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Beside him, Diogo laughed.
It took them three hours to make the primary sweep of the ship, and another five to hunt down all the stowaways huddled in ducts and secure rooms, waiting to make their presence known at the last minute and sabotage the mission. As those were hauled weeping off the ship, Miller wondered whether he’d just saved their lives. If all he’d done with his life was keep Fred Johnson from deciding whether to let a handful of innocent people die with the Nauvoo, or risk keeping Eros around for the inner planets, that wasn’t so bad.
As soon as Miller gave the word, the OPA tech team moved into action, reengaging the waldoes and transports, fixing the hundred small acts of sabotage that would have kept the Nauvoo’s engines from firing, clearing out equipment they wanted to save. Miller watched industrial lifts big enough to house a family of five shift crate after crate, moving out things that had only recently been moved it. The docks were as busy as Ceres at mid-shift. Miller half expected to see his old cohorts wandering among the stevedores and lift tubes, keeping what passed for the peace.
In the quiet moments, he set his hand terminal to the Eros feed. Back when he’d been a kid, there had been a performance artist making the rounds—Jila Sorormaya, her name was. As he recalled, she’d intentionally corrupted data-storage devices and then put the data stream through her music kit. She’d gotten into trouble when some of the proprietary code of the storage device software got incorporated into her music and posted. Miller hadn’t been a sophisticate. He’d figured another nutcase artist had to get a real job, and the universe could only be a better place.
Listening to the Eros feed—Radio Free Eros, he called it—he thought maybe he’d been a little rough on old Jila. The squeaks and cross-chatter, the flow of empty noise punctuated by voices, were eerie and compelling. Just like the broken data stream, it was the music of corruption.
… asciugare il pus e che possano sentirsi meglio…
… ja minä nousivat kuolleista ja halventaa kohtalo pakottaa minut ja siskoni…
… do what you have to…
He’d listened to the feed for hours, picking out voices. Once, the whole thing had fluttered, cutting in and out like a piece of equipment on the edge of failure. Only after it had resumed did Miller wonder if the stutters of quiet had been Morse code. He leaned against the bulkhead, the overwhelming mass of the Nauvoo towering above him. The ship only half born and already marked for sacrifice. Julie sat beside him, looking up. Her hair floated around her face; her eyes never stopped smiling. Whatever trick of the imagination had kept his own internal Juliette Andromeda Mao from coming back to him as her corpse, he thanked it.
It would have been something, wouldn’t it? she said. Flying through vacuum without a suit. Sleeping for a hundred years and waking up in the light of a different sun.
“I didn’t shoot that f**ker fast enough,” Miller said aloud.
He could have given us the stars.
A new voice broke in. A human voice shaking with rage.
“Antichrist!”
Miller blinked, returning to reality, and thumbed off the Eros feed. A prisoner transport wound its lazy way through the dock, a dozen Mormon technicians bound to its restraint poles. One was a young man with a pocked face and hatred in his eyes. He was staring at Miller.
“You’re the Antichrist, you vile excuse for a human! God knows you! He’ll remember you!”
Miller tipped his hat as the prisoners ambled by.
“Stars are better off without us,” he said, but too softly for anyone but Julie to hear.
A dozen tugs flew before the Nauvoo, the web of nanotubule tethers invisible at this distance. All Miller saw was the great behemoth, as much a part of Tycho Station as the bulkheads and air, shift in its bed, shrug, and begin to move. The tugs’ drive flares lit the interior space of the station, flickering in their perfectly choreographed duties like Christmas lights, and a nearly subliminal shudder passed through the deep steel bones of Tycho. In eight hours, the Nauvoo would be far enough out that the great engines could be brought online without endangering the station with their exhaust plume. It might be more than two weeks after that before it reached Eros.
Miller would beat it there by eighty hours.
“Oi, Pampaw,” Diogo said. “Done-done?”
“Yeah,” Miller said with a sigh. “I’m ready. Let’s get everyone together.”
The boy grinned. In the hours since the commandeering of the Nauvoo, Diogo had added bright red plastic decorations to three of his front teeth. It was apparently deeply meaningful in the youth culture of Tycho Station, and signified prowess, possibly sexual. Miller felt a moment’s relief that he wasn’t hot-bunking at the boy’s place anymore.
Now that he was running security ops for the OPA, the irregular nature of the group was clearer to him than ever. There had been a time when he’d thought the OPA might be something that could take on Earth or Mars when it came to a real war. Certainly, they had more money and resources than he’d thought. They had Fred Johnson. They had Ceres now, for as long as they could hold it. They’d taken on Thoth Station and won.
And yet the same kids he’d gone on the assault with had been working crowd control at the Nauvoo, and more than half of them would be on the demolitions ship when it left for Eros. It was the thing that Havelock would never understand. For that matter, it was the thing Holden would never understand. Maybe no one who had lived with the certainty and support of a natural atmosphere would ever completely accept the power and fragility of a society based in doing what needed doing, in becoming fast and flexible, the way the OPA had. In becoming articulated.
If Fred couldn’t build himself a peace treaty, the OPA would never win against the discipline and unity of an inner planet navy. But they would also never lose. War without end.
Well, what was history if not that?
And how would having the stars change anything?
As he walked to his apartment, he opened a channel request on his hand terminal. Fred Johnson appeared, looking tired but alert.
“Miller,” he said.
“We’re getting ready to ship out if the ordinance is ready.”
“It’s loading now,” Fred replied. “Enough fissionable material to keep the surface of Eros unapproachable for years. Be careful with it. If one of your boys goes down for a smoke in the wrong place, we aren’t going to be able to replace the mines. Not in time.”
Not you’ll all be dead. The weapons were precious, not the people.
