“Yeah, I’ll watch it,” Miller said.
“The Rocinante’s already on its way.”
That wasn’t something Miller needed to know, so there was some other reason Fred had mentioned it. His carefully neutral tone made it something like an accusation. The only controlled sample of protomolecule had left Fred’s sphere of influence.
“We’ll get out there to meet her in plenty of time to keep anybody off of Eros,” Miller said. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”
On the tiny screen, it was hard to tell how genuine Fred’s smile was.
“I hope your friends are really up for this,” he said.
Miller felt something odd. A little hollowness just below his breastbone.
“They aren’t my friends,” he said, keeping his tone of voice light.
“No?”
“I don’t exactly have friends. It’s more I’ve got a lot of people I used to work with,” he said.
“You put a lot of faith in Holden,” Fred said, making it almost a question. A challenge, at least. Miller smiled, knowing that Fred would be just as unsure if his was genuine.
“Not faith. Judgment,” he said.
Fred coughed out a laugh.
“And that’s why you don’t have friends, friend.”
“Part of it,” Miller said.
There was nothing more to say. Miller dropped the connection. He was almost at his hole, anyway.
It was nothing much. An anonymous cube on the station with even less personality to it than his place back on Ceres. He sat on his bunk, checked his terminal for the status of the demolitions ship. He knew that he should just go up to the docks. Diogo and the others were assembling, and while it wasn’t likely that the drug haze of the pre-mission parties would allow them all to arrive on time, it was at least possible. He didn’t even have that excuse.
Julie sat in the space behind his eyes. Her legs were folded under her. She was beautiful. She’d been like Fred and Holden and Havelock. Someone born in a gravity well who came to the Belt by choice. She’d died for her choice. She’d come looking for help and killed Eros by doing it. If she’d stayed there, on that ghost ship…
She tilted her head, her hair swinging against the spin gravity. There was a question in her eyes. She was right, of course. It would have slowed things down, maybe. It wouldn’t have stopped them. Protogen and Dresden would have found her eventually. Would have found it. Or gone back and dug up a fresh sample. Nothing would have stopped them.
And he knew—knew the way he knew he was himself—that Julie wasn’t like the others. That she’d understood the Belt and Belters, and the need to push on. If not for the stars, at least close to them. The luxury available to her was something Miller had never experienced, and never would. But she’d turned away. She’d come out here, and stayed even when they were going to sell her racing pinnace. Her childhood. Her pride.
That was why he loved her.
When Miller reached the dock, it was clear something had happened. It was in the way the dockworkers held themselves and the looks half amusement and half pleasure, on their faces. Miller signed in and crawled through the awkward Ojino-Gouch-style airlock, seventy years out of date and hardly larger than a torpedo tube, into the cramped crew area of the Talbot Leeds. The ship looked like it had been welded together from two smaller ships, without particular concern for design. The acceleration couches were stacked three deep. The air smelled of old sweat and hot metal. Someone had been smoking marijuana recently enough that the filters hadn’t cleared it out yet. Diogo was there along with a half dozen others. They all wore different uniforms, but they also all had the OPA armband.
“Oi, Pampaw! Kept top bunk á dir.”
“Thanks,” Miller said. “I appreciate that.”
Thirteen days. He was going to spend thirteen days sharing this tiny space with the demolitions crew. Thirteen days pressed into these couches, with megatons of fission mines in the ship’s hold. And yet the others were all smiling. Miller hauled himself up to the acceleration couch Diogo had saved for him, and pointed to the others with his chin.
“Someone have a birthday?”
Diogo gave an elaborate shrug.
“Why’s everyone in such a good f**king mood?” Miller said, more sharply than he’d intended. Diogo took no offense. He smiled his great red-and-white teeth.
“Audi-nichts?”
“No, I haven’t heard, or I wouldn’t be asking,” Miller said.
“Mars did the right thing,” Diogo said. “Got the feed off Eros, put two and two, and—”
The boy slammed a fist into his open palm. Miller tried to parse what he was saying. They’d attacked Eros? They’d taken on Protogen?
Ah. Protogen. Protogen and Mars. Miller nodded. “The Phoebe science station,” he said. “Mars quarantined it.”
“Fuck that, Pampaw. Autoclaved it, them. Moon is gone. Dropped enough nukes on it to split it subatomic.”
They better have, Miller thought. It wasn’t a big moon. If Mars had really destroyed it and there was any protomolecule left on a hunk of ejecta…
“Tu sabez?” Diogo said. “They’re on our side now. They get it. Mars-OPA alliance.”
“You don’t really think that,” Miller said.
“Nah,” Diogo said, just as pleased with himself in admitting that the hope was fragile at best and probably false. “But don’t hurt to dream, que no?”
“You don’t think?” Miller said, and lay back.
The acceleration gel was too stiff to conform to his body at the dock’s one-third g, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. He checked the news on his hand terminal, and indeed someone in the Martian navy had made a judgment call. It was a lot of ordinance to use, especially in the middle of a shooting war, but they’d expended it. Saturn had one fewer moon, one more tiny, unformed, filamentous ring—if there was even enough matter left from the detonations to form that. It looked to Miller’s unpracticed eye as if the explosions had been designed to drop debris into the protective and crushing gravity of the gas giant.
It was foolish to think it meant the Martian government wouldn’t want samples of the protomolecule. It was naive to pretend that any organization of that size and complexity was univocal about anything, much less something as dangerous and transforming as this.
But still.
Perhaps it was enough just knowing that someone on the other side of the political and military divide had seen the same evidence they had seen and drawn the same conclusions. Maybe it left room for hope. He switched his hand terminal back to the Eros feed. A strong throbbing sound danced below a cascade of noise. Voices rose and fell and rose again. Data streams spewed into one another, and the pattern-recognition servers burned every spare cycle making something from the resultant mess. Julie took his hand, the dream so convincing he could almost pretend he felt it.