Nemesis Games

“You didn’t grow up down a well. You know how little the inners cared about us. The Chesed. Anderson Station. The Cielo mine fire. Belter lives don’t mean shit to inners. Never have. You know that.”

“They’re not all like that.”

“Some that pretend they aren’t, yeah?” The accents of the Belt slipped into his voice. And a rattling anger with them. “But they can still go down the wells. There’re a thousand new worlds, and billions of inners who can just step onto them. No training, no rehab, no drugs. You know how many Belters can tolerate a full g? Give them everything, all the medical care, the exoskeleton support mechs, nursing homes? Two-thirds. Two-thirds of us could go be cripples on these brave néo worlds, if the inners pulled together and threw all their money at it. You think that’s going to happen? Never has before. Last year, three pharmaceutical plants stopped even making their low-end bone density cocktails. Didn’t open the patents. Didn’t apologize to any ships don’t have budget for the high-end stuff. Just stopped. Needed the capacity for colony ships and all the new ganga they’re making with the data coming back from the rings.

“We’re leftovers, Naomi. You and me and Karal and Cyn. Tia Margolis. Filip. They’re moving on, and they’re forgetting us because they can. They write the histories, you know what we’ll be? A paragraph about how much it sucks when a race of people go obsolete, and how it would have been more humane to put us down.

“Come. Tell me I’m wrong.”

It was the same ranting he’d done before, but perfected by years. A new variation of the same arguments he’d made on Ceres. She half expected him to say The Gamarra had it coming. This is war, and anyone who helps choke out the enemy is a soldier whether they know it or not. Her gut felt like it was made from water. It was a feeling she remembered from the dark times. Something in the back of her head shifted. The serpent of learned helplessness long asleep starting to wake. She pretended it wasn’t there, in hopes that if she denied it enough, it wouldn’t exist.

“What’s it got to do with me?” Naomi asked, less forcefully than she intended.

Marco smiled. When he spoke, it was back in the voice of the cultured leader. The rough-cut Belter thug vanished behind his mask. “You’re one of us. Estranged, yes, but one of us all the same. You’re the mother of my son. I didn’t want you in harm’s way.”

She was supposed to ask what that meant. The path was laid out before her in lights. What do you mean, harm’s way? she’d say, and he’d tell her. Watch her eyes go wide. See the fear in her.

Fuck that.

“Didn’t want me,” she said. “Wanted the Rocinante, only that didn’t work out. Was it the ship? Or was it Holden? You can tell me. Did you want to show off in front of my new boyfriend? Because that would be kind of sad.”

She felt her breath coming fast, adrenaline pumping through her. Marco’s expression hardened, but before he could speak, the comms chimed and a voice she didn’t recognize echoed on the deck.

“Hast contact,” the woman said.

“Que?”

“Little one. Pinnace out from Mars. Talking to the Andreas Hofer.”

“Scout ship?” Marco snapped.

The pause stretched for seconds. Then, “Looks like just some pinché asshole wrong-placing it. Seen one, seen the whole strike force, though, yeah?”

“How long before the trigger impact?”

“Twenty-seven minutes.” There had been no hesitation. Whoever was on the other end of the comms had known the question was coming. Marco scowled at the control panel.

“Couldn’t have waited a little longer. Would have been prettier without. But fine. Take out the pinnace.”

“Toda?”

Marco looked over at Naomi, his dark eyes on her. A smile touched his lips. Theatrical asshole that he was.

“No. No es toda. Launch the assault on the Martian prime minister’s ship too. And tell the hunt group to get ready, so that when the duster runs, we can take him down.”

“Sabez,” the woman said. “Orders out.”

Marco waited, hand out like a challenge. “This is the way,” he said. “Make it so they can’t forget us. Take chains they fashioned to bind us and use them as whips. We won’t go down to darkness. They’ll respect us now.”

“And do what? Shut down the Ring?” Naomi said. “Start making your cheap bone drugs again? What do you think shooting a Martian politician’s going to do for ‘our people’? How does that help anybody?”

Marco didn’t laugh, but he softened. She had the sense that she’d said something stupid, and it had pleased him. Despite it all, she felt a twinge of embarrassment.

“I’m sorry, Naomi. We’re going to have to take this up later. But I really am glad you’ve come back. I know there’s a lot of harsh between us, and that we don’t see the world the same way. But you’ll always be the mother of my son, and I will always love you for that.”