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Miller watched for ten hours as the attack became the blockade. The Martian navy, spread throughout the system, was turning home under heavy burn. The OPA feeds were calling it a victory, and maybe someone thought that was true. The pictures came through from the ships, from the sensor arrays. Dead warships, their sides ripped open by high-energy explosions, spi
But it hadn’t come yet, and every hour that didn’t bring it gave another sliver of hope that maybe, maybeit wasn’t going to happen.
“Hey,” Amos said. “You slept at all?”
Miller looked up, his neck stiff. Red creases of his pillow still on his cheek and forehead, the mechanic stood in the open doorway of Miller’s cabin.
“What?” Miller said. Then: “Yeah, no. I’ve been… watching.”
“Anyone drop a rock?”
“Not yet. It’s all still orbital or higher.”
“What kind of half-assed apocalypse are they ru
“Give ’em a break. It’s their first.”
The mechanic shook his broad head, but Miller could see the relief under the feigned disgust. As long as the domes were still standing on Mars, as long as the critical biosphere of Earth wasn’t in direct threat, humanity wasn’t dead. Miller had to wonder what they were hoping for out in the Belt, whether they’d managed to talk themselves into believing that the rough ecological pockets of the asteroids would sustain life indefinitely.
“You want a beer?” Amos asked.
“You’re having beer for breakfast?”
“Figure it’s di
The man was right. Miller needed sleep. He hadn’t managed more than a catnap since they’d scuttled the stealth ship, and that had been plagued by strange dreams. He yawned at the thought of yawning, but the tension in his gut said he was more likely to spend the day watching newsfeeds than resting.
“It’s probably breakfast again,” Miller said.
“Want some beer for breakfast?” Amos asked.
“Sure.”
Walking through the Rocinantefelt surreal. The quiet hum of the air recyclers, the softness of the air. The journey out to Julie’s ship was a haze of pain medication and sickness. The time on Eros before that was a nightmare that wouldn’t fade. To walk through the spare, functional corridors, thrust gravity holding him gently to the floor, with very little chance of anyone trying to kill him felt suspicious. When he imagined Julie walking with him, it wasn’t so bad.
As he ate, his terminal chimed, the automatic reminder for another blood flush. He stood, adjusted his hat, and headed off to let the needles and pressure injectors do their worst. The captain was already there and hooked into a station when Miller arrived.
Holden looked like he’d slept, but not well. There weren’t the bruise-dark marks under his eyes that Miller had, but his shoulders were tense, his brow on the edge of furrowed. Miller wondered whether he’d been a little too hard on the guy. I told you socould be an important message, but the burden of i
Or maybe he was still mooning over Naomi.
Holden raised the hand that wasn’t encased in medical equipment.
“Morning,” Miller said.
“Hey.”
“Decided where we’re going yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Getting harder and harder to get to Mars,” Miller said, easing himself into the familiar embrace of the medical station. “If that’s what you’re aiming for, you’d better do it soon.”
“While there’s still a Mars, you mean?”
“For instance,” Miller agreed.
The needles snaked out on gently articulated armatures. Miller looked at the ceiling, trying not to tense up as the lines forced their way into his veins. There was a moment’s stinging, then a low, dull ache, and then numbness. The display above him a
“Do you think they’d stop?” Holden asked. “I mean, Earth has got to be doing this because Protogen owns some generals or senators or something, right? It’s all because they want to be the only ones who have this thing. If Mars has it too, Protogen doesn’t have a reason to fight.”
Miller blinked. Before he could pick his answer- They’d try to a
“Screw it. We’ve got the datafiles. I’m going to broadcast them.”
Miller’s reply was as easy as reflex.
“No, you aren’t.”
Holden propped himself up, storm clouds in his expression.
“I appreciate that you might have a reasonable difference of opinion,” he said, “but this is still my ship. You’re a passenger.”
“True,” Miller said. “But you have a hard time shooting people, and you are going to have to shoot me before you send that thing out.”
“I’m what?”
The new blood flowed into Miller’s system like a tickle of ice water crawling toward his heart. The medical monitors shifted to a new pattern, counting up the anomalous cells as they hit its filters.
“You are going to have to shoot me,” Miller said, slowly this time. “Twice now you’ve had the choice of whether or not to break the solar system, and both times you’ve screwed it up. I don’t want to see you strike out.”
“I think you may have an exaggerated idea of how much influence the second-in-command of a long-distance water hauler actually has. Yes, there’s a war. And yes, I was there when it started up. But the Belt has hated the i
“You’ve got the i
Holden tilted his head.
“Earth has always hated Mars,” Holden said like he was reporting that water was wet. “When I was in the navy, we ran projections for this. Battle plans if Earth and Mars ever really got into it. Earth loses. Unless they hit first, hit hard, and don’t let up, Earth just plain loses.”
Maybe it was distance. Maybe it was a failure of imagination. Miller had never seen the i
“Seriously?” he asked.
“They’re the colony, but they have all the best toys and everyone knows it,” Holden said. “Everything that’s happening out there right now has been building up for a hundred years. If it hadn’t been there to start with, this couldn’t have happened.”
“That’s your defense? ‘Not my powder keg; I just brought the match’?”
“I’m not making a defense,” Holden said. His blood pressure and heart rate were spiking.
“We’ve been through this,” Miller said. “So let me just ask, why is it you think this time will be different?”
The needles in Miller’s arm seemed to heat up almost to the point of being painful. He wondered if that was normal, if every blood flush he had was going to feel the same way.
“This time isdifferent,” Holden said. “All the crap that’s going on out there is what happens when you have imperfect information. Mars and the Belt wouldn’t have been going after each other in the first place if they’d known what we know now. Earth and Mars wouldn’t be shooting each other if everyone knew the fight was being engineered. The problem isn’t that people know too much, it’s that they don’t know enough.”
Something hissed and Miller felt a wave of chemical relaxation swim through him. He resented it, but there was no calling the drugs back.
“You can’t just throw information at people,” Miller said. “You have to know what it means.What it’s going to do.There was a case back on Ceres. Little girl got killed. For the first eighteen hours, we were all sure Daddy did it. He was a felon. A drunk. He was the last one who saw her breathing. All the classic signs. Hour nineteen, we get a tip. Turned out Daddy owed a lot of money to one of the local syndicates. All of a sudden, things are more complicated. We have more suspects. Do you think if I’d been broadcasting everything I knew, Daddy would still have been alive when the tip came? Or would someone have put it all together and done the obvious thing?”