The night before the Pella left Pallas Station, Rosenfeld hosted a dinner for Marco and the other captains. The hall had been a vast open space designed as a construction compartment, but changed now into a kind of null-g throne room. A soft, chiming music played like flowing water with a melody. Serving platforms bristled with ceramic bulbs brightly colored as oil on water and filled with wine and water. Long ribbons of red and gold shifted in the breeze of the recyclers. Great lengths of gold fibered paper fluttered and bellied against the walls between the hand-and footholds. The crew of the Pella and the staff of Rosenfeld’s Pallas authority mixed, Free Navy uniforms standing out sharp and martial against the casual civilian clothes of the locals. Young men and women in flowing robes of crimson and blue floated through the air slowly enough to deliver tapas of bean-and-grain cake, curried shrimp fresh from the tanks, and garlic sausage with real meat stuffed in the skins.
No element of the design suggested a consensus up or down. No concession had been made to the architecture of Earth and Mars. The combination of a traditional Belter aesthetic with lushness and luxury left Filip a little intoxicated even before he started drinking.
“I don’t know what you could mean by purification,” his father said through laughter, “if not ‘getting rid of the impure parts.’”
Rosenfeld’s answering chuckle was dry. After weeks traveling with the man, Filip still wasn’t certain he could read his expressions. “You’re saying you planned for this?”
“Anticipated. A change in the system of the greater world always risks having people lose perspective. Get drunk on possibility. Pa rode the wave in; now she thinks she can command the tides. I didn’t know she would break, but I was ready if she did.”
Rosenfeld nodded. Across the great echoing chamber, two women sang together a few bars of a song that Filip knew, and then dissolved into hilarity. He looked across the open air, hoping that one of them might be looking back. That a girl would be watching him floating in conference with the great minds of the Free Navy. No one was.
When his father went on, his voice was lower. Still conversational, still friendly, but charged. “I had plans in place for anyone that broke. Pa, Sanjrani, Dawes. You. When I make my next strike, everyone will see how weak she is. Her support will burn off faster than breathing.”
“You’re sure,” Rosenfeld said, making the words a statement and a question at the same time. He drank from his bulb, coughed. Filip watched his father waiting for the pebble-skinned man to finish his thought. Rosenfeld sighed, nodded. Filip felt some deeper meaning swim just below his understanding, leaving him bobbing in its wake. “It’s only that she’s been feeding people. The laity find that sort of thing endearing, sí no?”
“Anyone can buy votes with free ganga,” Filip said.
Rosenfeld turned his head then, like he was noticing Filip for the first time. “True, true.”
“Johnson and his cobbled-up fleet,” Marco said, “have been squatting on Ceres with their eyes wide. Can’t move forward without exposing themselves. Can’t move back and leave Ceres to us again. They’re trapped. Just the way we said they’d be.”
“True,” Rosenfeld said, and left True, but …hanging in the air. All the criticisms trailed behind it like the ribbons in the breeze. True, but it’s been a long time since we left Ceres, and it’s left us looking weak … True, but one of your generals broke away and you haven’t brought her to heel … True, but Fred Johnson is issuing orders from the governor’s mansion at Ceres, and you aren’t. Filip felt every point like a blow to the gut, but because they were unspoken, he couldn’t answer them. Neither could his father. Rosenfeld took another drink, accepted a stick of vat-grown meat from a passing server, and steadied his drift with one hand as he ate. His expression was mild, but his gaze stayed locked on Marco.
“Waiting until the perfect moment is the mark of a great strategist,” Marco said. “For now, the outer planets are ours to pass through freely. Mars and Earth and Luna—even Ceres. They’re hiding behind their walls while we move through the wide plains of the vacuum, masters of the void. The more they realize they don’t matter, the more desperate they’ll become. All we have to do is watch for the opportunity that’s coming.”
“Fred Johnson,” Rosenfeld said. “He’s already reached out to Carlos Walker and Liang Goodfortune. Aimee Ostman.”
“Let them talk with him,” Marco said, an edge coming into his voice for the first time. “Let them see how little he’s become. I know his patterns, and I know what you’re saying.”
“Not saying anything, coyo,” Rosenfeld said. “Except maybe we’ve been drinking too much.”
“I told you before that Johnson would be off the board, and he will be. We didn’t take him at Tycho, and we’ll take him somewhere else. He is my white whale, and I will hunt him to the end of time.”
Rosenfeld looked down at his bulb, his body hunching a degree in submission. Filip had felt his father’s victory like it was his own.
“Didn’t finish reading that book, did you?” Rosenfeld asked mildly.
Marco called the ships the three wolves. The Pella, of course, was the leader of the pack, with the Koto and the Shinsakuto placed in slow orbit to support her. Moving the ships into position was the hard part. Marco’s trade hadn’t included true stealth ships. The nearest they had were regular gunships with a coating of the stolen radar-eating paint layered over the skin, and without being designed for it and for holding waste heat, the Martian tech was less effective.
But the Belt had always had smugglers, pirates, and thieves. There were ways to hide, even in the abyss. Running without transponders was only one of them. They’d left Pallas with a hard burn. Hours of being pressed into the crash couches, juice burning in their veins and still driven to the edge of consciousness. And then, the coast. With no drive plume to show where they were, the Pella and her fellow hunters were hardly more than warm rocks, making a traverse of the vastness between Ceres on the inner Belt and Tycho Station in its own deeper orbit. The Koto risked a braking burn to plant itself alongside a charted asteroid, using the mass of stone and ice to hide it and explain the ladar ping responses. The Pella and the Shinsakuto stayed on the float, their orbits matching the widespread detritus of the asteroid belt. No broadcasts. The only communications were tightbeam. They off-gassed a little to cool the outer hull and complicate its thermal signature. The emptiness itself was their friend. Even in the most crowded corners of the Belt, where the asteroids were thickest, it would have taken a telescope to see the nearest neighbors. The Pella was a warm sliver of metal and ceramic in trillions of square kilometers—less than a thumbnail clipping in an ocean.
Even if Ceres saw them—and over the long weeks of their silent hunt, it might—they would be indistinguishable from a thousand other unlicensed prospectors, smuggling ships, and homesteading Belter families. Johnson and his inner planet allies would need to know where to look to find them. And even if they found one, two more waited.
Fred Johnson’s desperate meeting to sweep up the shards of the OPA was still weeks away, but Marco put them in and flying dark long before Fred would need to leave the safety of Ceres. Men have patterns, he said. And Fred Johnson’s were misdirection followed by overwhelming force. Their sources said that the fleet would remain pinned at Ceres. With overwhelming force no longer an option, all that remained was misdirection. And so they floated, their passive sensor arrays pointed at Ceres and Tycho like a too-clever child watching a street magician’s other hand. When Fred Johnson went to make his plea to the ragged stragglers of the OPA still willing to listen, Marco said, he would know. And when Johnson’s prospective allies saw him die …
Well, they had lost Michio Pa. But Marco could replace her a hundred times over. Strength pulled people as surely as gravity. More, sometimes.