James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

“Seriously? Because it looks a lot like he just walked away from the biggest port in the Belt.”

Fred shrugged eloquently. “His apologists are good at their jobs. And everything is in the shadow of what he did to Earth. Sorrento-Gillis, Gao, all of them. They underestimated the anger in the Belt. And the desperation. People want Inaros to be a hero, and so what he does, they interpret as heroism.”

“Even running away?”

“He won’t only run away. Don’t know what he’s got in mind, but he isn’t about to retire. And Ceres Station … it’s a white elephant now. Just keeping the environmental systems running isn’t going to be trivial. We may have to consolidate. Concentrate people physically and abandon parts of the station. Which will be interpreted as Earth and Mars kicking Belters out of their homes by Inaros and his cabal.”

Holden ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah, that’s messed up.”

“It’s politics. And it’s why we need the OPA. There is support for us in the Belt, but it needs cultivation. And we have a few things going for us. They can call themselves a navy, but they’re amateurs. The kind of roughshod that thinks discipline is the same as punishment. Rumor is there’s already some dissent in Marco’s leadership. Probably, it’s over his tactics with Ceres. I still don’t understand why Dawes would let him walk away from the station, but … well, clearly he did. And Avasarala’s keeping a lid on Earth. If the UN had crumbled the way Mars has, I don’t know what we’d do.”

“This,” Holden said. “Try to gather some allies. Pretty much the same thing you’re going to do anyway. Only with less hope that it would work.”

Fred stretched, his joints popping, then sighed back down into the gel of the couch. The diagnostics on the comm panel flickered, and Patel tapped the run results. As far as she was concerned, the two of them might as well not have been there.

“You’re probably right,” Fred said. “Still, I’m glad it’s not worse. Not yet, anyway.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and Inaros will get himself killed without us.”

“It wouldn’t be enough,” Fred said. “Earth’s broken. It will be for generations. Mars may or may not collapse, but there’s still the gates. Still the colony worlds. Still all the pressures that keep the Belt on the edge of starvation and even less of what makes it valuable. There’s no getting back to status quo ante. We’ve got to move forward. Which brings us back to Draper. You’ve worked with her. Can she do the job?”

“Honestly, I think the best person to ask is her. We all know her. We all like her. I’d trust her with my ship, and I wouldn’t trust you with that. If she thinks she can, then I think she can.”

“And if she thinks she can’t?”

“Then ask Avasarala,” Holden said.

“I already know her opinion. All right, thank you. And … I’m going to regret asking. Do I want to know what you were doing with those two women in the galley?”

Maura Patel shifted in her chair. The first sign that she was listening to them at all.

“Filming them. That thing with clapping and marbles? It was really visually interesting, and Monica said that was something to be looking for. I’m doing these interviews, and she’s helping me edit and distribute them.”

“And why are you doing that?”

“It’s what’s missing in all of this,” Holden said. “It’s what let things get this bad. We don’t see each other as people. Even the feeds are always about weird things. Aberrations. All the times that a Belt station doesn’t have a riot? Those days aren’t news. It has to be an uprising or a protest or a system failure. Just being here, living a normal life? That’s not part of what the people on Earth or Mars hear about.”

“So you—” Fred closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re reaching for more unapproved press releases? You remember starting a war that way once?”

“Exactly. That was talking about an aberration, because I thought that was what people needed to know. But they need all the context too. What it’s like to be a teenager with his first crush on Ceres. Or to worry about your dad getting old on Pallas Station. The things that make people here the same as people everywhere.”

“Belters rain hell down on Earth,” Fred said slowly, “and you respond by trying to humanize Belters? You know there’s going to be a raft of people who call you a traitor for that.”

“I’d be doing the same thing on Earth, but I’m not there right now. If people call me names, they do. I’m just trying to make it a little harder for people to feel comfortable killing each other.”

Fred’s screen put up an alert. He glanced at it, dismissed it. “You know if anyone else came up with the idea that they ought to put themselves in the middle of a war so they could sing songs and hold hands and sow peace for all mankind, I’d call it narcissistic opportunism. Maybe megalomania.”

“But it’s not anyone else, so we’re good?”

Fred lifted his hands. A gesture made of equal weights amusement and despair. “I’ll want a private word with Draper.”

“I’ll let her know,” Holden said, standing up.

“I can reach her myself. And Holden …”

He turned back. In the dimness, Fred’s eyes were so dark the iris and the pupil were the same shade of black. He looked old. Weary. Focused. “Yes?” Holden said.

“The song those two were singing? Get the lyrics translated before you broadcast it. Just in case.”

Chapter Eighteen: Filip

The Pella coasted through the black, one node in a network of dark ships that traded tightbeams and compared strategies and planned. Stealth wasn’t possible in the strict sense. The enemy would be scanning the vault of the heavens for the Free Navy’s ships just as much as they were tracking the drive plumes of Earth and Mars and everyone else in the system. The universe was billions of points of unwavering light—stars and galaxies stretching out through time and space, their photon streams bent by gravity lensing and shifted by the speed of the universe’s expansion. The flicker of a drive might be overlooked or confused with another light source or hidden by one of the widely scattered asteroids that inhabited the system like dust motes in a cathedral.

There was no way to know how many of their ships the inners had managed to identify and track. There was no certainty that their own sensor arrays had targeted all of the so-called combined navy’s vessels. The scale of the vacuum alone built uncertainty.

The inners were easier, since so many of theirs had burned for Ceres. But who was to say there weren’t a few scattered hunters, dark and ballistic in the void? Marco had a handful of Free Navy like that, or at least that was what Karal said. Ships that hadn’t even been used in the first attacks, cruising in their own orbits like warm asteroids. Sleepers waiting for their moment. And maybe that was even true, though Filip hadn’t heard it directly from his father yet. And he liked to think his father would tell him anything.

The days were long and empty, wound tightly around a single, overwhelming question. The counterstrike would come. The attack that would prove that stepping back from Ceres was a tactical choice and not a show of weakness. More than anything that had come before, it would be the event—Marco said this, and Filip believed it—that made clear what made the Free Navy unbeatable. In the gym and the galley, the crew speculated. Tycho Station was the heart of the collaborationist wing of the OPA. Mars had suffered least in the initial attack, and deserved the same punishment as Earth. Luna had become the new center of UN power. Kelso Station and Rhea had rejected the Free Navy and shown their true colors.