Leviathan Wakes

Miller had known when he’d taken Holden’s side against his new boss that there were going to be consequences. His position with Fred and the OPA was tenuous to start with, and pointing out that Holden and his crew were not only more dedicated but also more trustworthy than Fred’s people wasn’t the thing you did when you were kissing up. That it was the truth only made it worse.

He’d expected some kind of payback. He would have been naive not to.

“Rise up, O men of God, in one united throng,” the resisters sang. “Bring in the days of bro-ther-hood, and end the night of wrong…”

Miller took off his hat and ran fingers through his thinning hair. It wasn’t going to be a good day.

The interior of the Nauvoo showed more patchwork and process than its hull suggested. Two kilometers long, its designers had built it as more than a huge ship. The great levels stacked one atop the other; alloy girders worked organically with what would have been pastoral meadows. The structure echoed the greatest cathedrals of Earth and Mars, rising up through empty air and giving both thrust-gravity stability and glory to God. It was still metal bones and woven agricultural substrate, but Miller could see where it was all heading.

A generation ship was a statement of overarching ambition and utter faith. The Mormons had known that. They’d embraced it. They’d constructed a ship that was prayer and piety and celebration all at the same time. The Nauvoo would be the greatest temple mankind had ever built. It would shepherd its crew through the uncrossable gulfs of interstellar space, humanity’s best hope of reaching the stars.

Or it would have been, if not for him.

“You want us to gas them, Pampaw?” Diogo asked.

Miller considered the resisters. At a guess, there might have been two hundred of them strung in linked chains across the access paths and engineering ducts. Transport lifts and industrial waldoes stood idle, their displays dark, their batteries shorted.

“Yeah, probably should,” Miller sighed.

The security team — his security team — numbered fewer than three dozen. Men and women more unified by the OPA-issued armbands than by their training, experience, loyalties, or politics. If the Mormons had chosen violence, it would have been a bloodbath. If they’d put on environment suits, the protest would have lasted hours. Days, possibly. Instead, Diogo gave the signal, and three minutes later, four small comets arced out into the null-g space, wavering on their tails of NNLP-alpha and tetrahydrocannabinol.

It was the kindest, gentlest riot control device in the arsenal. Any of the protesters with compromised lungs could still be in trouble, but within half an hour, all of them would be relaxed into near stupor and high as a kite. NNLPa and THC wasn’t a combination Miller had ever used on Ceres. If they’d tried to stock it, it would have been stolen for office parties. He tried to take some comfort in the thought. As if it would make up for the lifetimes of dreams and labor he was taking away.

Beside him, Diogo laughed.

It took them three hours to make the primary sweep of the ship, and another five to hunt down all the stowaways huddled in ducts and secure rooms, waiting to make their presence known at the last minute and sabotage the mission. As those were hauled weeping off the ship, Miller wondered whether he’d just saved their lives. If all he’d done with his life was keep Fred Johnson from deciding whether to let a handful of innocent people die with the Nauvoo, or risk keeping Eros around for the inner planets, that wasn’t so bad.

As soon as Miller gave the word, the OPA tech team moved into action, reengaging the waldoes and transports, fixing the hundred small acts of sabotage that would have kept the Nauvoo’s engines from firing, clearing out equipment they wanted to save. Miller watched industrial lifts big enough to house a family of five shift crate after crate, moving out things that had only recently been moved in. The docks were as busy as Ceres at mid-shift. Miller half expected to see his old cohorts wandering among the stevedores and lift tubes, keeping what passed for the peace.

In the quiet moments, he set his hand terminal to the Eros feed. Back when he’d been a kid, there had been a performance artist making the rounds — Jila Sorormaya, her name was. As he recalled, she’d intentionally corrupted data-storage devices and then put the data stream through her music kit. She’d gotten into trouble when some of the proprietary code of the storage device software got incorporated into her music and posted. Miller hadn’t been a sophisticate. He’d figured another nutcase artist had to get a real job, and the universe could only be a better place.