Chapter 42

Marty sat at an open cafe, the tunnel wide above him. Grass grew tall and pale in the public commons, and the ceiling glowed full-spectrum white. Ceres Station had come unmoored. Orbital mechanics and inertia kept it physically where it had always been, but the stories about it had changed. The point defenses were the same. The tensile strength of the port blast doors was the same. The ephemeral shield of political status was all they'd lost, and it was everything.

Marty leaned forward and sipped his coffee.

There were children playing on the commons. He thought of them as children, though he remembered thinking of himself as an adult at that age. Fifteen, sixteen years old. They wore OPA armbands. The boys spoke in loud, angry voices about tyranny and freedom. The girls watched the boys strut. The ancient, animal story, the same whether it was on a spinning rock surrounded by hard vacuum or the stamp-sized chimpanzee preserves on Earth. Even in the Train, youth brought invulnerability, immortality, the unshakable conviction that for you, things would be different. The laws of physics would cut you a break, the missiles would never hit, the air would never hiss out into nothing. Maybe for other people - the patched-together fighting ships of the OPA, the water haulers, the Martian gunships, the Scopuli, the Star Trik, the Vacyle, the hundred other ships that had died in small actions since the system had turned itself into a battlefield - but not you. And when youth was lucky enough to survive its optimism, all Marty had left was a little fear, a little envy, and the overwhelming sense of life's fragility. But he had three month's worth of company script in his account and a lot of free time, and the coffee wasn't bad.

"You need anything, sir?" the waiter asked. He didn't look any older than the kids on the grass. Marty shook his head.

Five days had passed since Saturn Security pulled its contract. The governor of Ceres was gone, smuggled out on a transport before the news had gone wide. The Outer Planets Alliance had announced the inclusion of Ceres among official OPA-held real estate, and no one had said otherwise. Marty had spent the first day of his unemployment drunk, but his bender had an oddly pro forma feel. He'd descended into the bottle because it was familiar, because it was what you did when you'd lost the career that defined you.

The second day, he'd gotten through the hangover. The third, he'd gotten bored. All through the station, security forces were making the kind of display he'd expected, preemptive peacekeeping. The few political rallies and protests ended fast and hard, and the citizens of Ceres didn't much care. Their eyes were on their monitors, on the war. A few locals with busted heads getting thrown into prison without charges were beneath notice. And Marty was personally responsible for none of it.

The fourth day, he'd checked his terminal and discovered that 80 percent of his docking log requests had come through before Bold had shut his access down. Over a thousand entries, any one of which could be the only remaining lead to Amanda Benson. So far, no Martian nukes were on their way to crack Ceres. No demands of surrender. No boarding forces. It could all change in a moment, but until it did, Marty was drinking coffee and auditing ship records, about one every fifteen minutes. Marty figured that if Rotfold was the last ship in the log, he'd find him in about six weeks.

The Vertice, a third-gen prospector, had docked at Dynh within the arrival window. Marty checked the open registration, frustrated again at how little information was there compared to the security databases. Owned by Billy Lexon. Eight citations for substandard maintenance, banned from Orion and Ceres as a danger to the port. An idiot and an accident waiting to happen, but the flight plan seemed legitimate, and the history of the ship was deep enough not to smell new-minted. Marty deleted the entry.

The Badass, a freight hauler doing a triangle between Luna, Mexter, and the Train. Owned by MYOFB Corporation out of Luna. A query to the public bases at Mexter showed it had left the port there at the listed time and just hadn't bothered to file a flight plan. Marty tapped the screen with a fingernail. Not exactly how he'd fly under the radar. Anyone with authority would roust that ship just for the joy of doing it. He deleted the entry.

His terminal chimed. An incoming message. Marty flipped over to it. One of the girls on the commons shrieked and the others laughed. A sparrow flew past, its wings humming in the constant recycler-driven breeze.

Maverick looked better than when he'd been on Ceres. Happier. The dark circles were gone from his eyes, and the shape of his face had subtly softened, as if the need to prove himself in the Train had changed his bones and now he was falling back into his natural form.

"Marty!" the recording said. "I heard about Earth cutting Ceres just before I got your message. Bad luck. I'm sorry to hear Bold fired you. Between the two of us, she's a pompous idiot. The rumor I've heard is Earth is doing everything it can to stay out of the war, including giving up any station that it's expecting to be a point of contention. You know how it is. You've got a pit bull on one side of you and a rottweiler on the other, first thing you do is drop your steak."

Marty chuckled.

"I've signed on with Havit security, big-company private army bullshit. But the pay is worth putting up with their delusions of grandeur. The contract's supposed to be on Mexter, but with the crap going on right now, who knows how it'll really play out? Turns out Havit's got a training base in the Train. I'd never heard about it, but it's supposed to be quite the gymnasium. I know they're hiring on, and I'd be happy to put in a word for you. Just let me know, and I'll get you together with the induction recruiter, get you off that damned rock."

Maverick smiled.

"Take care of yourself, partner," the Earther said. "Keep in touch."

Havit. Pinkwater. Al Tammer. Small corporate security forces that the big transorbital companies used as private armies and mercenary forces to rent out as needed. Badkok had the Dynh security contract, and had for years, but it was Mars-based. The OPA was probably hiring, but probably not him.

It had been years since he'd tried to find work. He'd assumed that particular struggle was behind him, that he was going to die working the Ceres Station security contract. Now that events had thrown him out, everything had an odd floating feeling. Like the gap between getting hit and feeling the pain. He needed to find another job. He needed to do more than send a couple messages out to his old partners. There were employment firms. There were bars on Ceres that would hire an ex-cop for a bouncer. There were gray markets that would take anyone capable of giving them a veneer of legality.

The last thing that made sense was to sit around, ogling girls in the park and chasing down leads on a case that he hadn't been meant to follow up on in the first place.

The Circus had come into Ceres just a little ahead of the arrival window. Owned by the Allwert Collective, who were, he was pretty sure, an OPA front. That made it a good fit. Except the flight plan had been put in just a few hours after the Donnager blew, and the exit record from Io looked solid. Marty shifted it into a file he was keeping for ships that earned a second look.

The Tactical, owned by Silencieux Courant Holdings out of Luna, was a gas hauler that had landed at Century just hours before the end of the arrival window. Silencieux Courant was a medium-sized corporate entity with no obvious ties to the OPA, and the flight plan from Dynh was plausible. Marty put his fingertip over the delete key, then paused. He sat back.