Leviathan Wakes - James S. A. Corey [156]
“I don’t need to tell you that leaking the coordinates would get my ass killed out here. So wipe the file when you’re done, and let’s not talk again for a long, long time.”
The datafile was small. Three lines of plaintext orbital notation. Miller put it into his hand terminal and killed the file off the Ganymede server. The bourbon still sat beside his hand, and he drank it off neat. The warmth in his chest might have been the alcohol or it might have been victory.
He turned on the hand terminal’s camera.
“Thanks. I owe you one. Here’s part of the payment. What happened on Eros? Protogen was part of it, and it’s big. If you get the chance to drop your contract with them, do it. And if they try to rotate you out to that black ops station, don’t go.”
Miller frowned. The sad truth was that Havelock was probably the last real partner he’d had. The only one who’d looked on him as an equal. As the kind of detective Miller had imagined himself to be.
“Take care of yourself, partner,” he said, then ended the file, encrypted it, shipped it out. He had the bone-deep feeling he wasn’t ever going to talk to Havelock again.
He put through a connection request to Holden. The screen filled with the captain’s open, charming, vaguely naive face.
“Miller,” Holden said. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah. Great. But I need to talk to your Fred guy. Can you arrange that?”
Holden frowned and nodded at the same time.
“Sure. What’s going on?”
“I know where Thoth Station is,” Miller said.
“You know what?”
Miller nodded.
“Where the hell did you get that?”
Miller grinned. “If I gave you that information and it got out, a good man would get killed,” he said. “You see how that works?”
It struck Miller as he, Holden, and Naomi waited for Fred that he knew an awful lot of inner planets types fighting against the inner planets. Or at least not for them. Fred, supposedly a high-ranking OPA member. Havelock. Three-quarters of the crew of the Rocinante. Juliette Mao.
It wasn’t what he would have expected. But maybe that was shortsighted. He was seeing the thing the way Shaddid and Protogen did. There were two sides fighting—that was true enough—but they weren’t the inner planets versus the Belters. They were the people who thought it was a good idea to kill people who looked or acted differently against the people who didn’t.
Or maybe that was a crap analysis too. Because given the chance to put the scientist from the Protogen pitch, the board of directors, and whoever this Dresden piece of shit was into an airlock, Miller knew he’d agonize about it for maybe half a second after he blew them all into vacuum. Didn’t put him on the side of angels.
“Mr. Miller. What can I do for you?”
Fred. The Earther OPA. He wore a blue button-down shirt and a nice pair of slacks. He could have been an architect or a mid-level administrator for any number of good, respectable corporations. Miller tried to imagine him coordinating a battle.
“You can convince me that you’ve really got what it takes to kill the Protogen station,” Miller said. “Then I’ll tell you where it is.”
Fred’s eyebrows rose a millimeter.
“Come into my office,” Fred said.
Miller went. Holden and Naomi followed. When the doors closed behind them, Fred was the first to speak.
“I’m not sure exactly what you want from me. I’m not in the habit of making my battle plans public knowledge.”
“We’re talking about storming a station,” Miller said. “Something with damn good defenses and maybe more ships like the one that killed the Canterbury. No disrespect intended, but that’s a pretty tall order for a bunch of amateurs like the OPA.”
“Ah, Miller?” Holden said. Miller held up a hand, cutting him off.
“I can give you the directions to Thoth Station,” Miller said. “But if I do that and it turns out you haven’t got the punch to see this through, then a