just lost wives, husbands, children, and lovers. People whose lives had just been branded by violence. More often than not, they were calmly offering drinks and answering questions, making the detectives feel welcome. A civilian coming in unaware might have mistaken them for whole. It was only in the careful way they held themselves and the extra quarter second it took their eyes to focus that Miller could see how deep the damage was.
Ceres Station was holding itself carefully. Its eyes were taking a quarter second longer to focus. Middle-class people - storekeepers, maintenance workers, computer techs - were avoiding him on the tube the way petty criminals did. Conversations died when Miller came near. In the station, the sense of being under siege was growing. A month earlier, Miller and Havelock, Cobb and Richter, and the rest had been the steadying hand of the law. Now they were employees of an Earth-based security contractor.
The difference was subtle, but it was deep. It made him want to stand taller, to show with his body that he was a Belter. That he belonged there. It made him want to win people's good opinion back. Let by a bunch of guys passing out virtual reality propaganda with a warning, maybe.
It wasn't a smart impulse.
"What've we got on the board?" Miller asked.
"Two burglaries that look like that same ring," Havelock said. "That domestic dispute from last week still needs the report closed up. There was a pretty good assault over by Nakanesh Import Consortium, but Shaddid was talking to Dyson and Patel about that, so it's probably spoken for already."
"So you want... "
Havelock looked up and out to cover the fact that he was looking away. It was something he'd been doing more often since things had gone to shit.
"We've really got to get the reports done," Havelock said. "Not just the domestic. There're four or five folders that are only still open because they need to be crossed and dotted."
"Yeah," Miller said.
Since the riots, he'd watched everyone in a bar get served before Havelock. He'd seen how the other cops from Shaddid down went out of their way to reassure Miller that he was one of the good guys, a tacit apology for saddling him with an Earther. And he'd seen Havelock see it too.
It made Miller want to protect the man, to let Havelock spend his days in the safety of paperwork and station house coffee. Help the man pretend that he wasn't hated for the gravity he'd grown up in.
That wasn't a smart impulse either.
"What about your bullshit case?" Havelock asked.
"What?"
Havelock held up a folder. The Julie Mao case. The kidnap job. The sideshow. Miller nodded and rubbed his eyes. Someone at the front of the station house yelped. Someone else laughed.
"Yeah, no," Miller said. "Haven't touched it."
Havelock grinned and held it out to him. Miller accepted the file, flipped it open. The eighteen-year-old grinned out at him with perfect teeth.
"I don't want to saddle you with all the desk driving," Miller said.
"Hey, you're not the one that kept me off that one. That was Shaddid's call. And anyway... it's just paperwork. Never killed anyone. You feel guilty about it, you can buy me a beer after work."
Miller tapped the case against the corner of his desk, the small impacts settling the contents against the folder's spine.
"Right," he said. "I'll go do some follow-up on the bullshit. I'll be back by lunch, write something up to keep the boss happy."
"I'll be here," Havelock said. Then, as Miller rose: "Hey. Look. I didn't want to say anything until I was sure, but I also don't want you to hear it someplace else... "
"Put in for a transfer?" Miller said.
"Yeah. Talked to some of those Protogen contractors that passed through. They say their Ganymede office is looking for a new lead investigator. And I thought... " Havelock shrugged.
"It's a good move," Miller said.
"Just want to go someplace with a sky, even if you look at it through domes," Havelock said, and all the bluff masculinity of police work couldn't keep the wistfulness out of his voice.
"It's a good move," Miller said again.
Juliette Andromeda Mao's hole was in the ninth level of a fourteen-tiered tunnel near the port. The great inverted V was almost half a kilometer wide at the top, and no more than a standard tube width at the bottom, the retrofit of one of a dozen reaction mass chambers from the years before the asteroid had been given its false