Babylon's Ashes (The Expanse, #6)

Chapter Eight: Dawes

The first session of Marco’s impromptu summit began when Michio Pa arrived, looking pleasant and implacable in equal measures. Her ship had docked halfway through a day cycle, so Marco only kept them for a few hours. The following three days were more punishing, the meetings lasting over thirteen hours each day without even so much as a break for meals. They’d eaten at the meeting tables while Marco laid out his vision for a grand, system-spanning network of Belter civilization.

Free spin stations, automated factories and farms, power stations hunkered close to the sun and beaming energy to the human habitations, the large-scale stripping of biological resources from the corpse of the Earth. It was a grand and beautiful vision with a scope and depth that dwarfed even the Martian terraforming project. And Marco Inaros presented it all with a ruthlessness and intensity that made the objections the rest of them brought up seem small and petty.

Sanjrani wanted to know how the labor force needed to create Marco’s massive snowflake-complex void cities would be trained. Marco waved the problem away. Belters were already trained to live and build in space. That knowledge was their birthright. Bred into their brittle bones. Pa brought up the problem of keeping food and medical supplies flowing to all the stations and ships already feeling the pinch from the loss of supply lines from Earth. Marco agreed that there would be lean times, but assured Pa that her fears were greater than the actual problem. No objection any of them raised swayed his commitment. His eyes were bright, his voice rich as a viol, his energy was boundless. After the meetings were done, Dawes went back to his quarters, weary to the bone. Marco went to the bars and pubs and union halls and spoke directly to the citizens of Ceres. If he slept, Dawes didn’t know when.

On the fifth day, they took a break, and it felt like collapsing at the end of a long run.

Rosenfeld’s interpretation did little to help.

“Coyo is manic. He’ll come back down.”

“And then what?” Dawes asked.

The pebble-skinned man shrugged. His smile had very little to do with pleasure. “Then we’ll see where we are. Inaros is a great man. For our purposes, he’s the great man. It isn’t a role that’s fit for a wholly sane person.”

They sat in the gardens of the governor’s palace. The smell of plants and soil mixed with the textured protein and grilled peppers that Rosenfeld preferred for breakfast. Dawes leaned back from the table and sipped from his bulb of hot, milky tea. He’d known Rosenfeld Guoliang for almost three decades, and he trusted him as much as he trusted anyone. But not completely.

“If you’re saying he’s gone mad,” Dawes said, “that’s a problem.”

“It’s not a problem, it’s a job requirement,” Rosenfeld said, waving the concern away like it was a gnat. “He’s slaughtered billions of people and remade the shape of human civilization. No one can do something on that scale and see themselves as fully human anymore. He may be a god or he may be a devil, but he can’t stomach the idea of being just an unreasonably pretty man who stumbled into the right combination of charisma and opportunity. This particular fever will pass. He’ll stop sounding like we’re making the first weld next week and start saying that our grandchildren’s grandchildren will finish it. Never been anyone as good at changing the song without missing a beat as our man Marco. Don’t you worry.”

“Hard not to.”

“Well. Only worry a little.” Rosenfeld took a thick bite of the protein and pepper, his rough eyelids lowering until he looked almost half-asleep. “We’re all here because he needed us. Apart from Fred Johnson, I had the only fighting force large enough to cause him trouble. Sanjrani’s a prat, but he ran Europa’s artificial economy well enough that everyone thinks he’s a genius. And who knows? Maybe he is. You control the port city of the Belt. Pa’s the poster child of dissenting from the OPA for moral reasons, and so she makes a fine Father Christmas for redistributing wealth to the groundlings and bringing the old loyalists over to us. No one in these meetings is here by chance. He put this team together. As long as we keep a unified front, we can keep him from floating away on his own grandiosity.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Rosenfeld chewed and grinned at the same time. “So do I.”

Anderson Dawes had been part of the OPA since before he was born. Trying to curry favor with their corporate overlords, his parents had named him after a mining company. Later, Fred Johnson’s butchery turned that same name into one of Earth’s greatest crimes against the Belt. He’d been raised to see the Belt as his home and the people living there—however different, however divided—as his kin. His father had been an organizer, his mother a union lawyer. He’d learned that all humanity was a negotiation even before he’d learned how to read. Everything in his life since then was an elaboration of the same simple theme: push hard enough that he never lost ground and never let an opportunity pass.

Always, his intention had been to put the Belt in its right place and end the casual exploitation of its people and wealth. How exactly that happened, he’d let the universe decide. He’d worked with the Persian Gulf Shared Interest Zone in rebuilding the station at L-4 and made contacts in the expatriate community there. He’d become a voice within the OPA on Ceres by showing up early at every meeting, listening carefully before he spoke, and making certain the right people knew his name.

Violence had always been a part of the environment. When he’d had to kill people, those people had died. When he found a promising young tech, he knew how to recruit them. Or an old enemy ripe to be turned. He’d brought Fred Johnson, the Butcher of Anderson Station, into the fold when everyone called him crazy, and then accepted their accolades when he’d bloodied the nose of the United Nations by doing it. Later, when it became clear that Johnson was unwilling to cooperate with the new regime, he’d agreed to cut him out. If watching his namesake go from a moderately successful Belter mining station to the rallying cry of Belter revolution had taught him anything, it was this: Situations change and clinging too tightly to what came before kills you.

And so when Marco Inaros struck his deal with the blackest black market on Mars to create a successor to the Outer Planets Alliance, Dawes had seen only two choices: Embrace the new reality or die with the past. He’d picked the way he always had, and because of it, he was at the table. Sometimes for thirteen hours while Inaros ranted his utopian dream-logic, but at the table nonetheless.

Still, there was part of him that wished this Winston Duarte had chosen to raise someone else up with his Mephistophelean arms deal.

He took another bite of his breakfast, but the peppers had gone cold and limp, and the protein had begun to harden. He dropped his fork.

“Any word from Medina?” he asked.

Rosenfeld shrugged. “Do you mean the station, or past it?”

“Anything, really.”

“Station’s well,” Rosenfeld said. “The defenses are in place, so that’s as it should be. Past that … well, no one knows, sa sa? Duarte’s keeping up his end, sending shipments of arms and equipment back from Laconia. The other colonies …”

“Problems,” Dawes said. He didn’t make it a question.

Rosenfeld scowled at his plate, avoiding eye contact for the first time since their unofficial meeting began. “Frontiers are dangerous places. Things happen there that wouldn’t if it were more civilized. Wakefield went silent. Some people are saying they woke something up there, but no one’s sent a ship out to look. Who has time, yeah? Got a war here to finish. Then we can look back out.”

“And the Barkeith?”