“Your father? He’s a good man. Belter to his bones, yeah? It’s just this Holden bastard’s a sore for him. Getting knocked back, happens a alles one time and another, y alles talk a little bigger afterward. Not a good thing, not a bad thing. Just the way men get made. Don’t take it too close.”
Filip paused. Turned back.
“Don’t take it too close?” he repeated, making it a question. A demand that Miral say what he meant.
“That,” Miral said. “Your dad doesn’t mean what he says.”
Filip turned his light on Miral, shining it through the older man’s faceplate. Miral squinted, put a hand up to shade his eyes.
“What does he say?” Filip asked.
Marco’s quarters were past clean to spotless. The walls shone in the light, freshly polished. The dark smudges that always built up beside handholds nearest the door—evidence of the passage of hundreds of hands—had been scraped away. The monitor didn’t carry so much as a fleck of lint. Fake sandalwood from the air recycler didn’t quite bury the ghost of disinfectant and antifungal wash. Even the gimbals on the crash couch sparkled in the gentle light.
His father, watching the monitor, was also groomed to an eerie perfection. His hair clean and perfectly in place. His beard soft and brown and trimmed so well it seemed almost false. His uniform looked like it had never been worn before. Crisp lines and clean folds. The seams set perfectly, as if by his own precision and the force of his will, he could haul all the rest of the ship up to his standards. Like all the control Marco had spread across the system had been concentrated in one place. Not an atom in the air was out of place.
Rosenfeld was on the monitor. Filip caught the words other eventualities before Marco stopped the playback and turned to him.
“Yes?” Marco said. Filip couldn’t tell what was in his voice. Calm, yeah. But Marco had a thousand varieties of calm, and not all of them meant things were okay. Filip was too aware that they hadn’t really spoken since the battle.
“Was talking to Miral?” Filip said, crossing his arms and leaning against the doorframe. Marco didn’t move. Not a nod, not a glance away. His dark eyes left Filip feeling exposed and uncertain, but there wasn’t a way to step back from this. Not without asking. “Said you were telling how what happened was my fault?”
“Because it was.”
The words were simple. Matter-of-fact. There was no heat to them, no sneer or accusation. Filip felt them like a blow to the chest.
“Okay,” he said. “Bien.”
“You were the gunner, and they got away.” Marco spread his arms in a quick, surgical shrug. “Was it a question? Or maybe you’re saying it was my fault for thinking you could do it?”
It took Filip an extra try to talk past his throat. “Didn’t drive us into those rounds, me,” he said. “Gunner, me. Not the pilot. And didn’t have a rail gun, yeah? Pinché Holden had a rail gun.”
His father tilted his head to one side. “I just told you that you failed. Now you’re giving me reasons why it’s okay that you failed? Is that how it works?” Filip knew the kind of calm now.
“No,” he said. Then, “No, sir.”
“Good. Bad enough that you fucked it up. Don’t start bawling over it too.”
“Not,” Filip said, but there were tears in his eyes. Shame ran through his blood like bad drugs and left him shaking. “Not bawling, me.”
“Then own it. Say it like a man. Say ‘I fucked it up.’”
I didn’t, Filip thought. It wasn’t my fault. “I fucked it up.”
“All right, then,” Marco said. “I’m busy. Close the door when you go.”
“Yeah, okay.”
As Filip turned, Marco shifted back to the monitor. His voice was soft as a sigh. “Crying and excuses are for girls, Filip.”
“Sorry,” Filip said, and pulled the door to behind him.
He walked down the narrow corridor. Voices from the lift. Voices from the galley. Two crews in the space of one, and he couldn’t stand to be near any of them. Not even Miral. Especially not Miral.
He put me up, Filip thought. It was like Miral said. They hadn’t kept hold of Ceres, and then Pa had insulted him by breaking away. This was supposed to be the thing to show the Free Navy couldn’t be fucked with, and all three of their wolves together hadn’t been able to stop the fucking Rocinante.
Marco had been humiliated. And shit floated against the spin, that was all it was. Still, the space below Filip’s ribs ached like he’d been punched. It wasn’t his fault. It was his fault. He wasn’t bawling out excuses. Except that was absolutely what he’d done.
He turned on the light in his cabin. One of the engineering techs was hot-bunking there, blinking up into the light like a baby mouse.
“Que sa?” the man said.
“I’m tired,” Filip said.
“Be tired somewhere else,” the tech said. “I’ve got two more hours down.”
Filip put his heel against the crash couch and spun it. The tech reached out a hand, stopped it, and unstrapped. “Fine,” he said. “You’re so fucking tired, sleep then.”
The tech took his clothes, muttering under his breath, and left. Filip locked the door behind him and folded himself into the couch, still in his uniform that stank of sweat and the vac-suit seals. The tears tried to come then, but he bit them back, pushed the hurt down into his gut until it settled into something else.
Marco was wrong. His father had embarrassed himself because Holden and Johnson and Naomi got past them. It was like Miral said. Men got like that, and they said things they didn’t mean. Did things they wouldn’t do if they were thinking straight.
Filip hadn’t fucked it up. Marco was wrong, that was all. This time, he just got it wrong.
Words came into his mind, as clear as if they’d been spoken. Though he’d never heard her speak them, they came in his mother’s voice. Wonder what else he got wrong.
Chapter Thirty-One: Pa
Eugenia was a terrible place to put a base of operations. It was less an asteroid than a complex pile of loose scrap and black gravel traveling in company. Neither the asteroid itself nor the tiny moon that circled it had ever suffered the gravity to press them together or the heat it would take to fuse them. Eugenia and other duniyaret like it offered nothing solid to build on, no internal structure to shore up. Even mining it was hard, the tissue of the asteroid too fast to shift and fall apart. Build a dome there, and the air would seep out through the ground it was built on. Try to spin it up, and it would fly apart. The science station that Earth had built there three generations ago and abandoned was little more than a ruin of sealed concrete and flaking ceramic. A ghost town of the Belt.
The only things it had to recommend it at all were that it wasn’t inhabited already and its orbit wasn’t too distant from Ceres and the questionable protection of the consolidated fleet. And even that proximity was only temporary. With Ceres’ orbital period a couple percent faster than Eugenia’s, every day added a little bit to the distance between them, stretching the bubble of safety until it would eventually, inevitably pop. In fairness, if they were still using it to escape the Free Navy when Eugenia and Ceres drifted to the far side of the sun from each other, they’d have bigger problems.
Instead of trying to build on the surface of the asteroid, Michio’s little fleet had begun assembling a nakliye port that orbited around Eugenia’s main body: shipping containers welded one to another to make passageways, warehouses, airlocks. A tiny reactor was enough to keep the air circulating and enough heat to balance what was lost to radiation. It was temporary by design. Inexpensive, fast to assemble, and made from material so standardized and ubiquitous that a solution discovered once could be applied in a thousand other situations. It grew from a seed of three or four containers, spreading out, connecting, reinforcing, making distance where distance was needed, bringing together where it was not, spreading like a snowflake the white of rotting sealant.