James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

Or there were the mining operations scattered throughout the Belt that answered to Earth-based corporations. They were easy pickings and couldn’t be defended. Or taking a solid hold on Ganymede, claiming and protecting the food supply of the Belt. There was even some talk of sending recovery forces out through the ring. Take back from the colonies what should never have been there in the first place. Or install platforms above the new planets and extract tribute from them. Reverse the political order and put all the bastards at the bottom of all the wells in chains.

Filip only smiled and shrugged, letting it look like he knew more than he did. Marco hadn’t told even him what the plan was. Not yet.

And then the message came.

I always respected you. That was how she began. Michio Pa, the head of the conscription effort. Filip remembered her, but he hadn’t had an opinion about her before now. She was a competent leader, a little famous for stepping in when the Behemoth ’s captain had lost his mind in the slow zone. His father liked her because she hated Fred Johnson, had defected from him, and because she was a Belter and pretty to look at and the face that the Belt would see when the colony ships cracked their guts open and spilled out their treasures. Only now she stared into a camera on her ship, her hair pulled back, her dark eyes serious. She didn’t look pretty.

“I have always respected you, sir. The work you have done for the independence of the Belt has been critical, and I’m proud to be part of it. I want to make it very clear before we go forward that my loyalty to our cause is unwavering and complete. On sober reflection and after a great deal of consideration, I find I have to disagree with the change in the plan for the conscription. While I understand the strategic importance of denying materiel to the enemy, I can’t in good conscience withhold it from the citizens of the Belt who are in immediate need. Because of this, I have chosen to proceed with the conscription efforts as originally outlined.

“Technically, this is disobeying an order, but I have great faith that when you reflect on how the needs of our people brought us to form the Free Navy, you’ll agree it is the best way forward.”

She signed off with a Free Navy salute. The one his father had created when he made everything else. Filip queued it up again, watching from the start to the end again, aware of Marco’s gaze on him as much as the woman on the screen. The galley around them was empty. No, not just empty. Emptied. Whether they’d been ordered to or not, the crew of the Pella had evacuated the space and left it for Marco and Filip. If it hadn’t been for a smell of curry lingering in the air, the stains of coffee on the table, it might have been their first time on the ship.

He didn’t know how many times his father had viewed the message, how he had taken it the first time he’d seen it, or what the mild expression he wore now meant. Filip’s uncertainty knotted at the bottom of his abdomen. Being shown the message was a test, and he didn’t know quite what he was meant to do with it.

After the second time Michio Pa saluted, Marco stretched his shoulders back, a physical symbol that they were switching to the next part of whatever their conversation was.

“It’s mutiny,” Filip said.

“It is,” Marco said, his voice and expression reasonable and calm. “Do you think she’s right?”

No leapt to Filip’s throat, but he stopped it there. It was too obvious an answer. He tried Yes in his mind, feeling the pressure of his father’s attention like it was heat radiating from him. He discarded it too.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said slowly. “Whether she’s right or wrong is beside the point. She broke with your authority.”

Marco reached out and tapped the tip of Filip’s nose the way he’d done when they were only father and son, not war leader and lieutenant. Marco’s eyes softened, his focus shifting elsewhere. Filip felt a momentary and irrational stab of loneliness.

“She did,” Marco said. “Even if she were right—she isn’t, but if—how could I let this go? It would be an invitation to chaos. Chaos.” He chuckled, shaking his head. Anger would have been less frightening.

Filip’s uncertainty shifted in his gut. Were they destroyed, then? Was it all falling apart? The vision of the system his father had dreamed—void cities, the Belt blooming into a new kind of humanity free from the oppression of Earth and Mars, the Free Navy as the order of the worlds—stuttered. He caught a glimpse of what the other future could look like. The death and the struggle and the war. The corpse Earth and the ghost town Mars and the shards of the Free Navy picking at each other until nothing was left. It was what Marco meant when he said chaos , Filip was sure of that. Nausea welled up in him. Someone should have kept that from happening. He shook his head.

“Some day,” Marco said, and then again, still without finishing the thought, “some day.”

“Do we do?” Filip asked.

Marco shrugged with his hands. “Stop trusting women,” he said, then flicked a foot against the wall, launching himself to the doorway. Filip watched as Marco grabbed a handhold and pulled himself away down the hall toward his cabin. All the questions he hadn’t answered floated invisibly behind him.

Left alone, Filip killed the sound to the screen and replayed her message again. He’d met this woman. He’d been in a room with her, and heard her voice, and he hadn’t seen her for the traitor she was. For the agent of chaos. She saluted, and he tried to see fear in her. Or malice. Anything more than a professional delivering a message she expected to be badly received. He played the message again. Her eyes were black and hate-filled, or steeled against dread. Her gestures were soaked in contempt, or controlled like a fighter preparing to lose a match.

With a little practice and will, he found he could see anything he chose in her.

A soft sound came from behind him. Sárta sloped into the room feetfirst, and caught herself in a foothold on the wall, locking her ankle in place and absorbing the inertia with her knees. Her smile had the same bleakness that Filip felt, and he suffered a moment’s anger that she should feel what he did. Karal’s voice came from the lift, talking in low, careful tones. Rosenfeld answered, too low to make out the words. They knew Marco was gone, then. The private audience concluded.

Sárta pointed to the screen with her chin. “Esá es some shit, que?” Fishing for information, looking to know what Marco hadn’t seen fit to tell her. Or anyone else.

“He saw it coming,” Filip said. He wasn’t even lying. Marco might not have said as much, but it was still true. Filip tapped his temple. “Knew to expect it. Everything going to be just fine.”

Three more days on the float, and Filip knew it wasn’t only the crew of the Pella who were feeling anxious. Every hour, it seemed, brought another round of contact requests. Encrypted tightbeam messages flooded into the Pella ’s queue and waited there for Marco’s response. Rosenfeld, as part of the inner circle, stepped in where he could. He went so far as to appropriate the command deck as a kind of private office. The war center in absentia until Marco “came back out of his tent”— whatever that meant.

For Filip, it was all an exercise in projecting confidence. His father had a plan. He’d gotten them all this far, and there was no reason to doubt he would get them the rest of the way. The others agreed with him, or at least seemed to when he was in the room. He wondered what they said when he was elsewhere. They’d all been through battle together. They’d shared their victories and the long, patient hours waiting for their traps to spring. This was different. The waiting was the same, but not being sure what they were waiting for made it feel like maybe they were waiting for nothing. Even for him.