Babylon's Ashes, Page 3

  “Got something else too. Message from himself.”

  “What does Dawes want?” Michio asked.

  “Not Dawes. Big himself.”

  “Inaros?” Michio said. “Play it.”

  “Under captain-only encrypt,” Oksana said. “I can pipe it to your cabin or your terminal if—”

  “Play it, Oksana.”

  Marco Inaros appeared on the monitor. From the drape of his hair, he was either on Ceres or under burn. There wasn’t enough visible background behind him to say if he was on a ship or in an office. His smile was charming and reached his warm, dark eyes. Michio felt her pulse step up a little, and told herself it was dread and not an attraction. For the most part, that was truth. He was a charismatic bastard, though.

  “Captain Pa,” Marco said. “I’m glad to hear you took the Hornblower cleanly. It’s another testament to your ability. We were right to have you in command of the conscription. Things have gone well enough, we’re ready to move on to the next stages of our plan.”

  Michio glanced over at Evans and Oksana. He was plucking at his beard, and she was trying not to look at Michio.

  “We’ll want to route the Hornblower directly to Ceres,” Marco said. “And before that, I’m calling a meeting. Strictly inner-circle. You, me, Dawes, Rosenfeld, Sanjrani. At Ceres Station.” His grin widened. “Now that we’re running the system, there are some changes we should make, eh? The Pella says you can make it there in two weeks. It’ll be good to see you in person.”

  He made a sharp Free Navy salute. The one he’d come up with. The screen went blank. The mix of confusion and distress and relief that flooded Michio’s gut wasn’t easy to make sense of. Having her mission change like that, so quickly and with so little explanation, left her on the wrong foot. And going into a meeting of the inner circle still had a little of the sense of danger that it had before the Free Navy had announced itself. Years of moving in shadows left habits of thought and feeling that were hard to step out of, even if they’d won. But at least they’d be back in the plane of the ecliptic, and not high up in the black, where ominous things happened. Bad things.

  Things, a small, still voice in her head said, like being called to an unexpected meeting.

  “Two weeks?” Michio asked.

  “Possible,” Busch answered almost before the question was out. She’d already run the plan. “But it’ll mean burning hard. And no waiting for the Hornblower.”

  “Carmondy won’t like that,” Pa said.

  “What’s he going to say?” Oksana said. “It’s himself giving the order.”

  “It is,” Michio agreed.

  Evans cleared his throat. “So we’re going?”

  Michio held up a fist. Yes. “It’s Inaros,” she said, ending the coming argument by invoking his name.

  “Well. Bien,” Evans said, but the tone of his voice said something different.

  “Something?” Pa asked.

  “Just isn’t the first time plans changed,” Evans said, his face wrinkled with worry. He wasn’t as pretty that way, but he was her newest husband, so she didn’t point it out. Pretty men could be so fragile.

  “Continue,” she said instead.

  “Well, there was the money thing with Sanjrani. And the Martian prime minister wound up making it safe to Luna when half the Free Navy was trying to take him out. And I hear we tried to kill Fred Johnson and James Holden both, and both still breathing and walking free. Leaves me wondering.”

  “Like maybe Marco isn’t as infallible as he plays?” Michio asked.

  For a moment, he didn’t answer. She thought he might not. “Something like,” Evans finally said. “But even thinking like that feels like it might get sticky, no?”

  “Something like,” Michio agreed.

  Chapter Two: Filip

  There was no one he hated more than James Holden. Holden, the peacemaker who’d never made peace. Holden, the champion of justice who’d never sacrificed anything for justice. James Holden, who crewed up with Martians and Belters—with one Belter—and moved through the system as if it made him better than everyone else. Neutral and above the fray while the inner planets shoved humanity’s resources out to the thirteen hundred–odd new planets and left the Belters to die. Who, against all odds, hadn’t died with the Chetzemoka.

  Fred Johnson, the Earther who’d gone native and started speaking for the Belt, was a close second. The Butcher of Anderson Station, who’d made his career by slaughtering innocent Belters and continued it by patronizing them all into an arc that led toward their cultural and individual deaths. For that he deserved hatred and disdain. But Filip’s mother hadn’t died directly because of Johnson, and so Holden—James pinché Holden—owned first prize.

  It was months since Filip had beaten his hands against the inner door of the airlock while his mother, her mind twisted by too much time in Holden’s cultlike presence, had spaced herself and Cyn along with her. Stupid deaths. Needless. That, he told himself, was why it hurt so much. That she hadn’t needed to die, and she’d chosen it anyway. He’d broken his hand trying to get her to stop, but it hadn’t helped anything. Naomi Nagata had picked a bad death in the void over a life with her true people. It was proof of how much power Holden had had over her. How deeply she’d been brainwashed, and how weak her mind had been from the start.

  He didn’t tell anyone on the Pella that he still dreamed about it every night: the closed door, the certainty that something precious—something important—was on the other side of it, and the sense of vicious loss that he couldn’t make the door open. If they knew how much it haunted him, he’d seem weak, and his father didn’t have room for men who couldn’t do their part. Not even his own son. Filip took his place as a Belter and a man of the Free Navy or he found a place on a station and stayed there as a boy. He was nearly seventeen now; he’d helped to destroy the oppressors on Earth. His childhood belonged in his past.

  Pallas Station was one of the oldest in the Belt. The first mines had been there, and following them, the first refineries. The newer facilities had followed, because this was where the industrial base was. And because it was easier to use the older, unretired crushers and spin separators as overflow capacity. And from habit. Pallas had never been spun up. The gravity it had was the naturally occurring microgravity of its mass—two percent of Earth’s full g. Hardly more than a persistent direction of drift. The station swooped above and below the plane of the ecliptic, like it was trying to elbow its way out of the solar system. Ceres and Vesta were larger and more populous, but the metal for ship plating and reactors, for station decks and shipping containers, for the guns that studded the Free Navy’s liberated warships and the rounds that they fired all came from here. If Ganymede was the breadbasket of the Belt, Pallas was its forge.

  It only made sense that the Free Navy should pass through there in its constant voyage through the liberated system, and that it should make sure to leave no resources behind.

  “S’yahaminda, que?” the harbormaster said, floating in the meeting room’s wider end. It was a Belter room. No tables, no chairs. Little reference to up or down in its architecture. After so long in a ship built with thrust gravity in mind, Filip thought it felt like home. Authentic in a way that the Martian-designed spaces never could.

  The harbormaster himself was the same. His body was longer than someone who’d spent their childhood with even low, intermittent gravity. His head was larger compared to his body than Filip’s or Marco’s or Karal’s. The harbormaster’s left eye was milky and blind where even the pharmaceutical cocktail that made human life in freefall possible had been insufficient to keep the capillaries from dying. He was the kind of man who would never be able to tolerate living on a planetary surface, even for a short period of time. The most extreme end of the Belter physiological spectrum. He was exactly who the Free Navy had risen up to protect and represent.

  Which was likely why he seemed so confused and betrayed now.

  “Is it a problem?” Marco sa
id, shrugging with his hands. The way he said it made emptying the warehouses into the void seem like an everyday thing to ask. Filip hoisted his own eyebrows to echo his father’s disbelief. Karal only glowered and kept one fist on his sidearm.

  “Per es esá mindan hoy,” he said.

  “I know it’s everything,” Marco said. “That’s the point. So long as it’s all here, Pallas will be a target for the inners. Put what you have in containers, fire them off, and only we will know their vectors. We’ll track where they are and salvage what we need when we need it. It’s not just keeping it out of their hands, it’s showing that the station warehouses are empty before they even reach for them, yeah?”

  “Per mindan …” the harbormaster said, blinking in distress.

  “You’ll be paid for it all,” Filip said. “Good Free Navy scrip.”

  “Good, yeah,” the harbormaster said. “Aber …”

  His blinking redoubled and he looked away from Marco as if the admiral of the Belters’ first real armed force was floating half a meter left of where he was. He licked his lips.

  “Aber?” Marco prompted, matching his accent.

  “Spin classifiers v’reist neue ganga, yeah?”

  “If you need new parts, then buy new parts,” Marco said, his voice taking on a dangerous buzz.

  “Aber …” The harbormaster swallowed.

  “But you used to buy from Earth,” Marco said. “And our money doesn’t spend there.”

  The harbormaster lifted a fist in acknowledgment.

  Marco’s smile was gentle and open. Sympathetic. “No one’s money spends there. Not anymore. You buy from the Belt now. Just the Belt.”

  “Belt don’t make good parts,” the harbormaster whined.

  “We make the best parts there are,” Marco said. “History’s moved on, my friend. Try to keep up. And package everything there is for push-out, sa sa?”

  The harbormaster met Marco’s gaze and lifted his fist again in assent. It wasn’t as if he had a choice. The advantage of being in command of all the guns was that no matter how nicely you asked for something, it was still an order. Marco pushed off, the thin gravity of Pallas bending the path of his body. He stopped his motion by grabbing handholds at the harbormaster’s side, and then embraced him. The harbormaster didn’t hug him back. He looked like a man holding his breath and hoping something dangerous wouldn’t notice him as it passed by.

  The corridors and passageways leading from the harbormaster’s office to the docks were a patchwork of ancient ceramic plating and newer carbon-silicate lace. The lace plating—one of the first new materials put into manufacture after the protomolecule’s appearance threw physical chemistry ahead by a few generations—had an eerie rainbow sheen as they floated past it. Like oil on the surface of water. It was supposed to be more resilient than ceramic and titanium, harder and more flexible. No one knew how it would age, though if reports from the other worlds were to be trusted, it would likely outlast the people who’d fashioned it by at least an order of magnitude. Assuming they were making it right. Hard to know.

  The Pallas shuttle was waiting when they reached it, Bastien strapped into the pilot’s couch.

  “Bist bien?” he asked as Marco cycled the airlock closed behind them.

  “As well as could be hoped,” Marco said, glancing around the small craft. Six couches, not counting Bastien’s pilot’s station. Karal was strapping into one, Filip into another. But Marco drifted slowly to the shuttle’s floor, his hair settling at his shoulders. He lifted his chin as a question.

  “Rosenfeld went already,” Bastien said. “Been on the Pella for three hours.”

  “Has he now,” Marco said, and his voice had an edge that maybe only Filip could hear. He slid into his couch and cinched down the straps. “That’s good. Let’s join up.”

  Bastien cleared with the dock control system, more from habit than need. Marco was captain of the Pella, admiral of the Free Navy, and his shuttle would take precedence over any other traffic. But Bastien checked anyway, then went through the seals and environment controls again, for what was likely the tenth time. For anyone raised in the Belt, checking the air and the water and the seals on ships and suits was like breathing. Not something you even thought about, just something that happened. People who didn’t live that way tended to leave the gene pool early.

  They grew a degree heavier as the shuttle launched, then the gimbals in the couches all hissed at once as Bastien fired the maneuvering thrusters. It wasn’t even a quarter-g burn, and still they reached the Pella in minutes. They cycled through the lock—the same one Naomi had chosen to die in—then floated out into the familiar air of the Pella.

  Rosenfeld Guoliang was waiting for them.

  All through Filip’s life, from his very first memories, the Belt had meant the Outer Planets Alliance, and the OPA had meant the people who mattered most. His people. It was only as he’d grown up and started being allowed to listen when his father spoke with other adults that his understanding of the OPA became deeper, more nuanced, and the word that redefined his people was alliance. Not republic, not unity government, not nation. Alliance. The OPA was a numberless wash of different groups that formed and fell apart and formed again, all of them tacitly agreeing that, whatever their disagreements might be, they were united against the oppression of the inner planets. There were a few large standard bearers under the OPA’s flag—Tycho Station under Fred Johnson, and Ceres Station under Anderson Dawes, each with their militias; the ideological provocateurs of the Voltaire Collective; the openly criminal Golden Bough; the nonviolent near-collaborationist Maruttuva Kulu. For each of those, there were dozens—hundreds, maybe—of smaller organizations and associations, cabals and mutual interest societies. What brought them together was the constant economic and military oppression of Earth and Mars.

  The Free Navy was not the OPA, and it was not meant to be. The Free Navy was the strongest of the old order, forged together into a force that didn’t need an enemy to define it. It was a promise of a future in which the yoke of the past was not only shrugged off but broken.

  That didn’t mean it was free from the past.

  Rosenfeld was a thin man who managed to slouch even on the float. His skin was dark and weirdly pebbled, his eyes sunk deep in their sockets. He had tattoos of the OPA’s split circle and the knifelike V of the Voltaire Collective, a bright and ready smile, and a sense of barely contained violence. And he was the reason Filip’s father had come to Pallas.

  “Marco Inaros,” Rosenfeld said, spreading his arms. “Look what you’ve done, coyo mis!”

  Marco launched himself forward into the man’s embrace, spinning with him as they held close and slowing when they pulled back. Any distrust Marco held toward Rosenfeld was gone. Or no, not gone, but shifted away for Filip and Karal to feel so that his own pleasure at the reunion could be pure.

  “You look good, old friend,” Marco said.

  “I don’t,” Rosenfeld said, “but I appreciate the lie.”

  “Do we need to transfer your men over?”

  “Already done,” Rosenfeld said, and Filip glanced to Karal, catching the little scowl at the corner of the older man’s mouth. Rosenfeld was a friend, an ally, one of the inner circle of the Free Navy, but he shouldn’t have been able to bring his private guard on the ship when Marco wasn’t there. The Pella was the flagship of the Free Navy, after all, and temptation was temptation. Marco and Rosenfeld reached out together, slowed their two-body rotation with a handhold jutting off the lockers, and still arm in arm, pushed out to the corridor and into the ship. Filip and Karal followed after.

  “Going to be a hard burn getting to Ceres in time for the meeting,” Marco said.

  “Your fault. I could have taken my own ship.”

  “You don’t have a gunship.”

  “I’ve lived my whole life in rock hoppers—”

  Even with only the back of his father’s head to see, Filip could hear the smile in Marco’s voice. “That was your
whole life until now. We’ve changed the game. Can’t have the high command moving unprotected. Even out here, not everyone’s with us. Not yet.”

  They reached the lift that ran the length of the ship, shifted around it, and swam headfirst through the air, down toward the crew decks. Karal looked behind, toward the operations and flight decks, as if to be sure none of Rosenfeld’s guard were at their six.

  “Why I waited,” Rosenfeld said. “The good little soldier, mé. Too bad about Johnson and Smith making it safe to Luna. Only took down one out of three?”

  “Earth was the one that mattered,” Marco said. Ahead of them, Sárta appeared, floating up past them toward ops. She nodded her greeting as they passed. “Earth was always the prime target.”

  “Well, Secretary-General Gao’s with her gods now, and I hope she died screaming”—Rosenfeld mimed spitting to the side after he said it—“but this Avasarala who’s taken her place—”

  “A bureaucrat,” Marco said as they hauled themselves around the corner and into the mess. The tables and benches bolted to the floor, the smell of Martian military food, the colors that had until recently been the banner of the enemy. They all stood in contrast to the men and women in the space. Belters all, and still Filip could pick out the Free Navy he served with from Rosenfeld’s guard. Self from not-self. They could pretend the division wasn’t there, but they all knew better. A dozen people, all told, like it was the change of shift. One of the Pella’s crew for each of Rosenfeld’s, so Karal wasn’t the only one to think a little vigilance between friends was a good thing.

  One of the guards tossed Rosenfeld a bulb. Coffee, tea, whiskey, or water, there was no way to know. Rosenfeld caught it without missing a beat in the conversation. “Seems like a bureaucrat with a hate on. You think you can handle her? Nothing personal, coyo, but you’ve got a blind spot underestimating women.”