The difference was subtle, but it was deep. It made him want to stand taller, to show with his body that he was a Belter. That he belonged there. It made him want to win people’s good opinion back. Let by a bunch of guys passing out virtual reality propaganda with a warning, maybe.
It wasn’t a smart impulse.
“What’ve we got on the board?” Miller asked.
“Two burglaries that look like that same ring,” Havelock said. “That domestic dispute from last week still needs the report closed up. There was a pretty good assault over by Nakanesh Import Consortium, but Shaddid was talking to Dyson and Patel about that, so it’s probably spoken for already.”
“So you want… ”
Havelock looked up and out to cover the fact that he was looking away. It was something he’d been doing more often since things had gone to shit.
“We’ve really got to get the reports done,” Havelock said. “Not just the domestic. There’re four or five folders that are only still open because they need to be crossed and dotted.”
“Yeah,” Miller said.
Since the riots, he’d watched everyone in a bar get served before Havelock. He’d seen how the other cops from Shaddid down went out of their way to reassure Miller that hewas one of the good guys, a tacit apology for saddling him with an Earther. And he’d seen Havelock see it too.
It made Miller want to protect the man, to let Havelock spend his days in the safety of paperwork and station house coffee. Help the man pretend that he wasn’t hated for the gravity he’d grown up in.
That wasn’t a smart impulse either.
“What about your bullshit case?” Havelock asked.
“What?”
Havelock held up a folder. The Julie Mao case. The kidnap job. The sideshow. Miller nodded and rubbed his eyes. Someone at the front of the station house yelped. Someone else laughed.
“Yeah, no,” Miller said. “Haven’t touched it.”
Havelock grinned and held it out to him. Miller accepted the file, flipped it open. The eighteen-year-old grinned out at him with perfect teeth.
“I don’t want to saddle you with all the desk driving,” Miller said.
“Hey, you’re not the one that kept me off that one. That was Shaddid’s call. And anyway… it’s just paperwork. Never killed anyone. You feel guilty about it, you can buy me a beer after work.”
Miller tapped the case against the corner of his desk, the small impacts settling the contents against the folder’s spine.
“Right,” he said. “I’ll go do some follow-up on the bullshit. I’ll be back by lunch, write something up to keep the boss happy.”
“I’ll be here,” Havelock said. Then, as Miller rose: “Hey. Look. I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure, but I also don’t want you to hear it someplace else… ”
“Put in for a transfer?” Miller said.
“Yeah. Talked to some of those Protogen contractors that passed through. They say their Ganymede office is looking for a new lead investigator. And I thought… ” Havelock shrugged.
“It’s a good move,” Miller said.
“Just want to go someplace with a sky, even if you look at it through domes,” Havelock said, and all the bluff masculinity of police work couldn’t keep the wistfulness out of his voice.
“It’s a good move,” Miller said again.
Juliette Andromeda Mao’s hole was in the ninth level of a fourteen-tiered tunnel near the port. The great inverted V was almost half a kilometer wide at the top, and no more than a standard tube width at the bottom, the retrofit of one of a dozen reaction mass chambers from the years before the asteroid had been given its false gravity. Now thousands of cheap holes burrowed into the walls, hundreds on each level, heading straight back like shotgun shacks. Kids played on the terraced streets, shrieking and laughing at nothing. Someone at the bottom was flying a kite in the constant gentle spin breeze, the bright Mylar diamond swerving and bucking in the microturbulence. Miller checked his terminal against the numbers painted on the wall. 5151-I.Home sweet home to the poor little rich girl.
He keyed his override, and the dirty green door popped its seals and let him pass.
The hole canted up into the body of the station. Three small rooms: general living space at the front, then a bedroom hardly larger than the cot it contained, then a stall with shower, toilet, and half sink all within elbow distance. It was a standard design. He’d seen it a thousand times.
Miller stood for a minute, not looking at anything in particular, listening to the reassuring hiss of air cycling through ductwork. He reserved judgment, waiting as the back of his head built an impression of the place and, through it, of the girl who’d lived there.
Spartanwas the wrong word. The place was simple, yes. The only decorations were a small framed watercolor of a slightly abstracted woman’s face over the table in the front room and a cluster of playing-card-sized plaques over the cot in the bedroom. He leaned close to read the small script. A formal award granting Julie Mao-not Juliette-purple belt status by the Ceres Center for Jiu Jitsu. Another stepping her up to brown belt. They were two years apart. Tough school, then. He put his fingers on the empty space on the wall where one for black could go. There was none of the affectation-no stylized throwing stars or imitation swords. Just a small acknowledgment that Julie Mao had done what she had done. He gave her points for that.
The drawers had two changes of clothes, one of heavy canvas and denim and one of blue linen with a silk scarf. One for work, one for play. It was less than Miller owned, and he was hardly a clotheshorse.
With her socks and underwear was a wide armband with the split circle of the OPA. Not a surprise, for a girl who’d turned her back on wealth and privilege to live in a dump like this. The refrigerator had two takeaway boxes filled with spoiled food and a bottle of local beer.
Miller hesitated, then took the beer. He sat at the table and pulled up the hole’s built-in terminal. True to Shaddid’s word, Julie’s partition opened to Miller’s password.
The custom background was a racing pinnace. The interface was customized in small, legible iconography. Communication, entertainment, work, personal. Elegant.That was the word. Not Spartan, but elegant.
He paged quickly through her professional files, letting his mind take in an overview, just as he had with the whole living space. There would be time for rigor, and a first impression was usually more useful than an encyclopedia. She had training videos on several different light transport craft. Some political archives, but nothing that raised a flag. A scanned volume of poetry by some of the first settlers in the Belt.
He shifted to her personal correspondence. It was all kept as neat and controlled as a Belter’s. All incoming messages were filtered to subfolders. Work, Personal, Broadcast, Shopping. He popped open Broadcast. Two or three hundred political newsfeeds, discussion group digests, bulletins and announcements. A few had been viewed here and there, but nothing with any sort of religious observation. Julie was the kind of woman who would sacrifice for a cause, but not the kind who’d take joy in reading the propaganda. Miller filed that away.
Shopping was a long tracking of simple merchant messages. Some receipts, some announcements, some requests for goods and services. A cancellation for a Belt-based singles circle caught his eye. Miller re-sorted for related correspondence. Julie had signed up for the “low g, low pressure” dating service in February of the previous year and canceled in June without having used it.
The Personal folder was more diverse. At a rough guess there were sixty or seventy subfolders broken down by name. Some were people-Sascha Lloyd-Navarro, Ehren Michaels. Others were private notations-Sparring Circle, OPA.