Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  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.

  Chapter Fifteen: Pa

  The grease crayon was meant to mark decking during construction, and so in a sense Michio was still keeping to its purpose. The marks weren’t inventory control or inspection chop, and what she was constructing wasn’t a ship, but still. The wall of her cabin had a long rectangular mark where she usually kept a mounted lithograph. An original print by Tabitha Toeava of false coral structures. Part of her One Hundred Aspects of Europa series, and it rested in its frame on her crash couch like it was watching her.

  Along one side of the wall, Michio had listed the major settlements of the outer planets: Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, Iapetus, Ganymede, and on and on. Some were based on moons, some in the tunnels of well-mined asteroids, and a few—Tycho Station, the Shirazi-Ma Complex, Coldwater, Kelso—were spin stations that floated free. She’d started writing what she thought they needed there: water where there wasn’t local ice, complex biologicals everywhere but Ganymede, construction material, food, medical supplies. When it got too dense to read, she cleaned the wall with the side of her fist. The smears were still there.

  In the middle column, the colony ships she and her fleet had taken: the Bedyadat Jadida, out of Luna. The John Galt and the Mark Watney, out of Mars. The Helen R. and Jacob H. Kanter, sponsored by the Congregation Ner Shalom. The San Pietro, sponsored by the DeVargas Corporation. The Caspian and the Hornblower and the Kingfisher, operating under independent charters. All of them stocked to make settlements on new and hostile worlds. Some hardly had enough for a small human toehold. Others, enough to carry a hundred people for three years. Enough to keep the Belt running long enough to remake itself independent of Earth and Mars. Hopefully.

  And on the other edge, her own fleet. Serrio Mal captained by Susanna Foyle, Panshin by Ezio Rodriguez, Witch of Endor by Carl al-Dujaili, and so on down the wall. Each of them with their own complement of boarding troops. All of them were hers to command, and would be until it came clear that she answered to herself now. Then … Well. That would be then.

  She squeezed the grease crayon and released it. The soft click as it gave up its grip on her fingertips again and again like someone tapping on the door. With every mark she made, the fear in her chest shifted. It didn’t leave her—nothing as straightforward as that—but instead of feeling bright and jittery and jagged, her heart folded in on itself and let the crust of a lifetime’s failures and pains fall away. At least for a little while. It felt like getting on a treadmill and finding the perfect rhythm. One that brought her breath and her body and her mind together and stilled time.

  When she’d started, she’d half hoped to find a reason she couldn’t go through with her mutiny. Now that she was engaged, the doubt was forgotten. Somewhere in the process, she’d gone from whether she should to how she was going to. Until Nadia spoke, Michio didn’t even notice she was there.

  “Bertold still not letting you on the system?”

  Michio sighed and shook her head. “Until we make the break, he wants everything off the computers. He’s got the local countermeasures ready to update. But you know how it is. Tipping our hand.”

  “Do you think Marco is monitoring the ship that closely?”

  “No,” Michio said. Then, “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s all right. Part of me likes working this way. It’s more … I don’t know. Tactile?”

  “Can see that,” Nadia said. “We’re getting close.”

  “I don’t want more than a second of light delay,” Michio said. “I can’t do this trading messages. I have to be able to talk.”

  “We’re getting close,” Nadia said again, her voice a halftone lower. She understood.

  Michio squeezed the grease crayon and relaxed. Tick. “How long?”

  “By tonight,” Nadia said. She stepped in close, considering the wall and all of its markings. She was half a head shorter than Michio, and the first scattering of gray hair complicated her temple. She sighed to herself and nodded.

  “Checking my work?” Michio said, teasing a little.

  “Yes,” Nadia said seriously. “This was a complicated situation before. We’re about to make it much more. Times like this, we check the seals we just checked.”

  Michio sat on her crash couch and let her wife go over all the ships and stations. Nadia put her hands to her hips in fists and made small sounds in the back of her throat. Michio thought they were approval. It would be easier when she had the ship’s system available to plot it all out, place each ship and its vector on a single interface. Even with her wall a mass of
careful handwriting, there were other lists—longer lists—of critically important information. The warships under Marco’s direct control. The elite guard force that Rosenfeld held in reserve. The thousands of supply containers from Pallas and Vesta and Callisto that had already been scattered to the care of the overwhelming void. Michio stretched her back against the one-third g braking burn, feeling the ache between her ribs.

  “When are we going to steal it all?” Nadia asked.

  “When I talk to Carmondy,” Michio said. “Earlier than that, and Himself might notice. Later, and he might be warned.”

  “Ah, Carmondy,” Nadia said with a sigh. “It bothers me.”

  “Me too,” Michio said. Nadia turned from the wall to consider her. The air of checking for errors didn’t change.

  “What bothers you?” Nadia asked.

  Michio nodded at the wall. “All this. Doing what I’m about to do.”

  “You don’t think it’s right?”

  “I don’t know if that matters. I mean, Marco does what he thinks is right. And Dawes. And Earth. All of them do what they think is right, and tell themselves that they’re moral people with the strength to do the necessary things, however terrible they seem at the time. Every atrocity that has been done to us had someone behind it who thought what they did was justified. And here I am. A moral person with the strength to do this. Because it’s justified.”

  “Ah,” Nadia said. “You don’t think Carmondy will join us.”

  “I don’t. And then I think I’ll have to make an example of him so that the others will take me seriously.”

  “It’s not much of a pirate queen who leaves survivors in peace,” Nadia said. And then, “You’re wrong about one thing, though. Not every evil thing is done by the righteous. Some people do harsh things for the pleasure. But that isn’t what bothers me.”

  Michio lifted her hands, asking the question.

  “Working with Carmondy,” Nadia said. “I don’t know what it is. The man annoys me.”