“We make the best parts there are,” Marco said. “History’s moved on, my friend. Try to keep up. And package everything there is for push-out, sa sa?”
The harbormaster met Marco’s gaze and lifted his fist again in assent. It wasn’t as if he had a choice. The advantage of being in command of all the guns was that no matter how nicely you asked for something, it was still an order. Marco pushed off, the thin gravity of Pallas bending the path of his body. He stopped his motion by grabbing handholds at the harbormaster’s side, and then embraced him. The harbormaster didn’t hug him back. He looked like a man holding his breath and hoping something dangerous wouldn’t notice him as it passed by.
The corridors and passageways leading from the harbormaster’s office to the docks were a patchwork of ancient ceramic plating and newer carbon-silicate lace. The lace plating—one of the first new materials put into manufacture after the protomolecule’s appearance threw physical chemistry ahead by a few generations—had an eerie rainbow sheen as they floated past it. Like oil on the surface of water. It was supposed to be more resilient than ceramic and titanium, harder and more flexible. No one knew how it would age, though if reports from the other worlds were to be trusted, it would likely outlast the people who’d fashioned it by at least an order of magnitude. Assuming they were making it right. Hard to know.
The Pallas shuttle was waiting when they reached it, Bastien strapped into the pilot’s couch.
“Bist bien?” he asked as Marco cycled the airlock closed behind them.
“As well as could be hoped,” Marco said, glancing around the small craft. Six couches, not counting Bastien’s pilot’s station. Karal was strapping into one, Filip into another. But Marco drifted slowly to the shuttle’s floor, his hair settling at his shoulders. He lifted his chin as a question.
“Rosenfeld went already,” Bastien said. “Been on the Pella for three hours.”
“Has he now,” Marco said, and his voice had an edge that maybe only Filip could hear. He slid into his couch and cinched down the straps. “That’s good. Let’s join up.”
Bastien cleared with the dock control system, more from habit than need. Marco was captain of the Pella, admiral of the Free Navy, and his shuttle would take precedence over any other traffic. But Bastien checked anyway, then went through the seals and environment controls again, for what was likely the tenth time. For anyone raised in the Belt, checking the air and the water and the seals on ships and suits was like breathing. Not something you even thought about, just something that happened. People who didn’t live that way tended to leave the gene pool early.
They grew a degree heavier as the shuttle launched, then the gimbals in the couches all hissed at once as Bastien fired the maneuvering thrusters. It wasn’t even a quarter-g burn, and still they reached the Pella in minutes. They cycled through the lock—the same one Naomi had chosen to die in—then floated out into the familiar air of the Pella.
Rosenfeld Guoliang was waiting for them.
All through Filip’s life, from his very first memories, the Belt had meant the Outer Planets Alliance, and the OPA had meant the people who mattered most. His people. It was only as he’d grown up and started being allowed to listen when his father spoke with other adults that his understanding of the OPA became deeper, more nuanced, and the word that redefined his people was alliance. Not republic, not unity government, not nation. Alliance. The OPA was a numberless wash of different groups that formed and fell apart and formed again, all of them tacitly agreeing that, whatever their disagreements might be, they were united against the oppression of the inner planets. There were a few large standard bearers under the OPA’s flag—Tycho Station under Fred Johnson, and Ceres Station under Anderson Dawes, each with their militias; the ideological provocateurs of the Voltaire Collective; the openly criminal Golden Bough; the nonviolent near-collaborationist Maruttuva Kulu. For each of those, there were dozens—hundreds, maybe—of smaller organizations and associations, cabals and mutual interest societies. What brought them together was the constant economic and military oppression of Earth and Mars.
The Free Navy was not the OPA, and it was not meant to be. The Free Navy was the strongest of the old order, forged together into a force that didn’t need an enemy to define it. It was a promise of a future in which the yoke of the past was not only shrugged off but broken.
That didn’t mean it was free from the past.
Rosenfeld was a thin man who managed to slouch even on the float. His skin was dark and weirdly pebbled, his eyes sunk deep in their sockets. He had tattoos of the OPA’s split circle and the knifelike V of the Voltaire Collective, a bright and ready smile, and a sense of barely contained violence. And he was the reason Filip’s father had come to Pallas.
“Marco Inaros,” Rosenfeld said, spreading his arms. “Look what you’ve done, coyo mis!”
Marco launched himself forward into the man’s embrace, spinning with him as they held close and slowing when they pulled back. Any distrust Marco held toward Rosenfeld was gone. Or no, not gone, but shifted away for Filip and Karal to feel so that his own pleasure at the reunion could be pure.
“You look good, old friend,” Marco said.
“I don’t,” Rosenfeld said, “but I appreciate the lie.”
“Do we need to transfer your men over?”
“Already done,” Rosenfeld said, and Filip glanced to Karal, catching the little scowl at the corner of the older man’s mouth. Rosenfeld was a friend, an ally, one of the inner circle of the Free Navy, but he shouldn’t have been able to bring his private guard on the ship when Marco wasn’t there. The Pella was the flagship of the Free Navy, after all, and temptation was temptation. Marco and Rosenfeld reached out together, slowed their two-body rotation with a handhold jutting off the lockers, and still arm in arm, pushed out to the corridor and into the ship. Filip and Karal followed after.
“Going to be a hard burn getting to Ceres in time for the meeting,” Marco said.
“Your fault. I could have taken my own ship.”
“You don’t have a gunship.”
“I’ve lived my whole life in rock hoppers—”
Even with only the back of his father’s head to see, Filip could hear the smile in Marco’s voice. “That was your
whole life until now. We’ve changed the game. Can’t have the high command moving unprotected. Even out here, not everyone’s with us. Not yet.”
They reached the lift that ran the length of the ship, shifted around it, and swam headfirst through the air, down toward the crew decks. Karal looked behind, toward the operations and flight decks, as if to be sure none of Rosenfeld’s guard were at their six.
“Why I waited,” Rosenfeld said. “The good little soldier, mé. Too bad about Johnson and Smith making it safe to Luna. Only took down one out of three?”
“Earth was the one that mattered,” Marco said. Ahead of them, Sárta appeared, floating up past them toward ops. She nodded her greeting as they passed. “Earth was always the prime target.”