Miller waited for him to say something, but Holden didn’t know what. This speech had the feel of something the detective had prepared ahead of time. Might as well let him finish it.

“So Mars finds out that maybe Earth’s been building ships on the side, ones with no flag on them. Some of them might have killed a Martian flagship. I bet Mars calls up to check. I mean, it’s the Earth-Mars Coalition Navy, one big happy hegemony. Been policing the solar system together for almost a hundred years. Commanding officers are practically sleeping together. So it must be a mistake, right?”

“Okay,” Holden said, waiting.

“So Mars calls,” Miller said. “I mean, I don’t know for sure, but I bet that’s how it starts. A call from some bigwig on Mars to some bigwig on Earth.”

“Seems reasonable,” Holden said.

“What d’you think Earth says back?”

“I don’t know.”

Miller reached over and flipped on one of the screens, then pulled up a file with his name on it, date stamped from less than an hour before. A recording of video from a Martian news source, showing the night sky through a Martian dome. Streaks and flashes fill the sky. The ticker across the bottom of the feed says that Earth ships in orbit around Mars suddenly and without warning fired on their Martian counterparts. The streaks in the sky are missiles. The flashes are ships dying.

And then a massive white flare turns the Martian night into day for a few seconds, and the crawl says that the Deimos deep radar station has been destroyed.

Holden sat and watched the video display the end of the solar system in vivid color and with expert commentary. He kept waiting for the streaks of light to begin descending on the planet itself, for the domes to fly apart in nuclear fire, but it seemed someone had kept some measure of restraint, and the battle remained in the sky.

It couldn’t stay that way forever.

“You’re telling me that I did this,” Holden said. “That if I hadn’t broadcast that data, those ships would still be alive. Those people.”

“That, yeah. And that if the bad guys wanted to keep people from watching Eros, it just worked.”

Chapter Thirty-Six: Miller

  The war stories flowed in. Miller watched the feeds five at a time, subscreens crowding the face of his terminal. Mars was shocked, amazed, reeling. The war between Mars and the Belt—the biggest, most dangerous conflict in the history of mankind—was suddenly a sideshow. The reactions of the talking heads of Earth security forces ran the gamut from calm, rational discussion of preemptive defense to foaming-at-the-mouth denunciations of Mars as a pack of baby-raping animals. The attack on Deimos had turned the moon into a slowly spreading ring of gravel in the moon’s old orbit, a smudge on the Martian sky, and with that, the game had changed again.

Miller watched for ten hours as the attack became the blockade. The Martian navy, spread throughout the system, was turning home under heavy burn. The OPA feeds were calling it a victory, and maybe someone thought that was true. The pictures came through from the ships, from the sensor arrays. Dead warships, their sides ripped open by high-energy explosions, spinning out into their irregular orbital graves. Medical bays like the Roci’s filled with boys and girls half his age bleeding, burning, dying. Each cycle, new footage came in, new details of death and carnage. And each time some new clip appeared, he sat forward, hand on his mouth, waiting for the word to come. The one event that would signal the end of it all.

But it hadn’t come yet, and every hour that didn’t bring it gave another sliver of hope that maybe, maybeit wasn’t going to happen.

“Hey,” Amos said. “You slept at all?”

Miller looked up, his neck stiff. Red creases of his pillow still on his cheek and forehead, the mechanic stood in the open doorway of Miller’s cabin.

“What?” Miller said. Then: “Yeah, no. I’ve beenc watching.”

“Anyone drop a rock?”

“Not yet. It’s all still orbital or higher.”

“What kind of half-assed apocalypse are they running down there?” Amos said.

“Give ’em a break. It’s their first.”

The mechanic shook his broad head, but Miller could see the relief under the feigned disgust. As long as the domes were still standing on Mars, as long as the critical biosphere of Earth wasn’t in direct threat, humanity wasn’t dead. Miller had to wonder what they were hoping for out in the Belt, whether they’d managed to talk themselves into believing that the rough ecological pockets of the asteroids would sustain life indefinitely.

“You want a beer?” Amos asked.

“You’re having beer for breakfast?”

“Figure it’s dinner for you,” Amos said.

The man was right. Miller needed sleep. He hadn’t managed more than a catnap since they’d scuttled the stealth ship, and that had been plagued by strange dreams. He yawned at the thought of yawning, but the tension in his gut said he was more likely to spend the day watching newsfeeds than resting.

“It’s probably breakfast again,” Miller said.

“Want some beer for breakfast?” Amos asked.

“Sure.”

Walking through the Rocinantefelt surreal. The quiet hum of the air recyclers, the softness of the air. The journey out to Julie’s ship was a haze of pain medication and sickness. The time on Eros before that was a nightmare that wouldn’t fade. To walk through the spare, functional corridors, thrust gravity holding him gently to the floor, with very little chance of anyone trying to kill him felt suspicious. When he imagined Julie walking with him, it wasn’t so bad.

As he ate, his terminal chimed, the automatic reminder for another blood flush. He stood, adjusted his hat, and headed off to let the needles and pressure injectors do their worst. The captain was already there and hooked into a station when Miller arrived.

Holden looked like he’d slept, but not well. There weren’t the bruise-dark marks under his eyes that Miller had, but his shoulders were tense, his brow on the edge of furrowed. Miller wondered whether he’d been a little too hard on the guy. I told you socould be an important message, but the burden of innocent death, of the chaos of a failing civilization might also be too much for one man to carry.

Or maybe he was still mooning over Naomi.

Holden raised the hand that wasn’t encased in medical equipment.

“Morning,” Miller said.

“Hey.”

“Decided where we’re going yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Getting harder and harder to get to Mars,” Miller said, easing himself into the familiar embrace of the medical station. “If that’s what you’re aiming for, you’d better do it soon.”

“While there’s still a Mars, you mean?”

“For instance,” Miller agreed.

The needles snaked out on gently articulated armatures. Miller looked at the ceiling, trying not to tense up as the lines forced their way into his veins. There was a moment’s stinging, then a low, dull ache, and then numbness. The display above him announced the state of his body to doctors who were watching young soldiers die miles above Olympus Mons.

“Do you think they’d stop?” Holden asked. “I mean, Earth has got to be doing this because Protogen owns some generals or senators or something, right? It’s all because they want to be the only ones who have this thing. If Mars has it too, Protogen doesn’t have a reason to fight.”

Miller blinked. Before he could pick his answer— They’d try to annihilate Mars completely,or It’s gone too far for that,or Exactly how naive are you, Captain?—Holden went on.

“Screw it. We’ve got the datafiles. I’m going to broadcast them.”

Miller’s reply was as easy as reflex.

“No, you aren’t.”

Holden propped himself up, storm clouds in his expression.