Leviathan Wakes

If Fred couldn’t build himself a peace treaty, the OPA would never win against the discipline and unity of an inner planet navy. But they would also never lose. War without end.

Well, what was history if not that?

And how would having the stars change anything?

And now they were making music from the screams of the dying. Of the dead. The were dancing to it in the low-rent clubs. What it must be like, Miller thought, to be young and soulless.

But no. That wasn’t fair. Diogo was a good kid. He was just naive. The universe would take care of that, given a little time.

That man could take a visitation from God with thirty underdressed angels announcing that sex was okay after all and make it seem vaguely depressing.

Miller was staring at him like an entomologist trying to figure out exactly where the pin went.

He cut the connection before she could answer. Long goodbyes weren’t anyone’s strong suit.

It was as easy as keying in a door code. Somehow he felt that arming fusion bombs to detonate around him should have been more difficult.

He considered recording it. His suit would be able to make a simple visual file and stream the data out in real time. But no. This was his moment. His and Julia’s. The rest of humanity could guess what it had been like if they cared.

Never knew if you had any luck left unless you pushed it.

He probed himself like a doctor searching for inflammation. Did it hurt here? Did he feel the loss there?

He didn’t. There was only a sense of relief so profound it approached giddiness.

The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending.

If things got out of hand, it would mean six or seven million dead people and the end of everything Miller had ever known.

Odd that it should feel almost like relief.

“Too many dots,” Miller said. “Not enough lines.”

All bluster, no balls.

Say what you will about organized crime, at least it’s organized.

It was a real book—onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent.

He couldn’t fix the cancer of war, couldn’t even slow down the spread, but at least he could admit it was happening.

“There’s a right thing to do,” Holden said.

“You don’t have a right thing, friend,” Miller said. “You’ve got a whole plateful of maybe a little less wrong.”

Liquor doesn’t make you feel better. Just makes you not so worried about feeling bad.

She didn’t care. Not caring was how she got through the day.

“See, this is why I can’t ever be in command,” she said.

“Don’t like making tough calls with incomplete information?”

“More I’m not suicidally irresponsible,” she replied.

“We regret the necessity of this action,” she said to everyone everywhere. “But in the cause of freedom, there can be no compromise.”

That’s what it’s come to, Miller thought, rubbing a hand across his chin. Pogroms after all. Cut off just a hundred more heads, just a thousand more heads, just ten thousand more heads, and then we’ll be free.

Holden decided that he was okay with not feeling any remorse for them. The moral complexity of the situation had grown past his ability to process it, so he just relaxed in the warm glow of victory instead.

It’s the problem with politics. Your enemies are often your allies. And vice versa.

There was life out there. They had proof of it now. And the proof came in the shape of a weapon, so what did that tell him?

The enlisted guys will be okay, but the officers get the sense of humor trained out of ’em.

When, Miller wondered, does someone stop being human? There had to be a moment, some decision that you made and before it, you were one person, and after it, someone else...If he’d seen it in someone else—Muss, Havelock, Sematimba—he wouldn’t have taken more than a minute to realize they’d gone off the rails. Since it was him, he had taken longer to notice. But Holden was right. Somewhere along the line, he’d lost himself.

If Miller had ever been called upon to describe her, the phrase deceptive coloration would have figured in.

“Stop,” Holden said. “I don’t care. I don’t want to hear any more of your stories about how being a cop makes you wiser and deeper and able to face the truth about humanity. As far as I can tell, all it did was break you. Okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Dresden and his Protogen buddies thought they could choose who lives and who dies. That sound familiar? And don’t tell me it’s different this time, because everyone says that, every time. And it’s not.”

This was the kind of man who’d killed Julie, Miller thought. Stupid. Shortsighted. A man born with a sense for raw opportunity where his soul should have been.