Free Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey Page B

smelling of fear. Miller saw the change in Havelock as they walked across the common area to their desks. Havelock had been able to put Miller’s reaction down to one man’s being oversensitive. A whole room, though. A whole station house. By the time they reached their chairs, Havelock’s eyes were wide.
    Captain Shaddid came in. The bleary look was gone. Her hair was pulled back, her uniform crisp and professional, her voice as calm as a surgeon in a battlefield hospital. She stepped up on the first desk she came to, improvising a pulpit.
    “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “You’ve seen the transmission. Any questions?”
    “Who let that fucking Earther near a radio?” someone shouted. Miller saw Havelock laugh along with the crowd, but it didn’t reach his eyes. Shaddid scowled and the crowd quieted.
    “Here’s the situation,” she said. “No way we can control this information. It was broadcast everywhere. We have five sites on the internal network that have been mirroring it, and we have to assume it’s public knowledge starting ten minutes ago. Our job now is to keep the rioting to a minimum and ensure station integrity around the port. Station houses fifty and two thirteen are helping on it too. The port authority has released all the ships with inner planet registry. That doesn’t mean they’re all gone. They still have to round up their crews. But it does mean they’re going.”
    “The government offices?” Miller said, loud enough to carry.
    “Not our problem, thank God,” Shaddid said. “They have infrastructure in place. Blast doors are already down and sealed. They’ve broken off from the main environmental systems, so we aren’t even breathing their air right now.”
    “Well, that’s a relief,” Yevgeny said from the cluster of homicide detectives.
    “Now the bad news,” Shaddid said. Miller heard the silence of a hundred and fifty cops holding their breath. “We’ve got eighty known OPA agents on the station. They’re all employed and legal, and you know this is the kind of thing they’ve been waiting for. We have an order from the governor that we’re not going to do any proactive detention. No one gets arrested until they do something.”
    Angry voices rose in chorus.
    “Who does he think he is?” someone called from the back. Shaddid snapped at the comment like a shark.
    “The governor is the one who contracted with us to keep this station in working order,” Shaddid said. “We’ll follow his directives.”
    In his peripheral vision, Miller saw Havelock nod. He wondered what the governor thought of the question of Belter independence. Maybe the OPA weren’t the only ones who’d been waiting for something like this to happen. Shaddid went on, outlining the security response they were permitted. Miller listened with half an ear, so lost in speculating on the politics behind the situation he almost missed it when Shaddid called his name.
    “Miller will take the second team to the port level and cover sectors thirteen through twenty-four. Kasagawa, team three, twenty-five through thirty-six, and so on. That’s twenty men apiece, except for Miller.”
    “I can make it with nineteen,” Miller said, then quietly to Havelock, “You’re sitting this one out, partner. Having an Earther with a gun out there isn’t going to make things better.”
    “Yeah,” Havelock said. “Saw that coming.”
    “Okay,” Shaddid said. “You all know the drill. Let’s move.”
    Miller rounded up his riot squad. All the faces were familiar, all men and women he’d worked with over his years in security. He organized them in his mind with a nearly automatic efficiency. Brown and Gelbfish both had SWAT experience, so they would lead the wings if it came to crowd control. Aberforth had three write-ups for excessive violence since her kid had been busted for drug running on Ganymede, so she was second string. She could work out her anger-management issues another time. Around the