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Naomi was right. It would be so easy to see Belters as alien. Hell, if you gave them time to develop some really efficient implantable oxygen storage and recycling and kept trimming the environment suits down to the minimum necessary for heat, you might wind up with Belters who spent more time outside their ships and stations than in.
Maybe that was why they were taxed to subsistence level. The bird was out of the cage, but you couldn’t let it stretch its wings too far or it might forget it belonged to you.
“You trust this Fred?” Miller asked.
“Sort of,” Holden said. “He treated us well last time, when everyone else wanted us dead or locked up.”
Miller grunted, as if that proved nothing.
“He’s OPA, right?”
“Yeah,” Holden said. “But I think maybe the real OPA. Not the cowboys who want to shoot it out with the inners. And not those nuts on the radio calling for war. Fred’s a politician.”
“What about the ones keeping Ceres in line?”
“I don’t know,” Holden said. “I don’t know about them. But Fred’s the best shot we have. Least wrong.”
“Fair enough,” Miller said. “We won’t find a political solution to Protogen, you know.”
“Yeah,” Holden said, then began unbuckling his harness as the Roci slid into its berth with a series of metallic bangs. “But Fred isn’t just a politician.”
Fred sat behind his large wooden desk, reading the notes Holden had written about Eros, the search for Julie, and the discovery of the stealth ship. Miller sat across from him, watching Fred like an entomologist might watch a new species of bug, guessing if it was likely to sting. Holden was a little farther away on Fred’s right, trying not to keep looking at the clock on his hand terminal. On the huge screen behind the desk, the Nauvoo drifted by like the metal bones of some dead and decaying leviathan. Holden could see the tiny spots of brilliant blue light where workers used welding torches on the hull and frame. To occupy himself, he started counting them.
He’d reached forty-three when a small shuttle appeared in his field of view, a load of steel beams clutched in a pair of heavy manipulator arms, and flew toward the half-built generation ship. The shuttle shrank to a point no larger than the tip of a pen before it stopped. The Nauvoo suddenly shifted in Holden’s mind from a large ship relatively nearby, to a gigantic ship farther away. It gave him a short rush of vertigo.
His hand terminal beeped at almost the same instant that Miller’s did. He didn’t even look at it; he just tapped the face to shut it up. He knew this routine by now. He pulled out a small bottle, took out two blue pills, and swallowed them dry. He could hear Miller pouring pills out of his bottle as well. The ship’s expert medical system dispensed them for him every week with a warning that failing to take them on schedule would lead to horrific death. He took them. He would for the rest of his life. Missing a few would just mean that wasn’t very long.
Fred finished reading and threw his hand terminal down on the desk, then rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands for several seconds. To Holden, he looked older than the last time they’d seen each other.
“I have to tell you, Jim, I have no idea what to make of this,” he finally said.
Miller looked at Holden and mouthed, Jim, at him with a question on his face. Holden ignored him.
“Did you read Naomi’s addition at the end?” Holden asked.
“The bit with the networked nanobugs for increased processing power?”
“Yeah, that bit,” Holden said. “It makes sense, Fred.”
Fred laughed without humor, then stabbed one finger at his terminal.
“That,” he said. “That only makes sense to a psychopath. No one sane could do that. No matter what they thought they might get out of it.”
Miller cleared his throat.
“You have something to add, Mr. Muller?” Fred asked.
“Miller,” the detective replied. “Yes. First—and all respect here—don’t kid yourself. Genocide’s old-school. Second, the facts aren’t in question. Protogen infected Eros Station with a lethal alien disease, and they’re recording the results. Why doesn’t matter. We need to stop them.”
“And,” Holden said, “we think we can track down where their observation station is.”
Fred leaned back in his chair, the fake leather and metal frame creaking under his weight even in the one-third g.
“Stop them how?” he asked. Fred knew. He just wanted to hear them say it out loud. Miller played along.
“I’d say we fly to their station and shoot them.”
“Who is ‘we’?” Fred asked.
“There are a lot of OPA hotheads looking to shoot it out with Earth and Mars,” Holden said. “We give them some real bad guys to shoot at instead.”
Fred nodded in a way that didn’t mean he agreed to anything.
“And your sample? The captain’s safe?” Fred said.
“That’s mine,” Holden said. “No negotiation on that.”
Fred laughed again, though there was some humor in it this time. Miller blinked in surprise and then stifled a grin.
“Why would I agree to that?” Fred asked.
Holden lifted his chin and smiled.
“What if I told you that I’ve hidden the safe on a planetesimal booby-trapped with enough plutonium to break anyone who touches it into their component atoms even if they could find it?” he said.
Fred stared at him for a moment, then said, “But you didn’t.”
“Well, no,” Holden said. “But I could tell you I did.”
“You are too honest,” Fred said.
“And you can’t trust anyone with something this big. You already know what I’m going to do with it. That’s why, until we can agree on something better, you’re leaving it with me.”
Fred nodded.
“Yes,” he said, “I guess I am.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Miller
The observation deck looked out over the Nauvoo as the behemoth slowly came together. Miller sat on the edge of a soft couch, his fingers laced over his knee, his gaze on the immense vista of the construction. After his time on Holden’s ship and, before that, in Eros, with its old-style closed architecture, a view so wide seemed artificial. The deck itself was wider than the Rocinante and decorated with soft ferns and sculpted ivies. The air recyclers were eerily quiet, and even though the spin gravity was nearly the same as Ceres’, the Coriolis felt subtly wrong.
