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“That was an explosion,” Alex said. “Ship drive at the least. Maybe a nuke.”
“They are going to kill the station,” Holden said. There was a kind of awe in his voice. “I never thought I’d miss the part where they just blew up the ships I was on. But now it’s stations.”
“They didn’t crack it,” Miller said.
“You’re sure of that?” Naomi asked.
“I can hear you talking,” Miller said. “That tells me there’s air.”
“There are airlocks,” Holden said. “If the station got holed and the locks closed down… ”
A woman pushed hard against Miller’s shoulder, forcing her way forward. If they weren’t damn careful, there was going to be a stampede. This was too much fear and not enough space. It hadn’t happened yet, but the impatient movement of the crowd, vibrating like molecules in water just shy of boiling, made Miller very uncomfortable.
“This isn’t a ship,” Miller said. “It’s a station. This is rock we’re on. Anything big enough to get to the parts of the station with atmosphere would crack the place like an egg. A great big pressurized egg.”
The crowd was stopped, the tunnel full. They were going to need crowd control, and they were going to need it fast. For the first time since he’d left Ceres, Miller wished he had a badge. Someone pushed into Amos’ side, then backed away through the press when the big guy growled.
“Besides,” Miller said, “it’s a rad hazard. You don’t need air loss to kill everyone in the station. Just burn a few quadrillion spare neutrons through the place at C, and there won’t be any trouble with the oxygen supply.”
“Cheerful f**ker,” Amos said.
“They build stations inside of rocks for a reason,” Naomi said. “Not so easy to force radiation through this many meters of rock.”
“I spent a month in a rad shelter once,” Alex said as they pushed through the thickening crowd. “Ship I was on had magnetic containment drop. Automatic cutoffs failed, and the reactor kept runnin’ for almost a second. Melted the engine room. Killed five of the crew on the next deck up before they knew we had a problem, and it took them three days to carve the bodies free of the melted decking for burial. The rest of us wound up eighteen to a shelter for thirty-six days while a tug flew to get us.”
“Sounds great,” Holden said.
“End of it, six of ’em got married, and the rest of us never spoke to each other again,” Alex said.
Ahead of them, someone shouted. It wasn’t in alarm or even anger, really. Frustration. Fear. Exactly the things Miller didn’t want to hear.
“That may not be our big problem,” Miller said, but before he could explain, a new voice cut in, drowning out the emergency-response loop.
“Okay, everybody! We’re Eros security, que no? We got an emergency, so you do what we tell you and nobody gets hurt.”
About time, Miller thought.
“So here’s the rule,” the new voice said. “Next ass**le who pushes anyone, I’m going to shoot them. Move in an orderly fashion. First priority: orderly. Second priority is move! Go, go, go!”
At first nothing happened. The knot of human bodies was tied too tightly for even the most heavy-handed crowd control to free quickly, but a minute later, Miller saw some heads far ahead of him in the tunnel start to shift, then move away. The air in the tunnel was thickening and the hot plastic smell of overloaded recyclers reached him just as the clot came free. Miller’s breath started coming easier.
“Do they have hard shelters?” a woman behind them asked her companion, and then was swept away by the currents. Naomi plucked Miller’s sleeve.
“Do they?” she asked.
“They should, yes,” Miller said. “Enough for maybe a quarter million, and essential personnel and medical crews would get first crack at them.”
“And everyone else?” Amos said.
“If they survive the event,” Holden said, “station personnel will save as many people as they can.”
“Ah,” Amos said. Then: “Well, f**k that. We’re going for the Roci, right?”
“Oh, hell yes,” Holden said.
Ahead of them, the fast-shuffling crowd in their tunnel was merging with another flow of people from a lower level. Five thick-necked men in riot gear were waving people on. Two of them were pointing guns at the crowd. Miller was more than half tempted to go up and slap the little idiots. Pointing guns at people was a lousy way to avoid panic. One of the security men was also far too wide for his gear, the Velcro fasteners at his belly reaching out for each other like lovers at the moment of separation.
Miller looked down at the floor and slowed his steps, the back of his mind suddenly and powerfully busy. One of the cops swung his gun out over the crowd. Another one—the fat guy—laughed and said something in Korean.
What had Sematimba said about the new security force? All bluster, no balls. A new corporation out of Luna. Belters on the ground. Corrupt.
The name. They’d had a name. CPM. Carne Por la Machina. Meat for the machine. One of the gun-wielding cops lowered his weapon, swept off his helmet, and scratched violently behind one ear. He had wild black hair, a tattooed neck, and a scar that went from one eyelid down almost to the joint of his jaw.
Miller knew him. A year and a half ago, he’d arrested him for assault and racketeering. And the equipment—armor, batons, riot guns—also looked hauntingly familiar. Dawes had been wrong. Miller had been able to find his own missing equipment after all.
Whatever this was, it had been going on a long time before the Canterbury had picked up a distress call from the Scopuli. A long time before Julie had vanished. And putting a bunch of Ceres Station thugs in charge of Eros crowd control using stolen Ceres Station equipment had been part of the plan. The third phase.
Ah, he thought. Well. That can’t be good.
Miller slid to the side, letting as many bodies as he plausibly could fill the space between him and the gunmen dressed as police.
“Get down to the casino level,” one of the gunmen shouted over the crowd. “We’ll get you into the radiation shelters from there, but you’ve got to get to the casino level!”
Holden and his crew hadn’t noticed anything odd. They were talking among themselves, strategizing about how to get to their ship and what to do once they got there, speculating about who might have attacked the station and where Julie Mao’s twisted, infected corpse might be headed. Miller fought the impulse to interrupt them. He needed to stay calm, to think things through. They couldn’t attract attention. He needed the right moment.
