Babylon's Ashes (Expanse 6)

“But it’s not anyone else, so we’re good?”

Fred lifted his hands. A gesture made of equal weights amusement and despair. “I’ll want a private word with Draper.”

“I’ll let her know,” Holden said, standing up.

“I can reach her myself. And Holden …”

He turned back. In the dimness, Fred’s eyes were so dark the iris and the pupil were the same shade of black. He looked old. Weary. Focused. “Yes?” Holden said.

“The song those two were singing? Get the lyrics translated before you broadcast it. Just in case.”

Chapter Eighteen: Filip

The Pella coasted through the black, one node in a network of dark ships that traded tightbeams and compared strategies and planned. Stealth wasn’t possible in the strict sense. The enemy would be scanning the vault of the heavens for the Free Navy’s ships just as much as they were tracking the drive plumes of Earth and Mars and everyone else in the system. The universe was billions of points of unwavering light—stars and galaxies stretching out through time and space, their photon streams bent by gravity lensing and shifted by the speed of the universe’s expansion. The flicker of a drive might be overlooked or confused with another light source or hidden by one of the widely scattered asteroids that inhabited the system like dust motes in a cathedral.

There was no way to know how many of their ships the inners had managed to identify and track. There was no certainty that their own sensor arrays had targeted all of the so-called combined navy’s vessels. The scale of the vacuum alone built uncertainty.

The inners were easier, since so many of theirs had burned for Ceres. But who was to say there weren’t a few scattered hunters, dark and ballistic in the void? Marco had a handful of Free Navy like that, or at least that was what Karal said. Ships that hadn’t even been used in the first attacks, cruising in their own orbits like warm asteroids. Sleepers waiting for their moment. And maybe that was even true, though Filip hadn’t heard it directly from his father yet. And he liked to think his father would tell him anything.

The days were long and empty, wound tightly around a single, overwhelming question. The counterstrike would come. The attack that would prove that stepping back from Ceres was a tactical choice and not a show of weakness. More than anything that had come before, it would be the event—Marco said this, and Filip believed it—that made clear what made the Free Navy unbeatable. In the gym and the galley, the crew speculated. Tycho Station was the heart of the collaborationist wing of the OPA. Mars had suffered least in the initial attack, and deserved the same punishment as Earth. Luna had become the new center of UN power. Kelso Station and Rhea had rejected the Free Navy and shown their true colors.

Or there were the mining operations scattered throughout the Belt that answered to Earth-based corporations. They were easy pickings and couldn’t be defended. Or taking a solid hold on Ganymede, claiming and protecting the food supply of the Belt. There was even some talk of sending recovery forces out through the ring. Take back from the colonies what should never have been there in the first place. Or install platforms above the new planets and extract tribute from them. Reverse the political order and put all the bastards at the bottom of all the wells in chains.

Filip only smiled and shrugged, letting it look like he knew more than he did. Marco hadn’t told even him what the plan was. Not yet.

And then the message came.

I always respected you. That was how she began. Michio Pa, the head of the conscription effort. Filip remembered her, but he hadn’t had an opinion about her before now. She was a competent leader, a little famous for stepping in when the Behemoth’s captain had lost his mind in the slow zone. His father liked her because she hated Fred Johnson, had defected from him, and because she was a Belter and pretty to look at and the face that the Belt would see when the colony ships cracked their guts open and spilled out their treasures. Only now she stared into a camera on her ship, her hair pulled back, her dark eyes serious. She didn’t look pretty.

“I have always respected you, sir. The work you have done for the independence of the Belt has been critical, and I’m proud to be part of it. I want to make it very clear before we go forward that my loyalty to our cause is unwavering and complete. On sober reflection and after a great deal of consideration, I find I have to disagree with the change in the plan for the conscription. While I understand the strategic importance of denying materiel to the enemy, I can’t in good conscience withhold it from the citizens of the Belt who are in immediate need. Because of this, I have chosen to proceed with the conscription efforts as originally outlined.

“Technically, this is disobeying an order, but I have great faith that when you reflect on how the needs of our people brought us to form the Free Navy, you’ll agree it is the best way forward.”

She signed off with a Free Navy salute. The one his father had created when he made everything else. Filip queued it up again, watching from the start to the end again, aware of Marco’s gaze on him as much as the woman on the screen. The galley around them was empty. No, not just empty. Emptied. Whether they’d been ordered to or not, the crew of the Pella had evacuated the space and left it for Marco and Filip. If it hadn’t been for a smell of curry lingering in the air, the stains of coffee on the table, it might have been their first time on the ship.

He didn’t know how many times his father had viewed the message, how he had taken it the first time he’d seen it, or what the mild expression he wore now meant. Filip’s uncertainty knotted at the bottom of his abdomen. Being shown the message was a test, and he didn’t know quite what he was meant to do with it.

After the second time Michio Pa saluted, Marco stretched his shoulders back, a physical symbol that they were switching to the next part of whatever their conversation was.

“It’s mutiny,” Filip said.

“It is,” Marco said, his voice and expression reasonable and calm. “Do you think she’s right?”

No leapt to Filip’s throat, but he stopped it there. It was too obvious an answer. He tried Yes in his mind, feeling the pressure of his father’s attention like it was heat radiating from him. He discarded it too.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said slowly. “Whether she’s right or wrong is beside the point. She broke with your authority.”

Marco reached out and tapped the tip of Filip’s nose the way he’d done when they were only father and son, not war leader and lieutenant. Marco’s eyes softened, his focus shifting elsewhere. Filip felt a momentary and irrational stab of loneliness.

“She did,” Marco said. “Even if she were right—she isn’t, but if—how could I let this go? It would be an invitation to chaos. Chaos.” He chuckled, shaking his head. Anger would have been less frightening.

Filip’s uncertainty shifted in his gut. Were they destroyed, then? Was it all falling apart? The vision of the system his father had dreamed—void cities, the Belt blooming into a new kind of humanity free from the oppression of Earth and Mars, the Free Navy as the order of the

worlds—stuttered. He caught a glimpse of what the other future could look like. The death and the struggle and the war. The corpse Earth and the ghost town Mars and the shards of the Free Navy picking at each other until nothing was left. It was what Marco meant when he said chaos, Filip was sure of that. Nausea welled up in him. Someone should have kept that from happening. He shook his head.

“Some day,” Marco said, and then again, still without finishing the thought, “some day.”

“Do we do?” Filip asked.