shudder.

  Holden reached for his gun, but the front sight caught in his waistband. He yanked it out, tearing his underwear, then crawled on his knees to the edge of the desk and looked out. Alex was lying on the floor on the other side of one of the couches, gun drawn and face white. As Holden looked, a burst of gunfire hit the couch, blowing stuffing into the air and making a line of holes in the back of the couch not more than twenty centimeters above Alex’s head. The pilot reached his pistol around the corner of the couch and blindly fired off half a dozen shots, yelling at the same time.

  “Fucking assholes!” Amos yelled, then rolled out and fired a couple more shots and rolled back before the return fire started.

  “Where are they?” Holden yelled at him.

  “Two are down, the rest in the stairwell!” Amos yelled back over the sound of return fire.

  Out of nowhere a burst of rounds bounced off the floor past Holden’s knee. “Shit, someone’s flanking us!” Amos cried out, then moved farther behind the desk and away from the shots.

  Holden crawled to the other side of the desk and peeked out. Someone was moving low and fast toward the hotel entrance. Holden leaned out and took a couple shots at him, but three guns opened up from the stairwell doorway and forced him back behind the desk.

  “Alex, someone’s moving to the entrance!” Holden screamed at the top of his lungs, hoping the pilot might be able to get off a shot before they were all chopped to pieces by crossfire.

  A pistol barked three times by the entrance. Holden risked a look. Their tail with the goofy hat crouched by the door, a gun in his hand, the machine gun–toting flanker lying still at his feet. Instead of looking at them, the tail was pointing his gun toward the stairwell.

  “No one shoot the guy with the hat!” Holden yelled, then moved back to the edge of the desk.

  Amos put his back to the desk and popped the magazine from his gun. As he fumbled around in his pocket for another, he said, “Guy is probably a cop.”

  “Extra especially do not shoot any cops,” Holden said, then fired a few shots at the stairwell door.

  Naomi, who’d spent the entire gunfight so far on the floor with her arms over her head, said, “They might all be cops.”

  Holden squeezed off a few more shots and shook his head.

  “Cops don’t carry small, easily concealable machine guns and ambush people from stairwells. We call those death squads,” he said, though most of his words were drowned out by a barrage of gunfire from the stairwell. Afterward came a few seconds of silence.

  Holden leaned back out in time to see the door swing shut.

  “I think they’re bugging out,” he said, keeping his gun trained on the door anyway. “Must have another exit somewhere. Amos, keep your eye on that door. If it opens, start shooting.” He patted Naomi on the shoulder. “Stay down.”

  Holden rose from behind the now ruined check-in kiosk. The desk facade had splintered and the underlying stone showed through. Holden held his gun barrel-up, his hands open. The man in the hat stood, considering the corpse at his feet, then looked up as Holden came near.

  “Thanks. My name is Jim Holden. You are?”

  The man didn’t speak for a second. When he did, his voice was calm. Almost weary. “Cops will be here soon. I need to make a call or we’re all going to jail.”

  “Aren’t you the cops?” Holden asked.

  The other man laughed; it was a bitter, short sound, but with some real humor behind it. Apparently Holden had said something funny.

  “Nope. Name’s Miller.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Miller

  Miller looked at the dead man—the man he’d just killed—and tried to feel something. There was the trailing adrenaline rush still ramping up his heartbeat. There was a sense of surprise that came from walking into an unexpected firefight. Past that, though, his mind had already fallen into the long habit of analysis. One plant in the main room so Holden and his crew wouldn’t see anything too threatening. A bunch of trigger-happy yahoos in the stairwell to back her up. That had gone well.

  It was a slapdash effort. The ambush had been set by people who either didn’t know what they were doing or didn’t have the time or resources to do it right. If it hadn’t been improvised, Holden and his three buddies would have been taken or killed. And him along with them.

  The four survivors of the Canterbury stood in the remains of the firefight like rookies at their first bust. Miller felt his mind shift back half a step as he watched everything without watching anything in particular. Holden was smaller than he’d expected from the video feeds. It shouldn’t have been surprising; he was an Earther. The man had the kind of face that was bad at hiding things.

  “Thanks. My name is Jim Holden. You are?”

  Miller thought of six different answers and turned them all aside. One of the others—a big man, solid, with a bare scalp—was pacing out the room, his eyes unfocused the same way Miller’s were. Of Holden’s four, that was the only guy who’d seen serious gunplay before.

  “The cops will be here soon,” Miller said. “I need to make a call or we’re all going to jail.”

  The other man—thinner, taller, East Indian by the look of him—had been hiding behind a couch. He was sitting on his haunches now, his eyes wide and panicky. Holden had some of the same look, but he was doing a better job of keeping control. The burdens, Miller thought, of leadership.

  “Aren’t you the cops?”

  Miller laughed.

  “Nope,” he said. “Name’s Miller.”

  “Okay,” the woman said. “Those people just tried to kill us. Why did they do that?”

  Holden took a half step toward her voice even before he turned to look at her. Her face was flushed, full lips pressed thin and pale. Her features showed a far-flung racial mix that was unusual even in the melting pot of the Belt. Her hands weren’t shaking. The big one had the most experience, but Miller put the woman down as having the best instincts.

  “Yeah,” Miller said. “I noticed.”

  He pulled out his hand terminal and opened a link to Sematimba. The cop accepted a few seconds later.

  “Semi,” Miller said. “I’m really sorry about this, but you know how I was going stay low-profile?”

  “Yes?” the local cop said, drawing the word out to three syllables.

  “Didn’t work out. I was heading to a meeting with a friend… ”

  “A meeting with a friend,” Sematimba echoed. Miller could imagine the man’s crossed arms even thought they didn’t show in the frame.

  “And I happened to see a bunch of tourists in the wrong place at the wrong time. It got out of hand.”

  “Where are you?” Sematimba asked. Miller gave him the station level and address. There was a long pause while Sematimba consulted with some internal communication software that would have been part of Miller’s tool set once. The man’s sigh was percussive. “I don’t see anything. Were there shots fired?”

  Miller looked at the chaos and ruin around them. About a thousand different alerts should have gone out with the first weapon fired. Security should have been swarming to
ward them.

  “A few,” he said.

  “Strange,” Sematimba said. “Stay put. I’ll be there.”

  “Will do,” Miller said, and dropped the connection.

  “Okay,” Holden said. “Who was that?”

  “The real cops,” Miller said. “They’ll be here soon. It’ll be fine.”

  I think it’ll be fine. It occurred to him that he was treating the situation like he was still on the inside, a part of the machine. That wasn’t true anymore, and pretending it was might have consequences.

  “He was following us,” the woman said to Holden. And then, to Miller, she said, “You were following us.”

  “I was,” Miller said. He didn’t think he sounded rueful, but the big guy shook his head.

  “It was the hat,” the big one said. “Stood out some.”

  Miller swept off his porkpie and considered it. Of course the big one had been the one to make him. The other three were competent amateurs, and Miller knew that Holden had done some time in the UN Navy. But Miller gave it better than even money that the big one’s background check would be interesting reading.

  “Why were you following us?” Holden asked. “I mean, I appreciate the part where you shot the people who were shooting at us, but I’d still like to know that first part.”

  “I wanted to talk to you,” Miller said. “I’m looking for someone.”

  There was a pause. Holden smiled.

  “Anyone in particular?” he asked.

  “A crew member of the Scopuli,” Miller said.

  “The Scopuli?” Holden said. He started to glance at the woman and stopped himself. There was something there. The Scopuli meant something to him beyond what Miller had seen on the news.

  “There was nobody on her when we got there,” the woman said.

  “Holy shit,” the shaky one behind the couch said. It was the first thing he’d said since the firefight ended, and he repeated it five or six more times in quick succession.

  “What about you?” Miller asked. “Donnager blew you to Tycho, and now here. What’s that about?”