“Got something else too. Message from himself.”
“What does Dawes want?” Michio asked.
“Not Dawes. Big himself.”
“Inaros?” Michio said. “Play it.”
“Under captain-only encrypt,” Oksana said. “I can pipe it to your cabin or your terminal if—”
“Play it, Oksana.”
Marco Inaros appeared on the monitor. From the drape of his hair, he was either on Ceres or under burn. There wasn’t enough visible background behind him to say if he was on a ship or in an office. His smile was charming and reached his warm, dark eyes. Michio felt her pulse step up a little, and told herself it was dread and not an attraction. For the most part, that was truth. He was a charismatic bastard, though.
“Captain Pa,” Marco said. “I’m glad to hear you took the Hornblower cleanly. It’s another testament to your ability. We were right to have you in command of the conscription. Things have gone well enough, we’re ready to move on to the next stages of our plan.”
Michio glanced over at Evans and Oksana. He was plucking at his beard, and she was trying not to look at Michio.
“We’ll want to route the Hornblower directly to Ceres,” Marco said. “And before that, I’m calling a meeting. Strictly inner-circle. You, me, Dawes, Rosenfeld, Sanjrani. At Ceres Station.” His grin widened. “Now that we’re running the system, there are some changes we should make, eh? The Pella says you can make it there in two weeks. It’ll be good to see you in person.”
He made a sharp Free Navy salute. The one he’d come up with. The screen went blank. The mix of confusion and distress and relief that flooded Michio’s gut wasn’t easy to make sense of. Having her mission change like that, so quickly and with so little explanation, left her on the wrong foot. And going into a meeting of the inner circle still had a little of the sense of danger that it had before the Free Navy had announced itself. Years of moving in shadows left habits of thought and feeling that were hard to step out of, even if they’d won. But at least they’d be back in the plane of the ecliptic, and not high up in the black, where ominous things happened. Bad things.
Things, a small, still voice in her head said, like being called to an unexpected meeting.
“Two weeks?” Michio asked.
“Possible,” Busch answered almost before the question was out. She’d already run the plan. “But it’ll mean burning hard. And no waiting for the Hornblower.”
“Carmondy won’t like that,” Pa said.
“What’s he going to say?” Oksana said. “It’s himself giving the order.”
“It is,” Michio agreed.
Evans cleared his throat. “So we’re going?”
Michio held up a fist. Yes. “It’s Inaros,” she said, ending the coming argument by invoking his name.
“Well. Bien,” Evans said, but the tone of his voice said something different.
“Something?” Pa asked.
“Just isn’t the first time plans changed,” Evans said, his face wrinkled with worry. He wasn’t as pretty that way, but he was her newest husband, so she didn’t point it out. Pretty men could be so fragile.
“Continue,” she said instead.
“Well, there was the money thing with Sanjrani. And the Martian prime minister wound up making it safe to Luna when half the Free Navy was trying to take him out. And I hear we tried to kill Fred Johnson and James Holden both, and both still breathing and walking free. Leaves me wondering.”
“Like maybe Marco isn’t as infallible as he plays?” Michio asked.
For a moment, he didn’t answer. She thought he might not. “Something like,” Evans finally said. “But even thinking like that feels like it might get sticky, no?”
“Something like,” Michio agreed.
Chapter Two: Filip
There was no one he hated more than James Holden. Holden, the peacemaker who’d never made peace. Holden, the champion of justice who’d never sacrificed anything for justice. James Holden, who crewed up with Martians and Belters—with one Belter—and moved through the system as if it made him better than everyone else. Neutral and above the fray while the inner planets shoved humanity’s resources out to the thirteen hundred–odd new planets and left the Belters to die. Who, against all odds, hadn’t died with the Chetzemoka.
Fred Johnson, the Earther who’d gone native and started speaking for the Belt, was a close second. The Butcher of Anderson Station, who’d made his career by slaughtering innocent Belters and continued it by patronizing them all into an arc that led toward their cultural and individual deaths. For that he deserved hatred and disdain. But Filip’s mother hadn’t died directly because of Johnson, and so Holden—James pinché Holden—owned first prize.
It was months since Filip had beaten his hands against the inner door of the airlock while his mother, her mind twisted by too much time in Holden’s cultlike presence, had spaced herself and Cyn along with her. Stupid deaths. Needless. That, he told himself, was why it hurt so much. That she hadn’t needed to die, and she’d chosen it anyway. He’d broken his hand trying to get her to stop, but it hadn’t helped anything. Naomi Nagata had picked a bad death in the void over a life with her true people. It was proof of how much power Holden had had over her. How deeply she’d been brainwashed, and how weak her mind had been from the start.
He didn’t tell anyone on the Pella that he still dreamed about it every night: the closed door, the certainty that something precious—something important—was on the other side of it, and the sense of vicious loss that he couldn’t make the door open. If they knew how much it haunted him, he’d seem weak, and his father didn’t have room for men who couldn’t do their part. Not even his own son. Filip took his place as a Belter and a man of the Free Navy or he found a place on a station and stayed there as a boy. He was nearly seventeen now; he’d helped to destroy the oppressors on Earth. His childhood belonged in his past.
Pallas Station was one of the oldest in the Belt. The first mines had been there, and following them, the first refineries. The newer facilities had followed, because this was where the industrial base was. And because it was easier to use the older, unretired crushers and spin separators as overflow capacity. And from habit. Pallas had never been spun up. The gravity it had was the naturally occurring microgravity of its mass—two percent of Earth’s full g. Hardly more than a persistent direction of drift. The station swooped above and below the plane of the ecliptic, like it was trying to elbow its way out of the solar system. Ceres and Vesta were larger and more populous, but the metal for ship plating and reactors, for station decks and shipping containers, for the guns that studded the Free Navy’s liberated warships and the rounds that they fired all came from here. If Ganymede was the breadbasket of the Belt, Pallas was its forge.
It only made sense that the Free Navy should pass through there in its constant voyage through the liberated system, and that it should make sure to leave no resources behind.
“S’yahaminda, que?” the harbormaster said, floating in the meeting room’s wider end. It was a Belter room. No tables, no chairs. Little reference to up or down in its architecture. After so long in a ship built with thrust gravity in mind, Filip thought it felt like home. Authentic in a way that the Martian-designed spaces never could.
The harbormaster himself was the same. His body was longer than someone who’d spent their childhood with even low, intermittent gravity. His head was larger compared to his body than Filip’s or Marco’s or Karal’s. The harbormaster’s left eye was milky and blind where even the pharmaceutical cocktail that made human life in freefall possible had been insufficient to keep the capillaries from dying. He was the kind of man who would never be able to tolerate living on a planetary surface, even for a short period of time. The most extreme end of the Belter physiological spectrum. He was exactly who the Free Navy had risen up to protect and represent.
Which was likely why he seemed so confused and betrayed now.
“Is it a problem?” Marco sa
id, shrugging with his hands. The way he said it made emptying the warehouses into the void seem like an everyday thing to ask. Filip hoisted his own eyebrows to echo his father’s disbelief. Karal only glowered and kept one fist on his sidearm.
“Per es esá mindan hoy,” he said.
“I know it’s everything,” Marco said. “That’s the point. So long as it’s all here, Pallas will be a target for the inners. Put what you have in containers, fire them off, and only we will know their vectors. We’ll track where they are and salvage what we need when we need it. It’s not just keeping it out of their hands, it’s showing that the station warehouses are empty before they even reach for them, yeah?”
“Per mindan …” the harbormaster said, blinking in distress.
“You’ll be paid for it all,” Filip said. “Good Free Navy scrip.”
“Good, yeah,” the harbormaster said. “Aber …”
His blinking redoubled and he looked away from Marco as if the admiral of the Belters’ first real armed force was floating half a meter left of where he was. He licked his lips.
“Aber?” Marco prompted, matching his accent.
“Spin classifiers v’reist neue ganga, yeah?”
“If you need new parts, then buy new parts,” Marco said, his voice taking on a dangerous buzz.
“Aber …” The harbormaster swallowed.
“But you used to buy from Earth,” Marco said. “And our money doesn’t spend there.”
The harbormaster lifted a fist in acknowledgment.
Marco’s smile was gentle and open. Sympathetic. “No one’s money spends there. Not anymore. You buy from the Belt now. Just the Belt.”
“Belt don’t make good parts,” the harbormaster whined.
“We make the best parts there are,” Marco said. “History’s moved on, my friend. Try to keep up. And package everything there is for push-out, sa sa?”
The harbormaster met Marco’s gaze and lifted his fist again in assent. It wasn’t as if he had a choice. The advantage of being in command of all the guns was that no matter how nicely you asked for something, it was still an order. Marco pushed off, the thin gravity of Pallas bending the path of his body. He stopped his motion by grabbing handholds at the harbormaster’s side, and then embraced him. The harbormaster didn’t hug him back. He looked like a man holding his breath and hoping something dangerous wouldn’t notice him as it passed by.
The corridors and passageways leading from the harbormaster’s office to the docks were a patchwork of ancient ceramic plating and newer carbon-silicate lace. The lace plating—one of the first new materials put into man