After the second time Michio Pa saluted, Marco stretched his shoulders back, a physical symbol that they were switching to the next part of whatever their conversation was.
“It’s mutiny,” Filip said.
“It is,” Marco said, his voice and expression reasonable and calm. “Do you think she’s right?”
No leapt to Filip’s throat, but he stopped it there. It was too obvious an answer. He tried Yes in his mind, feeling the pressure of his father’s attention like it was heat radiating from him. He discarded it too.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said slowly. “Whether she’s right or wrong is beside the point. She broke with your authority.”
Marco reached out and tapped the tip of Filip’s nose the way he’d done when they were only father and son, not war leader and lieutenant. Marco’s eyes softened, his focus shifting elsewhere. Filip felt a momentary and irrational stab of loneliness.
“She did,” Marco said. “Even if she were right—she isn’t, but if—how could I let this go? It would be an invitation to chaos. Chaos.” He chuckled, shaking his head. Anger would have been less frightening.
Filip’s uncertainty shifted in his gut. Were they destroyed, then? Was it all falling apart? The vision of the system his father had dreamed—void cities, the Belt blooming into a new kind of humanity free from the oppression of Earth and Mars, the Free Navy as the order of the worlds—stuttered. He caught a glimpse of what the other future could look like. The death and the struggle and the war. The corpse Earth and the ghost town Mars and the shards of the Free Navy picking at each other until nothing was left. It was what Marco meant when he said chaos, Filip was sure of that. Nausea welled up in him. Someone should have kept that from happening. He shook his head.
“Some day,” Marco said, and then again, still without finishing the thought, “some day.”
“Do we do?” Filip asked.
Marco shrugged with his hands. “Stop trusting women,” he said, then flicked a foot against the wall, launching himself to the doorway. Filip watched as Marco grabbed a handhold and pulled himself away down the hall toward his cabin. All the questions he hadn’t answered floated invisibly behind him.
Left alone, Filip killed the sound to the screen and replayed her message again. He’d met this woman. He’d been in a room with her, and heard her voice, and he hadn’t seen her for the traitor she was. For the agent of chaos. She saluted, and he tried to see fear in her. Or malice. Anything more than a professional delivering a message she expected to be badly received. He played the message again. Her eyes were black and hate-filled, or steeled against dread. Her gestures were soaked in contempt, or controlled like a fighter preparing to lose a match.
With a little practice and will, he found he could see anything he chose in her.
A soft sound came from behind him. Sárta sloped into the room feetfirst, and caught herself in a foothold on the wall, locking her ankle in place and absorbing the inertia with her knees. Her smile had the same bleakness that Filip felt, and he suffered a moment’s anger that she should feel what he did. Karal’s voice came from the lift, talking in low, careful tones. Rosenfeld answered, too low to make out the words. They knew Marco was gone, then. The private audience concluded.
Sárta pointed to the screen with her chin. “Esá es some shit, que?” Fishing for information, looking to know what Marco hadn’t seen fit to tell her. Or anyone else.
“He saw it coming,” Filip said. He wasn’t even lying. Marco might not have said as much, but it was still true. Filip tapped his temple. “Knew to expect it. Everything going to be just fine.”
Three more days on the float, and Filip knew it wasn’t only the crew of the Pella who were feeling anxious. Every hour, it seemed, brought another round of contact requests. Encrypted tightbeam messages flooded into the Pella’s queue and waited there for Marco’s response. Rosenfeld, as part of the inner circle, stepped in where he could. He went so far as to appropriate the command deck as a kind of private office. The war center in absentia until Marco “came back out of his tent”— whatever that meant.
For Filip, it was all an exercise in projecting confidence. His father had a plan. He’d gotten them all this far, and there was no reason to doubt he would get them the rest of the way. The others agreed with him, or at least seemed to when he was in the room. He wondered what they said when he was elsewhere. They’d all been through battle together. They’d shared their victories and the long, patient hours waiting for their traps to spring. This was different. The waiting was the same, but not being sure what they were waiting for made it feel like maybe they were waiting for nothing. Even for him.
Near the end of the third day, Rosenfeld asked Filip to join him in the command center. The older man looked tired, but his cyst-ridden skin made reading his expressions difficult. Rosenfeld had turned all the screens off. The command center felt smaller without their displays to give the illusion of depth and light. Rosenfeld floated beside one of the crash couches, his body canted a few degrees from the ship in a way that made him seem both taller and subtly threatening.
“So, young Master Inaros,” Rosenfeld said, “it seems we have a problem.”
“Don’t see it,” Filip said, but the amusement in the older man’s eyes was enough to show how weak his words sounded. Rosenfeld pretended Filip hadn’t spoken.
“The longer we go without responding to… call them ‘changes in the situation’? The longer we go, the more doubt starts to grow, yeah? Father Inaros is the face and voice of the Free Navy. Has been since the beginning. His skill, yeah? His peculiar gift. But—” Rosenfeld spread his hands. But he isn’t here.
“He has a plan,” Filip said.
“We have a problem. We can’t wait for him much longer. Haven’t told anyone. Hasn’t found its way to the grapevine. But the problem’s now, not tomorrow. Even the light lag may make us too late now.”
“What is it?” Filip asked.
“Witch of Endor. It’s at Pallas. All the cache-safes we threw out into the void? Captain al-Dujaili has started gathering them back up. Says it’s under orders from his commander, and he doesn’t mean us. That’s the fifth ship broken for Pa. Meantime, the Butcher’s on Ceres, his ass keeping Dawes’ chair warm. Calling for a meeting of the OPA clans, yeah? Black Sky. Carlos Walker. Administration on Rhea is looking to send a delegation. Free Navy made a statement when we broke Earth’s chains. Statement was, The revolution is already over. That we’d won. Inevitable. Already happened, us. Only now, maybe not.”
Filip’s gut was tight. Anger warmed his throat and shoved his jaw forward like a tumor at the base of his jaw. He didn’t know who he was angry with, but the rage was deep and powerful. Maybe Rosenfeld saw it, because his voice changed, became softer.
“Your father, he’s a great man. Great men, they’re not like you or me. They have other needs. Other rhythms. It’s what sets them apart. But sometimes they go so far into the void we lose sight of them. They lose sight of us. That’s where little people like me come through, yeah? Keep the engines running. Keep the filters clean. Do the needful things until the great man comes back to us.”
“Yeah,” Filip said. The rage still shoving its way up his neck, filling his head.
“Worst thing we can do is wait,” Rosenfeld said. “Better that we point all our ships the wrong direction than that we leave them too long floating. Change it later, bring them back, they think the situation shifted. Put them on the burn, they know they’re going somewhere.”