Babylon's Ashes

When the Minsky came to Ceres, the Connaught at its side, Filip had been sure that the moment had arrived. Pa was there, the consolidated fleet watching her inch toward them like a cat hauling a dead mouse home as a love gift. Filip felt it in his blood—the coming violence. The grand and gaudy proof that the Free Navy was stronger than its enemies. He hadn’t been the only one either. It was like all the crew of the Pella—Josie and Karal and Bastien and Jún—everyone had taken a breath at the same time, steeled themselves for the burn and the battle.

Everyone but Marco.

He’d stayed just the same, watching the datafeeds from his crash couch on the command deck. The attack from Ceres, the Rocinante’s defense of the Connaught. All of it seemed to wash over Marco like it was nothing. He captured images of the ship transfer. When he recorded his denouncement of Pa and revealed her as a stooge of the inners, he seemed to wake up for a moment, but only while the recording was going on. As soon as the camera shut off, he seemed to fall back into himself. Filip took comfort that this wasn’t the same torpor and indifference that had haunted the Pella after leaving Ceres the first time. Marco watched like a predator in cover, the Pella drifting in its orbit around the distant sun like it was locked to Ceres Station.

Several days after the Connaught’s departure, Filip dreamed of Earth—only it wasn’t Earth. It was a massive spaceship, layer upon layer of scaffold, reaching down forever. A great fire burned at its core, and Filip was lost in it, trying to find something. Something precious that he’d had and lost or else that had been hidden from him. Also, he was being chased. Sought by something so that he switched from being hunter to prey and back to hunter.

In the dream, he was floating down a long corridor. Purely ballistic. The handholds and footholds skated by on all sides, just beyond his reach. There was a strong smell—mineral and heat. The exposed iron core of the Earth. Its burning heart. And there was something at the end of the passage. Something waiting. His mother and an army of the dead who he’d killed. The rapping of their bone fingers on the deck was a threat and a promise. Filip woke with a shout, grabbing at the straps of his crash couch like they were trying to strangle him.

Then the rapping of fingers came again, and the door of his cabin slipped open. Karal floated in the corridor, his eyes an image of concern. And maybe excitement.

“Hoy, Filipito,” he said. “Bist bien?”

“Fine,” Filip said. What time was it? He felt like he’d woken in the middle of a cycle, but he couldn’t be sure. He’d been sleeping so much lately, it was easy for him to lose track. So long as there was nothing to do but wait, it hardly mattered how the hours passed. But sleeping too long was much like sleeping too little. It left him confused and tired.

“Marco wants you. Command deck, yeah?”

Filip nodded with his left hand while he unstrapped with his right. “Con que?” he said. “Something happened?”

Karal’s look of concern eroded into a bestial grin. “Dui,” he said. “But let Marco show you, yeah?”

Pulling himself along the lift tube, Filip’s heart tapped against his chest. The sense of the dream wasn’t quite gone, bleeding into the solid ship under his hands. Excitement and dread wore each other’s clothes, spoke in the same voice. When he reached the command deck, the lighting was set for battle, and the crash couches were crewed: Sárta strapping herself down, Wings already in place. Bastien’s voice echoed from the cockpit, and the anticipation of thrust made Filip think it was above them. The words were clipped and terse. The air seemed cleaner, as if Filip could see everything for the first time.

Marco reached out and spun his own couch on its gimbals to face him. The light from the screen threw shadows across his father’s eyes. Filip saluted, and Marco spread his hands.

“The hour has now arrived, Filip,” Marco said. “All of our patience and sacrifice have brought us here to this one, perfect moment.” Times like this, he sounded almost like an Earther. Filip nodded, his heart beating faster. He didn’t know whether to keep looking at Marco or if it would be all right to turn to the screens. Marco laughed, and pulled Filip close. He gestured to the tactical readout. A dot of light.

If he looked outside the ship, on float with merely human eyes or through the cameras that took in the same spectrum, the star field would have overwhelmed the glimmer from the ship. Even Ceres would have been little more than a bit of darkness where the starlight was blotted out. On the screen, the critical light was brighter, its path sketched in. Filip glanced at Marco for permission, received it in a nod, and then drew back the scale until the full arc of the little ship’s pathway was clear.

A single ship, burning hard from Ceres to Tycho.

“Fred Johnson,” Filip said.