Babylon's Ashes

He’d never been to Callisto before his raid. Never seen it before he called the strikes down. He didn’t know what it had looked like before, and he could still tell that the surviving half showed the scars. Walking past the dock and into the commercial district, Filip could pick out which walls had been replaced. Here and there, a run of decking had a slightly off color, the sealant not as aged as the runs around it. Little scars. He might not even have noticed if he hadn’t known to look.

It had been justified, though. It had been to get the radar-eating paint from the Dusters so that the rocks they threw at Earth would be hard to see. It had been part of the war. And anyway, he hadn’t tried to hurt them. It was only they were right beside the enemy. Their fault. Not his.

Voices wove a rich and shifting murmur through the wide, tall main hall. A cart blatted for people to clear its path. Work crews in gray jumpsuits wore Free Navy armbands and split-circle OPA tattoos on their wrists. The air smelled of urine and cold. Filip found a place against one wall, set his shoulders against it, and watched like he was waiting for something. Someone to see him, stop, and point an accusing finger. You were the one who tried to kill the yards! You were the one who cracked our seals! Do you know how many of us died?

He waited for something to happen, but no one took any notice of him one way or the other. He was no one to them. A kid with his back against the wall.

The bar he ended up in was at the far end of the shipyard complex, close to the tunnels down to the deeper-level neighborhoods and the fast transit to the Jovian observatory on the far side of the moon. It wasn’t only yard hands at the pressed-polymer tables. There were girls his own age in bright clothes come up from the residential levels below. Older people in academic-looking rumple hunched over their hand terminals and their beers. He’d known vaguely that there was a good upper university somewhere on Callisto, something associated with the technical institutes on Mars. Somehow never put it together in his mind with the place he’d been set to raid.

He sat apart, at a bright-pink table with a bowl of living grass as a centerpiece. From there he could watch the oversized wall screens with their scroll of newsfeeds muttering to themselves like angry drunks or else look over the finch-bright girls talking to one another and managing to never glance his way. He ordered black noodles in peanut sauce and a stout from the table display and paid with Free Navy scrip. For a long moment, he thought the table might refuse payment—if it said his money was bad, that would be when the girls looked over at him—but it chimed pleasantly, accepting, and threw up a countdown timer to when his order should come. Twelve minutes. So for twelve minutes, he watched the feeds.

The Earth still dominated, even in its suffering. Images of devastation mixed with earnest-looking newsreaders staring into the camera or else interviewing other people, sometimes earnest as sycophants, sometimes yelling like the other coyo’d been fucking their sweethearts. The bright girls ignored the screen, but Filip’s eye kept wandering back to it: a street covered in ashes so deep the woman cleaning it had a scarred snow shovel; an emaciated black bear lurching one direction and then another in distress and confusion; some official of the half-dead Earth government surveying a stadium filled with body bags. The beer and noodles came, and he started eating without quite noticing that he had. He watched the march of images, chewed, swallowed, drank. It was like his body was a ship, and all his crew were about their work but not talking to each other.

The pride in the devastation was still there. Those dead were because of him. The ash-drowned cities, the blackened lakes and oceans, the skyscraper burning like a torch because not enough infrastructure still existed to extinguish it. These were the temples and battlements of his people’s enemy, fallen into dust and ruin, and thanks to him. The raid he’d done here, at this yard, had let it happen.

And now here he was with the end and the beginning, one seen through the other like two sheets of plastic laid one on the other. Like time pressed flat. Still a victory and still his, but maybe there was a little aftertaste now, trailing just after like milk on the edge of sour.

Say it like a man. Say I fucked it up. Only he hadn’t. It hadn’t been his mistake.