“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 Rocislid into its berth with a series of metallic bangs. “But Fred isn’t justa 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 Nauvoodrifted 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 Nauvoosuddenly 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 Nauvooas 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 Rocinanteand 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.

He’d lived in the Belt his whole life, and he’d never been anywhere that was designed so carefully for the tasteful display of wealth and power. It was pleasant as long as he didn’t think about it too much.

He wasn’t the only one drawn to the open spaces of Tycho. A few dozen station workers sat in groups or walked through together. An hour before, Amos and Alex had gone by, deep in their own conversation, so he wasn’t entirely surprised when, standing up and walking back toward the docks, he saw Naomi sitting by herself with a bowl of food cooling on a tray at her side. Her gaze was fixed on her hand terminal.

“Hey,” he said.

Naomi looked up, recognized him, and smiled distractedly.

“Hey,” she said.

Miller nodded toward the hand terminal and shrugged a question.

“Comm data from that ship,” she said. It was always that ship,Miller noticed. The same way people would call a particularly godawful crime scene that place.“It’s all tightbeam, so I thought it wouldn’t be so hard to triangulate. Butc ”

“Not so much?”

Naomi lifted her eyebrows and sighed.

“I’ve been plotting orbits,” she said. “But nothing’s fitting. There could be relay drones, though. Moving targets the ship system was calibrated for that would send the message on to the actual station. Or another drone, and then the station, or who knows?”

“Any data coming off Eros?”

“I assume so,” Naomi said, “but I don’t know that it would be any easier to make sense of than this.”

“Can’t your OPA friends do something?” Miller asked. “They’ve got more processing power than one of these handhelds. Probably have a better activity map of the Belt too.”

“Probably,” she said.

He couldn’t tell if she didn’t trust this Fred that Holden had given them over to, or just needed to feel like the investigation was still hers. He considered telling her to back off it for a while, to let the others carry it, but he didn’t see he had the moral authority to make that one stick.

“What?” Naomi said, an uncertain smile on her lips.

Miller blinked.

“You were laughing a little,” Naomi said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you laugh before. I mean, not when something was funny.”

“I was just thinking about something a partner of mine told me about letting cases go when you got pulled from them.”