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“Why do you care if she is?”
“I don’t know the answer to that one,” Miller said. “I just do. If you don’t want to help me, then you don’t.”
“And you’ll go get your warrant. Do this through channels.”
Miller took off his hat, rubbed a long, thin hand across his head, and put the hat back in place.
“Probably not,” he said.
“Let me see your ID,” the man said. Miller pulled up his terminal and let the man confirm who he was. The man handed it back and pointed to a small door behind the heavy bags. Miller did as he was told.
The office was cramped. A small laminate desk with a soft sphere behind it in lieu of a chair. Two stools that looked like they’d come out of a bar. A filing cabinet with a small fabricator that stank of ozone and oil that was probably where the plaques and certificates were made.
“Why does the family want her?” the man asked, lowering himself onto the sphere. It acted like a chair but required constant balance. A place to rest without actually resting.
“They think she’s in harm’s way. At least, that’s what they’re saying, and I don’t have reason to disbelieve them yet.”
“What kind of harm?”
“Don’t know,” Miller said. “I know she was on station. I know she shipped out for Tycho, and after that, I’ve got nothing.”
“Her family want her back on their station?”
The man knew who her family was. Miller filed the information away without missing a beat.
“I don’t think so,” Miller said. “The last message she got from them routed through Luna.”
“Down the well.” The way he said it made it sound like a disease.
“I’m looking for anyone who knows who she was shipping with. If she’s on a run, where she was going and when she was planning to get there. If she’s in range of a tightbeam.”
“I don’t know any of that,” the man said.
“You know anyone I should ask?”
There was a pause.
“Maybe. I’ll find what I can for you.”
“Anything else you can tell me about her?”
“She started at the studio five years ago. She was… angry when she first came. Undisciplined.”
“She got better,” Miller said. “Brown belt, right?”
The man’s eyebrows rose.
“I’m a cop,” Miller said. “I find things out.”
“She improved,” her teacher said. “She’d been attacked. Just after she came to the Belt. She was seeing that it didn’t happen twice.”
“Attacked,” Miller said, parsing the man’s tone of voice. “Raped?”
“I didn’t ask. She trained hard, even when she was off station. You can tell when people let it slide. They come back weaker. She never did.”
“Tough girl,” Miller said. “Good for her. Did she have friends? People she sparred with?”
“A few. No lovers that I know of, since that’s the next question.”
“That’s strange. Girl like that.”
“Like what, Detective?”
“Pretty girl,” Miller said. “Competent. Smart. Dedicated. Who wouldn’t want to be with someone like that?”
“Perhaps she hadn’t met the right person.”
Something in the way he said it hinted at amusement. Miller shrugged, uncomfortable in his skin.
“What kind of work did she do?” he asked.
“Light freighter. I don’t know of any particular cargo. I had the impression that she shipped wherever there was a need.”
“Not a regular route, then?”
“That was my impression.”
“Whose ships did she work? One particular freighter, or whatever came to hand? A particular company?”
“I’ll find what I can for you,” the man said.
“Courier for the OPA?”
“I’ll find out,” the man said, “what I can.”
The news that afternoon was all about Phoebe. The science station there—the one that Belters weren’t allowed even to dock at—had been hit. The official report stated that half the inhabitants of the base were dead, the other half missing. No one had claimed responsibility yet, but the common wisdom was that some Belter group—maybe the OPA, maybe someone else—had finally managed an act of “vandalism” with a body count. Miller sat in his hole, watching the broadcast feed and drinking.
It was all going to hell. The pirate casts from the OPA calling for war. The burgeoning guerrilla actions. All of it. The time was coming that Mars wasn’t going to ignore them anymore. And when Mars took action, it wouldn’t matter if Earth followed suit. It would be the first real war in the Belt. The catastrophe was coming, and neither side seemed to understand how vulnerable they were. And there was nothing—not one single goddamned thing—that he could do to stop it. He couldn’t even slow it down.
Julie Mao grinned at him from the still frame, her pinnace behind her. Attacked, the man had said. There was nothing about it in her record. Might have been a mugging. Might have been something worse. Miller had known a lot of victims, and he put them into three categories. First there were the ones who pretended nothing had happened, or that whatever it was didn’t really matter. That was well over half the people he talked to. Then there were the professionals, people who took their victimization as permission to act out any way they saw fit. That ate most of the rest.
Maybe 5 percent, maybe less, were the ones who sucked it up, learned the lesson, and moved on. The Julies. The good ones.
His door chimed three hours after his official shift was over. Miller stood up, less steady on his feet than he’d expected. He counted the bottles on the table. There were more than he’d thought. He hesitated for a moment, torn between answering the door and throwing the bottles into the recycler. The door chimed again. He went to open it. If it was someone from the station, they expected him to be drunk, anyway. No reason to disappoint.
The face was familiar. Acne-pocked, controlled. The OPA armband from the bar. The one who’d had Mateo Judd killed.
The cop.
“Evening,” Miller said.
“Detective Miller,” the pocked man said. “I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. I was hoping we could try again.”
“Right.”
“May I come in?”
“I try not to take strange men home,” Miller said. “I don’t even know your name.”
