Babylon's Ashes (Expanse 6)

“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 sufferin

g. 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.”