Chapter 23: INSIDE MAN
The maintenance corridor smelled like recycled air and industrial lubricant.
I moved through it with the particular shuffle of a tired worker finishing a late shift—head down, tool bag over shoulder, not making eye contact with anyone I passed. Ceres Station hadn't changed much in the months since I'd left. Still overcrowded, still underfunded, still filled with people trying to survive in a system that barely noticed they existed.
The Protogen facility was two levels up from the main residential blocks, hidden behind a corporate facade that advertised water purification services. The kind of business no one paid attention to because everyone needed it.
"Checkpoint in thirty meters," Naomi's voice came through my earpiece. She was monitoring the facility's security feeds remotely, routing through systems that probably didn't know they'd been compromised.
"Copy."
The checkpoint was manned by a single guard—corporate security, not military, wearing armor that looked impressive but wouldn't stop anything serious. He glanced at my maintenance credentials without really looking, more interested in his terminal than in the tired Belter shuffling past.
"Late call," he said.
"Filtration alert in sector seven. Third one this week." I shrugged. "You know how it is."
"Yeah." He waved me through. "Good luck."
Inside, the facility was cleaner than I'd expected—bright lighting, polished floors, the particular aesthetic of a company that spent money on appearances. Not the kind of place you'd expect to find a bioweapons program.
But then, that was the point.
"Security patrol in two minutes," Naomi warned. "Northeast corridor."
I adjusted my route, taking a service passage that led toward the administrative section. Dresden's office was on the third floor—corner suite, good view of the docking bays, the kind of space a senior executive would claim.
The biometric lock on the stairwell door was standard corporate—easily bypassed with a maintenance override I'd memorized from the technical specs. The door clicked open, and I slipped through before the patrol could round the corner.
Third floor. Administrative corridor. Dresden's office at the end.
The door was unlocked.
That was wrong.
I drew the compact pistol I'd smuggled past security and moved forward carefully, using the wall for cover. The office beyond was dark—emergency lighting only, the particular dimness of systems that had been deliberately powered down.
"Status?" I subvocalized.
"I've lost visual on that section," Naomi said. "Someone killed the feeds internally. Recent—last forty-eight hours."
I eased through the doorway.
The office was empty.
Not just unoccupied—cleared out. Desk stripped of personal effects. Terminal wiped. Filing cabinets open and empty, their contents presumably destroyed or relocated.
Dresden was gone. Had been gone for days, maybe longer.
Someone had warned him.
"Target's not here," I reported. "The place has been evacuated."
"Can you recover anything?"
I moved to the terminal, running a quick diagnostic. The primary drives had been wiped, but corporate systems always had backups. Redundancy protocols that executives didn't know about, designed to protect data from exactly this kind of situation.
I found a secondary partition hidden in the system's maintenance logs. Fragmented files—most of them corrupted beyond recovery, but some still readable.
Project names. Locations. A single repeated reference: Eros.
"I've got partial data," I said. "Sending now."
The transfer took thirty seconds. During those thirty seconds, I catalogued everything else in the office—the layout, the security measures, the particular attention paid to certain drawers and cabinets. Whoever had cleared this place had been thorough but rushed. They'd missed things.
A keycard, half-hidden under the desk. Corporate access credentials for someone named "Cortez"—probably a cover identity, probably useless now, but worth keeping.
A handwritten note, crumpled in the corner. Numbers and letters that might be coordinates or might be nothing.
A stress mark on the floor where something heavy had been dragged toward the back wall.
"Security patrol incoming," Naomi warned. "Two guards, northeast approach."
Time to go.
I pocketed what I'd found and moved toward the maintenance corridor I'd mapped during approach. The guards passed within five meters of my position—close enough to hear their conversation, something about shift changes and a new posting on Ganymede.
Then they were gone, and I was alone in the corridor, moving toward the exit point where Amos was waiting.
The alley behind the facility was cramped and dark, the kind of space Ceres had thousands of—forgotten corners where station infrastructure met human habitation in uncomfortable ways.
Amos materialized from the shadows like he'd been part of them. "Trouble?"
"The target's gone. Someone warned him."
"Leak in Johnson's organization?"
"Possibly. Or Dresden had his own sources." I handed him the keycard. "See if this leads anywhere. And there's this."
The crumpled note. Amos smoothed it out, studied the numbers.
"Coordinates," he said. "Somewhere in the Belt."
"Or random garbage designed to waste our time."
"Only one way to find out."
We moved through the station's lower levels, taking routes that avoided security cameras and population centers. Amos moved well for an Earther—he'd learned to navigate spaces like this somewhere in his past, places where being seen could get you killed.
"Dresden knew we were coming," I said. "That changes things."
"Changes what?"
"The target. Dresden was the man who knew things—the connection between Protogen and whatever they're doing with the protomolecule. If he's gone, we need another approach."
"The data you pulled?"
"Points to Eros. Multiple references, all fragmentary. Whatever Protogen is planning, that station is involved."
Amos was quiet for a moment. "Eros is bad news. Always has been. The kind of place where people disappear and nobody asks questions."
"That's why they chose it."
We reached the transport hub where a shuttle was waiting—anonymous, untraceable, part of the arrangements Fred Johnson had made. The pilot nodded once and didn't ask questions.
As we lifted off, I watched Ceres shrink in the viewport. The station I'd woken up on, confused and afraid and barely surviving. The place where I'd learned what this body could do, where I'd built the foundation for everything that came after.
I'd come back looking for answers. Instead, I'd found more questions.
But the questions all pointed the same direction.
Eros.
The weight settled on me during the shuttle ride back.
The guard I'd disabled during the security patrol—a quick choke hold when he'd come around a corner unexpectedly—might have permanent damage. Or he might wake up with a headache and a story to tell. I hadn't had time to be careful, and I hadn't had the luxury of finding out.
Violence had consequences I didn't always see.
I flexed my hand, remembering the pressure, the way his body had gone limp. Clean technique, minimal force, maximum efficiency. The kind of thing that became automatic after enough practice.
Amos noticed. "Second thoughts?"
"Just thinking."
"About the guard?"
"About all of them." I stared at my hands. "The people we've killed. The people we might kill. Whether it matters."
"It matters to them." Amos's voice was flat, uninflected. "Doesn't matter to us. Can't matter to us, or we can't do what needs doing."
"That's one way to look at it."
"It's the only way." He settled back in his seat. "You know what I learned in Baltimore? Guilt is a luxury. Some people can afford it. Some people can't. The ones who can't—they survive. The ones who can..." He shrugged. "They don't always."
"Is that supposed to be comforting?"
"It's supposed to be true. Comfort's somebody else's job."
I didn't respond. The shuttle pushed through Ceres's orbital traffic, heading back toward where the Rocinante waited.
Amos was right, in his way. Guilt was a luxury I couldn't afford—not with the horrors I knew were coming, not with the lives that depended on me being effective rather than moral.
But knowing something and feeling something were different things.
The guard's face stayed with me all the way home.
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