Babylon's Ashes

Salis had friends in communication. Bragged about them all the time, how he knew what was going on with Duarte and Inaros, what kinds of barks and whines were floating through the rings. Someone was coordinating an attack on Medina, wouldn’t they be in communications? Have to be, ne? And Roberts talking about Callisto and proxy wars. How Duarte’s people were maybe using them against Earth and Mars, about how much she hated being caught between the powers like that. She’d been the first one Vandercaust knew to squint hard at the advisors from Laconia setting up defenses on the alien station where rail gun housings were. Possible that she’d work with the colonies if it meant shrugging off Laconia and keeping Medina independent. And hadn’t Jakulski been at the greeting when the advisors came? He said it had been as a favor to one of the other supervisors, but what if he’d been engineering a chance to put eyes on the enemy?

Thousands of people on Medina, living and working. All of them Belters, more or less. Most of them OPA before and Free Navy now. But there were some that hadn’t known what was coming. Maybe some with family still on Earth, dying under the rockfalls. He didn’t know anything about Jakulski’s mother, Salis’ siblings, Roberts’ old lovers. Any of them could just be acting like Free Navy because it was asking for hell to be anything else.

The boy cocked his head, sucked at the focus drugs. Vandercaust laced his fingers together and forced out a little laugh. “Easy to see how a coyo could get paranoid.”

“Why don’t we go over this from the start?” the boy said.

It went on for hours, it felt like. No hand terminal. No screens that he could see. All Vandercaust had to judge by was the animal rhythms of his body. How long it was before he got thirsty again. Hungry. When he started feeling sleepy. When he needed to visit the head. He walked the boy through his whole night before the attack. Where he’d been. Who else had been there. What he’d drunk. How he’d gotten back to his quarters. Over and over, pushing at anything he said a little different from another time, pushing him to remember things he didn’t really remember and then coming at him when he got some detail wrong. The boy asked about Roberts, Salis, Jakulski. He asked about who else Vandercaust knew on Medina. Who he knew on the Sol side of the ring. What he knew about Michio Pa and Susanna Foyle and Ezio Rodriguez. When he’d been at Tycho Station. At Ceres. At Rhea. At Ganymede.

They showed him images of the attacks. The ships emerging through the gates all around the great sphere of gates. He watched them die as tactical images. As telescopic records of real people, really dying. Then they talked more, and showed it all to him again. He had a sense that the readouts were subtly different the second time out—another attempt to catch him out on something—but he couldn’t say what the changes were.

It was exhausting. It was meant to be exhausting. After a while, he stopped trying to keep his answers safe. He’d known enough about interrogation to see that this—wearying and harsh and dull though it was—was on the gentler end of that spectrum. He had no reason to protect his friends beyond the vague tribalism of being on a workgroup with them. If they were innocent, the truth would have to be armor enough. For them, and for him too.

They took him back to his cell. No beating this time. Just a hard shove through the door that left him sprawling and knocked his cheek against the wall hard enough to split it. He slept for a while, woke in darkness, slept again. The second time he woke, there was a bowl of beans and mushrooms congealing beside the door. He ate them anyway. No way to know how long he’d be there. How long it would all go on. Whether it would get worse.

When the door opened again, five people in Free Navy uniforms came in. The brown-eyed boy wasn’t among them, and for a moment, that made Vandercaust very nervous. Like looking for a friend and not finding them. The leader of the new group was laughing with one of her subordinates, checked her hand terminal by holding it up beside his face without paying much attention to him, tapped her screen.

“You should go, pampaw,” she said, walking out. “Late for your shift, you.”

They left the door open behind them, and after a moment, Vandercaust walked out of the cell, out of the security station, into the wide corridors of the drum. His body felt like a rag used for too long. He was certain that he smelled like sick primate and old sweat. The guard had been right. It was almost time for his shift, but he still went back to his hole, showered, shaved, changed into new clothes. He spent a few long minutes admiring the bruises on his face and sides. On a younger man, they could have been badges of endurance. On him, they just looked like an old man who’d caught the toes of a few too many boots. So he was late. He had reason to be. Little rebel, him.