Holden vaulted the waist-high metal fence and came to a sliding halt about three meters from the fake cop and his victim. Holden’s gun fired one last time and then the slide locked in the open position to let him know it was empty.
The thug didn’t fall down. He straightened up, looked down at his torso, and then looked up and pointed his gun at Holden’s face. Holden had time to count the three bullets that were smashed against the heavy chest armor of the thug’s riot gear. Die gloriously in a hail of bullets,he thought.
The thug said, “Stupid mother fu—” and his head snapped back in a spray of red. He slumped to the floor.
“Gap at the neck, remember?” Miller said from behind him. “Chest armor’s too thick for a pistol.”
Suddenly dizzy, Holden bent over at the waist, gasping for air. He tasted lemon at the back of his throat and swallowed twice to stop himself from throwing up. He was afraid it would be full of blood and stomach lining. He didn’t need to see that.
“Thanks,” he gasped out, turning his head toward Miller.
Miller just nodded vaguely in his direction, then walked over to the guard and nudged him with one foot. Holden stood up and looked around the corridor, waiting for the inevitable wave of vengeful mafia enforcers to come crashing down on them. He didn’t see any. He and Miller were standing in a quiet island of calm in the midst of Armageddon. All around them, tendrils of violence were whipping into high gear. People were running in every direction; the mafia goons were yelling in booming amplified voices and punctuating the threats with periodic gunfire. But there were only hundreds of them, and there were many thousands of angry and panicked civilians. Miller gestured at the chaos.
“This is what happens,” he said. “Give a bunch of yahoos the equipment, and they think they know what they’re doing.”
Holden crouched beside the fallen child. It was a boy, maybe thirteen, with Asian features and dark hair. His chest had a gaping wound in it, blood trickling out instead of gushing. He didn’t have a pulse that Holden could find. Holden picked him up anyway, looking around for someplace to take him.
“He’s dead,” Miller said as he replaced the cartridge he’d fired.
“Go to hell. We don’t know. If we can get him to the ship, maybec ”
Miller shook his head, a sad but distant expression on his face as he looked at the child in Holden’s arms.
“He took high-caliber round to the center of mass,” Miller said. “He’s gone.”
“Fuck me,” Holden said.
“You keep saying that.”
A bright neon sign flashed above the corridor that led out of the casino levels and onto the ramps down to the docks. THANK YOU FOR PLAYING, it read. And YOU’RE ALWAYS A WINNER ON EROS. Below it, two ranks of men in heavy combat armor blocked the way. They might have given up on crowd control in the casinos, but they weren’t letting anyone go.
Holden and Miller crouched behind an overturned coffee cart a hundred meters from the soldiers. As they watched, a dozen or so people made a dash toward the guards and were summarily mowed down by machine gun fire, then fell to the deck beside those who had tried before.
“I count thirty-four of them,” Miller said. “How many can you handle?”
Holden spun to look at him in surprise, but Miller’s face told him the former cop was joking.
“Kidding aside, how dowe get past that?” Holden said.
“Thirty men with machine guns and a clear line of sight. No cover to speak of for the last twenty meters or so,” Miller said. “We don’t get past that.”
Chapter Thirty: Miller
They sat on the floor with their backs to a bank of pachinko machines no one was playing, watching the ebb and flow of the violence around them like it was a soccer game. Miller’s hat was perched on his bent knee. He felt the vibration against his back when one of the displays cycled through its dupe-call. The lights glittered and glowed. Holden, beside him, was breathing hard, like he’d run a race. Out beyond them, like something from Hieronymous Bosch, the casino levels of Eros prepared for death.
The riot’s momentum had spent itself for now. Men and women gathered together in small groups. Guards strode through, threatening and scattering any bunch that got too large or unruly. Something was burning fast enough that the air scrubbers couldn’t get out the smell of melting plastic. The bhangra Muzak mixed with weeping and screaming and wails of despair. Some idiot was shouting at one of the so-called cops: he was a lawyer; he was getting all of this on video; whoever was responsible was going to be in big trouble. Miller watched a bunch of people start to gather around the confrontation. The guy in the riot gear listened, nodded, and shot the lawyer once in the kneecap. The crowd dispersed except for one woman, the lawyer’s wife or girlfriend, bent down over him screaming. And in the privacy of Miller’s skull, everything slowly fell apart.
He was aware of having two different minds. One was the Miller he was used to, familiar with. The one who was thinking about what was going to happen when he got out, what the next step would be in connecting the dots between Phoebe Station, Ceres, Eros, and Juliette Mao, how to work the case. That version of him was scanning the crowd the way he might have watched the line at a crime scene, waiting for some detail, some change to catch his attention. Send him in the right direction to solve the mystery. It was the shortsighted, idiotic part of him that couldn’t conceive of his own personal extinction, and it thought surely, surelythere was going to be an after.
The other Miller was different. Quieter. Sad, maybe, but at peace. He’d read a poem many years before called “The Death-Self,” and he hadn’t understood the term until now. A knot at the middle of his psyche was untying. All the energy he’d put into holding things together—Ceres, his marriage, his career, himself—was coming free. He’d shot and killed more men in the past day than in his whole career as a cop. He’d started—only started—to realize that he’d actually fallen in love with the object of his search after he knew for certain that he’d lost her. He’d seen unequivocally that the chaos he’d dedicated his life to holding at bay was stronger and wider and more powerful than he would ever be. No compromise he could make would be enough. His death-self was unfolding in him, and the dark blooming took no effort. It was a relief, a relaxation, a long, slow exhale after decades of holding it in.
He was in ruins, but it was okay, because he was dying.
“Hey,” Holden said. His voice was stronger than Miller had expected it might be.
“Yeah?”
“Did you ever watch Misko and Mariskowhen you were a kid?”
Miller frowned. “The kids’ show?” he asked.
“The one with the five dinosaurs and the evil guy in the big pink hat,” Holden said, then starting humming a bright, boppy tune. Miller closed his eyes and then started singing along. The music had had words once. Now it was only a series of rises and falls, runs up and down a major scale, with every dissonance resolved in the note that followed.
“Guess I must have,” Miller said when they reached the end.
“I loved that show. I must have been eight or nine last time I saw it,” Holden said. “Funny how that stuff stays with you.”
“Yeah,” Miller said. He coughed, turned his head, and spat out something red. “How are you holding together?”
“I think I’m okay,” Holden said. Then, a moment later, he added, “As long as I don’t stand up.”
“Nauseated?”
“Yeah, some.”
“Me too.”
“What is this?” Holden asked. “I mean, what the hell is this all about? Why are they doingthis?”