Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Thirty-Six: Filip

Fixing your ship was what it meant to be a Belter. Earthers lived lives eating off the government dole and fucking each other into torpor by exploiting the Belt. Dusters sacrificed themselves and anyone else they could get their hands on for the dream of making Mars into a new Earth, even while they hated the old one. And Belters? They fixed their ships. They mined the asteroids and moons of the system. They made every scrap go longer than it was designed to. They used their cleverness and resourcefulness and reliance on each other to thrive in the vacuum like a handful of flowers blooming in an unimaginably vast desert. Putting hand to the Pella was as natural and proper as breathing in after breathing out.

Filip hated that he didn’t want to do it.

In the first days, it was simple on-the-float work. Even then, he felt the eyes of the others on him, heard their conversations go quiet when he came in earshot. Josie and Sárta welding in the space between the hulls had said something about the dangers of nepotism, not knowing he was on the frequency, and then pretended they hadn’t when he showed up. In the galley, newsfeeds from the crippled Earth were his best companions. His father didn’t call for him or restrict his duties. Either would have been better than this nameless limbo. If he’d been cast down, he could at least have taken some pride in having been wronged. Instead, he woke for his shift, went to help with the repairs, and wished that he could be someplace else.

It was only when it came clear that the dead thruster was going to need a new housing that they burned for a shipyard. In other lives, they’d have tried for Ceres or Tycho, but the second-string yards were still decent. Rhea. Pallas. Vesta. They didn’t use any of those. When his father’s order came down, it was for Callisto.

A new escort came, guns bared, to keep the Pella safe from the torpedoes and attack ships of the enemy. But while Earth and Mars and Fred Johnson’s OPA probably had their eyes on the Pella, they didn’t let themselves be pulled out from their bases and fleets. They were a prize, but not one worth risking for.

Lying in his crash couch, watching feeds of neo-taarab bands from Europa and half a dozen bad sex comedies because Sylvie Kai had roles in them, Filip fantasized that there would be an attack. Maybe a little fleet led by the Rocinante. James fucking Holden and Filip’s own traitorous whore of a mother in command, screaming out after him with their rail gun and torpedoes. Sometimes the fantasy ended with someone else getting the Pella beat up even worse and everyone seeing how hard it was to win that fight. Sometimes it ended with them killing the Rocinante, blowing it into glowing gas and shards of metal. Sometimes he imagined that they’d lose and die. And the twin points of light in that last and darkest daydream fit together like a clamp bolt in its housing: It would be an end to working on the ship, and also they would never reach Callisto.

The surviving shipyard on Callisto stood on the side permanently locked facing away from Jupiter. Its floodlights cast long, permanent shadows across the moon’s landscape and the ruins of its sister yard, a Martian base shattered years ago. Shattered in one of the first actions by the Free Navy. In Filip’s first command. The dust and fines stirred up by the actions of human commerce fell slowly on Callisto, giving an illusion of mist where there was no free water and only the most tenuous atmosphere to carry it. He watched the scattering of floodlights on the moon’s surface grow larger as they came in, white and bright and random like a handful of the star field had been grabbed and mashed into the dirt. When the Pella tipped down into a repair berth, the sound of the clamps coming into place was deep as a punch. Filip unstrapped and made his way to the airlock as soon as he could.

Josie was there—long, graying hair pulled back from his narrow, yellow-toothed face. Josie who’d been on the Callisto raid with him. Who’d been under Filip’s command. He lifted his eyebrows as Filip started to cycle the lock.

“Not wearing tués uniform,” Josie said, only the smallest sneer in his voice.

“Not on duty.”

“Hast shore leave, tu?”

“No one said no,” Filip said, hating how petulant his voice sounded in his own ears. Josie’s gaze hardened, but he only turned away. The pressures went equal, or nearly so. When the Pella’s outer doors slid open, there was still a little pop. Enough to make Filip feel the change from one place to another, but not so much that his ears hurt from it. A security detail waited on dock wearing light armor with raw places on the shoulder and breast where the indistinct outline of the Pinkwater logo could still be seen like a shadow. He nodded to them with his hands and walked forward, half afraid they’d call him to stop and half hoping for it.

He’d never been to Callisto before his raid. Never seen it before he called the strikes down. He didn’t know what it had looked like before, and he could still tell that the surviving half showed the scars. Walking past the dock and into the commercial district, Filip could pick out which walls had been replaced. Here and there, a run of decking had a slightly off color, the sealant not as aged as the runs around it. Little scars. He might not even have noticed if he hadn’t known to look.

It had been justified, though. It had been to get the radar-eating paint from the Dusters so that the rocks they threw at Earth would be hard to see. It had been part of the war. And anyway, he hadn’t tried to hurt them. It was only they were right beside the enemy. Their fault. Not his.

Voices wove a rich and shifting murmur through the wide, tall main hall. A cart blatted for people to clear its path. Work crews in gray jumpsuits wore Free Navy armbands and split-circle OPA tattoos on their wrists. The air smelled of urine and cold. Filip found a place against one wall, set his shoulders against it, and watched like he was waiting for something. Someone to see him, stop, and point an accusing finger. You were the one who tried to kill the yards! You were the one who cracked our seals! Do you know how many of us died?

He waited for something to happen, but no one took any notice of him one way or the other. He was no one to them. A kid with his back against the wall.

The bar he ended up in was at the far end of the shipyard complex, close to the tunnels down to the deeper-level neighborhoods and the fast transit to the Jovian observatory on the far side of the moon. It wasn’t only yard hands at the pressed-polymer tables. There were girls his own age in bright clothes come up from the residential levels below. Older people in academic-looking rumple hunched over their hand terminals and their beers. He’d known vaguely that there was a good upper university somewhere on Callisto, something associated with the technical institutes on Mars. Somehow never put it together in his mind with the place he’d been set to raid.

He sat apart, at a bright-pink table with a bowl of living grass as a centerpiece. From there he could watch the oversized wall screens with their scroll of newsfeeds muttering to themselves like angry drunks or else look over the finch-bright girls talking to one another and managing to never glance his way. He ordered black noodles in peanut sauce and a stout from the table display and paid with Free Navy scrip. For a long moment, he thought the table might refuse payment—if it said his money was bad, that would be when the girls looked over at him—but it chimed pleasantly, accepting, and threw up a countdown timer to when his order should come. Twelve minutes. So for twelve minutes, he watched the feeds.

The Earth still dominated, even in its suffering. Images of devastation mixed with earnest-looking newsreaders staring into the camera or else interviewing other people, sometimes earnest as sycophants, sometimes yelling like the other coyo’d been fucking their sweethearts. The bright girls ignored the screen, but Filip’s eye kept wandering back to it: a street covered in ashes so deep the woman cleaning it had a scarred snow shovel; an emaciated black bear lurching one direction and then another in distress and confusion; some official of the half-dead Earth government surveying a stadium filled with body bags. The beer and noodles came, and he started eating without quite noticing that he had. He watched the march of images, chewed, swallowed, drank. It was like his body was a ship, and all his crew were about their work but not talking to each other.

The pride in the devastation was still there. Those dead were because of him. The ash-drowned cities, the blackened lakes and oceans, the skyscraper burning like a torch because not enough infrastructure still existed to extinguish it. These were the temples and battlements of his people’s enemy, fallen into dust and ruin, and thanks to him. The raid he’d done here, at this yard, had let it happen.

And now here he was with the end and the beginning, one seen through the other like two sheets of plastic laid one on the other. Like time pressed flat. Still a victory and still his, but maybe there was a little aftertaste now, trailing just after like milk on the edge of sour.

Say it like a man. Say I fucked it up. Only he hadn’t. It hadn’t been his mistake.

The shining girls rose in a flock, touching each other’s hands, laughing, kissing each other’s cheeks, and then scattered. Filip watched them walk out with a kind of forlorn lust, and so he saw it when Karal walked in. The old Belter could have been a mech driver or a drive tech or a welder. His hair was white and thinning and cut close to the scalp. His shoulders and hands and cheeks showed a lifetime of scars. He stood for a moment, looked around with an air of not thinking much of what he saw, and then lumbered over toward Filip’s booth and sat across from him like they’d planned to meet there.

“Hoy,” Karal said after an awkward moment.

“He send you?” Filip asked.

“No one send me, aber se savvy I ought to come.”

Filip stirred his noodles. The bowl was hardly half empty, but his appetite was already gone. The slow, rolling anger in his gut seemed to take up all the space that food might want. “No need. Solid as stone, me, and twice as hard.”

It sounded like a boast. Like an accusation. Filip wasn’t even sure what he’d wanted the words to be, but not this. He ground his fork into the mash of noodles and sauce, shoved the bowl to the edge of the table for the server to take away. He kept the stout, though.

“Not throwing signs, me,” Karal said. “But was a time I was your age. Long time, but I remember it. Me y mis papá used to have it out sometimes. He’d get high and I’d get drunk and we’d spend the whole day sometimes yelling at each other about who was the dumbest asshole. Throw punches sometimes. Pulled a knife once, me.” Karal chuckled. “He cracked my ass the other way for that one. All I’m saying, fathers and sons, they fight. But you and yours? It’s different, yeah?”

“If you say,” Filip said.

“Your da? He’s not just your da. Marco Inaros, leader of the Free Navy. Big man, him. So much on his shoulders. So much he’s thinking on, worrying on, planning on, and it’s not like tu y la can scrap it out like the rest of us.”

“That’s not what it is,” Filip said.

“No? Bist bien, then. What’s it?” Karal said, and his voice was soft and warm and gentle.

The anger in Filip’s gut was shifting, unsteady as a scab on an infected wound. The rage and righteousness started to feel less authentic, like a wrap tied around something that wasn’t either. That was something worse. Filip gripped his hands in fists so tight they ached, but he lost his hold. The anger—not even anger, petulance—slid to the side and an oceanic sense of guilt rose up in him like a flood. It was too big, too pure, too painful to even have a single event to focus it.

It wasn’t that he regretted leaving the ship without permission or missing his shots on the Rocinante or killing Earth or wounding Callisto. It was larger than that. Regret was the universe. Guilt was bigger than the sun and the stars and the spaces between them. Whatever it was, all of it, was his fault and his failing. It was more than he’d done something bad. Like the fossil of an ancient animal was flesh that had been replaced by stone, whoever Filip had been once had kept his shape but been replaced by a raw and rising sense of loss.

“I feel …wrong?” Filip said, scrabbling for words to describe something so much bigger than language. “I feel … I feel like—”

“Fuck,” Karal said, breathy and sharp. His eyes were fixed behind Filip. Caught by something on the newsfeed. Filip turned, craning to see the screen. Fred Johnson looked out from the wall, dark-eyed, calm, somber. A red banner beneath him read, Confirmed Dead After Free Navy Attack. When he turned back, Karal had already pulled out his hand terminal and was shifting through newsfeeds as quickly as his crooked fingers could manage. Filip waited, then took his own terminal out. It wasn’t hard to find. It was all over the feeds—Belt and inner planets both. Sources from Tycho Manufacturing Collective on Earth were confirming the death of Frederick Lucius Johnson, formerly of UN Navy and longtime political activist, community organizer, and spokesman of the Outer Planets Alliance. He’d died as a result of injuries sustained during an ambush by forces of the Free Navy …

Filip read it all, aware that there was something to it he wasn’t understanding. It was only a wash of words and images, disconnected from his life, until Karal, across the table from him and grinning, spoke.

“Gratulacje, Filipito. Guess you got him after all.”

Back on the Pella, music was playing over the ship system. A bright mix of steel drum and guitar and men’s ululating voices raised together in celebration. Sárta, one of the first to see Filip when he came down the corridor from the airlock, scooped him up in her arms, pressing his cheek against hers and leaving him uncomfortably aware of her breasts. When she kissed him—briefly, but on the lips—she tasted of cheap mint liquor.

The galley was packed like a party. The whole crew, it seemed, gathered together in front of the newsfeeds that announced the death of the Butcher of Anderson Station. The heat of their bodies made the room feel stifling. His father was in among them, smiling and strutting and clapping people on the shoulder like the groom at a particularly fortunate wedding. All the sulking and menace were gone from his expression. When he caught sight of Filip across the crowded room, he put his hands together in front of his heart making a celebratory double fist.

This was, Filip realized, the first real victory since the first attack on Earth. Marco had been claiming success after success, but they’d all been for retreats and scuffles or the discipline killing of mutineers like the Witch of Endor. From the moment they’d left Ceres, the Free Navy had needed a solid, unequivocal success, and this was it. No wonder even the sober seemed drunk with it.

The newsfeed shifted, a Free Navy logo appearing in its place, and the roar of the group grew even louder as each told the others to be quiet. Someone cut the music and put the audio for the newsfeed in its place. When Marco appeared on the screen, more dignified and statesmanlike than the actual grinning man in the room, his voice rang all through the Pella.

“Fred Johnson claimed to speak for the same people he oppressed. He began his career by slaughtering Belters, then pretended to be our voice. His years as a representative of the OPA were marked by pleas for complacence, patience, and the constant deferment of the freedom of the Belt. And his fate will be the fate of all who stand against us. The Free Navy will defend and protect the Belt from all enemies, internal and external, now and forever.”

The speech went on, but the crew began cheering so loudly, Filip couldn’t hear it. Marco lifted his arms, not to quiet them but to bathe in the noise. His shining eyes found Filip again. When he spoke, Filip could read the words on his lips: We did it.

We, Filip thought as Aaman jostled into him, pressed a bulb of something alcoholic into his palm. We did it. When it was a mistake, it was mine. When it was a victory, it was ours.

In the center of the joyful storm, Filip felt himself growing still. A flicker of memory came to him, strong and rich with import as an image from a dream. He couldn’t place its source. A film he’d watched, he thought. Some drama where a stunningly beautiful woman had looked into the camera and in a voice made from smoke and muscle had said, He put blood on my hands too. He thought it would make me easier to control.