failure of imagination. Miller had never seen the inner planets as divided.
"Seriously?" he asked.
"They're the colony, but they have all the best toys and everyone knows it," Holden said. "Everything that's happening out there right now has been building up for a hundred years. If it hadn't been there to start with, this couldn't have happened."
"That's your defense? 'Not my powder keg; I just brought the match'?"
"I'm not making a defense," Holden said. His blood pressure and heart rate were spiking.
"We've been through this," Miller said. "So let me just ask, why is it you think this time will be different?"
The needles in Miller's arm seemed to heat up almost to the point of being painful. He wondered if that was normal, if every blood flush he had was going to feel the same way.
"This time is different," Holden said. "All the crap that's going on out there is what happens when you have imperfect information. Mars and the Belt wouldn't have been going after each other in the first place if they'd known what we know now. Earth and Mars wouldn't be shooting each other if everyone knew the fight was being engineered. The problem isn't that people know too much, it's that they don't know enough."
Something hissed and Miller felt a wave of chemical relaxation swim through him. He resented it, but there was no calling the drugs back.
"You can't just throw information at people," Miller said. "You have to know what it means. What it's going to do. There was a case back on Ceres. Little girl got killed. For the first eighteen hours, we were all sure Daddy did it. He was a felon. A drunk. He was the last one who saw her breathing. All the classic signs. Hour nineteen, we get a tip. Turned out Daddy owed a lot of money to one of the local syndicates. All of a sudden, things are more complicated. We have more suspects. Do you think if I'd been broadcasting everything I knew, Daddy would still have been alive when the tip came? Or would someone have put it all together and done the obvious thing?"
Miller's medical station chimed. Another new cancer. He ignored it. Holden's cycle was just finishing, the redness of his cheeks speaking as much to the fresh, healthy blood in his body as to his emotional state.
"That's the same ethos they have," Holden said.
"Who?"
"Protogen. You may be on different sides, but you're playing the same game. If everyone said what they knew, none of this would have happened. If the first lab tech on Phoebe who saw something weird had gotten on his system and said, 'Hey, everyone! Look, this is weird,' none of this would have happened."
"Yeah," Miller said, "because telling everyone there's an alien virus that wants to kill them all is a great way to maintain calm and order."
"Miller," Holden said. "I don't mean to panic you, but there's an alien virus. And it wants to kill everyone."
Miller shook his head and smiled like Holden had said something funny. "So look, maybe I can't point a gun at you and make you do the right thing. But lemme ask you something. Okay?"
"Fine," Holden said. Miller leaned back. The drugs were making his eyelids heavy.
"What happens?" Miller said.
There was a long pause. Another chime from the medical system. Another rush of cold through Miller's abused veins.
"What happens?" Holden repeated. It occurred to Miller he could have been more specific. He forced his eyes open again.
"You broadcast everything we've got. What happens?"
"The war stops. People go after Protogen."
"There's some holes in that, but let it go. What happens after that?"
Holden was quiet for a few heartbeats.
"People start going after the Phoebe bug," he said.
"They start experimenting. They start fighting for it. If that little bastard's as valuable as Protogen thinks, you can't stop the war. All you can do now is change it."
Holden frowned, angry lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes. Miller watched a little piece of the man's idealism die and was sorry that it gave him joy.
"So what happens if we get to Mars?" Miller went on, his voice low. "We trade out the protomolecule for more money than any of us have ever seen. Or maybe they just shoot you. Mars just wins against Earth. And the Belt. Or you go to the OPA, who are the best hope the Belt has of independence, and they're a bunch of crazy zealots, half of 'em thinking we can