Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Thirty-Two: Vandercaust

When the guards got bored kicking him, they rolled Vandercaust into the cell and sealed the door.

He lay in the dark for some stretch of time—five minutes, an hour. Not more than that. When he sat up, his ribs and back ached, but not with the deepness or grinding sensation that broken bones carried. The only light was a single recessed LED at the joint where the back wall and ceiling met. Its dimness stole the color from everything, so the little streaks of blood on his shirt only looked black.

With nothing better to do, he took a slow inventory of his body: bruised ribs and cheek, swollen eye, abrasions at his wrists where they’d cuffed him. Nothing bad, really. He’d suffered worse, and sometimes at the hands of his friends. Wasn’t like this was the first time he’d been arrested. Not even the first time he’d been arrested for something he didn’t do. It had always been inners that did it before, though.

The more it changes, the more it’s still the same, he thought. He found a comfortable spot in the corner where he could rest his head, close his eyes, and see if the anxiety was enough to keep him awake. It was, mostly, but he did manage a little doze before the door broke seal and swung open. Two guards in armor and sidearms. A higher-up in armor too. All Free Navy colors.

Probably that was good. People didn’t generally dress up for a murder.

“Emil Jacquard Vandercaust?”

“Aquí,” he said.

The higher-up was a thick-faced boy with a brown complexion that matched his eyes. Handsome, in his way, but too young for Vandercaust’s tastes. He’d come to an age when sex was less about who he fell into bed with and more about who he woke up next to, and the set of people he considered children extended to include men in their early thirties. The pretty child scowled, maybe at Vandercaust and maybe at how he’d been treated. For a moment, the silence in the room made him wonder if they’d leave again. Lock the door and stick him in the dark. The idea made him aware of his thirst.

“Agua, yeah?”

“Commst,” the boy said. Vandercaust levered himself up to his feet, his abused muscles shrieking, but not badly enough to stop him. The guards fell in, one ahead and one behind, and the boy leading them all like a sad little parade. The room they took him to was brighter, more comfortable, though not by much. A low metal stool was welded to the deck, short enough that sitting on it made Vandercaust feel like he was in some school for children, expected to take a desk meant for a six-year-old. He’d been questioned by security enough in his life to recognize the little humiliation as the tactic it was. A guard brought him half a bulb of tepid water, watched him drink it, and took it back.

The guards stepped out, the door closing behind them. The boy stood at a desk, looking down at him through a floating display. Seeing the display from behind was like seeing someone through a bright mist.

Vandercaust waited. The boy took a flat yellow lozenge out of his pocket. Focus drugs, or what Vandercaust was supposed to assume were. The boy put the lozenge under his tongue, sucked thoughtfully for a moment. Shuddered.

“You missed the battle alert yesterday,” he said.

“I did.”

“Can you explain that?”

Vandercaust shrugged. “Deep sleeper when I’m drunk, me. Didn’t hear it. No se savvy what happened before it was over, yeah?”

“Savvy tú now?”

“Heard some things, yeah.”

“Let’s go over what you heard, then.”

Vandercaust nodded, as much to himself as to the boy. Time to pick his handholds careful. Whatever they were spun up over, this was the time he’d land in it if he spoke the wrong words.

“Was a bunch of ships came from the colonies, what I heard. Fourteen, fifteen ships all through rings at the same time. Fast too. Trying to get to Medina before the rail guns took them out, yeah? Only didn’t so much. What the guns didn’t put holes in, station defenses took out. Some debris hits on the drum hull, aber nothing can’t be fixed.”

The boy nodded, made some notation in the bright air between them. “Fourteen or fifteen?”

“Yeah.”

The boy’s eyes hardened. “Was it fourteen you heard, or fifteen?”

Vandercaust frowned. There was something about the boy’s reaction that didn’t sit right. If they’d been playing poker, he’d wait to see if the boy’s hand was particularly strong or weak, then spend the rest of the night cleaning him out over that hardness. Only there weren’t any cards to come down here.

“Heard fourteen or fifteen. A phrase. Eight or ten. Six or seven. Didn’t hear a number.”

“What rings did they come through?”

“Don’t know.”

“Look at me,” the boy said. Vandercaust looked up into the boy’s light-brown eyes. “What rings did they go through?”

“No savvy. I don’t know.”

The boy’s eyes flickered, looked away. Vandercaust scratched his arm even though it didn’t itch. Just to be doing something.

“They all came through within fifteen seconds of each other,” the boy said. “And they were going fast. Any thoughts about that, Mister Vandercaust?”

“Coordinated,” he said. “Sounds like they been talking con alles, sa sa? Making plans.”

Which—ah, yes—meant they’d found some way to break lightspeed, bend time, and locate each other in the vastness of the galaxy, or else that conversation had been passing through the rings. Through Medina. It meant somewhere on Medina Station, somebody had been working against the Free Navy. He’d known that the arrest couldn’t just be for missing an emergency shift. Now it came a little clearer what the boy was looking for. Watched the boy watch him understand.

“Who told you about the attack?”

“Heard about it in my workgroup. Jakulski. Salis. Roberts. Just chap-chap over coffee, yeah?”

Another notation made. “Anything you think of I should know about them?”

A coldness that had nothing to do with the temperature ran up Vandercaust’s back, lifted his skin in bumps. Maybe it wasn’t only that he’d slept through the alarm. He’d been drunk. Drunk men could sleep through anything. But if he hadn’t made the call and he was near to someone with something worth hiding …

Salis had friends in communication. Bragged about them all the time, how he knew what was going on with Duarte and Inaros, what kinds of barks and whines were floating through the rings. Someone was coordinating an attack on Medina, wouldn’t they be in communications? Have to be, ne? And Roberts talking about Callisto and proxy wars. How Duarte’s people were maybe using them against Earth and Mars, about how much she hated being caught between the powers like that. She’d been the first one Vandercaust knew to squint hard at the advisors from Laconia setting up defenses on the alien station where rail gun housings were. Possible that she’d work with the colonies if it meant shrugging off Laconia and keeping Medina independent. And hadn’t Jakulski been at the greeting when the advisors came? He said it had been as a favor to one of the other supervisors, but what if he’d been engineering a chance to put eyes on the enemy?

Thousands of people on Medina, living and working. All of them Belters, more or less. Most of them OPA before and Free Navy now. But there were some that hadn’t known what was coming. Maybe some with family still on Earth, dying under the rockfalls. He didn’t know anything about Jakulski’s mother, Salis’ siblings, Roberts’ old lovers. Any of them could just be acting like Free Navy because it was asking for hell to be anything else.

The boy cocked his head, sucked at the focus drugs. Vandercaust laced his fingers together and forced out a little laugh. “Easy to see how a coyo could get paranoid.”

“Why don’t we go over this from the start?” the boy said.

It went on for hours, it felt like. No hand terminal. No screens that he could see. All Vandercaust had to judge by was the animal rhythms of his body. How long it was before he got thirsty again. Hungry. When he started feeling sleepy. When he needed to visit the head. He walked the boy through his whole night before the attack. Where he’d been. Who else had been there. What he’d drunk. How he’d gotten back to his quarters. Over and over, pushing at anything he said a little different from another time, pushing him to remember things he didn’t really remember and then coming at him when he got some detail wrong. The boy asked about Roberts, Salis, Jakulski. He asked about who else Vandercaust knew on Medina. Who he knew on the Sol side of the ring. What he knew about Michio Pa and Susanna Foyle and Ezio Rodriguez. When he’d been at Tycho Station. At Ceres. At Rhea. At Ganymede.

They showed him images of the attacks. The ships emerging through the gates all around the great sphere of gates. He watched them die as tactical images. As telescopic records of real people, really dying. Then they talked more, and showed it all to him again. He had a sense that the readouts were subtly different the second time out—another attempt to catch him out on something—but he couldn’t say what the changes were.

It was exhausting. It was meant to be exhausting. After a while, he stopped trying to keep his answers safe. He’d known enough about interrogation to see that this—wearying and harsh and dull though it was—was on the gentler end of that spectrum. He had no reason to protect his friends beyond the vague tribalism of being on a workgroup with them. If they were innocent, the truth would have to be armor enough. For them, and for him too.

They took him back to his cell. No beating this time. Just a hard shove through the door that left him sprawling and knocked his cheek against the wall hard enough to split it. He slept for a while, woke in darkness, slept again. The second time he woke, there was a bowl of beans and mushrooms congealing beside the door. He ate them anyway. No way to know how long he’d be there. How long it would all go on. Whether it would get worse.

When the door opened again, five people in Free Navy uniforms came in. The brown-eyed boy wasn’t among them, and for a moment, that made Vandercaust very nervous. Like looking for a friend and not finding them. The leader of the new group was laughing with one of her subordinates, checked her hand terminal by holding it up beside his face without paying much attention to him, tapped her screen.

“You should go, pampaw,” she said, walking out. “Late for your shift, you.”

They left the door open behind them, and after a moment, Vandercaust walked out of the cell, out of the security station, into the wide corridors of the drum. His body felt like a rag used for too long. He was certain that he smelled like sick primate and old sweat. The guard had been right. It was almost time for his shift, but he still went back to his hole, showered, shaved, changed into new clothes. He spent a few long minutes admiring the bruises on his face and sides. On a younger man, they could have been badges of endurance. On him, they just looked like an old man who’d caught the toes of a few too many boots. So he was late. He had reason to be. Little rebel, him.

He found Salis and Roberts deep in the service passageways, testing flow on the sewage intake for the backup recycling plant. Roberts’ eyes lit up as he approached, and she threw her arms around him.

“Perdíd,” she breathed against his ear. “Are you okay? We were worried.”

“Es dui?” Salis said, reaching across the table for the wasabi-flavored soy nuts. “They beat you up à nothing?”

The shift done, the three had retired to their usual bar. The breeze from spinward was as it always was. The thin line of sunlight stretched above them. Vandercaust pushed the bowl toward Salis’ fingers. “Security is police, and police are the same everywhere.”

“Still,” Roberts said. “Why bother pushing off the inners if it’s just to have a Belter foot stepping on our necks instead?”

“Wouldn’t talk like that,” Vandercaust said, then drank. Water tonight. Might be some time before he went for a long, solid drunk again. “Anxious times, these.”

“Talk how I want to talk,” Roberts said, but softly. She turned to her hand terminal. He could see the green and silver of the station feed, same colors it had been before the Free Navy took over. He wondered why they hadn’t changed it. A way to give a sense of continuity, maybe. Anything on the feed would have been vetted, of course. The power of Medina Station was that it was so much not a part of any of the systems on the far sides of the gate. The price of it was that information came from a single source. Back in Sol system, there would be any number of feeds and subfeeds. Some broadcast, some left in storage to be queried and mirrored. Hard to control what got out. Maybe impossible. Medina, one set of jammers blocked every unlicensed receiver and transmitter at once.

The server came with his gyro-textured fungus and soybean curd instead of lamb and beef. Cucumber yogurt. A sprig of mint. He reached out for it with a little grunt and a sudden ache. It wasn’t the worst beating he’d ever suffered, but he’d still be sore for days.

“Why they set you out?” Salis asked. “Sprecht el la?”

“No, they didn’t say,” Vandercaust replied. “Or that they wouldn’t be back. Maybe they just needed someone to keep you two on schedule.”

He’d missed two full shifts and come in during the middle of the third. Three days, almost, lost in the darkness of the security cell. No lawyer, no union representative. He could have asked for one—should have, by the rules and customs—but the certainty was solid as steel that it would have only meant more bruises. Maybe a broken bone. Vandercaust knew enough of history and human nature to know when the rules weren’t the rules anymore. He took a bite of his sandwich, then put it down while he chewed. After this, he’d go home. Sleep in his own bed. Sounded like the promise of paradise. He traced fingertips over the split circle on his wrist. It had been a statement of rebellion once. Now, maybe it only made him seem old. Still taking sides in the last generation’s fight.

“My friend in comms?” Salis said. “You know what they say? Found a hidden dump in the data core. Walled off. Think it was what they used to coordinate with the colonies. Confirmations came in from all the gates just before the attack hit. Only funny thing? Two ships didn’t come through.”

Salis cranked his eyebrows up toward his hairline.

Vandercaust grunted. “Were asking me about how many ships came through. Like they wanted a number.”

“Probably why. See if you knew how many came through or how many were supposed to, yeah? Trip you up if you were in on.”

“But didn’t have nothing,” Vandercaust said, tapping his forehead with two fingers. “Bon besse for me.”

Salis put a hand on his arm. The young man looked pained. Aching, but not in the muscles and joints. Not the way he was. “You should let me buy you a drink, coyo. You had a shit week.”

Vandercaust shrugged. He didn’t know how to explain himself to Salis or Roberts. They were young. They hadn’t seen the things he’d seen. Hadn’t done the thing he’d done. Being picked up by security, locked away, beaten, interrogated. They didn’t scare him in themselves. They scared him for what they said about how it came next. They scared him because they meant that Medina Station wasn’t a new beginning in history. It was and would be as red in the gutter as everyplace else humanity had set its flags.

Roberts sat up, her eyes going wide. “They got!”

Salis let his hand drop, turned to her. “Que?”

“The mole? The coordinator. They got.”

She turned her hand terminal toward them. On it, station security in Free Navy uniforms were walking, eight of them, around a broad-shouldered, squat man with dark hair and a scruff of beard. Vandercaust thought he looked familiar, but couldn’t place him. The image jumped to Captain Samuels, with Jon Amash standing behind her on one side. Political power and security service, one beside the other, and no light between them.

Samuels’ lips began to move.

“Turn it up,” Salis said. Roberts fumbled with her terminal, then shifted around between them so they could all see the screen.

“—ties not only to the settlements that chose aggression against us but also with regressive forces back in Sol system. He will be questioned fully before execution. While we have to keep eyes open and alert, I am convinced, given all I have seen, that the immediate threat to Medina Station is under control.”

“Execution,” Roberts said.

Salis shrugged. “You put the ship at risk, that’s what happens. Those colony bastards weren’t coming to play dice and make happy.”

“Least it’s over,” Vandercaust said.

“Is why they let you go,” Roberts said, shaking her hand terminal. “Found him. Saw you weren’t involved.”

Or picked someone to play the goat, Vandercaust thought. Only I got lucky enough it wasn’t me. It wasn’t the sort of thing you said out loud. Not at times like these.