The Belt had finally shrugged off the yoke of the inner planets. They had Medina Station at the heart of the ring gates, they had the only functioning navy in the solar system, and they had the gratitude of millions of Belters. In the long term, it was the greatest statement of independence and freedom the human race had ever made. In the short term, it was her job to see the victory didn’t starve them all to death.
For the next two days, Carmondy and his men would see that the would-be colonists were sealed on secured decks, where they could ride out the transit to a stable orbit around Jupiter. Then make a complete inventory of what had been gained by the taking of the Hornblower. Once they were done, it would still be a week before the salvage drives were in place. In that time, the Connaught would stand as guard and captor, and little enough for Michio to do but scan the darkness for other refugees.
She wasn’t looking forward to it, and she was sure the others in her marriage group weren’t either. Still, there was more than that in Oksana’s voice when she spoke.
“Bossmang. We got confirmation from Ceres.”
“Good,” Michio said, but with an uptick in her inflection that meant she’d heard whatever Oksana wasn’t saying. Oksana Busch had been her wife almost as long as the group had been together. They knew each other’s moods well.
“Got something else too. Message from himself.”
“What does Dawes want?” Michio asked.
“Not Dawes. Big himself.”
“Inaros?” Michio said. “Play it.”
“Under captain-only encrypt,” Oksana said. “I can pipe it to your cabin or your terminal if—”
“Play it, Oksana.”
Marco Inaros appeared on the monitor. From the drape of his hair, he was either on Ceres or under burn. There wasn’t enough visible background behind him to say if he was on a ship or in an office. His smile was charming and reached his warm, dark eyes. Michio felt her pulse step up a little, and told herself it was dread and not an attraction. For the most part, that was truth. He was a charismatic bastard, though.
“Captain Pa,” Marco said. “I’m glad to hear you took the Hornblower cleanly. It’s another testament to your ability. We were right to have you in command of the conscription. Things have gone well enough, we’re ready to move on to the next stages of our plan.”
Michio glanced over at Evans and Oksana. He was plucking at his beard, and she was trying not to look at Michio.
“We’ll want to route the Hornblower directly to Ceres,” Marco said. “And before that, I’m calling a meeting. Strictly inner-circle. You, me, Dawes, Rosenfeld, Sanjrani. At Ceres Station.” His grin widened. “Now that we’re running the system, there are some changes we should make, eh? The Pella says you can make it there in two weeks. It’ll be good to see you in person.”
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.
Pallas Station was one of the oldest in the Belt. The first mines had been there, and following them, the first refineries. The newer facilities had followed, because this was where the industrial base was. And because it was easier to use the older, unretired crushers and spin separators as overflow capacity. And from habit. Pallas had never been spun up. The gravity it had was the naturally occurring microgravity of its mass—two percent of Earth’s full g. Hardly more than a persistent direction of drift. The station swooped above and below the plane of the ecliptic, like it was trying to elbow its way out of the solar system. Ceres and Vesta were larger and more populous, but the metal for ship plating and reactors, for station decks and shipping containers, for the guns that studded the Free Navy’s liberated warships and the rounds that they fired all came from here. If Ganymede was the breadbasket of the Belt, Pallas was its forge.