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Funny how familiar that sounded.
The guy who walked into the bar and nodded to Miller was one of Diogo’s friends. Twenty years old or maybe a little south of that. A veteran of Thoth Station, just like Miller. He didn’t remember the kid’s name, but he’d seen him around often enough to know that the way he held himself was different than usual. Tight-wound. Miller tapped the mute on his terminal’s newsfeed and made his way over.
“Hey,” he said, and the kid looked up sharply. The face was tense, but a softer, intentional ease tried to mask it. It was just Diogo’s old grandpa. The one, everyone on Thoth knew, who’d killed the biggest dick in the universe. It won Miller some points, so the kid smiled and nodded to the stool beside him.
“All pretty f**ked up, isn’t it?” Miller said.
“You don’t know the half,” the kid said. He had a clipped accent. Belter by his height, but educated. Technician, probably. The kid tabbed in a drink order, and the bar offered up a glass of clear fluid so volatile Miller could watch it evaporate. The kid drank it down with a gulp.
“Doesn’t work,” Miller said.
The kid looked over. Miller shrugged.
“They say drinking helps, but it doesn’t,” Miller said.
“No?”
“Nope. Sex sometimes, if you’ve got a girl who’ll talk to you after. Or target practice. Working out, sometimes. Liquor doesn’t make you feel better. Just makes you not so worried about feeling bad.”
The kid laughed and shook his head. He was on the edge of talking, so Miller sat back and let the quiet do his work for him. He figured the kid had killed someone, probably on Thoth, and it was sneaking up on him. But instead of telling the story, the kid took Miller’s terminal, keyed in a few local codes, and handed it back. A huge menu of feeds appeared—video, audio, air pressure and content, radiological. It took Miller half a second to understand what he was seeing. They’d cracked the encryption on the Eros feeds.
He was looking at the protomolecule in action. He was seeing Juliette Andromeda Mao’s corpse writ large. For a moment, his imagined Julie flickered beside him.
“If you ever wonder if you did the right thing shooting that guy,” the kid said, “look at that.”
Miller opened a feed. A long corridor, wide enough for twenty people to walk abreast. The flooring was wet and undulating like the surface of a canal. Something small rolled awkwardly through the mush. When Miller zoomed in, it was a human torso—rib cage, spine, trailing lengths of what used to be intestines and were now the long black threads of the protomolecule—pushing itself along on the stump of an arm. There was no head. The feed output bar showed there was sound, and Miller undid the mute. The high, mindless piping reminded him of mentally ill children singing to themselves.
“It’s all like that,” the kid said. “Whole station’s crawling with… shit like that.”
“What’s it doing?”
“Building something,” the kid said, and shuddered. “I thought you should see it.”
“Yeah?” Miller said, his gaze nailed to the screen. “What did I ever do to you?”
The kid laughed.
“Everyone thinks you’re a hero for killing that guy,” the kid said. “Everyone thinks we should push every last prisoner we took off that station out an airlock.”
Probably should, Miller thought, if we can’t make them human again. He switched the feed. The casino level where he and Holden had been, or else a section very like it. A webwork of something like bones linked ceiling and roof. Black sluglike things a yard long slithered up and between them. The sound was a hushing, like the recordings he’d heard of surf against a beach. He switched again. The port, with bulkheads closed and encrusted with huge nautilus spirals that seemed to shift while he watched them.
“Everyone thinks you’re a f**king hero,” the kid said, and this time, it bit a little. Miller shook his head.
“Nah,” he said. “Just a guy who used to be a cop.”
Why should going into a firefight, charging into an enemy station filled with people and automatic systems built to kill you, seem less frightening than talking to people who you shipped with for weeks?
And still.
It was third shift, and the bar at the observation platform was set to imitate night. The air was scented with something smoky that wasn’t smoke. A piano and bass dueled lazily with each other while a man’s voice lamented in Arabic. Dim lights glowed at the bases of the tables, casting soft shadows up across faces and bodies, emphasizing the customers’ legs and bellies and br**sts. The shipyards beyond the windows were busy as always. If he went close, he could pick out the Rocinante, still recovering from its wounds. Not dead, and being made stronger.
Amos and Naomi were at a table in a corner. No sign of Alex. No sign of Holden. That made it easier. Not easy, but closer. He made his way toward them. Naomi saw him first, and Miller read the discomfort in her expression, covered over as quickly as it appeared. Amos turned to see what she’d been reacting to, and the corners of his mouth and eyes didn’t shift into a frown or a smile. Miller scratched his arm even though it didn’t itch.
“Hey,” he said. “Buy you folks a round?”
The silence lasted a beat longer than it should have, and then Naomi forced a smile.
“Sure. Just one. We’ve got… that thing. For the captain.”
“Oh yeah,” Amos said, lying even more awkwardly than Naomi had, making his awareness of the fact part of the message. “The thing. That’s important.”
Miller sat, lifted a hand for the waiter to see, and, when the man nodded, leaned forward with his elbows on the table. It was the seated version of a fighter’s crouch, bent forward with his arms protecting the soft places in his neck and belly. It was the way a man stood when he expected injury.
The waiter came, and then beers all around. Miller paid for them with the OPA’s money and took a sip.
“How’s the ship?” he asked at last.
“Coming together,” Naomi said. “They really banged the hell out of her.”
“She’ll still fly,” Amos said. “She’s one tough bitch.”
“That’s good. When—” Miller said, then tripped on his words and had to start again. “When are you folks shipping out?”
“Whenever the captain says,” Amos said with a shrug. “We’re airtight now, so could go tomorrow, if he’s got someplace he wants to be.”
