Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Fourteen: Filip

The docks of Ceres Station ran, roughly speaking, along its equator in a wide belt of titanium and ceramic and steel. The dwarf planet’s movement made docking difficult, but once the clamps took hold, ships had the advantage of the 0.3g of spin gravity even with the drive off and cold. And with the radius of spin as big as it was, the Coriolis should have been negligible. The Pella should have felt like it was under a moderate burn and nothing more, but something kept bothering Filip. A sense that the ship was wrong, or that he was.

Twice, he snuck into the medical bay and had diagnostics run, then deleted the results after he read them. They didn’t show anything anyway. But maybe he was just so used to life under thrust that the trace of sideways impulse was enough to unsettle him. Or maybe it was only that the ship was empty except for him. A small, gnawing part of his mind kept suggesting it had something to do with the man he’d shot, but that didn’t make any sense. Along with his father, he’d killed billions. Shooting one man—one that didn’t even die—was nothing to him. It had to be the Coriolis.

His father had made it very clear that Filip’s universe stopped at the airlock. The Pella and everything in it was his the same as it always was, but Ceres Station was worse than vacuum. Fair or unfair, Filip was banned from the station for life. It was the deal Marco had struck with the OPA governor, Dawes. The others would be an active part of the evacuation, but Filip could only watch. And so he walked the corridors, went up and down the lift, slept, ate, exercised, and waited while just on the other side of the airlock, all the people he knew best stripped Ceres Station to the studs. He’d have been part of the effort if he could. Maybe that was all it was. Maybe it was just the fact that he’d been left behind and relaxing while the others did the work didn’t sit well with him. That seemed more likely than Coriolis. Or the man he’d shot.

The truth was, he didn’t remember much of the event. He’d been out with maybe a dozen Free Navy and some local fringe and hangers-on. According to the old laws he was still too young to be in the bars and brothels, but he was Filip Inaros and no one had suggested he leave. There had been music. He’d danced with a local girl, admired her tattoos, bought her drinks. And he’d kept up with her too, drink for drink. She’d liked him, he could tell. And if the music had been too loud for them to talk, that didn’t matter. He could tell.

Her interest hadn’t been about him so much as about the story of who he was. The son of Marco Inaros. Karal had warned him. Marco had warned him. Some people would be attracted to what they thought he was. He had to be careful always to remember who his family was. Not let himself be baited or seduced. The Free Navy had the power now, but there were still people on Ceres who were more than half loyal to the old ways.

Our enemies, at least you know where they stand, his father had said when they arrived at Ceres. There’s nothing you can trust less than half-Belters. Marco hadn’t said it straight out, but he’d meant Filip’s mother and all the people like her. Belters who’d let themselves be turned away from the Belt and the condescending Fred Johnson Earthers who pretended to care about them. Moderate OPA was just another way to say traitor. So Filip had known not to trust the girl, even while he was drinking with her. Drinking too much with her. When she’d left without telling him, he’d felt humiliated and angry. And then something had happened, he couldn’t quite put together, and he’d been carted off by Ceres security and his father called. Which had been humiliating again.

They hadn’t talked, not really. Marco had ordered him to stay on ship, so on ship he’d stayed. Maybe they’d never speak of it again. Maybe that conversation was still coming. Maybe not knowing which was what left him feeling wrong. He didn’t know. He hated that he didn’t know.

He sat in the gunner’s station, the screen slaved to his terminal, and sampled the feeds. A man posting under an old-style OPA banner shouting about how the Free Navy was the last, best hope for Belter liberty. A thin-faced coyo sitting too close to his camera talking in halting Farsi about the implications of the biologicals supplied by Earth being cut off. Some high-end pornography in what looked like a water treatment plant and a hotel lobby. An old Sabbu Re movie series, pairing him against Sanjit Sangre back when Sangre had still looked like a badass. Noise. It was all just noise and images, and Filip let them wash over him without noticing what he was taking in. An impressionistic sense of violence and victory, with him and his father at the head of it all. Arousal and anger paired with all the complexity of an old way of life passing into darkness.

When he killed the speakers, the Pella was quiet in the never-quite silent way a ship had. The drive was off, so there were none of the low hums or occasional harmonics that made the background of his normal life. But the decking joints still ticked and murmured as the plates warmed or cooled. The air recyclers hissed and huffed and hissed again. So maybe that was part of what felt wrong. The sounds of a ship under thrust were so unlike a ship in dock that the subtle background music of his life had changed and set him on edge. The tightness in his belly, the impatience like an itch in his soul that kept him uncomfortable no matter what position he sat in or stood. The ache in his jaw and across his shoulders. Maybe they were just the natural expression of a man used to being in motion being forced into passivity. That was all. Nothing more than that.

Before you kill yourself, his mother had said, come find me.

He stood up, shut down the feeds with a gesture, and stalked down toward the gym. The good thing about being alone was that no one was using any of the equipment. He didn’t bother warming up, just brought down the resistance bands, strapped in, and pulled. He relished the way the handles bit into his palms, the sense of his muscles protesting and tearing, each little injury making them grow back again stronger. Between sets, he turned on some music—loud, aggressive dai-bhangra—only to stop in the middle of the next set and turn it off again.

Everything he wanted annoyed him as soon as he had it. He wondered if he’d have felt the same about the girl. If she’d stayed, and they’d fucked, if afterward he’d have wanted her gone. Turned off like the music. He didn’t know what it would take to make him feel right. Getting the fuck off Ceres wouldn’t hurt, though.

The voices came first, loud and laughing and familiar as Tía Michelle’s bread soup. Karal and Sárta, Wings, and Kennet and Josie. The crew, coming back on board. He wondered if his father was there yet, and what he hoped the answer would be.

“Bist bien,” Wings said. “Jeszcze seconds more.”

The older man staggered a little as he stepped into the gym. His hair was swept up at the sides as it always was, but with a little less crispness than usual. His real name was Alex, but someone had started calling him Wings because of that hairstyle, and his eyes were bloodshot pink, and his gait was a little too relaxed and unsteady. He had a crumpled purple bag under his arm.

“Filipito!” he said, lumbering over. “Bila a ti, I was.”

“And now found me,” Filip said. “So geht gut, yeah?”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” Wings said, not hearing the bite in Filip’s words. The older man lowered himself to the deck, and watched blearily as Filip pulled against the bands and trembled with the effort. “Done. Alles complét. Everyone coming home to … to roost. Or … not roost. Fly, sa sa? We’re flying out into the big, big empty.”

“Good,” Filip said. He made the last pull of the set, holding the tension long and hard until his arms shook and burned and failed. The bands snapped back a few centimeters, then slowed and retracted. Filip squeezed his fists. Wings held out the bag.

“Yours,” he said.

Filip looked at the bag, then at Wings who shook it at him in a take it gesture. It looked like plastic, but it felt and folded like paper in Filip’s hands. Whatever was inside it shifted, limp and heavy as a dead animal.

“No point leaving anything for the pinché inners,” Wings said. “Confiscations all over the station. Anything they didn’t bolt down and half of what they did. Only since tu es lá, I think for you. Yeah?”

He opened the flap. Something dark and textured, regular and irregular at the same time. He pulled the bag free and unfolded the heavy material. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever seen before. He unfolded it.

“A … vest?” Filip said.

“For you,” Wings said. “Leather, that. Alligát. Real too. From Earth. Took it from a high-end shop by the governor’s quarters. Very rich. Only the best for you, yeah?”

Filip gave into the temptation to smell the thing, putting the dead animal’s cured scales against his nose and breathing in. There was something subtle and beautiful about the leather—not sweet and not sour, but rich and low and deep. He put it on, settling the weight across his sweat-damp shoulders. Wings clapped his hands in glee.

“You know how much esá cost?” Wings said. “More scrip than you or me would see in five years. For that. Just that. Would be some pinché Inner strutting around the Belt wearing it just to show how he could and we couldn’t, yeah? But we’re Free Navy now. No one better than. None.”

Filip felt the smile on his lips, tentative as a breeze. He imagined himself in the bar now, wearing his leather vest like the richest of the rich from before. Wings was right. This was the kind of thing that no Belter could have had. A symbol of everything that Earth used to remind them that they were less. Small. Not worth. Only who had it now?

“Aituma,” Filip said.

“Welcome. You’re welcome,” Wings said, waving Filip’s gratitude away. “The thing for you, the pleasure for me. Good trade à alles.”

“How much was it a reál?” Filip asked, part to let Wings brag, part so he could brag himself later. Only Wings had lain back on the deck, his arm over his eyes.

The man shrugged. “Nothing. Everything. For for? Shop’s closed. Not like there’s going to be another shipment of them, yeah? Esá es the last leather vest out of Earth. End point.”

The Free Navy left Ceres Station like spores shed by a fungal body. Drive plumes lit and flared and blinked out again like images Filip had seen of fireflies on Earth. If there were still any fireflies on Earth.

And while each Free Navy ship carried a few civilians away toward safety, theirs were far from the only ships leaving. As soon as Marco had made his intentions clear, a wave of civilian refugees had made themselves ready. Rock hoppers and prospectors and shitty half-legal transport ships all filled to the bulkheads with people desperate to get out of the great city of the Belt before it fell back into the hands of Earth and Mars. And in the midst of it all, the great spinning plume of water and ice as the reservoirs vented. The water reserves spun out from the station, briefly echoing the arms of the galaxy and then stopped, thinned, and spread out into the vast darkness of the Belt. Ice lost among the steady brightness of stars.

The docks, they left in ruins. The reactors, powered down, then either sabotaged or stripped. The power grid and tube systems dismantled. The defense grids stood quiet, their magazines open and empty. Transmitter and sensor arrays were salvaged for parts, then melted to slag. The medical centers had been raided and emptied, leaving only enough to treat the patients already in their care. Taking those supplies, Marco said, would have been cruel.

Of the six million people on Ceres, maybe a million and a half would escape before the enemy arrived. The ones that remained would be in a shell of stone and titanium hardly more capable of sustaining life than the original asteroid had been.

If Earth hunkered down and rebuilt, it would take them years to get back to where Ceres had been, pinning them to the station like insects against a board. If Earth chased and attacked the Free Navy, they would be firing on ships carrying refugees. If they abandoned the station, millions of Belters would die under their care and push anyone still sympathetic to the old ways toward the new. Anything they did would be a victory for the Free Navy. They couldn’t win. That was Marco’s genius.

On the Pella, things fell quickly back into their old patterns of duty, but Filip saw differences now. Ways that Ceres Station had changed them. For one thing, the liquor was better. Jamil had his whole cabin stacked with bottles in polished boxes carved from real wood. The packaging alone would have cost more than Filip would have seen in three years’ work, to say nothing of the whiskey inside them. Dina came back with half a dozen hand-painted silk scarves confiscated from an Earther’s mansion, and she wore them like a bird proud of its plumage.

Everyone wore trinkets of gold and diamond and peridot, but the best was the amber. All the other gems and jewelry could maybe get mined from the Belt. Amber, though, needed a tree and a few million years. It was the one stone that spoke of Earth, and wearing it showed who they’d become better than all the perfumes and spices and leather vests there would ever be. The luxuries that Earth and Mars had bled the Belt to acquire belonged to the Free Navy now. Back to the Belt, as was only just.

It would have been perfect, except for his father.

From the moment Marco had returned to the ship, Rosenfeld at his side, Filip found himself avoiding them. After the first few days spent on the burn, he realized he was waiting to be summoned. Lying in his bunk, trying to sleep, Filip imagined himself under his father’s gaze, called upon to justify all that he’d done on Ceres. Murmuring under his breath so that no one passing by could hear it, he rehearsed all the things he would say. It was the security man’s fault. It was Filip’s own failing, driven by humiliation at the local girl’s disrespect. It had been an accident. It had been justified. The image of the girl from the club slowly shifted in Filip’s mind until she became something like the devil incarnate. The security man he’d shot grew in his private retellings to become a bumbler and a fool and likely a sympathizer for the inner planets.

When the confrontation he’d dreaded finally arrived, it was nothing like he’d expected. Late at night, his cabin door had simply opened and Marco stepped in as casually as if the room had been his own. Filip sat up, blinking away sleep as his father sat at the foot of his couch. The drive pressed him down at a gentle quarter g. He gestured, and the system brought up the lights.

Marco leaned forward, fingers knotted together. His hair was pulled back in a high, tight bun that drew the skin around his temples tight. Stubble darkened his cheeks and his eyes seemed to have retreated a few millimeters. Pensive, Filip thought. He knew that his father would turn in on himself sometimes. This was how he looked when it happened. Filip pulled his legs up, hugging his knees to his chest, and waited.

Marco sighed. When he spoke, his accent was thicker than usual.

“Appearances,” he said. “Savvy? War y politics y peace and all in between? It’s about appearances.”

“If you say.”

“Leaving Ceres, it was right. Clever. Genius move. Everyone says it. The inners, though. The old bitch on Earth and the new one on Mars? They’ll say otherwise. Call it fleeing, yeah? Retreat. A victory against the Free Navy and all it stands for.”

“Won’t be.”

“I know. But going to have to show it. Demonstration of power. Can’t …” Marco sighed again and leaned back. His smile was weary. “Can’t give them the tempo.”

“Can’t, so won’t,” Filip said.

Marco chuckled. A low, warm sound. He put his hand on Filip’s knee, his palm rough and warm. “Ah, Filipito. Mijo. You’re the only one I can really talk to anymore.”

Filip’s heart swelled in his breast, but he didn’t let himself smile. Only nodded the serious nod of a grown man and military advisor. Marco closed his eyes for a moment, leaning back against the bulkhead. He looked vulnerable then. Still his father, still the leader of the Free Navy, but also a man, weary and unguarded. Filip had never loved him more.

“So,” Marco said, “we will. Show of strength. Let them take the station and then show that they’ve won nothing against us. Not so hard.”

“Not at all,” Filip said as Marco pushed himself back up to standing and stepped to the door. When his father was halfway into the corridor, Filip spoke again. “Is there anything else?”

Marco looked back, eyebrows lifted, lips pursed. For a moment, they considered each other. Filip could hear his own heartbeat. All of his practiced lines seemed to have vanished under his father’s soft brown eyes.

“No,” Marco said, and stepped out. The door closed with a click, and Filip let his head sink onto his knees. His mistake on Ceres was gone. Forgotten. A disappointment he couldn’t explain tainted the relief that flowed through him, but only a little. He’d almost killed a man, and it was okay. Nothing bad was going to come of it. It was almost as good as being forgiven.

Someone should have kept that from happening, his mother whispered in his memory.

Filip pushed the thought away, turned his lights back down, and waited for sleep.