Babylon's Ashes

The docks of Ceres Station ran, roughly speaking, along its equator in a wide belt of titanium and ceramic and steel. The dwarf planet’s movement made docking difficult, but once the clamps took hold, ships had the advantage of the 0.3g of spin gravity even with the drive off and cold. And with the radius of spin as big as it was, the Coriolis should have been negligible. The Pella should have felt like it was under a moderate burn and nothing more, but something kept bothering Filip. A sense that the ship was wrong, or that he was.

Twice, he snuck into the medical bay and had diagnostics run, then deleted the results after he read them. They didn’t show anything anyway. But maybe he was just so used to life under thrust that the trace of sideways impulse was enough to unsettle him. Or maybe it was only that the ship was empty except for him. A small, gnawing part of his mind kept suggesting it had something to do with the man he’d shot, but that didn’t make any sense. Along with his father, he’d killed billions. Shooting one man—one that didn’t even die—was nothing to him. It had to be the Coriolis.

His father had made it very clear that Filip’s universe stopped at the airlock. The Pella and everything in it was his the same as it always was, but Ceres Station was worse than vacuum. Fair or unfair, Filip was banned from the station for life. It was the deal Marco had struck with the OPA governor, Dawes. The others would be an active part of the evacuation, but Filip could only watch. And so he walked the corridors, went up and down the lift, slept, ate, exercised, and waited while just on the other side of the airlock, all the people he knew best stripped Ceres Station to the studs. He’d have been part of the effort if he could. Maybe that was all it was. Maybe it was just the fact that he’d been left behind and relaxing while the others did the work didn’t sit well with him. That seemed more likely than Coriolis. Or the man he’d shot.

The truth was, he didn’t remember much of the event. He’d been out with maybe a dozen Free Navy and some local fringe and hangers-on. According to the old laws he was still too young to be in the bars and brothels, but he was Filip Inaros and no one had suggested he leave. There had been music. He’d danced with a local girl, admired her tattoos, bought her drinks. And he’d kept up with her too, drink for drink. She’d liked him, he could tell. And if the music had been too loud for them to talk, that didn’t matter. He could tell.

Her interest hadn’t been about him so much as about the story of who he was. The son of Marco Inaros. Karal had warned him. Marco had warned him. Some people would be attracted to what they thought he was. He had to be careful always to remember who his family was. Not let himself be baited or seduced. The Free Navy had the power now, but there were still people on Ceres who were more than half loyal to the old ways.

Our enemies, at least you know where they stand, his father had said when they arrived at Ceres. There’s nothing you can trust less than half-Belters. Marco hadn’t said it straight out, but he’d meant Filip’s mother and all the people like her. Belters who’d let themselves be turned away from the Belt and the condescending Fred Johnson Earthers who pretended to care about them. Moderate OPA was just another way to say traitor. So Filip had known not to trust the girl, even while he was drinking with her. Drinking too much with her. When she’d left without telling him, he’d felt humiliated and angry. And then something had happened, he couldn’t quite put together, and he’d been carted off by Ceres security and his father called. Which had been humiliating again.

They hadn’t talked, not really. Marco had ordered him to stay on ship, so on ship he’d stayed. Maybe they’d never speak of it again. Maybe that conversation was still coming. Maybe not knowing which was what left him feeling wrong. He didn’t know. He hated that he didn’t know.

He sat in the gunner’s station, the screen slaved to his terminal, and sampled the feeds. A man posting under an old-style OPA banner shouting about how the Free Navy was the last, best hope for Belter liberty. A thin-faced coyo sitting too close to his camera talking in halting Farsi about the implications of the biologicals supplied by Earth being cut off. Some high-end pornography in what looked like a water treatment plant and a hotel lobby. An old Sabbu Re movie series, pairing him against Sanjit Sangre back when Sangre had still looked like a badass. Noise. It was all just noise and images, and Filip let them wash over him without noticing what he was taking in. An impressionistic sense of violence and victory, with him and his father at the head of it all. Arousal and anger paired with all the complexity of an old way of life passing into darkness.