Страница 45 из 125
Havelock looked better than when he’d been on Ceres. Happier. The dark circles were gone from his eyes, and the shape of his face had subtly softened, as if the need to prove himself in the Belt had changed his bones and now he was falling back into his natural form.
“Miller!” the recording said. “I heard about Earth cutting Ceres just before I got your message. Bad luck. I’m sorry to hear Shaddid fired you. Between the two of us, she’s a pompous idiot. The rumor I’ve heard is Earth is doing everything it can to stay out of the war, including giving up any station that it’s expecting to be a point of contention. You know how it is. You’ve got a pit bull on one side of you and a rottweiler on the other, first thing you do is drop your steak.”
Miller chuckled.
“I’ve signed on with Protogen security, big-company private army bullshit. But the pay is worth putting up with their delusions of grandeur. The contract’s supposed to be on Ganymede, but with the crap going on right now, who knows how it’ll really play out? Turns out Protogen’s got a training base in the Belt. I’d never heard about it, but it’s supposed to be quite the gymnasium. I know they’re hiring on, and I’d be happy to put in a word for you. Just let me know, and I’ll get you together with the induction recruiter, get you off that damned rock.”
Havelock smiled.
“Take care of yourself, partner,” the Earther said. “Keep in touch.”
Protogen. Pinkwater. Al Abbiq. Small corporate security forces that the big transorbital companies used as private armies and mercenary forces to rent out as needed. A
It had been years since he’d tried to find work. He’d assumed that particular struggle was behind him, that he was going to die working the Ceres Station security contract. Now that events had thrown him out, everything had an odd floating feeling. Like the gap between getting hit and feeling the pain. He needed to find another job. He needed to do more than send a couple messages out to his old partners. There were employment firms. There were bars on Ceres that would hire an ex-cop for a bouncer. There were gray markets that would take anyone capable of giving them a veneer of legality.
The last thing that made sense was to sit around, ogling girls in the park and chasing down leads on a case that he hadn’t been meant to follow up on in the first place.
The Dagonhad come into Ceres just a little ahead of the arrival window. Owned by the Glapion Collective, who were, he was pretty sure, an OPA front. That made it a good fit. Except the flight plan had been put in just a few hours after the Do
The Rocinante,owned by Silencieux Courant Holdings out of Luna, was a gas hauler that had landed at Tycho just hours before the end of the arrival window. Silencieux Courant was a medium-sized corporate entity with no obvious ties to the OPA, and the flight plan from Pallas was plausible. Miller put his fingertip over the delete key, then paused. He sat back.
Why was a gas hauler going between Pallas and Tycho? Both stations were gas consumers.Flying from consumer to consumer without hitting a supply in the middle was a good way to not cover your docking fees. He put in a request for the flight plan that had taken the Rocinanteto Pallas from wherever it had been before, then sat back to wait. If the records were cached in the Ceres servers, the request shouldn’t take more than a minute or two. The notification bar estimated an hour and a half, so that meant the request was getting forwarded to the docking systems at Pallas. It hadn’t been in the local backup.
Miller stroked his chin; five days of stubble had almost reached the begi
“That you, Holden?” Miller said to the screen. “You out tilting at windmills?”
“Sir?” the waiter said, but Miller waved him away.
There were hundreds of entries still to be looked at and dozens at least in his second-look folder. Miller ignored them, staring at the entry from Tycho as if by sheer force of will he could make more information appear on the screen. Then, slowly, he pulled up the message from Havelock, hit the respond key, and looked into the tiny black pinprick of the terminal’s camera.
“Hey, partner,” he said. “Thanks for the offer. I may take you up on it, but I’ve got some kinks I need to work out before I jump. You know how it is. If you can do me a favor, thoughc I need to keep track of a ship, and I’ve only got the public databases to work from, plus which Ceres may be at war with Mars by now. Who knows, you know? Anyway, if you can put a level one watch on any flight plans for her, drop me a note if anything comes upc I’d buy you a drink sometime.”
He paused. There had to be something more to say.
“Take care of yourself, partner.”
He reviewed the message. On-screen, he looked tired, the smile a little fake, the voice a little higher than it sounded in his head. But it said what it needed to say. He sent it.
This was what he’d been reduced to. Access gone, service gun confiscated—though he still had a couple of drops in his hole—money ru
The sound of detonation came from spinward, then voices raised in anger. The kids on the commons stopped their games of touch-me touch-you and stared. Miller stood up. There was smoke, but he couldn’t see flames. The breeze picked up as the station air cleaners raised the flow to suck away particulates so the sensors didn’t think there was a risk of fa
The kids were walking toward the commotion. Miller caught one by the elbow. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, her eyes near black, her face a perfect heart shape.
“Don’t go over there,” he said. “Get your friends together and walk the other way.”
The girl looked at him, his hand on her arm, the distant commotion.
“You can’t help,” he said.
She pulled her arm free.
“Gotta try, yeah?” she said. “Podría intentar, you know.” You could too.
“Just did,” Miller said as he put his terminal in its case and walked away. Behind him, the sounds of the riot grew. But he figured the police could take care of it.
Over the next fourteen hours, the system net reported five riots on the station, some minor structural damage. Someone he’d never heard of a
Outside Ceres, things were getting worse. The deep astronomy labs on Triton had been occupied by a band of prospectors sympathetic to the OPA. They’d turned the array in-system and had been broadcasting the location of every Martian ship in the system along with high-definition images of the surface of Mars, down to the topless sunbathers in the dome parks. The story was that a volley of nukes was on its way to the station, and the array would be bright dust within a week. Earth’s imitation of a snail was picking up the pace as Earth- and Luna-based companies pulled back down the gravity well. Not all of them, not even half, but enough to send the Terran message: Count us out.Mars appealed for solidarity; the Belt appealed for justice or, more often, told the birthplace of humanity to go fuck itself.