James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

“True,” Rosenfeld said, and left True, but … hanging in the air. All the criticisms trailed behind it like the ribbons in the breeze. True, but it’s been a long time since we left Ceres, and it’s left us looking weak … True, but one of your generals broke away and you haven’t brought her to heel … True, but Fred Johnson is issuing orders from the governor’s mansion at Ceres, and you aren’t. Filip felt every point like a blow to the gut, but because they were unspoken, he couldn’t answer them. Neither could his father. Rosenfeld took another drink, accepted a stick of vat-grown meat from a passing server, and steadied his drift with one hand as he ate. His expression was mild, but his gaze stayed locked on Marco.

“Waiting until the perfect moment is the mark of a great strategist,” Marco said. “For now, the outer planets are ours to pass through freely. Mars and Earth and Luna—even Ceres. They’re hiding behind their walls while we move through the wide plains of the vacuum, masters of the void. The more they realize they don’t matter, the more desperate they’ll become. All we have to do is watch for the opportunity that’s coming.”

“Fred Johnson,” Rosenfeld said. “He’s already reached out to Carlos Walker and Liang Goodfortune. Aimee Ostman.”

“Let them talk with him,” Marco said, an edge coming into his voice for the first time. “Let them see how little he’s become. I know his patterns, and I know what you’re saying.”

“Not saying anything, coyo,” Rosenfeld said. “Except maybe we’ve been drinking too much.”

“I told you before that Johnson would be off the board, and he will be. We didn’t take him at Tycho, and we’ll take him somewhere else. He is my white whale, and I will hunt him to the end of time.”

Rosenfeld looked down at his bulb, his body hunching a degree in submission. Filip had felt his father’s victory like it was his own.

“Didn’t finish reading that book, did you?” Rosenfeld asked mildly.

Marco called the ships the three wolves. The Pella , of course, was the leader of the pack, with the Koto and the Shinsakuto placed in slow orbit to support her. Moving the ships into position was the hard part. Marco’s trade hadn’t included true stealth ships. The nearest they had were regular gunships with a coating of the stolen radar-eating paint layered over the skin, and without being designed for it and for holding waste heat, the Martian tech was less effective.

But the Belt had always had smugglers, pirates, and thieves. There were ways to hide, even in the abyss. Running without transponders was only one of them. They’d left Pallas with a hard burn. Hours of being pressed into the crash couches, juice burning in their veins and still driven to the edge of consciousness. And then, the coast. With no drive plume to show where they were, the Pella and her fellow hunters were hardly more than warm rocks, making a traverse of the vastness between Ceres on the inner Belt and Tycho Station in its own deeper orbit. The Koto risked a braking burn to plant itself alongside a charted asteroid, using the mass of stone and ice to hide it and explain the ladar ping responses. The Pella and the Shinsakuto stayed on the float, their orbits matching the widespread detritus of the asteroid belt. No broadcasts. The only communications were tightbeam. They off-gassed a little to cool the outer hull and complicate its thermal signature. The emptiness itself was their friend. Even in the most crowded corners of the Belt, where the asteroids were thickest, it would have taken a telescope to see the nearest neighbors. The Pella was a warm sliver of metal and ceramic in trillions of square kilometers—less than a thumbnail clipping in an ocean.

Even if Ceres saw them—and over the long weeks of their silent hunt, it might—they would be indistinguishable from a thousand other unlicensed prospectors, smuggling ships, and homesteading Belter families. Johnson and his inner planet allies would need to know where to look to find them. And even if they found one, two more waited.

Fred Johnson’s desperate meeting to sweep up the shards of the OPA was still weeks away, but Marco put them in and flying dark long before Fred would need to leave the safety of Ceres. Men have patterns , he said. And Fred Johnson’s were misdirection followed by overwhelming force. Their sources said that the fleet would remain pinned at Ceres. With overwhelming force no longer an option, all that remained was misdirection. And so they floated, their passive sensor arrays pointed at Ceres and Tycho like a too-clever child watching a street magician’s other hand. When Fred Johnson went to make his plea to the ragged stragglers of the OPA still willing to listen, Marco said, he would know. And when Johnson’s prospective allies saw him die …

Well, they had lost Michio Pa. But Marco could replace her a hundred times over. Strength pulled people as surely as gravity. More, sometimes.

Marco would wait for hours every day, strapped into his crash couch as if a hard burn could come at any second, his eyes flickering over sensor data, and still end his shifts energized and laughing, excited. Joyful. Filip didn’t have his father’s raw endurance. For the first several days, he could equal Marco’s focus and sense of imminent violence, and even then by the time he went to the gym, to the galley, to his cabin, the brightness in his chest had started to change to something more like anxiety. Or rage. Only he didn’t know what he was anxious about or who he was so angry with.

When the Minsky came to Ceres, the Connaught at its side, Filip had been sure that the moment had arrived. Pa was there, the consolidated fleet watching her inch toward them like a cat hauling a dead mouse home as a love gift. Filip felt it in his blood—the coming violence. The grand and gaudy proof that the Free Navy was stronger than its enemies. He hadn’t been the only one either. It was like all the crew of the Pella —Josie and Karal and Bastien and Jún—everyone had taken a breath at the same time, steeled themselves for the burn and the battle.

Everyone but Marco.

He’d stayed just the same, watching the datafeeds from his crash couch on the command deck. The attack from Ceres, the Rocinante ’s defense of the Connaught . All of it seemed to wash over Marco like it was nothing. He captured images of the ship transfer. When he recorded his denouncement of Pa and revealed her as a stooge of the inners, he seemed to wake up for a moment, but only while the recording was going on. As soon as the camera shut off, he seemed to fall back into himself. Filip took comfort that this wasn’t the same torpor and indifference that had haunted the Pella after leaving Ceres the first time. Marco watched like a predator in cover, the Pella drifting in its orbit around the distant sun like it was locked to Ceres Station.

Several days after the Connaught ’s departure, Filip dreamed of Earth—only it wasn’t Earth. It was a massive spaceship, layer upon layer of scaffold, reaching down forever. A great fire burned at its core, and Filip was lost in it, trying to find something. Something precious that he’d had and lost or else that had been hidden from him. Also, he was being chased. Sought by something so that he switched from being hunter to prey and back to hunter.

In the dream, he was floating down a long corridor. Purely ballistic. The handholds and footholds skated by on all sides, just beyond his reach. There was a strong smell—mineral and heat. The exposed iron core of the Earth. Its burning heart. And there was something at the end of the passage. Something waiting. His mother and an army of the dead who he’d killed. The rapping of their bone fingers on the deck was a threat and a promise. Filip woke with a shout, grabbing at the straps of his crash couch like they were trying to strangle him.