was your fault?"
"Yeah, well, if they'd only been sneaking cheese past the government auditors, we wouldn't have had a problem," Miller said. "But they had this habit of shooting the other cheese smugglers. Makes the cops notice. Bad business."
"Over fucking cheese?" Amos said, tossing his fork onto his plate with a clack. "Are you serious? I mean, drugs or gambling or something. But cheese?"
"Gambling's legal, most places," Miller said. "And a chemistry class dropout can cook up just about any drug you like in his bathroom. No way to control supply."
"Real cheese comes from Earth, or Mars," Naomi added. "And after they tack on shipping costs and the Coalition's fifty percent in taxes, it costs more than fuel pellets."
"We wound up with one hundred and thirty kilos of Vermont Cheddar in the evidence lockup," Miller said. "Street value that would have probably bought someone their own ship. It had disappeared by the end of the day. We wrote it up as lost to spoilage. No one said a word, as long as everyone went home with a brick."
The detective leaned back in his chair with a distant look on his face.
"My God, that was good cheese," he said with a smile.
"Yeah, well, this fake stuff does taste like shit," Amos said, then added in a hurry, "No offense, Boss, you did a real good job whipping it up. But that's still weird to me, fighting over cheese."
"It's why they killed Eros," Naomi said.
Miller nodded but said nothing.
"How do you figure that?" Amos said.
"How long have you been flying?" Naomi asked.
"I dunno," Amos replied, his lips compressing as he did the mental math. "Twenty-five years, maybe?"
"Fly with a lot of Belters, right?"
"Yeah," Amos said. "Can't get better shipmates than Belters. 'Cept me, of course."
"You've flown with us for twenty-five years, you like us, you've learned the patois. I bet you can order a beer and a hooker on any station in the Belt. Heck, if you were a little taller and a lot skinnier, you could pass for one of us by now."
Amos smiled, taking it as a compliment.
"But you still don't get us," Naomi said. "Not really. No one who grew up with free air ever will. And that's why they can kill a million and a half of us to figure out what their bug really does."
"Hey now," Alex interjected. "You serious 'bout that? You think the inners and outers see themselves as that different?"
"Of course they do," Miller said. "We're too tall, too skinny, our heads look too big, and our joints too knobby."
Holden noticed Naomi glancing across the table at him, a speculative look on her face. I like your head, Holden thought at her, but the radiation hadn't given him telepathy either, because her expression didn't change.
"We've practically got our own language now," Miller said. "Ever see an Earther try to get directions in the deep dig?"
" 'Tu run spin, pow, Schlauch tu way acima and ido,' " Naomi said with a heavy Belter accent.
"Go spinward to the tube station, which will take you back to the docks," Amos said. "The fuck's so hard about that?"
"I had a partner wouldn't have known that after two years on Ceres," Miller said. "And Havelock wasn't stupid. He just wasn't... from there."
Holden listened to them talk and pushed cold pasta around on his plate with a chunk of bread.
"Okay, we get it," he said. "You're weird. But to kill a million and a half people over some skeletal differences and slang... "
"People have been getting tossed into ovens for less than that ever since they invented ovens," Miller said. "If it makes you feel better, most of us think you're squat and microcephalic."
Alex shook his head.
"Don't make a lick of sense to me, turnin' that bug loose, even if you hated every single human on Eros personally. Who knows what that thing'll do?"
Naomi walked to the galley sink and washed her hands, the running water drawing everyone's attention.
"I've been thinking about that," she said, then turned around, wiping her hands on a towel. "The point of it, I mean."
Miller started to speak, but Holden hushed him with a quick gesture and waited for Naomi to continue.
"So," she said. "I've been thinking of it as a computing problem. If the virus or nanomachine or protomolecule or whatever was designed, it has a purpose, right?"
"Definitely," Holden said.
"And it seems like it's trying to do something - something complex. It doesn't make sense to go to all that trouble just to kill