Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Forty-Seven: Filip

“What was it like?” Filip asked, trying to sound casual.

Her name was Marta. She had a wide face with a scattering of moles along her jawline like she’d been splatted by something. Her hair was lighter than her skin. Of all the people in the club, she was the one who seemed to have the most patience with the new guy. When the karaoke was going, she’d offered him the mic, even though he hadn’t taken it. When the club had gotten crowded, she’d let him sit at the end of her table. Not with her, but not not with her either. She’d grown up in Callisto, born here. Worked for one of the warehouses doing compliance checks. She was about a year older than him. She’d been sixteen when it happened.

She narrowed her eyes and tilted her head. “What was the attack like? For for?”

“Wondered,” he said with a shrug. The club was dark enough she probably wouldn’t see him blushing. “Heard about it since I came.”

Marta shook her head, looked away. Someone jostled against Filip’s back on their way toward the bar. He was about to apologize—was finding the words for it—when she spoke.

“Was eine day, yeah? Woke up in the morning, same same. Got ready for school. Mom made hash and coffee for breakfast. Just eine day, same like otra. Was talking with some friends in the common room and everything shakes, yeah? Just once. Just a little bit, but everyone feels it. We all ask each other, and everyone feels it. Then the teacher come in all rapiutamine and says we have to get to the hard shelters. Something going on over à los Martian yards. Figured a reactor blew. Knew it was bad though. We’re hardly in when the next one comes, and it’s worse. Lot worse.”

“All the hits were on the Martian yard, though,” Filip said.

“Same rock,” Marta said with a shrug and a laugh. “Not like you can kick half a ball. Anyway, alarms are going off y everyone’s crying. And then when they let us back out, it’s just gone. Martian yard’s delenda, and half of ours too. It was just … no sé. It was just everything before and then everything after.”

“But you were okay,” Filip said.

Marta shook her head, just a little. “My mom died,” she said with a fake lightness. “Shelter she was in cracked.”

Filip felt the words in his sternum. “Sorry.”

“They said it was fast. She wouldn’t have known even.”

“Yeah,” Filip said. His hand terminal chimed for the fourth time in the hour.

“You sure you don’t want to answer those?” Marta said. “Your girlfriend’s wanting you pretty solid.”

“No. It’s all right,” he said. And then, “I don’t have a mother either.”

“What happened to yours?”

“Broke up with my dad when I was a baby. Dad always said he hid me away because she was crazy. But I don’t know. I met her first time a few months ago, but she’s gone again.”

“Did she seem crazy to you?”

“Yeah,” Filip said. Then, “No. Seemed like she didn’t want to be there.”

“Harsh.”

“She told me that the only right you have with anyone in life is the right to walk away.”

Marta coughed out a disbelieving laugh. “Kind of bitch says that to her kid?”

The doors to the club were built like an airlock with inner and outer doors either side of a short hall, but to keep the brightness of the common corridor out. A bright streak and a few silhouetted bodies showed both sets of doors opened at once. Filip wondered whether he should tell the girl more. I thought I watched her kill herself, only it turns out she didn’t die. She was only leaving again. It was true, but it wouldn’t seem like it. Some things you couldn’t talk about except with people who’d been there. His hand terminal chimed again.

Someone shoved him, hard. Filip’s stool tilted, and he grabbed the table to stop his fall. Marta yelped and stood up, shouting as she did. “Berman! Que sa?”

Filip turned slowly. The man who’d shoved him was his own age plus maybe a year or two. Deep-green jumpsuit with the logo of a shipping company on the sleeve. His chin jutted. His chest was pushed forward, his arms pulled back. Everything about him said he was looking for violence except that he wasn’t hitting Filip.

“Que nammen?” the new man demanded.

“Filip,” he answered. He was aware of the mass of the gun in his pocket like it was calling to him. Calmly, slowly, he put a hand against the grip of the pistol. Marta shoved her way between them, her arms wide. She was yelling about how Berman—who had to be the guy with the chin—was out of his mind. How he was stupid. How she was just talking with coyo and Berman was out-of-his-head jealous and fucked up too. Berman kept shifting his head to stare at Filip around her. Filip felt his own rage boiling up, like fumes off a fire. Draw the gun, level it just long enough for the coyo to know what was coming, then bang and the kick in his wrist. He was Filip Inaros, and he’d killed billions. He’d killed Marta’s mother.

“It’s okay,” Filip said as he stood. “Misunderstanding. No harm, sa sa?”

“Pinché asshole better run,” Berman shouted at Filip’s back, and then Marta shouting some more and Berman shouting at her, and Filip was in the fake airlock and pushing through to the common corridor beyond. It was bright there. The smell of liquor and old smoke stayed around him for a few seconds before the gentle breeze from the recyclers pulled it away. He was shaking. Trembling. His hands ached with the need to hit something or someone. He started walking without any idea where he was walking to, just needing something to let him move. Let whatever beast was running through his bloodstream work itself out a little.

Callisto passed him as he went. Pale corridors wider than most of the stations and ships he’d been on, with a honeycomb pattern on the curved walls that made him think of a football. Banks of heaters made irregular tapping sounds as they glowed down from the ceilings, radiating at the top of his head the way that the cold of the moon’s body crept up from the floors. People walked or rode bicycles or carts. He wondered how many of them had lost family in the attack on Callisto. In the story he’d told himself about the attack, it had all been Dusters that died. Soldiers whose work was to keep the Belt’s head underwater until it drowned. And in his story, his father was the leader to unite the Belt, to lead it against everything that was bent on destroying their futures and erasing their pasts.

And he still thought that. Even while he doubted, he believed. It was like everything in his private world had doubled. One Callisto that had been the target of his raid. His critical victory that led to the bombardment of Earth and the freedom of the Belt. Another Callisto that he walked through now, where normal people had lost their mothers and children, husbands and friends in a disaster. The two places were so different, they didn’t relate. Like two ships with the same name but different layouts and jobs.

And he had two fathers now. The one who led the fight against the inners and who Filip loved like plants love light, and the one who twisted out of everything that went wrong and blamed anyone but himself. The Free Navy that was the first real hope the Belt had ever had, and the Free Navy that was falling apart. Swapping out generals and leaders faster than air filters. They couldn’t both exist, and he couldn’t let either version go.

His hand terminal chimed again. He plucked it out of his pocket. The connection request came from Karal and the Pella. It was the twelfth he’d made. Filip accepted.

“Filipito!” Karal said. “Hell have you been, coyo?” He was on the command deck and wearing his uniform. Even had the collar done, which he usually didn’t. It didn’t make him look like he was military, though. He looked like himself, but in costume.

“Around.”

“Around,” Karal said, shaking his head. “You got to get back to the ship. You got to come now.”

“For for?”

Karal leaned in close to the screen like he was going to whisper a secret. “Battle analysis leaked out à Medina, yeah? The rail guns are down. Medina has one ship guarding it. One, and it’s—”

“Rocinante,” Filip said.

“Sí no? Every ship with more than half a hull, Marco’s putting them together. Retaking Medina like we’re putting out a fire, us.”

“Yeah,” Filip said.

“Getting fresh juice. Topping up the reaction mass. And then we’re gone. Meeting up with the rest of the navy on the way, but your father? I’ve never seen him like—”

A voice came from the hand terminal, snapping Karal’s attention away from him. “You found him?”

“Que no?” Karal said, but not to him.

The image jumped, cutting from one camera to another. An empty crash couch with a vague shadow along one edge. The shadow fell back, gained resolution, became his father. Filip braced for abuse, for contempt. For all the condescension he’d been suffering. Say it like a man. Say I fucked up. His stomach was tight.

Marco beamed at him, eyes bright.

“Did you hear? Did Karal tell you?”

“About Medina, and the ship there.” For some reason he couldn’t explain he didn’t want to say the name Rocinante out loud. He felt it would be like bad luck.

“This is our moment, Filipito. It has all come together perfectly. We bit them and bit them and bit them and faded into the dark until they went mad with it. They’ve pushed out past their defenses, and now we can come down on them like a hammer.”

Them. He didn’t mean Earth and Mars. He didn’t mean the governments of the inner planets. Whether he knew it or not, Filip was certain—as certain as he’d been of anything—that James Holden and Naomi Nagata were them.

“That’s good, then,” he said.

“Good?” his father hooted. “This is it. This is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for. This is how we break them. All the half-loyal cunts in the OPA who trotted wherever Fred Johnson led them? Pa and Ostman and Walker—all of them. They all fell in with Holden, and we will take him away from them just the way we killed Johnson. We will punish them for their disloyalty.”

Filip felt a little thrill of excitement. The idea of victory—resounding, triumphant, and final—was intoxicating. His father’s joy bore him up, promised to wash away all his anger and his doubts. But there was another Filip, a smaller and less emotional one, who watched the swelling enthusiasm with disgust.

Luring Naomi and her lover out to Medina to be killed was the plan now. But more than that, it had always been the plan. They’d killed Fred Johnson as part of it. They’d abandoned Ceres too. The consolidated fleet’s massive and coordinated attacks had been them falling for his father’s brilliant strategy to lure them out.

And if it failed, if something went wrong, that would always have been the plan too. His father’s new generals would change, getting better with every purge. And when it got so foul there was no way to pretend it into victory, it would be someone else who had failed. Maybe Filip.

“Highest burn we’ve ever done, but it will be worth it,” Marco was saying. “It will carry rewards greater than anything before it. Only there isn’t time to waste. We’re launching inside the hour. All hands. All ships, everyone. We’ll melt the fucking ring with our braking burn and char Holden to ash.”

Marco clapped his hands, delighting in the prospect. Filip smiled and nodded.

“As soon as we’re supplied,” Marco said, growing a degree more sober, “we’re gone. Be back to the ship in half an hour, yeah?”

“All right,” Filip said.

Marco looked out of the screen and into his eyes. There was a softness in his expression. A kind of sensual pleasure almost indistinguishable from love. “This will be glorious,” his father said. “They will remember this forever.”

And then, like an actor having delivered his final line, Marco dropped the connection.

Looking up from his hand terminal felt like coming out of a dream. He’d just been someplace else, with someone. And now he was here again, in this corridor. If he turned around, he could go back to the club he’d been in. It seemed strange in a way he couldn’t quite explain that his father’s glorious battle plan and a common corridor of Callisto yards should exist in the same universe. Maybe because, in a way, they didn’t.

The docks weren’t far. There was a tube station that could have gotten him there in five minutes, but half an hour was more than he’d need to walk the distance. He put his hand terminal back in his pocket where it clicked against his pistol, a nearly inaudible tick with every step.

Moving from the residential corridors to the docks had a thousand little signals. There were none of the teenage girls here, and more of the people drifting through the intersections were wearing jumpsuits and tool belts. The air smelled different. Even if they used the same filters, the docks would always smell of welding and synthetic oil and cold. He still had twenty minutes.

The concourse between the military and civilian yards was shaped like a massive Y. Where the paths met, someone in the station had decided it would be a good idea to put a statue of something that looked like a wide, abstract Minotaur fashioned out of brushed steel. Directly above the weird art, a screen listed the berths and the ships in each of them. On the military side, there were seven Free Navy ships, an Earth transport they’d captured when they took the station, and three empty berths. He looked at the word PELLA for a couple breaths as if it were as much a piece of art as the uncomfortable man-bull beneath it. On the civilian side, almost a dozen ships. Prospectors, miners, transport. An emergency medical relief ship. He imagined there would have been more if there wasn’t a war on.

Against the wall, another screen showed the exchange rates for fifty or sixty kinds of scrip—corporate, governmental, cooperative, commodity-based. A small gray rat scampered along the floor underneath the screen and squeezed itself into a hole Filip hadn’t even noticed was there like it was falling into shadow. His hand terminal chimed, but he ignored it. The docks were right there.

Just down the corridor to the civilian docks, there was a waiting area with six rows of uncomfortable ceramic chairs facing each other and a bright orange recycler at the end of every other row. An old man in a fake leather coat and grimy pants stared blankly in Filip’s direction, seeing him but not seeing him. A row of grimy kiosks dug into one wall. A noodle stall. A public terminal. Two union offices. Employment and housing brokers. Filip looked at them all with the same detachment he’d felt looking at the berth displays.

His hand terminal chimed again. He took it out without looking at it, switched it to his off-hand, and drew out the gun. The old man’s stare was less blank now. He watched as Filip walked toward the chairs and fed first the gun and then the hand terminal into the recycler. Filip nodded to the old man, and after a long moment, the old man nodded back.

The employment broker’s kiosk had bright marks of wear at the edge of the counter, worn into the metal by millions of tired elbows. The bulletproof glass had pits in it, tiny as stars. The woman behind the glass wore her gray hair in a buzz cut. The place smelled vaguely of piss. Filip walked to the counter and rested his elbows on the edge.

“I need work,” he said like someone else was saying it.

The gray woman flicked her eyes up at him, then back down. “What can you do?”

“Environmental maintenance. Machining.”

“Both or either?”

“Anything. I just need work.”

The counter lit up. A virtual keyboard and a form. He looked at it, his heart sinking.

“Put in your employment ID,” the gray woman said.

“I don’t have an employment ID.”

The flicker of her eyes was longer this time. “Union waiver?”

“I’m not in a union.”

“No ID, no waiver. You’re fucked, kid.”

There was still time. He could run. He could catch the Pella before she left. His father would wait for him. They would burn out to Medina. They would take back the Belt for Belters, and it would be glorious. His heart started racing, but he put his hands on the edge of the counter. Squeezed like he was holding himself in place.

“Please. I just need work.”

“I run a clean shop, kid.”

“Please.”

She didn’t look up. He didn’t move. The right corner of her mouth quirked up like it was somehow independent of the rest of her face. The counter blinked, and a shorter form appeared. PRÉNOM. NOM DE FAMILIE. RÉSIDENCE. ÂGE. COORDONNÉES.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said, not looking up.

He put his finger on COORDONNÉES. “I don’t have a hand terminal.”

“You can come back tomorrow,” she said like it was a common enough problem.

PRÉNOM: FILIP

NOM DE FAMILIE:

“You okay, kid?” The hard eyes on him. He nodded.

NOM DE FAMILIE: NAGATA