Babylon's Ashes

The shining girls rose in a flock, touching each other’s hands, laughing, kissing each other’s cheeks, and then scattered. Filip watched them walk out with a kind of forlorn lust, and so he saw it when Karal walked in. The old Belter could have been a mech driver or a drive tech or a welder. His hair was white and thinning and cut close to the scalp. His shoulders and hands and cheeks showed a lifetime of scars. He stood for a moment, looked around with an air of not thinking much of what he saw, and then lumbered over toward Filip’s booth and sat across from him like they’d planned to meet there.

“Hoy,” Karal said after an awkward moment.

“He send you?” Filip asked.

“No one send me, aber se savvy I ought to come.”

Filip stirred his noodles. The bowl was hardly half empty, but his appetite was already gone. The slow, rolling anger in his gut seemed to take up all the space that food might want. “No need. Solid as stone, me, and twice as hard.”

It sounded like a boast. Like an accusation. Filip wasn’t even sure what he’d wanted the words to be, but not this. He ground his fork into the mash of noodles and sauce, shoved the bowl to the edge of the table for the server to take away. He kept the stout, though.

“Not throwing signs, me,” Karal said. “But was a time I was your age. Long time, but I remember it. Me y mis papá used to have it out sometimes. He’d get high and I’d get drunk and we’d spend the whole day sometimes yelling at each other about who was the dumbest asshole. Throw punches sometimes. Pulled a knife once, me.” Karal chuckled. “He cracked my ass the other way for that one. All I’m saying, fathers and sons, they fight. But you and yours? It’s different, yeah?”

“If you say,” Filip said.

“Your da? He’s not just your da. Marco Inaros, leader of the Free Navy. Big man, him. So much on his shoulders. So much he’s thinking on, worrying on, planning on, and it’s not like tu y la can scrap it out like the rest of us.”

“That’s not what it is,” Filip said.

“No? Bist bien, then. What’s it?” Karal said, and his voice was soft and warm and gentle.

The anger in Filip’s gut was shifting, unsteady as a scab on an infected wound. The rage and righteousness started to feel less authentic, like a wrap tied around something that wasn’t either. That was something worse. Filip gripped his hands in fists so tight they ached, but he lost his hold. The anger—not even anger, petulance—slid to the side and an oceanic sense of guilt rose up in him like a flood. It was too big, too pure, too painful to even have a single event to focus it.

It wasn’t that he regretted leaving the ship without permission or missing his shots on the Rocinante or killing Earth or wounding Callisto. It was larger than that. Regret was the universe. Guilt was bigger than the sun and the stars and the spaces between them. Whatever it was, all of it, was his fault and his failing. It was more than he’d done something bad. Like the fossil of an ancient animal was flesh that had been replaced by stone, whoever Filip had been once had kept his shape but been replaced by a raw and rising sense of loss.

“I feel…wrong?” Filip said, scrabbling for words to describe something so much bigger than language. “I feel… I feel like—”

“Fuck,” Karal said, breathy and sharp. His eyes were fixed behind Filip. Caught by something on the newsfeed. Filip turned, craning to see the screen. Fred Johnson looked out from the wall, dark-eyed, calm, somber. A red banner beneath him read, Confirmed Dead After Free Navy Attack. When he turned back, Karal had already pulled out his hand terminal and was shifting through newsfeeds as quickly as his crooked fingers could manage. Filip waited, then took his own terminal out. It wasn’t hard to find. It was all over the feeds—Belt and inner planets both. Sources from Tycho Manufacturing Collective on Earth were confirming the death of Frederick Lucius Johnson, formerly of UN Navy and longtime political activist, community organizer, and spokesman of the Outer Planets Alliance. He’d died as a result of injuries sustained during an ambush by forces of the Free Navy…

Filip read it all, aware that there was something to it he wasn’t understanding. It was only a wash of words and images, disconnected from his life, until Karal, across the table from him and grinning, spoke.

“Gratulacje, Filipito. Guess you got him after all.”

Back on the Pella, music was playing over the ship system. A bright mix of steel drum and guitar and men’s ululating voices raised together in celebration. Sárta, one of the first to see Filip when he came down the corridor from the airlock, scooped him up in her arms, pressing his cheek against hers and leaving him uncomfortably aware of her breasts. When she kissed him—briefly, but on the lips—she tasted of cheap mint liquor.