Filip hated that he didn’t want to do it.
In the first days, it was simple on-the-float work. Even then, he felt the eyes of the others on him, heard their conversations go quiet when he came in earshot. Josie and Sárta welding in the space between the hulls had said something about the dangers of nepotism, not knowing he was on the frequency, and then pretended they hadn’t when he showed up. In the galley, newsfeeds from the crippled Earth were his best companions. His father didn’t call for him or restrict his duties. Either would have been better than this nameless limbo. If he’d been cast down, he could at least have taken some pride in having been wronged. Instead, he woke for his shift, went to help with the repairs, and wished that he could be someplace else.
It was only when it came clear that the dead thruster was going to need a new housing that they burned for a shipyard. In other lives, they’d have tried for Ceres or Tycho, but the second-string yards were still decent. Rhea. Pallas. Vesta. They didn’t use any of those. When his father’s order came down, it was for Callisto.
A new escort came, guns bared, to keep the Pella safe from the torpedoes and attack ships of the enemy. But while Earth and Mars and Fred Johnson’s OPA probably had their eyes on the Pella, they didn’t let themselves be pulled out from their bases and fleets. They were a prize, but not one worth risking for.
Lying in his crash couch, watching feeds of neo-taarab bands from Europa and half a dozen bad sex comedies because Sylvie Kai had roles in them, Filip fantasized that there would be an attack. Maybe a little fleet led by the Rocinante. James fucking Holden and Filip’s own traitorous whore of a mother in command, screaming out after him with their rail gun and torpedoes. Sometimes the fantasy ended with someone else getting the Pella beat up even worse and everyone seeing how hard it was to win that fight. Sometimes it ended with them killing the Rocinante, blowing it into glowing gas and shards of metal. Sometimes he imagined that they’d lose and die. And the twin points of light in that last and darkest daydream fit together like a clamp bolt in its housing: It would be an end to working on the ship, and also they would never reach Callisto.
The surviving shipyard on Callisto stood on the side permanently locked facing away from Jupiter. Its floodlights cast long, permanent shadows across the moon’s landscape and the ruins of its sister yard, a Martian base shattered years ago. Shattered in one of the first actions by the Free Navy. In Filip’s first command. The dust and fines stirred up by the actions of human commerce fell slowly on Callisto, giving an illusion of mist where there was no free water and only the most tenuous atmosphere to carry it. He watched the scattering of floodlights on the moon’s surface grow larger as they came in, white and bright and random like a handful of the star field had been grabbed and mashed into the dirt. When the Pella tipped down into a repair berth, the sound of the clamps coming into place was deep as a punch. Filip unstrapped and made his way to the airlock as soon as he could.
Josie was there—long, graying hair pulled back from his narrow, yellow-toothed face. Josie who’d been on the Callisto raid with him. Who’d been under Filip’s command. He lifted his eyebrows as Filip started to cycle the lock.
“Not wearing tués uniform,” Josie said, only the smallest sneer in his voice.
“Not on duty.”
“Hast shore leave, tu?”
“No one said no,” Filip said, hating how petulant his voice sounded in his own ears. Josie’s gaze hardened, but he only turned away. The pressures went equal, or nearly so. When the Pella’s outer doors slid open, there was still a little pop. Enough to make Filip feel the change from one place to another, but not so much that his ears hurt from it. A security detail waited on dock wearing light armor with raw places on the shoulder and breast where the indistinct outline of the Pinkwater logo could still be seen like a shadow. He nodded to them with his hands and walked forward, half afraid they’d call him to stop and half hoping for it.
He’d never been to Callisto before his raid. Never seen it before he called the strikes down. He didn’t know what it had looked like before, and he could still tell that the surviving half showed the scars. Walking past the dock and into the commercial district, Filip could pick out which walls had been replaced. Here and there, a run of decking had a slightly off color, the sealant not as aged as the runs around it. Little scars. He might not even have noticed if he hadn’t known to look.
It had been justified, though. It had been to get the radar-eating paint from the Dusters so that the rocks they threw at Earth would be hard to see. It had been part of the war. And anyway, he hadn’t tried to hurt them. It was only they were right beside the enemy. Their fault. Not his.
Voices wove a rich and shifting murmur through the wide, tall main hall. A cart blatted for people to clear its path. Work crews in gray jumpsuits wore Free Navy armbands and split-circle OPA tattoos on their wrists. The air smelled of urine and cold. Filip found a place against one wall, set his shoulders against it, and watched like he was waiting for something. Someone to see him, stop, and point an accusing finger. You were the one who tried to kill the yards! You were the one who cracked our seals! Do you know how many of us died?
He waited for something to happen, but no one took any notice of him one way or the other. He was no one to them. A kid with his back against the wall.
The bar he ended up in was at the far end of the shipyard complex, close to the tunnels down to the deeper-level neighborhoods and the fast transit to the Jovian observatory on the far side of the moon. It wasn’t only yard hands at the pressed-polymer tables. There were girls his own age in bright clothes come up from the residential levels below. Older people in academic-looking rumple hunched over their hand terminals and their beers. He’d known vaguely that there was a good upper university somewhere on Callisto, something associated with the technical institutes on Mars. Somehow never put it together in his mind with the place he’d been set to raid.
He sat apart, at a bright-pink table with a bowl of living grass as a centerpiece. From there he could watch the oversized wall screens with their scroll of newsfeeds muttering to themselves like angry drunks or else look over the finch-bright girls talking to one another and managing to never glance his way. He ordered black noodles in peanut sauce and a stout from the table display and paid with Free Navy scrip. For a long moment, he thought the table might refuse payment—if it said his money was bad, that would be when the girls looked over at him—but it chimed pleasantly, accepting, and threw up a countdown timer to when his order should come. Twelve minutes. So for twelve minutes, he watched the feeds.
The Earth still dominated, even in its suffering. Images of devastation mixed with earnest-looking newsreaders staring into the camera or else interviewing other people, sometimes earnest as sycophants, sometimes yelling like the other coyo’d been fucking their sweethearts. The bright girls ignored the screen, but Filip’s eye kept wandering back to it: a street covered in ashes so deep the woman cleaning it had a scarred snow shovel; an emaciated black bear lurching one direction and then another in distress and confusion; some official of the half-dead Earth government surveying a stadium filled with body bags. The beer and noodles came, and he started eating without quite noticing that he had. He watched the march of images, chewed, swallowed, drank. It was like his body was a ship, and all his crew were about their work but not talking to each other.