Babylon's Ashes

His own crew was there too. Men and women he’d been shipping with since before it all began. Aaman. Miral. Wings. Karal. Josie. They were looking away as much as the others. Only about half of them were wearing their Free Navy uniforms. Koto and Pella both had dropped back to the simple functional clothes that any crew might wear, and some of the ones still in uniform had rolled up their sleeves or left their collars open. Filip felt his own uniform, crisp and fresh and done to the neck, and for the first time he felt a little foolish in it. Like a kid dressed in his father’s clothes as a costume.

The murmur of conversation was a wall that excluded him. He hesitated. He could just take the bowl back to his quarters. It wasn’t really that they were keeping him apart. It was only that they were so crowded now, and stung from having lost a fight. He took a step toward the corridor, intending to go. Meaning to. And then stopping and looking back in case there was some slot, some corner of bench, that he’d overlooked. Some place for him.

He caught Miral’s eye. The older man nodded, and—Filip thought with a sigh—shifted to open a little room beside him. Filip didn’t run there like a little boy, but he went quickly, worried that the gap might close again before he reached it.

Karal was sitting across from Miral, and all of them sandwiched by unfamiliar bodies. A woman with dark skin and a scar across her upper lip. A thin man with a tattoo on his neck. An older woman—white, close-cropped hair and a crooked, unfriendly smile. Karal was the only one of them to acknowledge Filip, and that only with a grunt and a nod.

When the older woman spoke, it seemed like she was picking up the thread of a conversation that had been going on before Filip had taken his seat, but with a studied casualness of someone with an agenda. “Con mis coyo on the Shinsakuto, the Ceres fleet’s there forever. Earth away from Earth.”

“Forever’s a long time,” Miral said, considering the table like he was reading it. “Can think we know what a year, two years, three years down looks like, aber that’s only shit and guessing.”

“Can’t see the future,” the woman said. “Can see what’s there now, though, que no?”

Filip took a mouthful of too-salty noodles. He’d waited too long to start eating, and they were more than halfway to paste. The older woman grinned like she’d won a point, leaned in, put her elbows on the table so the split-circle tattoo of the OPA on her wrist showed. Almost like she was displaying it.

“All I’m saying is maybe time we start winning something, yeah? Ceres. Enceladus. Seems like las sola cocks we kick anymore are Michio Pa’s, and not so much hers even.”

“We beat Earth,” Filip said. He’d meant it to seem like an offhand comment. Something thrown into the conversation almost at random. Instead, he sounded shrill and defensive, even to himself. The words lay there on the table like something broken past fixing. The older woman’s smile was thin and nasty. Or maybe he only thought it was. One way or the other, she leaned back, took her elbows off the table. When she stood, when she walked away, it was with the air of having made her point, whatever it had been.

Karal coughed, shook his head. “No te preoccupes, Filipito,” he said.

“Why would I worry?” Filip asked around another bite of the noodles.

Karal made a circling motion with his hand. All this and everyone. “After a fight it’s the story about the fight, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Filip said. “Bist bien. I understand.”

Miral and Karal glanced at each other, and he pretended not to notice. The other crew from the Koto kept their silences to themselves. “Hoy, coyo,” Miral said, touching Filip’s shoulder. “Finish that and come help me with some repair work, yeah? Still tracking down some ganga between the hulls.”

Filip pushed the bowl away with his fingertips. “This is done already,” he said. “Let’s go, us.”

The strike that had crippled the Pella hadn’t been one thing, but a tight cluster of PDC rounds. If they’d hit straight on, it would have been better. The top of the ship above the cockpit and command deck was angled and reinforced against exactly that kind of impact. Maybe it would have peeled back a section of the hull and made a hell of a bang, but kept the guts of the ship safe. The way it had happened—the rounds raking down the side of the ship in a stream—was worse. The housings of the Pella’s maneuvering thrusters and PDC cannons, sensor arrays and external antennas had suffered. It was like someone had taken a scraper along all the exposed parts of the ship and taken off whatever could be removed. The damage had left a blind spot in their PDC coverage, but the torpedo that came through it had malfunctioned. If it had detonated, it could have cracked the ship in two, and the old bitch from the galley would have had to hope for the mercy of the inners to keep her leathery ass from drowning in her own waste air.