But he could tell it was taking too long, and worse than that-they weren’t talking about it; neither one spoke-they were walking more slowly than normal. It wasn’t up to the threshold of consciousness, but Miller knew that both of their bodies were starting to feel the radiation damage. It wasn’t going to get better.
“Okay,” Holden said. “Somewhere around here there has to be a maintenance shaft.”
“Could also try the tube station,” Miller said. “The cars run in vacuum, but there might be some service tunnels running parallel.”
“Don’t you think they’d have shut those down as part of the big roundup?”
“Probably,” Miller said.
“Hey! You two! What the fuck you think you’re doing up here?”
Miller looked back over his shoulder. Two men in riot gear were waving at them menacingly. Holden said something sharp under his breath. Miller narrowed his eyes.
The thing was these men were amateurs. The beginning of an idea moved in the back of Miller’s mind as he watched the two approach. Killing them and taking their gear wouldn’t work. There was nothing like scorch marks and blood to make it clear something had happened. But…
“Miller,” Holden said, a warning in his voice.
“Yeah,” Miller said. “I know.”
“I said what the fuck are you two doing here?” one of the security men said. “The station’s on lockdown. Everyone goes down to the casino level or up to the radiation shelters.”
“We were just looking for a way to… ah… get down to the casino level,” Holden said, smiling and being nonthreatening. “We’re not from around here, and-”
The closer of the two guards jabbed the butt of his rifle neatly into Holden’s leg. The Earther staggered, and Miller shot the guard just below the faceplate, then turned to the one still standing, mouth agape.
“You’re Mikey Ko, right?” Miller said.
The man’s face went even paler, but he nodded. Holden groaned and stood.
“Detective Miller,” Miller said. “Busted you on Ceres about four years ago. You got a little happy in a bar. Tappan’s, I think? Hit a girl with a pool cue?”
“Oh, hey,” the man said with a frightened smile. “Yeah, I remember you. How you been doing?”
“Good and bad,” Miller said. “You know how it is. Give the Earther your gun.”
Ko looked from Miller to Holden and back, licking his lips and judging his chances. Miller shook his head.
“Seriously,” Miller said. “Give him the gun.”
“Sure, yeah. No problem.”
This was the kind of man who’d killed Julie, Miller thought. Stupid. Shortsighted. A man born with a sense for raw opportunity where his soul should have been. Miller’s mental Julie shook her head in disgust and sorrow, and Miller found himself wondering if she meant the thug now handing his rifle to Holden or himself. Maybe both.
“What’s the deal here, Mikey?” Miller asked.
“What do you mean?” the guard said, playing stupid, like they were in an interrogation cell. Stalling for time. Walking through the old script of cop and criminal as if it still made sense. As if everything hadn’t changed. Miller was surprised by a tightness in his throat. He didn’t know what it was there for.
“The job,” he said. “What’s the job?”
“I don’t know-”
“Hey,” Miller said gently. “I just killed your buddy.”
“And that’s his third today,” Holden said. “I saw him.”
Miller could see it in the man’s eyes: the cunning, the shift, the move from one strategy to another. It was old and familiar and as predictable as water moving down.
“Hey,” Ko said, “it’s just a job. They told us about a year ago how we were making a big move, right? But no one knows what it is. So a few months back, they start moving guys over. Training us up like we were cops, you know?”
“Who was training you?” Miller said.
“The last guys. The ones who were working the contract before us,” Ko said.
“Protogen?”
“Something like that, yeah,” he said. “Then they took off, and we took over. Just muscle, you know. Some smuggling.”
“Smuggling what?”
“All kinds of shit,” Ko said. He was starting to feel safe, and it showed in the way he held himself and the way he spoke. “Surveillance equipment, communication arrays, serious-as-fuck servers with their own little gel software wonks already built in. Scientific equipment too. Stuff for checking the water and the air and shit. And these ancient remote-access robots like you’d use in a vacuum dig. All sorts of shit.”
“Where was it going to?” Holden asked.
“Here,” Ko said, gesturing to the air, the stone, the station. “It’s all here. They were like months installing it all. And then for weeks, nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?” Miller asked.
“Nothing nothing. All this buildup and then we sat around with our thumbs up our butts.”
Something had gone wrong. The Phoebe bug hadn’t made its rendezvous, but then Julie had come, Miller thought, and the game had turned back on. He saw her again as if he were in her apartment. The long, spreading tendrils of whatever the hell it was, the bone spurs pressing out against her skin, the black froth of filament pouring from her eyes.
“The pay’s good, though,” Ko said philosophically. “And it was kind of nice taking some time off.”
Miller nodded in agreement, leaned close, tucking the barrel of his gun through the interleaving of armor at Ko’s belly, and shot him.
“What the fuck!” Holden said as Miller put his gun into his jacket pocket.
“What did you think was going to happen?” Miller said, squatting down beside the gut-shot man. “It’s not like he was going to let us go.”
“Yeah, okay,” Holden said. “But… ”
“Help me get him up,” Miller said, hooking an arm behind Ko’s shoulder. Ko shrieked when Miller lifted him.
“What?”
“Get his other side,” Miller said. “Man needs medical attention, right?”
“Um. Yes,” Holden said.
“So get his other side.”
It wasn’t as far back to the radiation shelters as Miller had expected, which had its good points and its bad ones. On the upside, Ko was still alive and screaming. The chances were better that he’d be lucid, which wasn’t what Miller had intended. But as they came near the first group of guards, Ko’s babbling seemed scattered enough to work.
“Hey!” Miller shouted. “Some help over here!”
At the head of the ramp, four of the guards looked at one another and then started moving toward them, curiosity winning out over basic operating procedures. Holden was breathing hard. Miller was too. Ko wasn’t that heavy. It was a bad sign.
“What the hell is this?” one of the guards said.
“There’s a bunch of people holed up back there,” Miller said. “Resistance. I thought you people swept this level.”
“That wasn’t our job,” the guy said. “We’re just making sure the groups from the casino get to the shelters.”
“Well, someone screwed up,” Miller snapped. “You have transport?”
The guards looked at each other again.
“We can call for one,” a guy at the back said.
“Never mind,” Miller said. “You boys go find the shooters.”
“Wait a minute,” the first guy said. “Exactly who the hell are you?”
“The installers from Protogen,” Holden said. “We’re replacing the sensors that failed. This guy was supposed to help us.”
