“We helped,” Holden said, but his voice had a more somber tone. Miller’s death still bothered the captain. Fred knew how that felt. “It was a joint effort.”
Fred’s personal secretary cleared her throat and glanced toward the door. They’d need to go soon.
“I’ll do what I can,” Fred said. “I’ve got a lot of other things on the plate, but I’ll do what I can.”
“And Mars can’t have the Roci back,” Holden said. “Right of salvage says that’s my ship now.”
“They aren’t going to see it that way, but I will do what I can.”
“You keep saying that.”
“It keeps being all I can do.”
“And you’ll tell them about him, right?” Holden said. “Miller. He deserves the credit.”
“The Belter who went back into Eros of his own free will in order to save Earth? You’re damn right I’m going to tell them about him.”
“Not ‘the Belter.’ Him. Josephus Aloisus Miller.”
Holden had stopped eating the free strawberries. Fred crossed his arms.
“You’ve been reading up,” Fred said.
“Yeah. Well. I didn’t know him all that well.”
“Neither did anybody else,” Fred said, and then softened a little. “I know it’s hard, but we don’t need a real man with a complex life. We need a symbol of the Belt. An icon.”
“Sir,” the secretary said. “We really do need to go now.”
“That’s what got us here,” Holden said. “Icons. Symbols. People without names. All of those Protogen scientists were thinking about biomass and populations. Not Mary who worked in supply and raised flowers in her spare time. None of them killed her.”
“You think they wouldn’t have?”
“I think if they were going to, they owed it to her to know her name. All their names. And you owe it to Miller not to make him into something he wasn’t.”
Fred laughed. He couldn’t help it.
“Captain,” he said, “if you’re saying that I should amend my address to the peace conference so that it wasn’t a noble Belter sacrificing himself to save the Earth—if you’re suggesting that I say something like ‘We happened to have a suicidal ex-cop on-site’ instead—you understand this process less than I thought you did. Miller’s sacrifice is a tool, and I’m going to use it.”
“Even if it makes him faceless,” Holden said. “Even if it makes him something he never was?”
“Especially if it makes him something he never was,” Fred said. “Do you remember what he was like?”
Holden frowned and then something flickered in his eyes. Amusement. Memory.
“He was kind of a pain in the ass, wasn’t he?” Holden said.
“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.”
“He was a good man,” Holden said.
“He wasn’t,” Fred said. “But he did his job. And now I’ve got to go do mine.”
“Give ’em hell,” Holden said. “And amnesty. Keep talking up the amnesty.”
Fred walked down the curving hallway, his secretary close behind him. The conference halls had been designed for smaller things. Petty ones. Hydroponics scientists getting away from their husbands and wives and children to get drunk and talk about raising bean sprouts. Miners coming together to lecture each other about waste minimization and tailings disposal. High school band competitions. And instead, these work carpets and brushed-stone walls were going to have to bear the fulcrum of history. It was Holden’s fault that the shabby, small surroundings reminded him of the dead detective. They hadn’t before.
The delegations were seated across the aisle from each other. The generals and political appointees and general secretaries of Earth and Mars, the two great powers together at his invitation to Ceres, to the Belt. Territory made neutral because neither side took it seriously enough to be concerned about their demands.
All of history had brought them here, to this moment, and now, in the next few minutes, Fred’s job was to change that trajectory. The fear was gone. Smiling, he stepped up to the speaker’s dais, the podium.
The pulpit.
There was a scattering of polite applause. A few smiles, and a few frowns. Fred grinned. He wasn’t a man anymore. He was a symbol, an icon. A narrative about himself and about the forces at play in the solar system.
And for a moment, he was tempted. In that hesitation between drawing breath and speaking, part of him wondered what would happen if he shed the patterns of history and spoke about himself as a man, about the Joe Miller who he’d known briefly, about the responsibility they all shared to tear down the images they held of one another and find the genuine, flawed, conflicted people they actually were.
It would have been a noble way to fail.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “We stand at a crossroads. On one hand, there is the very real threat of mutual annihilation. On the other…”
He paused for effect.
“On the other, the stars.”
Acknowledgments
Like most children, this book took a village. I would like to express my deep gratitude to my agents, Shawna and Danny, and to my editors DongWon and Darren. Also instrumental in the early formation of the book were Melinda, Emily, Terry, Ian, George, Steve, Walter, and Victor, of the New Mexico Critical Mass writers group, and also Carrie, who read an early draft. An additional thanks goes to Ian, who helped with some of the math, and who is responsible for none of the mistakes I made understanding it. I also owe an enormous debt to Tom, Sake Mike, Non-Sake Mike, Porter, Scott, Raja, Jeff, Mark, Dan, and Joe. Thanks, guys, for doing the beta testing. And finally, a special thanks to the Futurama writers and Bender Bending Rodriguez for babysitting the kid while I wrote.
Meet the Author
JAMES S. A. COREY is the pen name of fantasy author Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, George R. R. Martin’s assistant. They both live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Find out more about this series at www.the-expanse.com.
Interview
Leviathan Wakes is the first book in a series called The Expanse. What kind of story are you telling in this series?
There’s a lot of science fiction that talks about the near future. There’s a lot about great galaxy-spanning empires of the distant future. But there’s not much that talks about the part in between. The Expanse is playing on that bridge. Whatever drives us off Earth to the rest of the solar system or from there to the stars, the problems we have are the ones we bring with us. What I want to do is write good old-fashioned space opera centered around human stories, but with an increasingly large backdrop.
It seems like Leviathan Wakes is a science fiction book, but it borrows from a lot of other genres as well, including horror and noir. Did you intend to blend those genres? What kind of book do you feel this is?
It’s definitely science fiction of the old-school space opera variety. That’s the story I wanted to tell. But half of the story was a detective story, and as soon as Detective Miller hit the page, he told me in a loud voice that he was a classic noir character. It was in his voice and the way he talked about things, you know? As for the horror feel, that’s just the way I roll. I’ve never written anything in my life that didn’t at least blur the line into horror. If I wrote greeting cards, they’d probably have a squick factor.
Leviathan Wakes has two protagonists with very different worldviews, which are often in conflict. Can you describe those views and why you chose that particular conflict?