of his mouth before he saw they'd been a mistake. Shaddid's face closed down like a light going out. Now that he'd said it, he saw the implied threat he'd just made.
"I'm just pointing out the source reliability issue," Shaddid said. "You don't go to the suspect and ask where they think you should look next. And the Juliette Mao retrieval isn't your first priority."
"I'm not saying it is," Miller said, chagrined to hear the defensiveness in his voice.
"We have a board out there that's full and getting fuller. Our first priorities are safety and continuity of services. If what you're doing isn't directly related to that, there are better things for you to be doing."
"This war - "
"Isn't our job," Shaddid said. "Our job is Ceres. Get me a final report on Juliette Mao. I'll send it through channels. We've done what we could."
"I don't think - "
"I do," Shaddid said. "We've done what we could. Now stop being a pussy, get your ass out there, and catch bad guys. Detective."
"Yes, Captain," Miller said.
Muss was sitting at Miller's desk when he got back to it, a cup in her hand that was either strong tea or weak coffee. She nodded toward his desktop monitor. On it, three Belters - two men and one woman - were coming out of a warehouse door, an orange plastic shipping container carried between them. Miller raised his eyebrows.
"Employed by an independent gas-hauling company. Nitrogen, oxygen. Basic atmospherics. Nothing exotic. Looks like they had the poor bastard in one of the company warehouses. I've sent forensics over to see if we can get any blood splatters for confirmation."
"Good work," Miller said.
Muss shrugged. Adequate work, she seemed to say.
"Where are the perps?" Miller asked.
"Shipped out yesterday," she said. "Flight plan logs them as headed for Io."
"Io?"
"Earth-Mars Coalition central," Muss said. "Want to put any money on whether they actually show up there?"
"Sure," Miller said. "I'll lay you fifty that they don't."
Muss actually laughed.
"I've put them on the alert system," she said. "Anyplace they land, the locals will have a heads-up and a tracking number for the Dos Santos thing."
"So case closed," Miller said.
"Chalk another one up for the good guys," Muss agreed.
The rest of the day was hectic. Three assaults, two of them overtly political and one domestic. Muss and Miller cleared all three from the board before the end of shift. There would be more by tomorrow.
After he clocked out, Miller stopped at a food cart near one of the tube stations for a bowl of vat rice and textured protein that approximated teriyaki chicken. All around him on the tube, normal citizens of Ceres read their newsfeeds and listened to music. A young couple half a car up from him leaned close to each other, murmuring and giggling. They might have been sixteen. Seventeen. He saw the boy's wrist snake up under the girl's shirt. She didn't protest. An old woman directly across from Miller slept, her head lolling against the wall of the car, her snores almost delicate.
These people were what it was all about, Miller told himself. Normal people living small lives in a bubble of rock surrounded by hard vacuum. If they let the station turn into a riot zone, let order fail, all these lives would get turned into kibble like a kitten in a meat grinder. Making sure it didn't happen was for people like him, Muss, even Shaddid.
So, a small voice said in the back of his mind, why isn't it your job to stop Mars from dropping a nuke and cracking Ceres like an egg? What's the bigger threat to that guy standing over there, a few unlicensed whores or a Belt at war with Mars?
What was the harm that could come from knowing what happened to the Scopuli?
But of course he knew the answer to that. He couldn't judge how dangerous the truth was until he knew it - which was itself a fine reason to keep going.
The OPA man, Anderson Dawes, was sitting on a cloth folding chair outside Miller's hole, reading a book. It was a real book - onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent.
"Detective."
"Mr. Dawes."
"I was hoping we could talk."
Miller was glad, as they went inside together, that he'd cleaned up a little. All the beer bottles had gone to recycler. The tables and cabinets