Babylon's Ashes

  Sanjrani wanted to know how the labor force needed to create Marco’s massive snowflake-complex void cities would be trained. Marco waved the problem away. Belters were already trained to live and build in space. That knowledge was their birthright. Bred into their brittle bones. Pa brought up the problem of keeping food and medical supplies flowing to all the stations and ships already feeling the pinch from the loss of supply lines from Earth. Marco agreed that there would be lean times, but assured Pa that her fears were greater than the actual problem. No objection any of them raised swayed his commitment. His eyes were bright, his voice rich as a viol, his energy was boundless. After the meetings were done, Dawes went back to his quarters, weary to the bone. Marco went to the bars and pubs and union halls and spoke directly to the citizens of Ceres. If he slept, Dawes didn’t know when.

  On the fifth day, they took a break, and it felt like collapsing at the end of a long run.

  Rosenfeld’s interpretation did little to help.

  “Coyo is manic. He’ll come back down.”

  “And then what?” Dawes asked.

  The pebble-skinned man shrugged. His smile had very little to do with pleasure. “Then we’ll see where we are. Inaros is a great man. For our purposes, he’s the great man. It isn’t a role that’s fit for a wholly sane person.”

  They sat in the gardens of the governor’s palace. The smell of plants and soil mixed with the textured protein and grilled peppers that Rosenfeld preferred for breakfast. Dawes leaned back from the table and sipped from his bulb of hot, milky tea. He’d known Rosenfeld Guoliang for almost three decades, and he trusted him as much as he trusted anyone. But not completely.

  “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.

  “I put an automated monitor on him,” Shaddid said. “Slaved it to my system. No one else turns it on or off.”

  “Because?” Dawes said. He was sitting at her desk. She might be the head of security, but he was the governor of Ceres.

  “They’d turn it off,” Shaddid said. “And you wouldn’t ever see that little piece of shit alive again. And just between us, you’d be doing the universe a favor.”

  On the screen, Filip Inaros sat against the cell wall, his head tilted back and his eyes closed. He was a young man. Or an old child. As Dawes watched, the boy stretched, wrapped his arms around himself, and settled back without looking around once. He couldn’t tell if it was the movement of someone certain that they were untouchable or frightened that they might not be. Dawes could see the resemblance to Marco, but where the father seemed to radiate charm and confidence, the son was all rage and a vulnerability that made Dawes think of abrasions and raw wounds. Under other circumstances, he might have felt sorry for the prisoner.

  “How did it happen?” Dawes asked.

  Shaddid tapped on her hand terminal and threw the data to the screen. A corridor outside a nightclub up nearer the center of spin. A door swung open and three people came out, all Belters. A man and woman, their hands caressing each other like they were already in private, and a second young man. A moment later, the door opened again, and Filip Inaros stepped out. There was no sound, so Dawes didn’t know what Filip had shouted at the retreating figures, only that he had. The single young man turned back, and the couple paused to watch. Filip’s head was back, his chest out. For generations, humanity had been free of the gravity well of the inner planets, but the posturing of young men spoiling for a fight never changed.

  A new figure stepped into the frame. A man in a security uniform, hands lifted in command. Filip turned toward him, shouting. The security man shouted back, pointed to the wall, ordering Filip against it. The couple turned away and pretended not to know anything about it. The young man who’d been coming back to the fight slowly stepped back, not turning away, but willing to let his enemies spend themselves against each other. Filip went terribly still. Dawes had to force himself not to look away.

  The security man reached for his weapon, and a gun appeared in Filip’s hand, the kind of magic flicker that comes of hundreds of hours of practicing a fast draw. And then, as part of the same motion, the muzzle flash.

  “God dammit,” Dawes said.

  “It’s not subtle,” Shaddid said. “He was given a security order. He refused and fired on the agent. If he was anyone else, he’d be feeding mushrooms right now.”

  Dawes pressed his palm to his mouth, rubbing until his lips felt bruised. There had to be something. Some way to walk this back. “How’s your man?”

  There was a pause before Shaddid answered. She knew what he was really asking. “Stabilized.”

  “Not going to die?”

  “Not out of the woods yet either,” she said. And then, “I can’t do my job if people get away with shooting security. I understand there’s diplomacy involved, but with respect, that’s your job. Mine is to keep six million people from killing too many of each other on any given day.”

  My job’s not so different, he thought. This wasn’t the time to say it. “Contact Marco Inaros. He’ll be on the Pella in dock 65-C,” Dawes said. “Tell him to meet me here.”

  At the end of particularly bad days, Dawes would sometimes pour himself a glass of whiskey and sit for a time with his prized possession: a printed volume of Marcus Aurelius that had belonged to his grandmother. The Meditations were the private thoughts of a person with terrible power—an emperor who could order to death anyone he chose, create the law by speaking it, command any woman to his bed. Or any man, if the mood took him. The thin pages were filled with Aurelius’ private struggle to be a good man despite the frustrations of the world. It left Dawes feeling not comforted but consoled. All through human history, being a moral person and not being pulled into the dramatics and misbehavior of others had caused intelligent people grief.

  Dawes had spent decades with that beneath all his personal philosophy. There were bad people everywhere, stupidity and avarice and hubris and pride. And he had to navigate it if there was ever to be hope of a better place for Belters. It wasn’t that things were worse now than they’d been before. Only that they weren’t better.

  Tonight, he suspected, would be a good one for rereading his Aurelius.

  Marco swept into the security station like he owned it. Smiles and laughter, and a sheer animal presence that filled the space. The security agents unconsciously moved to the edges of the room and didn’t meet his gaze. Dawes went out to lead him back to Shaddid’s office and found himself shaking the man’s hand there in front of everyone. He hadn’t meant to do that.

  “This is embarrassing,” Marco said as if he was agreeing with something that had already been said. “I will see that it doesn’t happen again.”

  “Your son could have killed one of my people,” Dawes said.

  Marco sat back in his chair and opened his arms, an expansive gesture that seemed intended to diminish what anyone else could say. “There was a scuffle, and it got out of hand. Dawes, tell me you’ve never had something like it.”

  “I’ve never had something like it,” Dawes said. His voice was cool and hard, and for the first time, Marco’s jovial expression shifted.

  “You aren’t going to make this a problem, are you?” Marco said, his voice sinking low. “We have a lot of work to do. Real work. Word’s come that Earth took out the Azure Dragon. We have to reassess our strategy down sunward.”

  It was the first Dawes had heard of it, and he had the sense that Marco had kept the information private, ready to play it when he wanted a subject changed. Well, he’d find Dawes harder to throw off than that.

  “And we will. But that’s not why I called you here.”

  Shaddid coughed, and Marco turned to scowl at her. When he looked back at Dawes, his expression had changed. His smile was as wide, his expression as open and merry, but something in his eyes made Dawes’ stomach clench.

  “All right,” Marco said. “Bien, coyo mis. Why did you call me here?”

  “Your son can’t be on my station,” Dawes said. “If he stays, I have to put him through a trial. Have to protect him from anyone who might get impatient waiting.” He paused. “Have to follow through the sentence, if there is one.”

  Marco went still, a copy of his son on the assault footage. Dawes made an effort not to swallow.

  “That sounds like a threat, Anderson.”

  “It’s an explanation. It’s why you need to take your boy off my station, and never bring him back to it. I’m doing this as a favor. Anyone else, and things would just take their course.”

  Marco drew in a long, slow breath and let it out between his teeth. “I see.”

  “He shot a security agent. He may have killed him.”

  “We’ve killed a world,” Marco said, waving the words away. But then he seemed to remember something, nodding as much to himself as to Dawes or Shaddid. “But I appreciate your bending the rules for me. And for him. I won’t let this go by. He and I will have a serious conversation.”

  “All right,” Dawes said. “Captain Shaddid will release him to you. If you want to bring some of your people down before she does—”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Marco said. No bodyguards were called for. None of the security force would dare face down Marco Inaros of the Free Navy. And what was worse, Dawes believed Marco was right. “We’ll have a meeting tomorrow. About the Azure Dragon and Earth. Next steps.”

  “Next steps,” Dawes agreed, and stood. “You know this isn’t temporary. Filip can never set foot on Ceres again.”

  Marco’s smile was unexpected and deep. His dark eyes flashed. “
Don’t worry, old friend. If you don’t want him here, he won’t be here. That’s a promise.”

  Chapter Nine: Holden

  The sound reached all the way to the galley: a deep thud, then a pause, then another thud. Each time it came, Holden felt himself flinch a little. Naomi and Alex sat with him, trying to ignore it, but whatever they started a conversation about—the state of the ship, the success of their mission, the question of whether to give in to fate and convert a section of the crew quarters into a brig—it died out under the slow, unending beat.

  “Maybe I should talk to her,” Holden said. “I think I should.”

  “Don’t know why you think that,” Alex said.

  Naomi shrugged, abstaining. Holden took one last bite of his fake lamb, wiped his mouth with the napkin, and dropped everything into the recycler. Part of him hoped that one of them would stop him. They didn’t.

  The Rocinante’s gym showed its age. No two resistance bands were quite the same color, the green-gray mats had white lines where the fabric had worn thin, and the smell of old sweat softened the air. Bobbie had strung a heavy bag on a tight line between the ceiling and the deck. Her exercise outfit was tight and gray and soaked with sweat. Her hair was tied back, and her eyes were locked on the bag as she shifted on the balls of her feet. As Holden stepped into the room, she turned to the left, putting her weight into a roundhouse kick. This close, the thud sounded like something heavy being dropped. The system reported a little under ninety-five kilograms per square centimeter. Bobbie danced back, her focus locked on the bag. She shifted to the right, and kicked with her other leg. The thud was a little softer, but the reading went up by three kilos. She danced back, reset. Her shins were red and raw-looking.