Babylon's Ashes

Fixing your ship was what it meant to be a Belter. Earthers lived lives eating off the government dole and fucking each other into torpor by exploiting the Belt. Dusters sacrificed themselves and anyone else they could get their hands on for the dream of making Mars into a new Earth, even while they hated the old one. And Belters? They fixed their ships. They mined the asteroids and moons of the system. They made every scrap go longer than it was designed to. They used their cleverness and resourcefulness and reliance on each other to thrive in the vacuum like a handful of flowers blooming in an unimaginably vast desert. Putting hand to the Pella was as natural and proper as breathing in after breathing out.

Filip hated that he didn’t want to do it.

In the first days, it was simple on-the-float work. Even then, he felt the eyes of the others on him, heard their conversations go quiet when he came in earshot. Josie and Sárta welding in the space between the hulls had said something about the dangers of nepotism, not knowing he was on the frequency, and then pretended they hadn’t when he showed up. In the galley, newsfeeds from the crippled Earth were his best companions. His father didn’t call for him or restrict his duties. Either would have been better than this nameless limbo. If he’d been cast down, he could at least have taken some pride in having been wronged. Instead, he woke for his shift, went to help with the repairs, and wished that he could be someplace else.

It was only when it came clear that the dead thruster was going to need a new housing that they burned for a shipyard. In other lives, they’d have tried for Ceres or Tycho, but the second-string yards were still decent. Rhea. Pallas. Vesta. They didn’t use any of those. When his father’s order came down, it was for Callisto.

A new escort came, guns bared, to keep the Pella safe from the torpedoes and attack ships of the enemy. But while Earth and Mars and Fred Johnson’s OPA probably had their eyes on the Pella, they didn’t let themselves be pulled out from their bases and fleets. They were a prize, but not one worth risking for.

Lying in his crash couch, watching feeds of neo-taarab bands from Europa and half a dozen bad sex comedies because Sylvie Kai had roles in them, Filip fantasized that there would be an attack. Maybe a little fleet led by the Rocinante. James fucking Holden and Filip’s own traitorous whore of a mother in command, screaming out after him with their rail gun and torpedoes. Sometimes the fantasy ended with someone else getting the Pella beat up even worse and everyone seeing how hard it was to win that fight. Sometimes it ended with them killing the Rocinante, blowing it into glowing gas and shards of metal. Sometimes he imagined that they’d lose and die. And the twin points of light in that last and darkest daydream fit together like a clamp bolt in its housing: It would be an end to working on the ship, and also they would never reach Callisto.

The surviving shipyard on Callisto stood on the side permanently locked facing away from Jupiter. Its floodlights cast long, permanent shadows across the moon’s landscape and the ruins of its sister yard, a Martian base shattered years ago. Shattered in one of the first actions by the Free Navy. In Filip’s first command. The dust and fines stirred up by the actions of human commerce fell slowly on Callisto, giving an illusion of mist where there was no free water and only the most tenuous atmosphere to carry it. He watched the scattering of floodlights on the moon’s surface grow larger as they came in, white and bright and random like a handful of the star field had been grabbed and mashed into the dirt. When the Pella tipped down into a repair berth, the sound of the clamps coming into place was deep as a punch. Filip unstrapped and made his way to the airlock as soon as he could.

Josie was there—long, graying hair pulled back from his narrow, yellow-toothed face. Josie who’d been on the Callisto raid with him. Who’d been under Filip’s command. He lifted his eyebrows as Filip started to cycle the lock.

“Not wearing tués uniform,” Josie said, only the smallest sneer in his voice.

“Not on duty.”

“Hast shore leave, tu?”

“No one said no,” Filip said, hating how petulant his voice sounded in his own ears. Josie’s gaze hardened, but he only turned away. The pressures went equal, or nearly so. When the Pella’s outer doors slid open, there was still a little pop. Enough to make Filip feel the change from one place to another, but not so much that his ears hurt from it. A security detail waited on dock wearing light armor with raw places on the shoulder and breast where the indistinct outline of the Pinkwater logo could still be seen like a shadow. He nodded to them with his hands and walked forward, half afraid they’d call him to stop and half hoping for it.