Babylon's Ashes (Expanse 6)

“If you’re saying he’s gone mad,” Dawes said, “that’s a problem.”

“It’s not a problem, it’s a job requirement,” Rosenfeld said, waving the concern away like it was a gnat. “He’s slaughtered billions of people and remade the shape of human civilization. No one can do something on that scale and see themselves as fully human anymore. He may be a god or he may be a devil, but he can’t stomach the idea of being just an unreasonably pretty man who stumbled into the right combination of charisma and opportunity. This particular fever will pass. He’ll stop sounding like we’re making the first weld next week and start saying that our grandchildren’s grandchildren will finish it. Never been anyone as good at changing the song without missing a beat as our man Marco. Don’t you worry.”

“Hard not to.”

“Well. Only worry a little.” Rosenfeld took a thick bite of the protein and pepper, his rough eyelids lowering until he looked almost half-asleep. “We’re all here because he needed us. Apart from Fred Johnson, I had the only fighting force large enough to cause him trouble. Sanjrani’s a prat, but he ran Europa’s artificial economy well enough that everyone thinks he’s a genius. And who knows? Maybe he is. You control the port city of the Belt. Pa’s the poster child of dissenting from the OPA for moral reasons, and so she makes a fine Father Christmas for redistributing wealth to the groundlings and bringing the old loyalists over to us. No one in these meetings is here by chance. He put this team together. As long as we keep a unified front, we can keep him from floating away on his own grandiosity.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Rosenfeld chewed and grinned at the same time. “So do I.”

Anderson Dawes had been part of the OPA since before he was born. Trying to curry favor with their corporate overlords, his parents had named him after a mining company. Later, Fred Johnson’s butchery turned that same name into one of Earth’s greatest crimes against the Belt. He’d been raised to see the Belt as his home and the people living there—however different, however divided—as his kin. His father had been an organizer, his mother a union lawyer. He’d learned that all humanity was a negotiation even before he’d learned how to read. Everything in his life since then was an elaboration of the same simple theme: push hard enough that he never lost ground and never let an opportunity pass.

Always, his intention had been to put the Belt in its right place and end the casual exploitation of its people and wealth. How exactly that happened, he’d let the universe decide. He’d worked with the Persian Gulf Shared Interest Zone in rebuilding the station at L-4 and made contacts in the expatriate community there. He’d become a voice within the OPA on Ceres by showing up early at every meeting, listening carefully before he spoke, and making certain the right people knew his name.

Violence had always been a part of the environment. When he’d had to kill people, those people had died. When he found a promising young tech, he knew how to recruit them. Or an old enemy ripe to be turned. He’d brought Fred Johnson, the Butcher of Anderson Station, into the fold when everyone called him crazy, and then accepted their accolades when he’d bloodied the nose of the United Nations by doing it. Later, when it became clear that Johnson was unwilling to cooperate with the new regime, he’d agreed to cut him out. If watching his namesake go from a moderately successful Belter mining station to the rallying cry of Belter revolution had taught him anything, it was this: Situations change and clinging too tightly to what came before kills you.

And so when Marco Inaros struck his deal with the blackest black market on Mars to create a successor to the Outer Planets Alliance, Dawes had seen only two choices: Embrace the new reality or die with the past. He’d picked the way he always had, and because of it, he was at the table. Sometimes for thirteen hours while Inaros ranted his utopian dream-logic, but at the table nonetheless.

Still, there was part of him that wished this Winston Duarte had chosen to raise someone else up with his Mephistophelean arms deal.

He took another bite of his breakfast, but the peppers had gone cold and limp, and the protein had begun to harden. He dropped his fork.

“Any word from Medina?” he asked.

Rosenfeld shrugged. “Do you mean the station, or past it?”

“Anything, really.”

“Station’s well,” Rosenfeld said. “The defenses are in place, so that’s as it should be. Past that … well, no one knows, sa sa? Duarte’s keeping up his end, sending shipments of arms and equipment back from Laconia. The other colonies …”

“Problems,” Dawes said. He didn’t make it a question.

Rosenfeld scowled at his plate, avoiding eye contact for the first time since their unofficial meeting began. “Frontiers are dangerous places. Things happen there that wouldn’t if it were more civilized. Wakefield went silent. Some people are saying they woke something up there, but no one’s sent a ship out to look. Who has time, yeah? Got a war here to finish. Then we can look back out.”

“And the Barkeith?”

Rosenfeld’s gaze stayed fixed on the peppers. “Duarte’s people say they’re looking into it. Not to worry. Not blaming us.”

Everything in the other man’s body told Dawes not to press further, and he was almost ready to let it go. He could change the angle of attack, at least. “How is it all the other colonies are fighting to grow enough food, not have their hydroponics collapse like on Welker, but Laconia’s already got a manufacturing base?”

“Just means it’s better planned. Better funded. The thing you don’t understand about this pinché Martian Duarte is—”

Dawes’ hand terminal blatted out an alert. High-priority connection request. The channel he used for station emergencies. Captain Shaddid. He held up a finger, asking Rosenfeld’s patience, and accepted the connection.

“What’s the matter?” he said instead of hello.

Shaddid was at her desk. He recognized the wall behind her. “I need you down here. One of my men is in the hospital. Medic says he may not make it. I have the shooter in custody.”

“Good that you caught him.”

“His name’s Filip Inaros.”

Dawes felt a weight drop into his gut. “I’ll be right there.”

Shaddid had given the boy his own cell. She’d been wise to do so. From the moment he walked into the security station

, Dawes had felt the shock and rage like a charge in the atmosphere. Shooting a security officer on Ceres was a short way to an airlock. Or it would have been for most people.