“Bist bien,” Wings said. “Jeszcze seconds more.”
The older man staggered a little as he stepped into the gym. His hair was swept up at the sides as it always was, but with a little less crispness than usual. His real name was Alex, but someone had started calling him Wings because of that hairstyle, and his eyes were bloodshot pink, and his gait was a little too relaxed and unsteady. He had a crumpled purple bag under his arm.
“Filipito!” he said, lumbering over. “Bila a ti, I was.”
“And now found me,” Filip said. “So geht gut, yeah?”
“Yeah yeah yeah,” Wings said, not hearing the bite in Filip’s words. The older man lowered himself to the deck, and watched blearily as Filip pulled against the bands and trembled with the effort. “Done. Alles complét. Everyone coming home to… to roost. Or… not roost. Fly, sa sa? We’re flying out into the big, big empty.”
“Good,” Filip said. He made the last pull of the set, holding the tension long and hard until his arms shook and burned and failed. The bands snapped back a few centimeters, then slowed and retracted. Filip squeezed his fists. Wings held out the bag.
“Yours,” he said.
Filip looked at the bag, then at Wings who shook it at him in a take it gesture. It looked like plastic, but it felt and folded like paper in Filip’s hands. Whatever was inside it shifted, limp and heavy as a dead animal.
“No point leaving anything for the pinché inners,” Wings said. “Confiscations all over the station. Anything they didn’t bolt down and half of what they did. Only since tu es lá, I think for you. Yeah?”
He opened the flap. Something dark and textured, regular and irregular at the same time. He pulled the bag free and unfolded the heavy material. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever seen before. He unfolded it.
“A… vest?” Filip said.
“For you,” Wings said. “Leather, that. Alligát. Real too. From Earth. Took it from a high-end shop by the governor’s quarters. Very rich. Only the best for you, yeah?”
Filip gave into the temptation to smell the thing, putting the dead animal’s cured scales against his nose and breathing in. There was something subtle and beautiful about the leather—not sweet and not sour, but rich and low and deep. He put it on, settling the weight across his sweat-damp shoulders. Wings clapped his hands in glee.
“You know how much esá cost?” Wings said. “More scrip than you or me would see in five years. For that. Just that. Would be some pinché Inner strutting around the Belt wearing it just to show how he could and we couldn’t, yeah? But we’re Free Navy now. No one better than. None.”
Filip felt the smile on his lips, tentative as a breeze. He imagined himself in the bar now, wearing his leather vest like the richest of the rich from before. Wings was right. This was the kind of thing that no Belter could have had. A symbol of everything that Earth used to remind them that they were less. Small. Not worth. Only who had it now?
“Aituma,” Filip said.
“Welcome. You’re welcome,” Wings said, waving Filip’s gratitude away. “The thing for you, the pleasure for me. Good trade à alles.”
“How much was it a reál?” Filip asked, part to let Wings brag, part so he could brag himself later. Only Wings had lain back on the deck, his arm over his eyes.
The man shrugged. “Nothing. Everything. For for? Shop’s closed. Not like there’s going to be another shipment of them, yeah? Esá es the last leather vest out of Earth. End point.”
The Free Navy left Ceres Station like spores shed by a fungal body. Drive plumes lit and flared and blinked out again like images Filip had seen of fireflies on Earth. If there were still any fireflies on Earth.
And while each Free Navy ship carried a few civilians away toward safety, theirs were far from the only ships leaving. As soon as Marco had made his intentions clear, a wave of civilian refugees had made themselves ready. Rock hoppers and prospectors and shitty half-legal transport ships all filled to the bulkheads with people desperate to get out of the great city of the Belt before it fell back into the hands of Earth and Mars. And in the midst of it all, the great spinning plume of water and ice as the reservoirs vented. The water reserves spun out from the station, briefly echoing the arms of the galaxy and then stopped, thinned, and spread out into the vast darkness of the Belt. Ice lost among the steady brightness of stars.
The docks, they left in ruins. The reactors, powered down, then either sabotaged or stripped. The power grid and tube systems dismantled. The defense grids stood quiet, their magazines open and empty. Transmitter and sensor arrays were salvaged for parts, then melted to slag. The medical centers had been raided and emptied, leaving only enough to treat the patients already in their care. Taking those supplies, Marco said, would have been cruel.
Of the six million people on Ceres, maybe a million and a half would escape before the enemy arrived. The ones that remained would be in a shell of stone and titanium hardly more capable of sustaining life than the original asteroid had been.
If Earth hunkered down and rebuilt, it would take them years to get back to where Ceres had been, pinning them to the station like insects against a board. If Earth chased and attacked the Free Navy, they would be firing on ships carrying refugees. If they abandoned the station, millions of Belters would die under their care and push anyone still sympathetic to the old ways toward the new. Anything they did would be a victory for the Free Navy. They couldn’t win. That was Marco’s genius.
On the Pella, things fell quickly back into their old patterns of duty, but Filip saw differences now. Ways that Ceres Station had changed them. For one thing, the liquor was better. Jamil had his whole cabin stacked with bottles in polished boxes carved from real wood. The packaging alone would have cost more than Filip would have seen in three years’ work, to say nothing of the whiskey inside them. Dina came back with half a dozen hand-painted silk scarves confiscated from an Earther’s mansion, and she wore them like a bird proud of its plumage.
Everyone wore trinkets of gold and diamond and peridot, but the best was the amber. All the other gems and jewelry could maybe get mined from the Belt. Amber, though, needed a tree and a few million years. It was the one stone that spoke of Earth, and wearing it showed who they’d become better than all the perfumes and spices and leather vests there would ever be. The luxuries that Earth and Mars had bled the Belt to acquire belonged to the Free Navy now. Back to the Belt, as was only just.
It would have been perfect, except for his father.
From the moment Marco had returned to the ship, Rosenfeld at his side, Filip found himself avoiding them. After the first few days spent on the burn, he realized he was waiting to be summoned. Lying in his bunk, trying to sleep, Filip imagined himself under his father’s gaze, called upon to justify all that he’d done on Ceres. Murmuring under his breath so that no one passing by could hear it, he rehearsed all the things he would say. It was the security man’s fault. It was Filip’s own failing, driven by humiliation at the local girl’s disrespect. It had been an accident. It had been justified. The image of the girl from the club slowly shifted in Filip’s mind until she became something like the devil incarnate. The security man he’d shot grew in his private retellings to become a bumbler and a fool and likely a sympathizer for the inner planets.
When the confrontation he’d dreaded finally arrived, it was nothing like he’d expected. Late at night, his cabin door had simply opened and Marco stepped in as casually as if the room had been his own. Filip sat up, blinking away sleep as his father sat at the foot of his couch. The drive pressed him down at a gentle quarter g. He gestured, and the system brought up the lights.