As he stepped out the airlock again, his hand terminal chirped. A new message had arrived from Earth. From Avasarala. He paused in the wide air of the docks. The roar of the air recyclers and the clang of the loading mechs. The smell of lubricant and dust. His security detail was already moving toward him, ready to usher him back into his fishbowl. He waved them back and started the message.
Avasarala was in a corridor, shuffling briskly in the lunar microgravity. She looked as tired as he did, but she had a thin, amused smile. He’d never known anyone in his life who could be so cheerfully disappointed in humanity.
“I’ve run your list past my relief coordinator,” she said—what would it be? Eight minutes ago? Ten? He used to be able to calculate light delay in his head. “It didn’t quite bring him to orgasm, but I think he may want to take you out for drinks when you’re in town. Be careful with him. He’s got busy hands.”
Someone off screen interrupted. Avasarala’s eyes flickered away from the camera and she shook her head. “Does he want me to wipe his ass for him too? His job is to make decisions, not ask me what decisions he ought to make.” A curt, deferential voice said yes, ma’am or something like it, and she started walking again.
Fred found himself smiling. When she’d been his enemy, she’d been a good one. Now that they were working as allies, the ways that they were the same almost humanized her.
“Where was I? Oh. Yes, the so-called relief supplies. I’m sending along a list of what we most need on the surface. If you get a chance to pass it on to Pa, please do. Apparently we’re all fucking pirates now.”
Chapter Twenty-Six: Filip
The night before the Pella left Pallas Station, Rosenfeld hosted a dinner for Marco and the other captains. The hall had been a vast open space designed as a construction compartment, but changed now into a kind of null-g throne room. A soft, chiming music played like flowing water with a melody. Serving platforms bristled with ceramic bulbs brightly colored as oil on water and filled with wine and water. Long ribbons of red and gold shifted in the breeze of the recyclers. Great lengths of gold fibered paper fluttered and bellied against the walls between the hand- and footholds. The crew of the Pella and the staff of Rosenfeld’s Pallas authority mixed, Free Navy uniforms standing out sharp and martial against the casual civilian clothes of the locals. Young men and women in flowing robes of crimson and blue floated through the air slowly enough to deliver tapas of bean-and-grain cake, curried shrimp fresh from the tanks, and garlic sausage with real meat stuffed in the skins.
No element of the design suggested a consensus up or down. No concession had been made to the architecture of Earth and Mars. The combination of a traditional Belter aesthetic with lushness and luxury left Filip a little intoxicated even before he started drinking.
“I don’t know what you could mean by purification,” his father said through laughter, “if not ‘getting rid of the impure parts.’”
Rosenfeld’s answering chuckle was dry. After weeks traveling with the man, Filip still wasn’t certain he could read his expressions. “You’re saying you planned for this?”
“Anticipated. A change in the system of the greater world always risks having people lose perspective. Get drunk on possibility. Pa rode the wave in; now she thinks she can command the tides. I didn’t know she would break, but I was ready if she did.”
Rosenfeld nodded. Across the great echoing chamber, two women sang together a few bars of a song that Filip knew, and then dissolved into hilarity. He looked across the open air, hoping that one of them might be looking back. That a girl would be watching him floating in conference with the great minds of the Free Navy. No one was.
When his father went on, his voice was lower. Still conversational, still friendly, but charged. “I had plans in place for anyone that broke. Pa, Sanjrani, Dawes. You. When I make my next strike, everyone will see how weak she is. Her support will burn off faster than breathing.”
“You’re sure,” Rosenfeld said, making the words a statement and a question at the same time. He drank from his bulb, coughed. Filip watched his father waiting for the pebble-skinned man to finish his thought. Rosenfeld sighed, nodded. Filip felt some deeper meaning swim just below his understanding, leaving him bobbing in its wake. “It’s only that she’s been feeding people. The laity find that sort of thing endearing, sí no?”
“Anyone can buy votes with free ganga,” Filip said.
Rosenfeld turned his head then, like he was noticing Filip for the first time. “True, true.”
“Johnson and his cobbled-up fleet,” Marco said, “have been squatting on Ceres with their eyes wide. Can’t move forward without exposing themselves. Can’t move back and leave Ceres to us again. They’re trapped. Just the way we said they’d be.”
“True,” Rosenfeld said, and left True, but …hanging in the air. All the criticisms trailed behind it like the ribbons in the breeze. True, but it’s been a long time since we left Ceres, and it’s left us looking weak … True, but one of your generals broke away and you haven’t brought her to heel … True, but Fred Johnson is issuing orders from the governor’s mansion at Ceres, and you aren’t. Filip felt every point like a blow to the gut, but because they were unspoken, he couldn’t answer them. Neither could his father. Rosenfeld took another drink, accepted a stick of vat-grown meat from a passing server, and steadied his drift with one hand as he ate. His expression was mild, but his gaze stayed locked on Marco.
“Waiting until the perfect moment is the mark of a great strategist,” Marco said. “For now, the outer planets are ours to pass through freely. Mars and Earth and Luna—even Ceres. They’re hiding behind their walls while we move through the wide plains of the vacuum, masters of the void. The more they realize they don’t matter, the more desperate they’ll become. All we have to do is watch for the opportunity that’s coming.”
“Fred Johnson,” Rosenfeld said. “He’s already reached out to Carlos Walker and Liang Goodfortune. Aimee Ostman.”
“Let them talk with him,” Marco said, an edge coming into his voice for the first time. “Let them see how little he’s become. I know his patterns, and I know what you’re saying.”
“Not saying anything, coyo,” Rosenfeld said. “Except maybe we’ve been drinking too much.”
“I told you before that Johnson would be off the board, and he will be. We didn’t take him at Tycho, and we’ll take him somewhere else. He is my white whale, and I will hunt him to the end of time.”
Rosenfeld looked down at his bulb, his body hunching a degree in submission. Filip had felt his father’s victory like it was his own.
“Didn’t finish reading that book, did you?” Rosenfeld asked mildly.
Marco called the ships the three wolves. The Pella, of course, was the leader of the pack, with the Koto and the Shinsakuto placed in slow orbit to support her. Moving the ships into position was the hard part. Marco’s trade hadn’t included true stealth ships. The nearest they had were regular gunships with a coating of the stolen radar-eating paint layered over the skin, and without being designed for it and for holding waste heat, the Martian tech was less effective.
But the Belt had always had smugglers, pirates, and thieves. There were ways to hide, even in the abyss. Running without transponders was only one of them. They’d left Pallas with a hard burn. Hours of being pressed into the crash couches, juice burning in their veins and still driven to the edge of consciousness. And then, the coast. With no drive plume to show where they were, the Pella and her fellow hunters were hardly more than warm rocks, making a traverse of the vastness between Ceres on the inner Belt and Tycho Station in its own deeper orbit. The Koto risked a braking burn to plant itself alongside a charted asteroid, using the mass of stone and ice to hide it and explain the ladar ping responses. The Pella and the Shinsakuto stayed on the float, their orbits matching the widespread detritus of the asteroid belt. No broadcasts. The only communications were tightbeam. They off-gassed a little to cool the outer hull and complica
te its thermal signature. The emptiness itself was their friend. Even in the most crowded corners of the Belt, where the asteroids were thickest, it would have taken a telescope to see the nearest neighbors. The Pella was a warm sliver of metal and ceramic in trillions of square kilometers—less than a thumbnail clipping in an ocean.
Even if Ceres saw them—and over the long weeks of their silent hunt, it might—they would be indistinguishable from a thousand other unlicensed prospectors, smuggling ships, and homesteading Belter families. Johnson and his inner planet allies would need to know where to look to find them. And even if they found one, two more waited.
Fred Johnson’s desperate meeting to sweep up the shards of the OPA was still weeks away, but Marco put them in and flying dark long before Fred would need to leave the safety of Ceres. Men have patterns, he said. And Fred Johnson’s were misdirection followed by overwhelming force. Their sources said that the fleet would remain pinned at Ceres. With overwhelming force no longer an option, all that remained was misdirection. And so they floated, their passive sensor arrays pointed at Ceres and Tycho like a too-clever child watching a street magician’s other hand. When Fred Johnson went to make his plea to the ragged stragglers of the OPA still willing to listen, Marco said, he would know. And when Johnson’s prospective allies saw him die …
Well, they had lost Michio Pa. But Marco could replace her a hundred times over. Strength pulled people as surely as gravity. More, sometimes.
Marco would wait for hours every day, strapped into his crash couch as if a hard burn could come at any second, his eyes flickering over sensor data, and still end his shifts energized and laughing, excited. Joyful. Filip didn’t have his father’s raw endurance. For the first several days, he could equal Marco’s focus and sense of imminent violence, and even then by the time he went to the gym, to the galley, to his cabin, the brightness in his chest had started to change to something more like anxiety. Or rage. Only he didn’t know what he was anxious about or who he was so angry with.
When the Minsky came to Ceres, the Connaught at its side, Filip had been sure that the moment had arrived. Pa was there, the consolidated fleet watching her inch toward them like a cat hauling a dead mouse home as a love gift. Filip felt it in his blood—the coming violence. The grand and gaudy proof that the Free Navy was stronger than its enemies. He hadn’t been the only one either. It was like all the crew of the Pella—Josie and Karal and Bastien and Jún—everyone had taken a breath at the same time, steeled themselves for the burn and the battle.
Everyone but Marco.
He’d stayed just the same, watching the datafeeds from his crash couch on the command deck. The attack from Ceres, the Rocinante’s defense of the Connaught. All of it seemed to wash over Marco like it was nothing. He captured images of the ship transfer. When he recorded his denouncement of Pa and revealed her as a stooge of the inners, he seemed to wake up for a moment, but only while the recording was going on. As soon as the camera shut off, he seemed to fall back into himself. Filip took comfort that this wasn’t the same torpor and indifference that had haunted the Pella after leaving Ceres the first time. Marco watched like a predator in cover, the Pella drifting in its orbit around the distant sun like it was locked to Ceres Station.
Several days after the Connaught’s departure, Filip dreamed of Earth—only it wasn’t Earth. It was a massive spaceship, layer upon layer of scaffold, reaching down forever. A great fire burned at its core, and Filip was lost in it, trying to find something. Something precious that he’d had and lost or else that had been hidden from him. Also, he was being chased. Sought by something so that he switched from being hunter to prey and back to hunter.
In the dream, he was floating down a long corridor. Purely ballistic. The handholds and footholds skated by on all sides, just beyond his reach. There was a strong smell—mineral and heat. The exposed iron core of the Earth. Its burning heart. And there was something at the end of the passage. Something waiting. His mother and an army of the dead who he’d killed. The rapping of their bone fingers on the deck was a threat and a promise. Filip woke with a shout, grabbing at the straps of his crash couch like they were trying to strangle him.
Then the rapping of fingers came again, and the door of his cabin slipped open. Karal floated in the corridor, his eyes an image of concern. And maybe excitement.
“Hoy, Filipito,” he said. “Bist bien?”
“Fine,” Filip said. What time was it? He felt like he’d woken in the middle of a cycle, but he couldn’t be sure. He’d been sleeping so much lately, it was easy for him to lose track. So long as there was nothing to do but wait, it hardly mattered how the hours passed. But sleeping too long was much like sleeping too little. It left him confused and tired.
“Marco wants you. Command deck, yeah?”
Filip nodded with his left hand while he unstrapped with his right. “Con que?” he said. “Something happened?”
Karal’s look of concern eroded into a bestial grin. “Dui,” he said. “But let Marco show you, yeah?”
Pulling himself along the lift tube, Filip’s heart tapped against his chest. The sense of the dream wasn’t quite gone, bleeding into the solid ship under his hands. Excitement and dread wore each other’s clothes, spoke in the same voice. When he reached the command deck, the lighting was set for battle, and the crash couches were crewed: Sárta strapping herself down, Wings already in place. Bastien’s voice echoed from the cockpit, and the anticipation of thrust made Filip think it was above them. The words were clipped and terse. The air seemed cleaner, as if Filip could see everything for the first time.
Marco reached out and spun his own couch on its gimbals to face him. The light from the screen threw shadows across his father’s eyes. Filip saluted, and Marco spread his hands.
“The hour has now arrived, Filip,” Marco said. “All of our patience and sacrifice have brought us here to this one, perfect moment.” Times like this, he sounded almost like an Earther. Filip nodded, his heart beating faster. He didn’t know whether to keep looking at Marco or if it would be all right to turn to the screens. Marco laughed, and pulled Filip close. He gestured to the tactical readout. A dot of light.
If he looked outside the ship, on float with merely human eyes or through the cameras that took in the same spectrum, the star field would have overwhelmed the glimmer from the ship. Even Ceres would have been little more than a bit of darkness where the starlight was blotted out. On the screen, the critical light was brighter, its path sketched in. Filip glanced at Marco for permission, received it in a nod, and then drew back the scale until the full arc of the little ship’s pathway was clear.
A single ship, burning hard from Ceres to Tycho.
“Fred Johnson,” Filip said.
“More than that,” Marco said, and the calm in his voice made him sound almost drugged by pleasure. “Look at the drive signature.”
Filip did, blinked. His breath went shallow and tight. It matched the Rocinante. James Holden’s ship. His betrayer of a mother. The clean, clear center of everything he hated, everything they had to overcome. And here it was, delivered to them like a present.
“I’ve been tracking them. They’ve left the effective protection range of Ceres. They’re alone in the void, except for us.” Marco’s smile was beatific, but the expression in his dark eyes changed. Instead of being lost in the gratification of the moment, he was looking at Filip. More than looking at him. Seeing him. Seeing into him.
“Karal,” Marco said. Half strapped into his couch, the big man paused. Marco shifted a degree. “Need you in engineering. Damage control, yeah?”
Karal shrugged, unstrapped. Marco looked back at Filip, then pointed to the crash couch with his chin. It’s your station. Take it. As Karal launched down the lift tube, feet vanishing last, Filip pulled himself into the crash couch. Weapons controls filled the screen. Torpedoes. PDCs. The sword of the Pella was in his hands.
The warning Klaxon seemed to come from a great distance. The Pella, prepa
ring after weeks sleeping on the float. The needle stung when it went into his vein, and the cold, bright flow of military-grade juice lit him from within like he was fire itself, consuming everything he touched.
Two new dots appeared on tactical. New stars in the star-sown blackness, both marked as friendlies. The Koto and the Shinsakuto leaping from their cover, and announcing their attack. The Pella jumped up around Filip, grabbing his crash couch and all the others on the command deck. The gimbals hissed in unison as Bastien brought them around, couches snapping to face the new up and follow it, whichever way the maneuvering thrusters demanded. The rumble of the drive passed through the ship, through Filip’s bones. The crash couch gel flowed up the sides of his body. As if he was watching someone else do it, he keyed in firing solutions. One gunship against three. The Rocinante couldn’t help but die.
“They saw us, them!” Bastien shouted. “We’re getting painted!”
“Filip,” Marco said.
“Sa sa,” Filip said. With a motion, he trained the PDCs toward the distant flicker that was the enemy, ready to chew down any incoming torpedoes. The Pella jumped forward again, the hard burn jumping harder. Filip let his arms sink down to his sides, fingers on the built-in controls. He fought to inhale. Five gs. Six, and the acceleration was still going up. The wolves were loose now. The pack running.
His vision narrowed, shadows crowding his peripherals like the dead from his dream. He had the weird sensation that she was in the room. Naomi Nagata. But that was only an accident of sleep and high-g blood flow. The crash couch chimed, a fresh infusion of juice brightening him. His lips were growing numb and tingling. He couldn’t lift his head from the couch any longer. It was like he was becoming the ship. Or it was becoming him.
Babylon's Ashes Page 26