“Oi, Pampaw,” the kid next to him said, and Miller smiled, recognizing Diogo’s voice behind the face mask. “Day’s the day, passa?”
“I’ve seen worse,” Miller agreed, then paused. He tried to scratch his injured elbow, but the armor plates kept anything satisfying from happening.
“Beccas tu?” Diogo asked.
“No, I’m fine. It’s just… this place. I don’t get it. It looks like a spa, and it’s built like a prison.”
The boy’s hands shifted in query. Miller shook his fist in response, thinking through the ideas as he spoke.
“It’s all long sight lines and locked-down side passages,” Miller said. “If I was going to build a place like this, I’d—”
The air sang, and Diogo went down, his head snapping back as he fell. Miller yelped and wheeled. Behind them in the side corridor, two figures in Protogen security uniform dove for cover. Something hissed through the air by Miller’s left ear. Something else bounced off the breastplate of his fancy Martian armor like a hammer blow. He didn’t think about raising his assault weapon; it was just there, coughing out return fire like an extension of his will. The other three OPA soldiers turned to help.
“Get back,” Miller barked. “Keep your fucking eyes on the main corridor! I’m on this.”
Stupid, Miller told himself, stupid to let them get behind us. Stupid to stop and talk in the middle of a firefight. He should have known better, and now, because he’d lost focus, the boy was…
Laughing?
Diogo sat up, lifted his own assault weapon, and peppered the side corridor with rounds. He got unsteadily to his feet, then whooped like a child who’d just gotten off a thrill ride. A wide streak of white goo stretched from his collarbone up across the right side of his face mask. Behind it, Diogo was grinning. Miller shook his head.
“What the hell are they using crowd suppression rounds for?” he said to himself as much as the boy. “They think this is a riot?”
“Forward teams,” Fred said in Miller’s ear, “get ready. We’re moving in five. Four. Three. Two. Go!”
We don’t know what we’re getting into here, Miller thought as he joined the sprint down the corridor, pressing toward the assault’s final target. A wide ramp led up to a set of blast doors done in wood-grain veneer. Something detonated behind them, but Miller kept his head low and didn’t look back. The press of bodies jostling in their ragtag armor grew thicker, and Miller stumbled on something soft. A body in Protogen uniform.
“Give us some room!” a woman at the front shouted. Miller pushed toward her, cutting through the crowd of OPA soldiers with his shoulder and elbow. The woman shouted again as he reached her.
“What’s the problem?” Miller shouted.
“I can’t cut through this bitch with all these dick-lickers pushing me,” she said, lifting a cutting torch already glowing white at the edge. Miller nodded and slid his assault rifle into the sling on his back. He grabbed two of the nearest shoulders, shook the men until they noticed him, and then locked his elbows with theirs.
“Just need to give the techs some room,” Miller said, and together they waded into their own men, pushing them back. How many battles, all through history, fell apart at moments like this? he wondered. The victory all but delivered until allied forces started tripping over each other. The welder popped to life behind him, the heat pressing at his back like a hand even in armor.
At the edge of the crowd, automatic weapons gurgled and choked.
“How’s it going back there?” Miller shouted over his shoulder.
The woman didn’t answer. Hours seemed to pass, though it couldn’t have been more than five minutes. The haze of hot metal and aerosolized plastic filled the air.
The welding torch turned off with a pop. Over his shoulder, Miller saw the bulkhead sag and shift. The tech placed a card-thin jack into the gap between plates, activated it, and stood back. The station around them groaned as a new set of pressures and strains reshaped the metal. The bulkhead opened.
“Come on,” Miller shouted, then tucked his head and moved through the new passageway, up a carpeted ramp, and into the ops center. A dozen men and women looked up from their stations, eyes wide with fear.
“You’re under arrest!” Miller shouted as the OPA soldiers boiled in around him. “Well, no you’re not, but… shit. Put your hands up and back away from the controls!”
One of the men—tall as a Belter, but built solid as a man in full gravity—sighed. He wore a good suit, linen and raw silk, without the lines and folds that spoke of computer tailoring.
“Do what they say,” the linen suit said. He sounded peeved, but not frightened.
Miller’s eyes narrowed.
“Mr. Dresden?”
The suit raised a carefully shaped eyebrow, paused, and nodded.
“Been looking for you,” Miller said.
Fred walked into the ops center like he belonged there. With a tighter set of the shoulders and a degree’s shift of the spine, the master engineer of Tycho Station was gone, and the general was in his place. He looked over the ops center, sucking in every detail with a flicker of his eyes, then nodded at one of the senior OPA techs.
“All locked down, sir,” the tech said. “The station’s yours.”
Miller had almost never been present to witness another man’s moment of absolution. It was such a rare thing, and so utterly private that it approached the spiritual. Decades ago, this man—younger, fitter, not as much gray in his hair—had taken a space station, wading up to his knees in the gore and death of Belters, and Miller saw the barely perceptible relaxation in his jaw, the opening of his chest that meant that burden had lifted. Maybe it wasn’t gone, but it was near enough. It was more than most people managed in a lifetime.
He wondered what it would feel like if he ever got the chance.
“Miller?” Fred said. “I hear you’ve got someone we’d like to talk to.”
Dresden unfolded from his chair, ignoring the sidearms and assault weapons as if such things didn’t apply to him.
“Colonel Johnson,” Dresden said. “I should have expected that a man of your caliber would be behind all this. My name is Dresden.”
He handed Fred a matte black business card. Fred took it as if by reflex but didn’t look at it.
“You’re the one responsible for this?”
Dresden gave him a chilly smile and looked around before he answered.
“I’d say you’re responsible for at least part of it,” Dresden said. “You’ve just killed quite a few people who were simply doing their jobs. But maybe we can dispense with the moral finger-pointing and get down to what actually matters?”
Fred’s smile reached all the way to his eyes.
“And what exactly would that be?”
“Negotiating terms,” Dresden replied. “You are a man of experience. You understand that your victory here puts you in an untenable position. Protogen is one of the most powerful corporations on Earth. The OPA has attacked it, and the longer you try to hold it, the worse the reprisals will be.”
“Is that so?”
“Of course it is,” Dresden said, waving Fred’s tone away with a dismissing hand. Miller shook his head. The man genuinely didn’t understand what was going on. “You’ve taken your hostages. Well, here we are. We can wait until Earth sends a few dozen battleships and negotiate while you look down the barrels, or we can end this now.”
“You’re asking me… how much money I want to take my people and just leave,” Fred said.