Leviathan Wakes - James S. A. Corey [46]
“That’s great,” Miller said. “But I don’t know what you’re talking about. Last night was a bust.”
“No OPA?”
“Sure, OPA. Anymore, you swing a dead cat in this station, you’ll hit three OPA guys. Just no good information.”
Havelock leaned back, lips pressed thin and bloodless. Miller’s shrug asked a question, and the Earther nodded toward the board. A new homicide topped the list. At three in the morning, while Miller had been having inchoate dream conversations, someone had opened Mateo Judd’s hole and fired a shotgun cartridge full of ballistic gel into his left eye.
“Well,” Miller said, “called that one wrong.”
“Which one?” Havelock said.
“OPA’s not moving in on the criminals,” Miller said. “They’re moving in on the cops.”
Chapter Eleven: Holden
The Donnager was ugly.
Holden had seen pictures and videos of the old oceangoing navies of Earth, and even in the age of steel, there had always been something beautiful about them. Long and sleek, they had the appearance of something leaning into the wind, a creature barely held on the leash. The Donnager had none of that. Like all long-flight spacecraft, it was built in the “office tower” configuration: each deck one floor of the building, ladders or elevators running down the axis. Constant thrust took the place of gravity.
But the Donnager actually looked like an office building on its side. Square and blocky, with small bulbous projections in seemingly random places. At nearly five hundred meters long, it was the size of a 130-story building. Alex had said it was 250,000 tons dry weight, and it looked heavier. Holden reflected, not for the first time, on how so much of the human sense of aesthetics had been formed in a time when sleek objects cut through the air. The Donnager would never move through anything thicker than interstellar gas, so curves and angles were a waste of space. The result was ugly.
It was also intimidating. As Holden watched from his seat next to Alex in the cockpit of the Knight, the massive battleship matched course with them, looming close and then seeming to stop above them. A docking bay opened, breaking up the Donnager’s flat black belly with a square of dim red light. The Knight beeped insistently, reminding him of the targeting lasers painting their hull. Holden looked for the point defense cannons aimed at him. He couldn’t find them.
When Alex spoke, Holden jumped.
“Roger that, Donnager,” the pilot said. “We’ve got steering lock. I’m killing thrust.”
The last shreds of weight vanished. Both ships were still moving at hundreds of kilometers a minute, but their matched courses felt like stillness.
“Got docking permission, Cap. Take her in?”
“It seems late to make a run for it, Mr. Kamal,” Holden said. He imagined Alex making a mistake that the Donnager interpreted as threatening, and the point defense cannons throwing a couple hundred thousand Teflon-coated chunks of steel through them.
“Go slowly, Alex,” he said.
“They say one of those can kill a planet,” Naomi said over the comm. She was at the ops station a deck below.
“Anyone can kill a planet from orbit,” Holden replied. “You don’t even need bombs. Just push anvils out the airlock. That thing out there could kill… Shit. Anything.”
Tiny touches shifted them as the maneuvering rockets fired. Holden knew that Alex was guiding them in, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that the Donnager was swallowing them.
Docking took nearly an hour. Once the Knight was inside the bay, a massive manipulator arm grabbed her and put it down in an empty section of the deck. Clamps grabbed the ship, the Knight’s hull reverberating with a metallic bang that reminded Holden of a brig cell’s maglocks.
The Martians ran a docking tube from one wall and mated up to the Knight’s airlock. Holden gathered the crew at the inner door.
“No guns, no knives, no anything that might look like a weapon,” he said. “They’ll probably be okay with hand terminals, but keep them turned off just in case. If they ask for it, hand it over without complaint. Our survival