Leviathan Wakes - James S. A. Corey [87]
As he packed up his hole, throwing out the collected detritus that grew over decades like a crust, he talked to her. He tried to explain why he’d given up everything to find her. After his discovery of the Rocinante, he could hardly avoid the word quixotic.
His imaginary Julie laughed or was touched. She thought he was a sad, pathetic little man, since just tracking her down was the nearest to a purpose in life he could find. She dressed him down as being a tool of her parents. She wept and put her arms around him. She sat with him in some almost unimaginable observation lounge and watched the stars.
He fit everything he had into a shoulder bag. Two changes of clothes, his papers, his hand terminal. A picture of Candace from back in better days. All the hard copy of Julie’s case he’d made before Shaddid wiped his partition, including three pictures of Julie. He thought that everything he’d lived through should have added up to more, and then changed his mind. It was probably about right.
He spent one last day ignoring the curfew, making his rounds of the station, saying goodbye to the few people he felt he might miss or might miss him. To his surprise, Muss, who he found at a tense and uncomfortable police bar, actually teared up and hugged him until his ribs ached from it.
He booked passage on a transport to Tycho. His bunk ran him a quarter of his remaining funds. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he had to find Julie pretty damn quick or find a job to support him through the investigation. But it hadn’t happened yet, and the universe wasn’t stable enough anymore to make long-range planning more than a sour joke.
As if to prove the point, his terminal chimed as he was in the line to board the transport.
“Hey, partner,” Havelock said. “That favor you needed? I got a bite. Your package just put in a flight plan for Eros. I’m sending the public-access data attached. I’d get you the good stuff, but these Protogen guys are tight. I mentioned you to the recruiter and she seemed interested. So let me know, right? Talk to you soon.”
Eros.
Great.
Miller nodded at the woman behind him, stepped out of line, and walked to the kiosk. By the time a screen was open, they were calling final boarding for the Tycho transport. Miller turned in his ticket, got a nominal refund, and spent a third of what he still had in his account for a ticket to Eros. Still, it could have been worse. He could have been on the way before he got word. He had to start thinking about it as good luck, not bad.
The passage confirmation came through with a chime like a gently struck triangle.
“I hope I’m right about this,” he said to Julie. “If Holden’s not there, I’m gonna feel pretty stupid.”
In his mind, she smiled ruefully.
Life is risk, she said.
Chapter Twenty-One: Holden
Ships were small. Space was always at a premium, and even on a monster like the Donnager, the corridors and compartments were cramped and uncomfortable. On the Rocinante, the only rooms where Holden could spread out his arms without touching two walls were the galley and the cargo bay. No one who flew for a living was claustrophobic, but even the most hardened Belt prospector could recognize the rising tension of being ship-bound. It was the ancient stress response of the trapped animal, the subconscious knowledge that there was literally nowhere to go that you couldn’t see from where you were already standing. Getting off the ship at port was a sudden and sometimes giddying release of tension.
It often took the form of a drinking game.
Like all professional sailors, Holden had sometimes ended long flights by drinking himself into a stupor. More than once he’d wandered into a brothel and left only when they threw him out with an emptied account, a sore groin, and a prostate as dry as the Sahara desert. So when Amos staggered into his room after three days on station, Holden knew exactly what the big mechanic felt like.
Holden and Alex were sharing the couch and watching a newsfeed. Two talking heads were discussing the Belter actions