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“Fuckin’ A,” said Amos, and strapped one of the guns to his thigh.
Alex stuffed his into the pocket of his flight suit. Naomi wrinkled her nose and waved off the last gun. Holden put it back into his duffel, led the crew into the Rocinante’s airlock, and cycled it. An older, dark-ski
“Welcome to Tycho Station,” said the Butcher of Anderson Station. “Call me Fred.”
Chapter Eighteen: Miller
The death of the Do
The Canterburyhad stripped away the complacency of the Belt, but the Do
It would have scared Miller more if he’d been sober.
Miller’s alarm had been going off for the past ten minutes. The grating buzz took on subtones and overtones when he listened to it long enough. A constant rising tone, fluttering percussion throbbing under it, even soft music hiding underneath the blare. Illusions. Aural hallucinations. The voice of the whirlwind.
The previous night’s bottle of fungal faux bourbon sat on the bedside table where a carafe of water usually waited. It still had a couple fingers at the bottom. Miller considered the soft brown of the liquid, thought about how it would feel on his tongue.
The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending. All the years he’d told himself that he was respected, that he was good at his job, that all his sacrifices had been made for a reason fell away and left him with the clear, unmuddied knowledge that he was a functional alcoholic who had pared away everything good in his own life to make room for anesthetic. Shaddid thought he was a joke. Muss thought he was the price she paid not to sleep with someone she didn’t like. The only one who might have any respect for him at all was Havelock, an Earther. It was peaceful, in its way. He could stop making the effort to keep up appearances. If he stayed in bed listening to the alarm drone, he was just living up to expectations. No shame in that.
And still there was work to be done. He reached over and turned off the alarm. Just before it cut off, he heard a voice in it, soft but insistent. A woman’s voice. He didn’t know what she’d been saying. But since she was just in his head, she’d get another chance later.
He levered himself out of bed, sucked down some painkillers and rehydration goo, stalked to the shower, and burned a day and a half’s ration of hot water just standing there, watching his legs get pink. He dressed in his last set of clean clothes. Breakfast was a bar of pressed yeast and grape sweetener. He dropped the bourbon from the bedside table into the recycler without finishing it, just to prove to himself that he still could.
Muss was waiting at the desk. She looked up when he sat.
“Still waiting for the labs on the rape up on eighteen,” she said. “They promised them by lunch.”
“We’ll see,” Miller said.
“I’ve got a possible witness. Girl who was with the vic earlier in the evening. Her deposition said she left before anything happened, but the security cameras aren’t backing her up.”
“Want me in the questioning?” Miller asked.
“Not yet. But if I need some theater, I’ll pull you in.”
“Fair enough.”
Miller didn’t watch her walk away. After a long moment staring at nothing, he pulled up his disk partition, reviewed what still needed doing, and started cleaning the place up.
As he worked, his mind replayed for the millionth time the slow, humiliating interview with Shaddid and Dawes. We have Holden,Dawes said. You can’t even find what happened to your own riot gear.Miller poked at the words like a tongue at the gap of a missing tooth. It rang true. Again.
Still, it might have been bullshit. It might have been a story concocted just to make him feel small. There wasn’t any proof, after all, that Holden and his crew had survived. What proof could there be? The Do
Or sure you could. It just wouldn’t be easy. He squinted at the empty air of the station house. Now. How wouldyou cover up a surviving ship?
Miller pulled up a cheap navigation plotter he’d bought five years before—transit times had figured in a smuggling case—and plotted the date and position of the Do
He looked at the data for almost ten minutes, but the next step didn’t come to him, so he stepped away, got some coffee, and pulled up the interview he and Muss had done with a Belter ground-crew grunt. The man’s face was long and cadaverous and subtly cruel. The recorder hadn’t had a good fix on him, so the picture kept bouncing around. Muss asked the man what he’d seen, and Miller leaned forward to read the transcribed answers, checking for incorrectly recognized words. Thirty seconds later, the grunt said clip whoreand the transcript read clipper.Miller corrected it, but the back of his mind kept churning.
Probably eight or nine hundred ships came into Ceres in a given day. Call it a thousand to be safe. Give it a couple days on either side of the three-week mark, that was only four thousand entries. Pain in the ass, sure, but not impossible. Ganymede would be the other real bitch. With its agriculture, there would be hundreds of transports a day there. Still, it wouldn’t double the workload. Eros. Tycho. Pallas. How many ships docked on Pallas every day?
He’d missed almost two minutes of the recording. He started again, forcing himself to pay attention this time, and half an hour later, he gave up.
The ten busiest ports with two days to either side of an estimated arrival of an Epstein-drive ship that originated when and where the Do
Except no. Because there were ways to narrow it. He was only looking for Epstein drive ships. Most of the traffic at any of the ports would be local. Torch drive ships flown by prospectors and short-hop couriers. The economics of spaceflight made relatively few and relatively large ships the right answer for long flights. So take it down by, conservatively, three-quarters, and he was back in the close-to-four-thousand range again. Still hundreds of hours of work, but if he could think of some other filter that would just feed him the likely suspectsc For instance, if the ship couldn’t have filed a flight plan before the Do