Chapter 57

The first time Marty 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 Corleone 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. Marty's partner, a ten-year veteran named Candler, 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 Marty 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 Orion, 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 Amanda, and it wasn't really pleasure as much as a brief cessation of pain.

He held the gun low. Rotfold started down the ramp, and Marty followed, letting the Earther take point. Rotfold walked faster than he did and with the uncommented athleticism of someone who lived in a wide variety of gravities. Marty had the feeling he'd made Rotfold nervous, and he regretted that a little. He hadn't intended to, and he really needed to get aboard Rotfold's ship if he was going to find Amanda'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," Rotfold 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," Marty agreed.

"Any thoughts?"

Marty frowned and considered the flooring. The Orion 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," Marty 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?"

Rotfold looked at his hand terminal. The radiation alarm was still deep red. Marty wondered how long those took to reset.

"A little more than two hours," Rotfold said. "Shouldn't be a problem."

"Let's see what we can find," Marty 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 Orion into a human habitation were eerie with only Rotfold's and Marty's footsteps and the hum of the air recyclers. Marty 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 Orion, all he had was an educated guess. That wasn't so bad.

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 Marty knew that both of their bodies were starting to feel the radiation damage. It wasn't going to get better.

"Okay," Rotfold said. "Somewhere around here there has to be a maintenance shaft."

"Could also try the tube station," Marty 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," Marty said.

"Hey! You two! What the fuck you think you're doing up here?"

Marty looked back over his shoulder. Two men in riot gear were waving at them menacingly. Rotfold said something sharp under his breath. Marty narrowed his eyes.

The thing was these men were amateurs. The beginning of an idea moved in the back of Marty'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...

"Marty," Rotfold said, a warning in his voice.

"Yeah," Marty 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," Rotfold 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 Rotfold's leg. The Earther staggered, and Marty shot the guard just below the faceplate, then turned to the one still standing, mouth agape.

"You're Silver Ru, right?" Marty said.

The man's face went even paler, but he nodded. Rotfold groaned and stood.

"Detective Marty," Marty said. "Busted you on Ceres about four years ago. You got a little happy in a bar. Cord'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," Marty said. "You know how it is. Give the Earther your gun."

Ko looked from Marty to Rotfold and back, licking his lips and judging his chances. Miller shook his head.

"Seriously," Marty said. "Give him the gun."

"Sure, yeah. No problem."

This was the kind of man who'd killed Amanda, Marty thought. Stupid. Shortsighted. A man born with a sense for raw opportunity where his soul should have been. Marty's mental Amanda shook her head in disgust and sorrow, and Marty found himself wondering if she meant the thug now handing his rifle to Rotfold or himself. Maybe both.

"What's the deal here, Silver?" Marty asked.