Leviathan Wakes (Expanse 1)

Miller keyed in his access code. The seals released; the lockers opened.

“Well,” Miller said conversationally. “Fuck me.”

The lockers were empty, gray coffins with the corpses all gone. Across the room, he heard one of the other squads shouting in outrage. Miller systematically opened every riot control locker he could get to. All of them were the same. Shaddid appeared at his side, her face pale with rage.

“What’s plan B?” Miller asked.

Shaddid spat on the floor, then closed her eyes. They shifted under her lids like she was dreaming. Two long breaths later, they opened.

“Check the SWAT lockers. There should be enough in there to outfit two people in each squad.”

“Snipers?” Miller said.

“You have a better idea, Detective?” Shaddid said, leaning on the last word.

Miller raised his hands in surrender. Riot gear was meant to intimidate and control. SWAT gear was made to kill with the greatest efficiency possible. Seemed their mandate had just changed.

On any given day, a thousand ships might be docked on Ceres Station, and activity there rarely slowed and never stopped. Each sector could accommodate twenty ships, the traffic of humanity and cargo, transport vans, mesocranes, and industrial forklifts, and his squad was responsible for twenty sectors.

The air stank of refrigerant and oil. The gravity was slightly above 0.3 g, station spin alone lending the place a sense of oppression and danger. Miller didn’t like the port. Having vacuum so close under his feet made him nervous. Passing the dockworkers and transport crews, he didn’t know whether to scowl or smile. He was here to scare people into behaving and also to reassure them that everything was under control. After the first three sectors, he settled on the smile. It was the kind of lie he was better at.

They had just reached the junction of sectors nineteen and twenty when they heard screaming. Miller pulled his hand terminal out of his pocket, connected to the central surveillance network, and called up the security camera array. It took a few seconds to find it: a mob of fifty or sixty civilians stretching almost all the way across the tunnel, traffic blocked on both sides. There were weapons being waved over heads. Knives, clubs. At least two pistols. Fists pumped in the air. And at the center of the crowd, a huge shirtless man was beating someone to death.

“Showtime,” Miller said, waving his squad forward at a run.

He was still a hundred meters from the turn that would take them to the clot of human violence when he saw the shirtless man knock his victim to the ground, then stomp on her neck. The head twisted sideways at an angle that didn’t leave any question. Miller slowed his team to a brisk walk. Arresting the murderer while surrounded by a crowd of his friends would be tough enough without being winded.

There was blood in the water now. Miller could sense it. The mob was going to turn out. To the station, to the ships. If the people started joining the chaos… what path would it be likely to take? There was a brothel one level up from there and half a kilometer anti-spinward that catered to inner planet types. The tariff inspector for sector twenty-one was married to a girl from Luna and had bragged about it maybe once too often.

There were too many targets, Miller thought even as he motioned his snipers to spread out. He was trying to reason with a fire. Stop it here, and no one else got killed.

In his imagination, Candace crossed her arms and said, What’s plan B?

The outer edge of the mob raised the alarm well before Miller reached it. The surge of bodies and threats shifted. Miller tipped back his hat. Men, women. Dark skin, pale, golden brown, and all with the long, thin build of Belters, all with the square-mouthed angry gape of chimpanzees at war.

“Let me take a couple of them down, sir,” Gelbfish said from his terminal. “Put the fear of God into them.”

“We’ll get there,” Miller said, smiling at the angry mob. “We’ll get there.”

The face he expected floated to the front. Shirtless. The big man, blood covering his hands and splattered on his cheek. The seed crystal of the riot.

“That one?” Gelbfish asked, and Miller knew that a tiny infrared dot was painting Shirtless’ forehead even as he glowered at Miller and the uniforms behind him.

“No,” Miller said. “That’ll only set the rest of them off.”

“So what do we do?” Brown said.

It was a hell of a question.

“Sir,” Gelbfish said. “The big f**ker’s got an OPA tattoo on his left shoulder.”

“Well,” Miller said, “if you do have to shoot him, start there.”

He stepped forward, tying his terminal into the local system, overriding the alert. When he spoke, his voice boomed from the overhead speakers.

“This is Detective Miller. Unless you all want to be locked up as accessories to murder, I suggest you disperse now.” Muting the microphone in his terminal, he said to Shirtless, “Not you, big fella. Move a muscle and we shoot you.”

Someone in the crowd threw a wrench, the silver metal arcing low through the air toward Miller’s head. He almost stepped out of the way, but the handle caught him across the ear. His head filled with the deep sound of bells, and the wet of blood tracked down his neck.

“Hold fire,” Miller shouted. “Hold your fire.”

The crowd laughed, as if he’d been talking to them. Idiots. Shirtless, emboldened, strode forward. The steroids had distended his thighs so badly that he waddled. Miller turned the mic on his terminal back on. If the crowd was watching them face each other down, they weren’t breaking things. It wasn’t spreading. Not yet.

“So. Friend. You only kick helpless people to death, or can anybody join in?” Miller asked, his voice conversational but echoing out of the dock speakers like a pronouncement from God.

“The f**k you barking, Earth dog?” Shirtless said.

“Earth?” Miller said, chuckling. “I look like I grew up in a gravity well to you? I was born on this rock.”

“Inners kibble you, bitch,” Shirtless said. “You they dog.”

“You think?”

“Fuckin’ dui,” Shirtless said. Fucking true. He flexed his pectorals. Miller suppressed the urge to laugh.

“So killing that poor bastard was for the good of the station?” Miller said. “The good of the Belt? Don’t be a chump, kid. They’re playing you. They want you to act like a bunch of stupid riotboys so they have a reason to shut this place down.”

“Schrauben sie sie weibchen,” Shirtless said in Belter-inflected gutter German, leaning forward.