“I’ve never actually seen the detector activate,” Miller said, his voice rough and faint after his coughing fit. “What does it mean when the thing is red?”
“It means we’ll be bleeding from our rectums in about six hours,” Holden said. “We have to get to the ship. It’ll have the meds we need.”
“What,” Miller said, “the
Holden grabbed Miller by the arm and led him back down the corridor toward the ramps. Holden’s skin felt warm and itchy. He didn’t know if it was radiation burn or psychosomatic. With the amount of radiation he’d just taken, it was a good thing he had sperm tucked away in Montana and on Europa.
Thinking that made his balls itch.
“They nuke the station,” Holden said. “Hell, maybe they just
“There are easier ways to kill people,” Miller said, his breathing coming in ragged gasps as they ran down the corridor.
“So it has to be more than that,” Holden said. “The bug, right? The one that killed that girl. It… fed on radiation.”
“Incubators,” Miller said, nodding in agreement.
They arrived at one of the ramps to the lower levels, but a group of citizens led by two fake riot cops were coming up. Holden grabbed Miller and pulled him to one side, where they could hide in the shadow of a closed noodle shop.
“So they infected them, right?” Holden said in a whisper, waiting for the group to pass. “Maybe fake radiation meds with the bug in it. Maybe that brown goo just spread around on the floor. Then whatever was in the girl, Julie-”
He stopped when Miller walked away from him straight at the group that had just come up the ramp.
“Officer,” said Miller to one of the fake cops.
They both stopped, and one of them said, “You supposed to be-”
Miller shot him in the throat, right below his helmet’s faceplate. Then he swiveled smoothly and shot the other guard in the inside of the thigh, just below the groin. When the man fell backward, yelling in pain, Miller walked up and shot him again, this time in the neck.
A couple of the citizens started screaming. Miller pointed his gun at them and they got quiet.
“Go down a level or two and find someplace to hide,” he said. “Do not cooperate with these men, even though they’re dressed like police. They do not have your best interests at heart. Go.”
The citizens hesitated, then ran. Miller took a few cartridges out of his pocket and began replacing the three he’d fired. Holden started to speak, but Miller cut him off.
“Take the throat shot if you can. Most people, the faceplate and chest armor don’t quite cover that gap. If the neck is covered, then shoot the inside of the thigh. Very thin armor there. Mobility issue. Takes most people down in one shot.”
Holden nodded, as though that all made sense.
“Okay,” Holden said. “Say, let’s get back to the ship before we bleed to death, right? No more shooting people if we can help it.” His voice sounded calmer than he felt.
Miller slapped the magazine back into his gun and chambered a round.
“I’m guessing there’s a lot more people need to be shot before this is over,” he said. “But sure. First things first.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Miller
The first time Miller killed anyone was in his third year working security. He’d been twenty-two, just married, talking about having kids. As the new guy on the contract, he’d gotten the shit jobs: patrolling levels so high the Coriolis made him seasick, taking domestic disturbance calls in holes no wider than a storage bin, standing guard on the drunk tank to keep predators from raping the unconscious. The normal hazing. He’d known to expect it. He’d thought he could take it.
The call had been from an illegal restaurant almost at the mass center. At less than a tenth of a g, gravity had been little more than a suggestion, and his inner ear had been confused and angered by the change in spin. If he thought about it, he could still remember the sound of raised voices, too fast and slurred for words. The smell of bathtub cheese. The thin haze of smoke from the cheap electric griddle.
It had happened fast. The perp had come out of the hole with a gun in one hand, dragging a woman by the hair with the other. Miller’s partner, a ten-year veteran named Carson, had shouted out the warning. The perp had turned, swinging the gun out at arm’s length like a stuntman in a video.
All through training, the instructors had said that you couldn’t know what you’d do until the moment came. Killing another human being was hard. Some people couldn’t. The perp’s gun came around; the gunman dropped the woman and shouted. It turned out that, for Miller at least, it wasn’t all that hard.
Afterward, he’d been through mandatory counseling. He’d cried. He’d suffered the nightmares and the shakes and all the things that cops suffered quietly and didn’t talk about. But even then, it seemed to be happening at a distance, like he’d gotten too drunk and was watching himself throw up. It was just a physical reaction. It would pass.
The important thing was he knew the answer to the question. Yes, if he needed to, he could take a life.
It wasn’t until now, walking through the corridors of Eros, that he’d taken joy in it. Even taking down the poor bastard in that first firefight had felt like the sad necessity of work. Pleasure in killing hadn’t come until after Julie, and it wasn’t really pleasure as much as a brief cessation of pain.
He held the gun low. Holden started down the ramp, and Miller followed, letting the Earther take point. Holden walked faster than he did and with the uncommented athleticism of someone who lived in a wide variety of gravities. Miller had the feeling he’d made Holden nervous, and he regretted that a little. He hadn’t intended to, and he really needed to get aboard Holden’s ship if he was going to find Julie’s secrets.
Or, for that matter, not die of radiation sickness in the next few hours. That seemed a finer point than it probably was.
“Okay,” Holden said at the bottom of the ramp. “We need to get back down, and there are a lot of guards between us and Naomi that are going to be really confused by two guys walking the wrong direction.”
“That’s a problem,” Miller agreed.
“Any thoughts?”
Miller frowned and considered the flooring. The Eros floors were different than Ceres’. Laminate with flecks of gold.
“Tubes aren’t going to be running,” he said. “If they are, it’ll be in lockdown mode, where it only stops at the holding pen down in the casino. So that’s out.”
“Maintenance corridor again?”
“If we can find one that goes between levels,” Miller said. “Might be a little tricky, but it seems like a better bet than shooting our way past a couple dozen assholes in armor. How long have we got before your friend takes off?”
Holden looked at his hand terminal. The radiation alarm was still deep red. Miller wondered how long those took to reset.
“A little more than two hours,” Holden said. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Let’s see what we can find,” Miller said.
The corridors nearest the radiation shelters-the death traps, the incubators-had been emptied. Wide passages built to accommodate the ancient construction equipment that had carved Eros into a human habitation were eerie with only Holden’s and Miller’s footsteps and the hum of the air recyclers. Miller hadn’t noticed when the emergency announcements had stopped, but the absence of them now seemed ominous.
If it had been Ceres, he would have known where to go, where everything led, how to move gracefully from one stage to another. On Eros, all he had was an educated guess. That wasn’t so bad.
