The Dragon’s Path (81 page)

“Toss me some chow, XO,” Amos said.

“Captain,” Naomi corrected.

Holden threw a protein bar at him too. Amos snatched it from the air, then considered the long, thin package with distaste.

“Goddamn, Boss, I’d give my left nut for food that didn’t look like a dildo,” Amos said, then tapped his food against Naomi’s in mock toast.

“Tell me about our water,” Holden said.

“Well, I’ve been crawling around between hulls all day. I’ve tightened everything that can be tightened, and slapped epoxy on anything that can’t, so we aren’t dripping anywhere.”

“It’ll still be right down to the wire, Jim,” Naomi said. “The
Knight
’s recycling systems are crap. She was never intended to process five people’s worth of waste back into potables for two weeks.”

“Down to the wire, I can handle. We’ll just learn to live with each other’s stink. I was worried about ‘nowhere near enough.’ ”

“Speaking of which, I’m gonna head to my rack and spray on some more deodorant,” Amos said. “After all day crawling in the ship’s guts, my stink’s even keeping me awake tonight.”

Amos swallowed the last of his food and smacked his lips with mock relish, then climbed out of his couch and headed down the crew ladder. Holden took a bite of his own bar. It tasted like greased cardboard.

“What’s Shed up to?” he asked. “He’s been pretty quiet.”

Naomi, frowning, put her half-eaten bar down on the comm panel.

“I wanted to talk to you about that. He’s not doing well, Jim. Out of all of us, he’s having the hardest time with… what’s happened. You and Alex were both navy men. They train you to deal with losing shipmates. Amos has been flying so long this is actually the
third
ship that’s gone down under him, if you can believe that.”

“And you are made entirely of cast iron and titanium,” Holden said, only pretending to joke.

“Not entirely. Eighty, ninety percent. Tops,” Naomi said with a half smile. “Seriously, though. I think you should talk to him.”

“And say what? I’m no psychiatrist. The navy version of this speech involves duty and honorable sacrifice and avenging fallen comrades. Doesn’t work as well when your friends have been murdered for no apparent reason and there’s essentially no chance you can do anything about it.”

“I didn’t say you had to fix him. I said you needed to talk to him.”

Holden got up from his couch with a salute.

“Yes, sir,” he said. At the ladder he paused. “Again, thank you, Naomi. I’d really—”

“I know. Go be the captain,” she said, turning back to her panel and calling up the ship ops screen. “I’ll keep waving at the neighbors.”

Holden found Shed in the
Knight
’s tiny sick bay. Really more a sick closet. Other than a reinforced cot, the cabinets of supplies, and a half dozen pieces of wall-mounted equipment, there was just enough room for one stool stuck to the floor on magnetic feet. Shed was sitting on it.

“Hey, buddy, mind if I come in?” Holden asked.
Did I actually say ‘Hey, buddy’?

Shed shrugged and pulled up an inventory screen on the wall panel, opening various drawers and staring at the contents. Pretending he’d been in the middle of something.

“Look, Shed. This thing with the
Canterbury
has really hit everyone hard, and you’ve—” Holden said. Shed turned, holding up a white squeeze tube.

“Three percent acetic acid solution. Didn’t realize we had this out here. The
Cant
’s run out, and I’ve got three people with GW who could really use it. Why’d they put it on the
Knight,
I wonder,” Shed said.

“GW?” was all Holden could think to reply.

“Genital warts. Acetic acid solution is the treatment for any visible warts. Burns ’em off. Hurts like hell, but it does the job. No reason to keep it on the shuttle. Medical inventory is always so messed up.”

Holden opened his mouth to speak, found nothing to say, and closed it again.

“We’ve got acetic acid cream,” Shed said, his voice increasingly shrill, “but no elemcet for pain. Which do you think you’d need more on a rescue shuttle? If we’d found anyone on that wreck with a bad case of GW, we’d have been set. A broken bone? You’re out of luck. Just suck it up.”

“Look, Shed,” Holden said, trying to break in.

“Oh, and look at this. No coagulant booster. What the hell? Hey, no chance anyone on a rescue mission could, you know, start
bleeding.
Catch a case of red bumps on your crank, sure, but bleeding? No way! I mean, we’ve got four cases of syphilis on the
Cant
right now. One of the oldest diseases in the book, and we still can’t get rid of it. I tell those guys, ‘The hookers on Saturn Station are banging every ice bucker on the circuit, so put the glove on,’ but do they listen? No. So here we are with syphilis and not enough ciprofloxacin.”

Holden felt his jaw slide forward. He gripped the side of the hatch and leaned into the room.

“Everyone on the
Cant
is dead,” Holden said, making each word clear and strong and brutal. “Everyone is dead. No one needs the antibiotics. No one needs wart cream.”

Shed stopped talking, and all the air went out of him like he’d been gut punched. He closed the drawers in the supply cabinet and turned off the inventory screen with small precise movements.

“I know,” he said in a quiet voice. “I’m not stupid. I just need some time.”

“We all do. But we’re stuck in this tiny can together. I’ll be honest, I came down here because Naomi is worried about you, but now that I’m here, you’re freaking me the hell out. That’s okay,
because I’m the captain now and it’s my job. But I can’t have you freaking Alex or Amos out. We’re ten days from being grabbed by a Martian battleship, and that’s scary enough without the doctor falling apart.”

“I’m not a doctor, I’m just a tech,” Shed said, his voice very small.

“You’re
our
doctor, okay? To the four of us here with you on this ship, you’re our doctor. If Alex starts having post-traumatic stress episodes and needs meds to keep it together, he’ll come to you. If you’re down here jabbering about warts, he’ll turn around and go back up to the cockpit and just do a really bad job of flying. You want to cry? Do it with all of us. We’ll sit together in the galley and get drunk and cry like babies, but we’ll do it together where it’s safe. No more hiding down here.”

Shed nodded.

“Can we do that?” he said.

“Do what?” Holden asked.

“Get drunk and cry like babies?”

“Hell yes. That is officially on the schedule for tonight. Report to the galley at twenty hundred hours, Mr. Garvey. Bring a cup.”

Shed started to reply when the general comm clicked on and Naomi said, “Jim, come back up to ops.”

Holden gripped Shed’s shoulder for a moment, then left.

In ops, Naomi had the comm screen up again and was speaking to Alex in low tones. The pilot was shaking his head and frowning. A map glowed on her screen.

“What’s up?” Holden asked.

“We’re getting a tightbeam, Jim. It locked on and started transmitting just a couple minutes ago,” Naomi replied.

“From the
Donnager
?” The Martian battleship was the only thing he could think of that might be inside laser communications range.

“No. From the Belt,” Naomi said. “And not from Ceres, or Eros, or Pallas either. None of the big stations.”

She pointed at a small dot on her display.

“It’s coming from here.”

“That’s empty space,” Holden said.

“Nope. Alex checked. It’s the site of a big construction project Tycho is working on. Not a lot of detail on it, but radar returns are pretty strong.”

“Something out there has a comm array that’ll put a dot the size of your anus on us from over three AU away,” Alex said.

“Okay, wow, that’s impressive. What is our anus-sized dot saying?” Holden asked.

“You’ll never believe this,” Naomi said, and turned on the playback.

A dark-skinned man with the heavy facial bones of an Earther appeared on the screen. His hair was graying, and his neck was ropy with old muscle. He smiled and said, “Hello, James Holden. My name is Fred Johnson.”

Holden hit the pause button.

“This guy looks familiar. Search the ship’s database for that name,” he said.

Naomi didn’t move; she just stared at him with a puzzled look on her face.

“What?” he said.

“That’s
Frederick Johnson,
” she said.

“Okay.”

“Colonel Frederick Lucius Johnson.”

The pause might have been a second; it might have been an hour.

“Jesus,” was all Holden could think to say.

The man on the screen had once been among the most decorated officers in the UN military, and ended up one of its most embarrassing failures. To Belters, he was the Earther Sheriff of Nottingham who’d turned into Robin Hood. To Earth, he was the hero who’d fallen from grace.

Fred Johnson started his rise to fame with a series of high-profile captures of Belt pirates during one of the periods of tension between Earth and Mars that seemed to ramp up every few
decades and then fade away again. Whenever the system’s two superpowers rattled their sabers at each other, crime in the Belt rose. Colonel Johnson—Captain Johnson at the time—and his small wing of three missile frigates destroyed a dozen pirate ships and two major bases in a two-year span. By the time the Coalition had stopped bickering, piracy was actually
down
in the Belt, and Fred Johnson was the name on everyone’s lips. He was promoted and given command over the Coalition marine division tasked with policing the Belt, where he continued to serve with distinction.

Until Anderson Station.

A tiny shipping depot almost on the opposite side of the Belt from the major port Ceres, most people, including most Belters, would not have been able to find Anderson Station on a map. Its only importance was as a minor distribution station for water and air in one of the sparsest stretches of the Belt. Fewer than a million Belters got their air from Anderson.

Gustav Marconi, a career Coalition bureaucrat on the station, decided to implement a 3-percent handling surcharge on shipments passing through the station in hopes of raising the bottom line. Less than 5 percent of the Belters buying their air from Anderson were living bottle to mouth, so just under fifty thousand Belters might have to spend one day of each month not breathing. Only a small percentage of those fifty thousand lacked the leeway in their recycling systems to cover this minor shortfall. Of those, only a small portion felt that armed revolt was the correct course.

Which was why of the million affected, only 170 armed Belters came to the station, took over, and threw Marconi out an airlock. They demanded a government guarantee that no further handling surcharges would be added to the price of air and water coming through the station.

The Coalition sent Colonel Johnson.

During the Massacre of Anderson Station, the Belters kept the station cameras rolling, broadcasting to the solar system the entire
time. Everyone watched as Coalition marines fought a long, gruesome corridor-to-corridor battle against men with nothing to lose and no reason to surrender. The Coalition won—it was a foregone conclusion—but it took three days of broadcast slaughter. The iconic image of the video was not one of the fighting, but the last image the station cameras caught before they were cut off: Colonel Johnson in station ops, surrounded by the corpses of the Belters who’d made their last stand there, surveying the carnage with a flat stare and hands limp at his sides.

The UN tried to keep Colonel Johnson’s resignation quiet, but he was too much a public figure. The video of the battle dominated the nets for weeks, only displaced when the former Colonel Johnson made a public statement apologizing for the massacre and announcing that the relationship between the Belt and the inner planets was untenable and heading toward ever greater tragedy.

Then he vanished. He was almost forgotten, a footnote in the history of human carnage, until the Pallas colony revolt four years later. This time refinery metalworkers kicked the Coalition governor off station. Instead of a tiny way station with 170 rebels, it was a major Belt rock with more than 150,000 people on it. When the Coalition ordered in the marines, everyone expected a bloodbath.