LEVIATHAN WAKES

Fred leaned back in his chair, the fake leather and metal frame creaking under his weight even in the one-third g.

“Stop them how?” he asked. Fred knew. He just wanted to hear them say it out loud. Miller played along.

“I’d say we fly to their station and shoot them.”

“Who is ‘we’?” Fred asked.

“There are a lot of OPA hotheads looking to shoot it out with Earth and Mars,” Holden said. “We give them some real bad guys to shoot at instead.”

Fred nodded in a way that didn’t mean he agreed to anything.

“And your sample? The captain’s safe?” Fred said.

“That’s mine,” Holden said. “No negotiation on that.”

Fred laughed again, though there was some humor in it this time. Miller blinked in surprise and then stifled a grin.

“Why would I agree to that?” Fred asked.

Holden lifted his chin and smiled.

“What if I told you that I’ve hidden the safe on a planetesimal booby-trapped with enough plutonium to break anyone who touches it into their component atoms even if they could find it?” he said.

Fred stared at him for a moment, then said, “But you didn’t.”

“Well, no,” Holden said. “But I could tell you I did.”

“You are too honest,” Fred said.

“And you can’t trust anyone with something this big. You already know what I’m going to do with it. That’s why, until we can agree on something better, you’re leaving it with me.”

Fred nodded.

“Yes,” he said, “I guess I am.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Miller

The observation deck looked out over the Nauvooas the behemoth slowly came together. Miller sat on the edge of a soft couch, his fingers laced over his knee, his gaze on the immense vista of the construction. After his time on Holden’s ship and, before that, in Eros, with its old-style closed architecture, a view so wide seemed artificial. The deck itself was wider than the Rocinanteand decorated with soft ferns and sculpted ivies. The air recyclers were eerily quiet, and even though the spin gravity was nearly the same as Ceres’, the Coriolis felt subtly wrong.

He’d lived in the Belt his whole life, and he’d never been anywhere that was designed so carefully for the tasteful display of wealth and power. It was pleasant as long as he didn’t think about it too much.

He wasn’t the only one drawn to the open spaces of Tycho. A few dozen station workers sat in groups or walked through together. An hour before, Amos and Alex had gone by, deep in their own conversation, so he wasn’t entirely surprised when, standing up and walking back toward the docks, he saw Naomi sitting by herself with a bowl of food cooling on a tray at her side. Her gaze was fixed on her hand terminal.

“Hey,” he said.

Naomi looked up, recognized him, and smiled distractedly.

“Hey,” she said.

Miller nodded toward the hand terminal and shrugged a question.

“Comm data from that ship,” she said. It was always that ship,Miller noticed. The same way people would call a particularly godawful crime scene that place.“It’s all tightbeam, so I thought it wouldn’t be so hard to triangulate. But… ”

“Not so much?”

Naomi lifted her eyebrows and sighed.

“I’ve been plotting orbits,” she said. “But nothing’s fitting. There could be relay drones, though. Moving targets the ship system was calibrated for that would send the message on to the actual station. Or another drone, and then the station, or who knows?”

“Any data coming off Eros?”

“I assume so,” Naomi said, “but I don’t know that it would be any easier to make sense of than this.”

“Can’t your OPA friends do something?” Miller asked. “They’ve got more processing power than one of these handhelds. Probably have a better activity map of the Belt too.”

“Probably,” she said.

He couldn’t tell if she didn’t trust this Fred that Holden had given them over to, or just needed to feel like the investigation was still hers. He considered telling her to back off it for a while, to let the others carry it, but he didn’t see he had the moral authority to make that one stick.

“What?” Naomi said, an uncertain smile on her lips.

Miller blinked.

“You were laughing a little,” Naomi said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you laugh before. I mean, not when something was fu

“I was just thinking about something a partner of mine told me about letting cases go when you got pulled from them.”

“What did he say?”

“That it’s like taking half a shit,” Miller said.

“Had a way with words, that one.”

“He was all right for an Earther,” Miller said, and something tickled at the back of his mind. Then, a moment later: “Ah, Jesus. I may have something.”

Havelock met him in an encrypted drop site that lived on a server cluster on Ganymede. The latency kept them from anything like real-time conversation. It was more like dropping notes, but it did the trick. The waiting made Miller anxious. He sat with his terminal set to refresh every three seconds.

“Would you like anything else?” the woman asked. “Another bourbon?”

“That’d be great,” Miller said, and checked to see if Havelock had replied yet. He hadn’t.

Like the observation deck, the bar looked out on the Nauvoo,though from a slightly different angle. The great ship looked foreshortened, and arcs of energy lit it where a layer of ceramic was a

Would they all die like Julie had?

There was life out there. They had proof of it now. And the proof came in the shape of a weapon, so what did that tell him? Except that maybe the Mormons deserved a little warning about what they were signing their great-grandkids up for.

He laughed to himself when he realized that was exactly what Holden would say.

The bourbon arrived at the same moment his hand terminal chimed. The video file had a layered encryption that took almost a minute to unpack. That alone was a good sign.

The file opened, and Havelock gri

“Hey, buddy,” Havelock said. “Good to hear from you. After what happened with Shaddid and the OPA, I was afraid we were going to be on different sides now. I’m glad you got out of there before the shit hit the fan.

“Yeah, I’m still with Protogen, and I’ve got to tell you, these guys are kind of scary. I mean, I’ve worked contract security before, and I’m pretty clear when someone’s hard-core. These guys aren’t cops. They’re troops. You know what I mean?

“Officially, I don’t know dick about a Belt station, but you know how it is. I’m from Earth. There are a lot of these guys who gave me shit about Ceres. Working with the vacuum-heads. That kind of thing. But the way things are here, it’s better to be on the good side of the bad guys. It’s just that kind of job.”

There was an apology in his expression. Miller understood. Working in some corporations was like going to prison. You adopted the views of the people around you. A Belter might get hired on, but he’d never belong. Like Ceres, just pointed the other way. If Havelock had made friends with a set of i