Leviathan Wakes (48 page)

“They’re in engineering,” Miller said.

“Who?” Holden said.

“The crew. Whoever was on the ship. All except that one,” he said, gesturing at half a footprint that led toward the lift. “You see how her footprints are over the top of everything else. And there, where she stepped in that blood, it was already dry. Flaked instead of smearing.”

“How you know it was a girl?” Holden asked.

“Because it was Julie,” Miller said.

“Well, whoever’s in there, they’ve been sucking vacuum for a long time,” Amos said. “Want to go see?”

No one said yes, but they all floated forward. The hatch stood open. If the darkness beyond it seemed more solid, more ominous, more
personal
than the rest of the dead ship had, it was only Mill
er’s imagination playing tricks. He hesitated, trying to summon up the image of Julie, but she wouldn’t come.

Floating into the engineering deck was like swimming into a cave. Miller saw the other flashlights playing over walls and panels, looking for live controls, or else controls that could come alive. He aimed his own beam into the body of the room, the dark swallowing it.

“We got batteries, Cap’n,” Amos said. “And… looks like the reactor got shut down. Intentional.”

“Think you can get it back up?”

“Want to run some diagnostics,” Amos said. “There could be a reason they shut it off, and I don’t want to find out the hard way.”

“Good point.”

“But I can at least get us… some… come
on,
you bastard.”

All around the deck, blue-white lights flared up. The sudden brilliance blinded Miller for a half second. His vision returned with a sense of growing confusion. Naomi gasped, and Holden yelped. Something in the back of Miller’s own mind started to shriek, and he forced it into silence. It was just a crime scene. They were only bodies.

Except they weren’t.

The reactor stood before him, quiescent and dead. All around it, a layer of human flesh. He could pick out arms, hands with fingers splayed so wide they hurt to look at. The long snake of a spine curved, ribs fanning out like the legs of some perverse insect. He tried to make what he was seeing make sense. He’d seen men eviscerated before. He knew that the long, ropy swirl to the left of the thing were intestines. He could see where the small bowel widened to become a colon. The familiar shape of a skull looked out at him.

But then, among the familiar anatomy of death and dismemberment, there were other things: nautilus spirals, wide swaths of soft black filament, a pale expanse of something that might have been skin cut by a dozen gill-like vents, a half-formed limb that looked equally like an insect and a fetus without being either one.
The frozen, dead flesh surrounded the reactor like the skin of an orange. The crew of the stealth ship. Maybe of the
Scopuli
as well.

All but Julie.

“Yeah,” Amos said. “This could take a little longer than I was thinking, Cap.”

“It’s okay,” Holden said. His voice on the radio sounded shaky. “You don’t have to.”

“It’s no trouble. As long as none of
that
freaky shit broke the containment, reactor should boot up just fine.”

“You don’t mind being around… it?” Holden said.

“Honest, Cap’n, I’m not thinking about it. Give me twenty minutes, I’ll tell you if we got power or if we have to patch a line over from the
Roci.
”

“Okay,” Holden said. And then again, his voice more solid: “Okay, but don’t touch any of that.”

“Wasn’t going to,” Amos said.

They floated back out through the hatch, Holden and Naomi and Miller coming last.

“Is that… ” Naomi said, then coughed and started again. “Is that what’s happening on Eros?”

“Probably,” Miller said.

“Amos,” Holden said. “Do you have enough battery power to light up the computers?”

There was a pause. Miller took a deep breath, the plastic-and-ozone scent of the suit’s air system filling his nose.

“I think so,” Amos said dubiously. “But if we can get the reactor up first… ”

“Bring up the computers.”

“You’re the captain, Cap’n,” Amos said. “Have it to you in five.”

In silence, they floated up—back—to the airlock, and past it to the operations deck. Miller hung back, watching the way Holden’s trajectory kept him near Naomi and then away from her.

Protective and head-shy both, Miller thought. Bad combination.

Julie was waiting in the airlock. Not at first, of course. Miller
slid back into the space, his mind churning through everything he’d seen, just like it was a case. A normal case. His gaze drifted toward the broken locker. There was no suit in it. For a moment, he was back on Eros, in the apartment where Julie had died. There had been an environment suit there. And then Julie was there with him, pushing her way out of the locker.

What were you doing there?
he thought.

“No brig,” he said.

“What?” Holden said.

“I just noticed,” Miller said. “Ship’s got no brig. They aren’t built to carry prisoners.”

Holden made a low agreeing grunt.

“Makes you wonder what they were planning to do with the crew of the
Scopuli,
” Naomi said. The tone of her voice meant she didn’t wonder at all.

“I don’t think they were,” Miller said slowly. “This whole thing… they were improvising.”

“Improvising?” Naomi said.

“Ship was carrying an infectious something or other without enough containment to contain it. Taking on prisoners without a brig to hold ’em in. They were making this up as they went along.”

“Or they had to hurry,” Holden said. “Something happened that made them hurry. But what they did on Eros must have taken months to arrange. Maybe years. So maybe something happened at the last minute?”

“Be interesting to know what,” Miller said.

Compared to the rest of the ship, the ops deck looked peaceful. Normal. The computers had finished their diagnostics, screens glowing placidly. Naomi went to one, holding the back of the chair with one hand so the gentle touch of her fingers against the screen wouldn’t push her backward.

“I’ll do what I can here,” she said. “You can check the bridge.”

There was a pause that carried weight.

“I’ll be fine,” Naomi said.

“All right. I know you’ll… I… C’mon, Miller.”

Miller let the captain float ahead into the bridge. The screens there were spooling through diagnostics so standard Miller recognized them. It was a wider space than he’d imagined, with five stations with crash couches customized for other people’s bodies. Holden strapped in at one. Miller took a slow turn around the deck. Nothing seemed out of place here—no blood, no broken chairs or torn padding. When it happened, the fight had been down near the reactor. He wasn’t sure yet what that meant. He sat at what, under a standard layout, would have been the security station, and opened a private channel to Holden.

“Anything you’re looking for in particular?”

“Briefings. Overviews,” Holden said shortly. “Whatever’s useful. You?”

“See if I can get into the internal monitors.”

“Hoping to find…?”

“What Julie found,” Miller said.

The security assumed that anyone sitting at the console had access to the low-level feeds. It still took half an hour to parse the command structure and query interface. Once Miller had that down, it wasn’t hard. The time stamp on the log listed the feed as the day the
Scopuli
had gone missing. The security camera in the airlock bay showed the crew—Belters, most of them—being escorted in. Their captors were in armor, with faceplates lowered. Miller wondered if they’d meant to keep their identities secret. That would almost have suggested they were planning to keep the crew alive. Or maybe they were just wary of some last-minute resistance. The crew of the
Scopuli
weren’t wearing environment suits or armor. A couple of them weren’t even wearing uniforms.

But Julie was.

It was strange, watching her move. With a sense of dislocation, Miller realized that he’d never actually seen her in motion. All the pictures he’d had in his file back on Ceres had been stills. Now here she was, floating with her chosen compatriots, her hair back out of her eyes, her jaw clamped. She looked very small surrounded by her crew and the men in armor. The little rich girl
who’d turned her back on wealth and status to be with the downtrodden Belt. The girl who’d told her mother to sell the
Razorback
—the ship she’d loved—rather than give in to emotional blackmail. In motion, she looked a little different from the imaginary version he’d built of her—the way she pulled her shoulders back, the habit of reaching her toes toward the floor even in null g—but the basic image was the same. He felt like he was filling in blanks with the new details rather than reimagining the woman.

The guards said something—the security feed’s audio was playing to vacuum—and the
Scopuli
crew looked aghast. Then, hesitantly, the captain started taking his uniform off. They were stripping the prisoners. Miller shook his head.

“Bad plan.”

“What?” Holden said.

“Nothing. Sorry.”

Julie wasn’t moving. One of the guards moved toward her, his legs braced on the wall. Julie, who’d lived through being raped, maybe, or something as bad. Who’d studied jiu jitsu to feel safe afterward. Maybe they thought she was just being modest. Maybe they were afraid she was hiding a weapon under her clothes. Either way, they tried to force the point. One of the guards pushed her, and she latched on to his arm like her life depended on it. Miller winced when he saw the man’s elbow bend the wrong way, but he also smiled.

That’s my girl,
he thought.
Give ’em hell.

And she did. For almost forty seconds, the airlock bay was a battleground. Even some of the cowed
Scopuli
crew tried to join in. But then Julie didn’t see a thick-shouldered man launch from behind her. Miller felt it when the gauntleted hand hammered Julie’s temple. She wasn’t out, but she was groggy. The men with guns stripped her with a cold efficiency, and when there were no weapons or comm devices, they handed her a jumpsuit and shoved her in a locker. The others, they led down into the ship. Miller matched time stamps and switched feeds.

The prisoners were taken to the galley, then bound to the tables.
One of the guards spent a minute or so talking, but with his faceplate down, the only clues Miller had to the content of the sermon were the reactions of the crew—wide-eyed disbelief, confusion, outrage, and fear. The guard could have been saying anything.

Miller started skipping. A few hours, then a few more. The ship was under thrust, the prisoners actually sitting at the tables instead of floating near them. He flipped to other parts of the ship. Julie’s locker was still closed. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have assumed she was dead.

He skipped ahead.

One hundred and thirty-two hours later, the crew of the
Scopuli
grew a pair. Miller saw it in their bodies even before the violence started. He’d seen holding cells rise up before, and the prisoners had the same sullen-but-excited look. The feed showed the stretch of wall where he’d seen the bullet holes. They weren’t there yet. They would be. A man came into the picture with a tray of food rations.

Here it comes,
Miller thought.

The fight was short and brutal. The prisoners didn’t stand a chance. Miller watched as they hauled one of them—a sandy-haired man—to the airlock and spaced him. The others were put in heavy restraints. Some wept. Some screamed. Miller skipped ahead.

It had to be in there someplace. The moment when it—whatever it was—got loose. But either it had happened in some unmonitored crew quarters or it had been there from the beginning. Almost exactly one hundred and sixty hours after Julie had gone into the locker, a man in a white jumper, eyes glassy and stance unsure, lurched out of the crew quarters and vomited on one of the guards.

“Fuck!” Amos shouted.

Miller was out of his chair before he knew what had happened. Holden was up too.

“Amos?” Holden said. “Talk to me.”

“Hold on,” Amos said. “Yeah, it’s okay, Cap’n. It’s just these
fuckers stripped off a bunch of the reactor shielding. We’ve got her up, but I sucked down a few more rads than I’d have picked.”

“Get back to the
Roci,
” Holden said. Miller steadied himself against a wall, pushing back down toward the control stations.

“No offense, sir, but it ain’t like I’m about to start pissing blood or anything fun like that,” Amos said. “I got surprised more than anything. I start feeling itchy, I’ll head back over, but I can get some atmosphere for us by working out of the machine shop if you give me a few more minutes.”

Miller watched Holden’s face as the man struggled. He could make it an order; he could leave it be.

“Okay, Amos. But you start getting light-headed or anything—I mean
anything
—and you get over to the sick bay.”

“Aye, aye,” Amos said.

“Alex, keep an eye on Amos’ biomed feed from over there. Give us a heads-up if you see a problem,” Holden said on the general channel.