Marco listened to Filip’s report with a gentle attention, nodding with his hands at each point of importance, letting Filip cover everything—Fred Johnson, the Witch of Endor, Rosenfeld’s half-spoken threat to take the reins—without interrupting him. Filip felt the anger slip away as he spoke, his gut relaxing as the anxiety faded, until by the end he wiped away a tear that had nothing to do with sorrow and everything to do with relief. Marco put a hand on Filip’s shoulder, a soft grip that held the two of them together.
“We pause when it’s time to pause, and we strike when it’s time to strike,” Marco said.
“I know,” Filip said. “It’s only …” He didn’t know how to end the thought, but his father smiled anyway, as if he understood.
Marco gestured at the cabin’s system, opening a connection request for Rosenfeld. The pebble-skinned man appeared on the screen almost at once. “Marco,” he said. “Good to have you back among the living.”
“To the underworld and returned with wisdom,” Marco said, a sharpness in his voice. “Didn’t frighten you with my absence, did I?”
“Not as long as you came back,” Rosenfeld said through a rough laugh. “We have a full plate, old friend. Too much needs doing.” Filip had the sense that a second conversation was happening between the men he couldn’t quite parse, but he kept quiet and watched.
“Less soon,” Marco said. “Send me the tracking data for all of the ships still answering to Pa’s commands. You tell your guard
ships at Pallas Witch of Endor’s gone rogue. Jam it, kill it, and send the battle data to us. No mercy for traitors.”
Rosenfeld nodded. “And Fred Johnson?”
“Butcher will bleed in his turn,” Marco said. “Never fear. This war’s just beginning.”
Chapter Nineteen: Pa
Iapetus Station wasn’t on the moon itself, but in locked orbit around it. The station’s design was old: two long counter-rotating arms supporting habitation rings, a central docking station on the axis. Lights glittered on the surface of the moon, marking automated stations where the ice was quarried and split. On their approach, there was a point where the station and moon and the ringed bulk of Saturn behind it were all the same size on the screen. An illusion of perspective.
The docks were almost filled with ancient water haulers that the tariffs had kept from harvesting the moon. No one was enforcing the fees anymore, and all the ships that could were taking advantage of the opportunity. Tugs flying teakettle rose up from the surface or dropped down toward it. Shipping containers filled with ice studded the hulls of the haulers like a crust of salt. The administration of Iapetus hadn’t sided with Marco and the Free Navy or against them, but they weren’t losing the chance to shrug off the strictures of Earth and Mars either. Michio watched the traffic control data and tried to see it more as liberty and freedom, less as grabbing what there was to take and getting away while the getting was good.
The comm channel opened. A request from Iapetus control. She could have let Oksana answer it, but impatience won out. “This is the Connaught,” she said.
“Bien, Connaught. Iapetus bei hier. We’re slotting the Hornblower into berth sixteen. Good to go in half an hour, yeah?”
“That’ll do.”
“Hear tús have prisoners, yeah?”
“Do. Refugees too. Hornblower’s original crew.”
“Pissed off, them?”
“Not happy,” Michio said. “Think they’ll be grateful to be in rooms that aren’t welded shut, though. Your supply officer said you’d be able to take them.”
“Can take contract here, can book passage to Earth or Mars. Or refugees, can etwas. Prisoners are their own thing.”
“Won’t have them hurt,” Michio said. “Don’t want them let free either.”
“Guests of the station,” Iapetus control said. “All marked. Good and good. And … not official, yeah? ’Gato for the load. Hydroponics were getting mighty strained with the shipments from Earth dead.”
“Glad we could help,” Michio said before she dropped the connection.
It was true too. There was something in her chest—a soft, golden feeling—that came from knowing that the people who would have suffered without her would at least suffer less. She’d spent more time on Rhea than on Iapetus, but she’d had enough experience to know what shortages of hydroponic equipment meant to a station like this. At the least, her shipments would mean the difference between uncertainty and stability. At most, between death and life.
It wouldn’t have been this way if the Belt had been allowed to grow and become independent. But Earth and Mars had kept the labor here on a leash made of soil analogues and complex organics. Now, thanks to Marco, the Belt would have a chance to bootstrap itself up into a sustainable future. Unless, thanks to Marco, it starved and collapsed in the attempt.
She hadn’t heard back from him one way or the other since she’d called her ships to refuse his orders. Statements of allegiance had come from eight of her sixteen ships. Acknowledgment from four more. Only the Ando and the Dagny Taggart had rejected her outright, and even they hadn’t taken action yet. Everyone was waiting for Marco to make an announcement. Even her. And every hour he didn’t made it seem more possible that he wouldn’t.
Other voices, though. Oh, there were others. A collective of independent prospecting vessels out of Titania needed replacement parts for their drives. A cargo ship that was also home to a family crew of twenty people suffered a catastrophic failure of their Epstein drive’s power systems and were on the drift. Vesta was putting its population on protein rationing until the food relief Michio had promised them actually arrived. Kelso Station, in an irrational fit of altruism, had sent relief supplies to Earth and was now facing shortages of water and helium-3 for the reactors.
Centuries of technology and progress had allowed humanity to create a place for itself in the vacuum and radiation of space, but nothing had overcome entropy or ideology or bad judgment. The millions of skin-bound complications of salt water and minerals that were human bodies scattered throughout the Belt still needed food and air and clean water, energy and shelter. Ways to keep from drowning in their own shit or cooking in their waste heat. And through accidents of Marco’s charisma and her own idealism, she’d become responsible for it all.
But here was her start. The supplies of the Hornblower, instead of flying through gates and away forever, would feed Iapetus and give the station there the reserves to help others. The Connaught and her sister ships didn’t need to solve every distribution issue. Only get the supplies, make them available, and let market forces and the communal nature of the Belt take over from there.