Babylon's Ashes

He made a sharp Free Navy salute. The one he’d come up with. The screen went blank. The mix of confusion and distress and relief that flooded Michio’s gut wasn’t easy to make sense of. Having her mission change like that, so quickly and with so little explanation, left her on the wrong foot. And going into a meeting of the inner circle still had a little of the sense of danger that it had before the Free Navy had announced itself. Years of moving in shadows left habits of thought and feeling that were hard to step out of, even if they’d won. But at least they’d be back in the plane of the ecliptic, and not high up in the black, where ominous things happened. Bad things.

Things, a small, still voice in her head said, like being called to an unexpected meeting.

“Two weeks?” Michio asked.

“Possible,” Busch answered almost before the question was out. She’d already run the plan. “But it’ll mean burning hard. And no waiting for the Hornblower.”

“Carmondy won’t like that,” Pa said.

“What’s he going to say?” Oksana said. “It’s himself giving the order.”

“It is,” Michio agreed.

Evans cleared his throat. “So we’re going?”

Michio held up a fist. Yes. “It’s Inaros,” she said, ending the coming argument by invoking his name.

“Well. Bien,” Evans said, but the tone of his voice said something different.

“Something?” Pa asked.

“Just isn’t the first time plans changed,” Evans said, his face wrinkled with worry. He wasn’t as pretty that way, but he was her newest husband, so she didn’t point it out. Pretty men could be so fragile.

“Continue,” she said instead.

“Well, there was the money thing with Sanjrani. And the Martian prime minister wound up making it safe to Luna when half the Free Navy was trying to take him out. And I hear we tried to kill Fred Johnson and James Holden both, and both still breathing and walking free. Leaves me wondering.”

“Like maybe Marco isn’t as infallible as he plays?” Michio asked.

For a moment, he didn’t answer. She thought he might not. “Something like,” Evans finally said. “But even thinking like that feels like it might get sticky, no?”

“Something like,” Michio agreed.

Chapter Two: Filip

There was no one he hated more than James Holden. Holden, the peacemaker who’d never made peace. Holden, the champion of justice who’d never sacrificed anything for justice. James Holden, who crewed up with Martians and Belters—with one Belter—and moved through the system as if it made him better than everyone else. Neutral and above the fray while the inner planets shoved humanity’s resources out to the thirteen hundred–odd new planets and left the Belters to die. Who, against all odds, hadn’t died with the Chetzemoka.

Fred Johnson, the Earther who’d gone native and started speaking for the Belt, was a close second. The Butcher of Anderson Station, who’d made his career by slaughtering innocent Belters and continued it by patronizing them all into an arc that led toward their cultural and individual deaths. For that he deserved hatred and disdain. But Filip’s mother hadn’t died directly because of Johnson, and so Holden—James pinché Holden—owned first prize.

It was months since Filip had beaten his hands against the inner door of the airlock while his mother, her mind twisted by too much time in Holden’s cultlike presence, had spaced herself and Cyn along with her. Stupid deaths. Needless. That, he told himself, was why it hurt so much. That she hadn’t needed to die, and she’d chosen it anyway. He’d broken his hand trying to get her to stop, but it hadn’t helped anything. Naomi Nagata had picked a bad death in the void over a life with her true people. It was proof of how much power Holden had had over her. How deeply she’d been brainwashed, and how weak her mind had been from the start.

He didn’t tell anyone on the Pella that he still dreamed about it every night: the closed door, the certainty that something precious—something important—was on the other side of it, and the sense of vicious loss that he couldn’t make the door open. If they knew how much it haunted him, he’d seem weak, and his father didn’t have room for men who couldn’t do their part. Not even his own son. Filip took his place as a Belter and a man of the Free Navy or he found a place on a station and stayed there as a boy. He was nearly seventeen now; he’d helped to destroy the oppressors on Earth. His childhood belonged in his past.