Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  He caught Miral’s eye. The older man nodded, and—Filip thought with a sigh—shifted to open a little room beside him. Filip didn’t run there like a little boy, but he went quickly, worried that the gap might close again before he reached it.

  Karal was sitting across from Miral, and all of them sandwiched by unfamiliar bodies. A woman with dark skin and a scar across her upper lip. A thin man with a tattoo on his neck. An older woman—white, close-cropped hair and a crooked, unfriendly smile. Karal was the only one of them to acknowledge Filip, and that only with a grunt and a nod.

  When the older woman spoke, it seemed like she was picking up the thread of a conversation that had been going on before Filip had taken his seat, but with a studied casualness of someone with an agenda. “Con mis coyo on the Shinsakuto, the Ceres fleet’s there forever. Earth away from Earth.”

  “Forever’s a long time,” Miral said, considering the table like he was reading it. “Can think we know what a year, two years, three years down looks like, aber that’s only shit and guessing.”

  “Can’t see the future,” the woman said. “Can see what’s there now, though, que no?”

  Filip took a mouthful of too-salty noodles. He’d waited too long to start eating, and they were more than halfway to paste. The older woman grinned like she’d won a point, leaned in, put her elbows on the table so the split-circle tattoo of the OPA on her wrist showed. Almost like she was displaying it.

  “All I’m saying is maybe time we start winning something, yeah? Ceres. Enceladus. Seems like las sola cocks we kick anymore are Michio Pa’s, and not so much hers even.”

  “We beat Earth,” Filip said. He’d meant it to seem like an offhand comment. Something thrown into the conversation almost at random. Instead, he sounded shrill and defensive, even to himself. The words lay there on the table like something broken past fixing. The older woman’s smile was thin and nasty. Or maybe he only thought it was. One way or the other, she leaned back, took her elbows off the table. When she stood, when she walked away, it was with the air of having made her point, whatever it had been.

  Karal coughed, shook his head. “No te preoccupes, Filipito,” he said.

  “Why would I worry?” Filip asked around another bite of the noodles.

  Karal made a circling motion with his hand. All this and everyone. “After a fight it’s the story about the fight, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Filip said. “Bist bien. I understand.”

  Miral and Karal glanced at each other, and he pretended not to notice. The other crew from the Koto kept their silences to themselves. “Hoy, coyo,” Miral said, touching Filip’s shoulder. “Finish that and come help me with some repair work, yeah? Still tracking down some ganga between the hulls.”

  Filip pushed the bowl away with his fingertips. “This is done already,” he said. “Let’s go, us.”

  The strike that had crippled the Pella hadn’t been one thing, but a tight cluster of PDC rounds. If they’d hit straight on, it would have been better. The top of the ship above the cockpit and command deck was angled and reinforced against exactly that kind of impact. Maybe it would have peeled back a section of the hull and made a hell of a bang, but kept the guts of the ship safe. The way it had happened—the rounds raking down the side of the ship in a stream—was worse. The housings of the Pella’s maneuvering thrusters and PDC cannons, sensor arrays and external antennas had suffered. It was like someone had taken a scraper along all the exposed parts of the ship and taken off whatever could be removed. The damage had left a blind spot in their PDC coverage, but the torpedo that came through it had malfunctioned. If it had detonated, it could have cracked the ship in two, and the old bitch from the galley would have had to hope for the mercy of the inners to keep her leathery ass from drowning in her own waste air.

  The torpedo had still hit hard enough to breach the outer hull, though. And the long, tedious work of finding each bit of scrap shaken loose needed to happen. Leaving a handful of metal and ceramic shards to rattle around between decks whenever they fired the maneuvering thrusters was begging for death. So Filip and Miral suited up, checked each other’s seals and bottles and rebreathers, and crawled into the space between the hulls. The Martian designs were elegant and well ordered, everything labeled along with inspection and change-out dates. In the white flare of light from his lamp, Filip considered the bent plate of the outer hull, the jagged gash where the stars showed through. The galactic plane glowed white and gold and rose against the black. It was hard not to stop and stare.

  It was different looking at the stars as stars and not dots on a screen. He’d spent his whole life in ships and stations. Seeing the billions of unblinking lights with just his own eyes only happened when he went outside on a repair or an operation. It was always beautiful, sometimes alarming. This time, it seemed almost like a promise. The endless abyss opened around them, a whisper that the universe was larger than his ship. Larger than all the ships put together. Humanity could put its flag on thirteen hundred of those dots and not be a percent of a percent of a percent. That was the empire the inners were fighting and dying to control. A hundred more planets a dozen times over, and less than a rounding error of what was out there staring back at them.

  “Hoy, Filipito,” Miral said on the suit’s private channel. “Come around. Think I’ve got something.”

  “Commé. Moment.”

  Miral was crouched down beside the power conduit for the sensor array. His light was playing over a bit of inner hull. A short, bright line showed where something had scratched it. Miral ran his glove over it, and it smeared. Ceramic, then.

  “Okay, you little shit,” Filip said, playing his lamp down the conduit. “Where’d you go?”

  “Follow on,” Miral said, scrambling down the handholds.

  When they reached Pallas, the crews could do a more complete inspection. There were tools to blast nitrogen and argon into every crease and curve of the ship and blow out anything stuck there. Better, though, to have as much done before they arrived. And, Filip thought, there weren’t any other people out between the hulls. As jobs went, it was the most isolated one that the Pella had to offer. All alone, that was reason enough to work it.

  Miral’s little gasp of victory caught Filip’s attention and brought him down close to where the other man was hunched. Miral took a pair of pliers from his belt, applied himself to a section of conduit where the weld had left a gap, then sat back with a grin Filip could see through the suit’s helmet mask. The chip was the size of a thumbnail, jagged along one side, smooth on the other.

  Filip whistled appreciatively. “Big one.”

  “Si no?” Miral said. “Leave esá bastard la bouncing around like shooting a gun in here, yeah?”

  “One less,” Filip said. “Let’s see how many more we find.”

  Miral made a fist and agreed, then tucked the shard into a pocket. “You know, when I was about your age? Drinker back then, me. Spent my time with this coyo always talked about fights he’d been in. Got in them a lot. Liked them, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” Filip said, lowering himself farther down, playing his light across the housing of a maneuvering thruster. He didn’t know where Miral was going with this.

  “This coyo, he said mostly when things spun up, it was from the other bastard getting embarrassed, sa sa? Maybe didn’t want to throw knuckles, but couldn’t find a way to push off without his crew seeing him weak.”

  Filip scowled behind his faceplate. Maybe Miral was talking about what had happened on Ceres? It still bothered Filip sometimes. Not the violence itself, but little flashes of the humiliation left over from realizing the girl he’d been with at the Ceres bar had gone. It wasn’t something he wanted to spend more time with. “Que sa, es,” he said, hoping that would be enough.

  But Miral went on. “Only saying, a man who’s feeling like he lost face, yeah? He’ll say things he doesn’t mean because of it. Do things he doesn’t mean.”

  I meant all what I did, Filip thought
but didn’t say. Would mean it again, to do it over.

  But it had the bright, painful feel of touching a fresh scrape, and he’d already come across like a shitty little kid once today. Better to keep his own counsel. And as it turned out, that wasn’t what Miral meant at all.

  “Your father? He’s a good man. Belter to his bones, yeah? It’s just this Holden bastard’s a sore for him. Getting knocked back, happens a alles one time and another, y alles talk a little bigger afterward. Not a good thing, not a bad thing. Just the way men get made. Don’t take it too close.”

  Filip paused. Turned back.

  “Don’t take it too close?” he repeated, making it a question. A demand that Miral say what he meant.

  “That,” Miral said. “Your dad doesn’t mean what he says.”

  Filip turned his light on Miral, shining it through the older man’s faceplate. Miral squinted, put a hand up to shade his eyes.

  “What does he say?” Filip asked.

  Marco’s quarters were past clean to spotless. The walls shone in the light, freshly polished. The dark smudges that always built up beside handholds nearest the door—evidence of the passage of hundreds of hands—had been scraped away. The monitor didn’t carry so much as a fleck of lint. Fake sandalwood from the air recycler didn’t quite bury the ghost of disinfectant and antifungal wash. Even the gimbals on the crash couch sparkled in the gentle light.

  His father, watching the monitor, was also groomed to an eerie perfection. His hair clean and perfectly in place. His beard soft and brown and trimmed so well it seemed almost false. His uniform looked like it had never been worn before. Crisp lines and clean folds. The seams set perfectly, as if by his own precision and the force of his will, he could haul all the rest of the ship up to his standards. Like all the control Marco had spread across the system had been concentrated in one place. Not an atom in the air was out of place.

  Rosenfeld was on the monitor. Filip caught the words other eventualities before Marco stopped the playback and turned to him.

  “Yes?” Marco said. Filip couldn’t tell what was in his voice. Calm, yeah. But Marco had a thousand varieties of calm, and not all of them meant things were okay. Filip was too aware that they hadn’t really spoken since the battle.

  “Was talking to Miral?” Filip said, crossing his arms and leaning against the doorframe. Marco didn’t move. Not a nod, not a glance away. His dark eyes left Filip feeling exposed and uncertain, but there wasn’t a way to step back from this. Not without asking. “Said you were telling how what happened was my fault?”

  “Because it was.”

  The words were simple. Matter-of-fact. There was no heat to them, no sneer or accusation. Filip felt them like a blow to the chest.

  “Okay,” he said. “Bien.”

  “You were the gunner, and they got away.” Marco spread his arms in a quick, surgical shrug. “Was it a question? Or maybe you’re saying it was my fault for thinking you could do it?”

  It took Filip an extra try to talk past his throat. “Didn’t drive us into those rounds, me,” he said. “Gunner, me. Not the pilot. And didn’t have a rail gun, yeah? Pinché Holden had a rail gun.”

  His father tilted his head to one side. “I just told you that you failed. Now you’re giving me reasons why it’s okay that you failed? Is that how it works?” Filip knew the kind of calm now.

  “No,” he said. Then, “No, sir.”

  “Good. Bad enough that you fucked it up. Don’t start bawling over it too.”

  “Not,” Filip said, but there were tears in his eyes. Shame ran through his blood like bad drugs and left him shaking. “Not bawling, me.”

  “Then own it. Say it like a man. Say ‘I fucked it up.’”

  I didn’t, Filip thought. It wasn’t my fault. “I fucked it up.”

  “All right, then,” Marco said. “I’m busy. Close the door when you go.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  As Filip turned, Marco shifted back to the monitor. His voice was soft as a sigh. “Crying and excuses are for girls, Filip.”

  “Sorry,” Filip said, and pulled the door to behind him.

  He walked down the narrow corridor. Voices from the lift. Voices from the galley. Two crews in the space of one, and he couldn’t stand to be near any of them. Not even Miral. Especially not Miral.

  He put me up, Filip thought. It was like Miral said. They hadn’t kept hold of Ceres, and then Pa had insulted him by breaking away. This was supposed to be the thing to show the Free Navy couldn’t be fucked with, and all three of their wolves together hadn’t been able to stop the fucking Rocinante.

  Marco had been humiliated. And shit floated against the spin, that was all it was. Still, the space below Filip’s ribs ached like he’d been punched. It wasn’t his fault. It was his fault. He wasn’t bawling out excuses. Except that was absolutely what he’d done.

  He turned on the light in his cabin. One of the engineering techs was hot-bunking there, blinking up into the light like a baby mouse.

  “Que sa?” the man said.

  “I’m tired,” Filip said.

  “Be tired somewhere else,” the tech said. “I’ve got two more hours down.”

  Filip put his heel against the crash couch and spun it. The tech reached out a hand, stopped it, and unstrapped. “Fine,” he said. “You’re so fucking tired, sleep then.”

  The tech took his clothes, muttering under his breath, and left. Filip locked the door behind him and folded himself into the couch, still in his uniform that stank of sweat and the vac-suit seals. The tears tried to come then, but he bit them back, pushed the hurt down into his gut until it settled into something else.

  Marco was wrong. His father had embarrassed himself because Holden and Johnson and Naomi got past them. It was like Miral said. Men got like that, and they said things they didn’t mean. Did things they wouldn’t do if they were thinking straight.

  Filip hadn’t fucked it up. Marco was wrong, that was all. This time, he just got it wrong.

  Words came into his mind, as clear as if they’d been spoken. Though he’d never heard her speak them, they came in his mother’s voice. Wonder what else he got wrong.

  Chapter Thirty-One: Pa

  Eugenia was a terrible place to put a base of operations. It was less an asteroid than a complex pile of loose scrap and black gravel traveling in company. Neither the asteroid itself nor the tiny moon that circled it had ever suffered the gravity to press them together or the heat it would take to fuse them. Eugenia and other duniyaret like it offered nothing solid to build on, no internal structure to shore up. Even mining it was hard, the tissue of the asteroid too fast to shift and fall apart. Build a dome there, and the air would seep out through the ground it was built on. Try to spin it up, and it would fly apart. The science station that Earth had built there three generations ago and abandoned was little more than a ruin of sealed concrete and flaking ceramic. A ghost town of the Belt.

  The only things it had to recommend it at all were that it wasn’t inhabited already and its orbit wasn’t too distant from Ceres and the questionable protection of the consolidated fleet. And even that proximity was only temporary. With Ceres’ orbital period a couple percent faster than Eugenia’s, every day added a little bit to the distance between them, stretching the bubble of safety until it would eventually, inevitably pop. In fairness, if they were still using it to escape the Free Navy when Eugenia and Ceres drifted to the far side of the sun from each other, they’d have bigger problems.

  Instead of trying to build on the surface of the asteroid, Michio’s little fleet had begun assembling a nakliye port that orbited around Eugenia’s main body: shipping containers welded one to another to make passageways, warehouses, airlocks. A tiny reactor was enough to keep the air circulating and enough heat to balance what was lost to radiation. It was temporary by design. Inexpensive, fast to assemble, and made from material so standardized and ubiquitous that a solution discovered once could be applied in a thousand other situati
ons. It grew from a seed of three or four containers, spreading out, connecting, reinforcing, making distance where distance was needed, bringing together where it was not, spreading like a snowflake the white of rotting sealant.

  There were stories of the poorest Belters living in nakliye stations for years, but more often they were used as Michio used them: storage and refueling stations. Floating warehouses without taxes or tariffs to bite into the operating budgets of the prospector. Hyperdistilled water to give pirates reaction mass and potables and oxygen. The older siblings to the scattered supply dumps the Free Navy had consigned to the void. On her monitor, it looked like some ancient sea creature, still experimenting with multiple cells. And beside it, the Panshin, compact and sleek.

  The ship had matched orbit so precisely it seemed motionless beside the port, as if the two were connected. The flares of working lights and welding torches studded the station’s skin, and the spidery shapes of mechs shepherded supplies to it from the Panshin. The Connaught had shut down its Epstein hours before to keep from slagging the port and the Panshin besides, and eased into her own gentle orbit on maneuvering thrusters. The deceleration burn was less like thrust gravity than a suggestion that Michio snuggle into her crash couch.

  “They’re painting us. Should I acknowledge?” Evans asked.

  Everything was a question with him now. Ever since the scare at Ceres Station, his confidence had shattered. It was a problem, but like so many of her problems, she wasn’t sure how to fix it. “Please do,” she said. “Let them know I’ll be coming over.”

  “Yes, sir,” Evans said, turning to his monitor. Michio stretched, forcing her blood along its course. She didn’t know why she should feel anxious about seeing Ezio Rodriguez again. She had known him for years, on and off. Another partner in the ongoing struggle to keep the Belt from being used and discarded by the inners and their allies. Only now, he’d taken her side against the Free Navy. This would be the first time she’d breathed his same air since her relief effort had become what it had become. And what did you take to a meeting with a man who’d agreed with you enough to risk his life and the lives of his crew? A thank-you card?