Leviathan Wakes Read Online Free PDF Page A

changed?”
    “They didn’t see fit to share that information.”
    “Right.”
    “Last records show she was employed on Tycho Station but maintained an apartment here. I’ve found her partition on the network and locked it down. The password is in your files.”
    “Okay,” Miller said. “What’s my contract?”
    “Find Julie Mao, detain her, and ship her home.”
    “A kidnap job, then,” he said.
    “Yes.”
    Miller stared down at his hand terminal, flicking the files open without particularly looking at them. A strange knot had tied itself in his guts. He’d been working Ceres security for sixteen years, and he hadn’t started with many illusions in place. The joke was that Ceres didn’t have laws—it had police. His hands weren’t any cleaner than Captain Shaddid’s. Sometimes people fell out airlocks. Sometimes evidence vanished from the lockers. It wasn’t so much that it was right or wrong as that it was justified. You spent your life in a stone bubble with your food, your water, your
air
shipped in from places so distant you could barely find them with a telescope, and a certain moral flexibility was necessary. But he’d never had to take a kidnap job before.
    “Problem, Detective?” Captain Shaddid asked.
    “No, sir,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”
    “Don’t spend too much time on it,” she said.
    “Yes, sir. Anything else?”
    Captain Shaddid’s hard eyes softened, like she was putting on a mask. She smiled.
    “Everything going well with your partner?”
    “Havelock’s all right,” Miller said. “Having him around makes people like me better by contrast. That’s nice.”
    Her smile’s only change was to become half a degree more genuine. Nothing like a little shared racism to build ties with the boss. Miller nodded respectfully and headed out.

     
    His hole was on the eighth level, off a residential tunnel a hundred meters wide with fifty meters of carefully cultivated green park running down the center. The main corridor’s vaulted ceiling was lit by recessed lights and painted a blue that Havelock assured him matched the Earth’s summer sky. Living on the surface of a planet, mass sucking at every bone and muscle, and nothing but gravity to keep your air close, seemed like a fast path to crazy. The blue was nice, though.
    Some people followed Captain Shaddid’s lead by perfuming their air. Not always with coffee and cinnamon scents, of course. Havelock’s hole smelled of baking bread. Others opted for floral scents or semipheromones. Candace, Miller’s ex-wife, had preferred something called EarthLily, which had always made him think of the waste recycling levels. These days, he left it at the vaguely astringent smell of the station itself. Recycled air that had passed through a million lungs. Water from the tap so clean it could be used for lab work, but it had been piss and shit and tears and blood and would be again. The circle of life on Ceres was so small you could see the curve. He liked it that way.
    He poured a glass of moss whiskey, a native Ceres liquor made from engineered yeast, then took off his shoes and settled onto the foam bed. He could still see Candace’s disapproving scowl and hear her sigh. He shrugged apology to her memory and turned back to work.
    Juliette Andromeda Mao. He read through her work history, her academic records. Talented pinnace pilot. There was a picture of her at eighteen in a tailored vac suit with the helmet off: pretty girl with a thin, lunar citizen’s frame and long black hair. She was grinning like the universe had given her a kiss. The linked text said she’d won first place in something called the Parrish/Dorn500K. He searched briefly. Some kind of race only really rich people could afford to fly in. Her pinnace—the
Razorback
—had beaten the previous record and held it for two years.
    Miller sipped his whiskey and wondered what had happened to the girl with enough wealth and power to own a private ship that would