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“Sounds like a disease.”
“The herpes simplex of the species?” the missionary said with a laugh. “I suppose there are worse ways to think of it. I’m afraid that as long as we’re human, it will be with us.”
Miller looked over at the wide, moon-round face.
“As long as we’re human?” he said.
“Some of us believe that we shall all eventually become angels,” the missionary said.
“Not the Methodists.”
“Even them, eventually,” the man said, “but they probably won’t go first. And what brings you to Our Lady of Sleeping Through It?”
Miller sighed, sitting back against the unyielding chair. Two rows down, a young woman shouted at two boys to stop jumping on the seats and was ignored. A man behind them coughed. Miller took a long breath and let it out slowly.
“I was a cop on Ceres,” he said.
“Ah. The change of contract.”
“That,” Miller said.
“Taking up work on Eros, then?”
“More looking up an old friend,” Miller said. Then, to his own surprise, he went on. “I was born on Ceres. Lived there my whole life. This is the… fifth? Yeah, fifth time I’ve been off station.”
“Do you plan to go back?”
“No,” Miller said. He sounded more certain that he’d known. “No, I think that part of my life is pretty much over.”
“That must be painful,” the missionary said.
Miller paused, letting the comment settle. The man was right; it should have been painful. Everything he’d ever had was gone. His job, his community. He wasn’t even a cop anymore, his checked-in-luggage handgun notwithstanding. He would never eat at the little East Indian cart at the edge of sector nine again. The receptionist at the station would never nod her greeting to him as he headed in for his desk again. No more nights at the bar with the other cops, no more off-color stories about busts gone weird, no more kids flying kites in the high tunnels. He probed himself like a doctor searching for inflammation. Did it hurt here? Did he feel the loss there?
He didn’t. There was only a sense of relief so profound it approached giddiness.
“I’m sorry,” the missionary said, confused. “Did I say something funny?”
Eros supported a population of one and a half million, a little more than Ceres had in visitors at any given time. Roughly the shape of a potato, it had been much more difficult to spin up, and its surface velocity was considerably higher than Ceres’ for the same internal g. The old shipyards protruded from the asteroid, great spiderwebs of steel and carbon mesh studded with warning lights and sensor arrays to wave off any ships that might come in too tight. The internal caverns of Eros had been the birthplace of the Belt. From raw ore to smelting furnace to annealing platform and then into the spines of water haulers and gas harvesters and prospecting ships. Eros had been a port of call in the first generation of humanity’s expansion. From there, the sun itself was only a bright star among billions.
The economics of the Belt had moved on. Ceres Station had spun up with newer docks, more industrial backing, more people. The commerce of shipping moved to Ceres, while Eros remained a center of ship manufacture and repair. The results were as predictable as physics. On Ceres, a longer time in dock meant lost money, and the berth fee structure reflected that. On Eros, a ship might wait for weeks or months without impeding the flow of traffic. If a crew wanted a place to relax, to stretch, to get away from one another for a while, Eros was the port of call. And with the lower docking fees, Eros Station found other ways to soak money from its visitors: Casinos. Brothels. Shooting galleries. Vice in all its commercial forms found a home in Eros, its local economy blooming like a fungus fed by the desires of Belters.
A happy accident of orbital mechanics put Miller there half a day ahead of the Rocinante. He walked through the cheap casinos, the opioid bars and sex clubs, the show fight areas where men or women pretended to beat one another senseless for the pleasure of the crowds. Miller imagined Julie walking with him, her sly smile matching his own as he read the great animated displays. RANDOLPH MAK, HOLDER OF THE BELT FREEFIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP FOR SIX YEARS, AGAINST MARTIAN KIVRIN CARMICHAEL IN A FIGHT TO THE DEATH!
Surely not fixed, Julie said drily in his mind.
Wonder which one’s going to win, he thought, and imagined her laughing.
He’d stopped at a noodle cart, two new yens’ worth of egg noodles in black sauce steaming in their cone, when a hand clapped on his shoulder.
“Detective Miller,” a familiar voice said. “I think you’re outside your jurisdiction.”
“Why, Inspector Sematimba,” Miller said. “As I live and breathe. You give a girl the shakes, sneaking up like that.”
Sematimba laughed. He was a tall man, even among Belters, with the darkest skin Miller had ever seen. Years before, Sematimba and Miller had coordinated on a particularly ugly case. A smuggler with a cargo of designer euphorics had broken with his supplier. Three people on Ceres had been caught in the crossfire, and the smuggler had shipped out for Eros. The traditional competitiveness and insularity of the stations’ respective security forces had almost let the perp slip away. Only Miller and Sematimba had been willing to coordinate outside the corporate channels.
“What brings you,” Sematimba said, leaning against a thin steel railing and gesturing at the tunnel, “to the navel of the Belt, the glory and power that is Eros?”
“Following up on a lead,” Miller said.
“There’s nothing good here,” Sematimba said. “Ever since Protogen pulled out, things have been going from bad to worse.”
Miller sucked up a noodle.
“Who’s the new contract?” he asked.
“CPM,” Sematimba said.
“Never heard of them.”
“Carne Por la Machina,” Sematimba said, and pulled a face: exaggerated bluff masculinity. He thumped his breast and growled, then let the imitation go and shook his head. “New corporation out of Luna. Mostly Belters on the ground. Make themselves out to be all hard core, but they’re mostly amateurs. All bluster, no balls. Protogen was inner planets, and that was a problem, but they were serious as hell. They broke heads, but they kept the peace. These new ass**les? Most corrupt bunch of thugs I’ve ever worked for. I don’t think the board of governors is going to renew when the contract’s up. I didn’t say that, but it’s true.”
