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If you were going to make a poster of the Belter’s dream, it would have been the Xinglong.
The Scipio Africanus,a patrol destroyer, was due to head back down toward Mars at the end of its two-year tour of the Belt. They both headed for a captured cometary body a few hundred thousand kilometers from Chiron to top off their water.
When the prospecting ship first came in range, the Scipiosaw a fast-moving ship ru
The reaction had been as predictable as elementary physics. The Martians were diverting another couple dozen ships to help “maintain order.” The OPA’s shriller talking heads called for open war, and fewer and fewer of the independent sites and casts were disagreeing with them. The great, implacable clockwork of war ticked one step closer to open fighting.
And someone on Ceres had put a Martian-born citizen named Enrique Dos Santos through eight or nine hours of torture and nailed the remains to a wall near sector eleven’s water reclamation works. They identified him by the terminal that had been left on the floor along with the man’s wedding ring and a thin faux-leather wallet with his credit access data and thirty thousand Europa-script new yen. The dead Martian had been affixed to the wall with a single-charge prospector’s spike. Five hours afterward, the air recyclers were still laboring to get the acid smell out. The forensics team had taken their samples. They were about ready to cut the poor bastard down.
It always surprised Miller how peaceful dead people looked. However godawful the circumstances, the slack calm that came at the end looked like sleep. It made him wonder if when his turn came, he’d actually feel that last relaxation.
“Surveillance cameras?” he said.
“Been out for three days,” his new partner said. “Kids busted ’em.”
Octavia Muss was originally from crimes against persons, back before Star Helix split violence up into smaller specialties. From there, she’d been on the rape squad. Then a couple of months of crimes against children. If the woman still had a soul, it had been pressed thin enough to see through. Her eyes never registered anything more than mild surprise.
“We know which kids?”
“Some punks from upstairs,” she said. “Booked, fined, released into the wild.”
“We should round ’em back up,” Miller said. “It’d be interesting to know whether someone paid them to take out these particular cameras.”
“I’d bet against it.”
“Then whoever did this had to know that these cameras were busted.”
“Someone in maintenance?”
“Or a cop.”
Muss smacked her lips and shrugged. She’d come from three generations in the Belt. She had family on ships like the one the Scipiohad killed. The skin and bone and gristle hanging in front of them were no surprise to her. You dropped a hammer under thrust, and it fell to the deck. Your government slaughtered six families of ethnic Chinese prospectors, someone pi
“There’s going to be consequences,” Miller said, meaning This isn’t a corpse, it’s a billboard. It’s a call to war.
“There ain’t,” Muss said. The war is here anyway, ba
“Yeah,” Miller said. “You’re right. There ain’t.”
“You want to do next of kin? I’ll go take a look at outlying video. They didn’t burn his fingers off here in the corridor, so they had to haul him in from somewhere.”
“Yeah,” Miller said. “I’ve got a sympathy form letter I can fire off. Wife?”
“Don’t know,” she said. “Haven’t looked.”
Back at the station house, Miller sat alone at his desk. Muss already had her own desk, two cubicles over and customized the way she liked it. Havelock’s desk was empty and cleaned twice over, as if the custodial services had wanted the smell of Earth off their good Belter chair. Miller pulled up the dead man’s file, found the next of kin. Jun-Yee Dos Santos, working on Ganymede. Married six years. No kids. Well, there was something to be glad of, at least. If you were going to die, at least you shouldn’t leave a mark.
He navigated to the form letter, dropped in the new widow’s name and contact address. Dear Mrs. Dos Santos, I am very sorry to have to tell youblah blah blah. Your[he spun through the menu] husband was a valued and respected member of the Ceres community, and I assure you that everything possible will be done to see that her[Miller toggled that] his killer or killers will be brought to answer for this. Yours…
It was inhuman. It was impersonal and cold and as empty as vacuum. The hunk of flesh on that corridor wall had been a real man with passions and fears, just like anyone else. Miller wanted to wonder what it said about him that he could ignore that fact so easily, but the truth was he knew. He sent the message and tried not to dwell on the pain it was about to cause.
The board was thick. The incident count was twice what it should have been. This is what it looks like,he thought. No riots. No hole-by-hole military action or marines in the corridors. Just a lot of unsolved homicides.
Then he corrected himself: This is what it looks like so far.
It didn’t make his next task any easier.
Shaddid was in her office.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
“I need to make some requisitions for interrogation transcripts,” he said. “But it’s a little irregular. I was thinking it might be better if it came through you.”
Shaddid sat back in her chair.
“I’ll look at it,” she said. “What are we trying to get?”
Miller nodded, as if by signaling yeshimself, he could get her to say the same.
“Jim Holden. The Earther from the Canterbury.Mars should be picking his people up around now, and I need to petition for the debriefing transcripts.”
“You have a case that goes back to the Canterbury?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Seems like I do.”
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me now.”
“It’s the side job. Julie Mao. I’ve been looking into it… ”
“I saw your report.”
“So you know she’s associated with the OPA. From what I’ve found, it looks like she was on a freighter that was doing courier runs for them.”
“You have proof of that?”
“I have an OPA guy that said as much.”
“On the record?”
“No,” Miller said. “It was informal.”
“And it tied into the Martian navy killing the Canterburyhow?”
“She was on the Scopuli,” Miller said. “It was used as bait to stop the Canterbury.The thing is, you look at the broadcasts Holden makes, he talks about finding it with a Mars Navy beacon and no crew.”
“And you think there’s something in there that’ll help you?”
“Won’t know until I see it,” Miller said. “But if Julie wasn’t on that freighter, then someone had to take her off.”
Shaddid’s smile didn’t reach her eyes.
“And you would like to ask the Martian navy to please hand over whatever they got from Holden.”
“If he saw something on that boat, something that’ll give us an idea what happened to Julie and the other-”
“You aren’t thinking this through,” Shaddid said. “The Mars Navy killed the Canterbury.They did it to provoke a reaction from the Belt so they’d have an excuse to roll in and take us over. The only reason they’re ‘debriefing’ the survivors is so that no one could get to the poor bastards first. Holden and his crew are either dead or getting their minds cored out by Martian interrogation specialists right now.”