It only made sense that the Free Navy should pass through there in its constant voyage through the liberated system, and that it should make sure to leave no resources behind.
“S’yahaminda, que?” the harbormaster said, floating in the meeting room’s wider end. It was a Belter room. No tables, no chairs. Little reference to up or down in its architecture. After so long in a ship built with thrust gravity in mind, Filip thought it felt like home. Authentic in a way that the Martian-designed spaces never could.
The harbormaster himself was the same. His body was longer than someone who’d spent their childhood with even low, intermittent gravity. His head was larger compared to his body than Filip’s or Marco’s or Karal’s. The harbormaster’s left eye was milky and blind where even the pharmaceutical cocktail that made human life in freefall possible had been insufficient to keep the capillaries from dying. He was the kind of man who would never be able to tolerate living on a planetary surface, even for a short period of time. The most extreme end of the Belter physiological spectrum. He was exactly who the Free Navy had risen up to protect and represent.
Which was likely why he seemed so confused and betrayed now.
“Is it a problem?” Marco said, shrugging with his hands. The way he said it made emptying the warehouses into the void seem like an everyday thing to ask. Filip hoisted his own eyebrows to echo his father’s disbelief. Karal only glowered and kept one fist on his sidearm.
“Per es esá mindan hoy,” he said.
“I know it’s everything,” Marco said. “That’s the point. So long as it’s all here, Pallas will be a target for the inners. Put what you have in containers, fire them off, and only we will know their vectors. We’ll track where they are and salvage what we need when we need it. It’s not just keeping it out of their hands, it’s showing that the station warehouses are empty before they even reach for them, yeah?”
“Per mindan …” the harbormaster said, blinking in distress.
“You’ll be paid for it all,” Filip said. “Good Free Navy scrip.”
“Good, yeah,” the harbormaster said. “Aber …”
His blinking redoubled and he looked away from Marco as if the admiral of the Belters’ first real armed force was floating half a meter left of where he was. He licked his lips.
“Aber?” Marco prompted, matching his accent.
“Spin classifiers v’reist neue ganga, yeah?”
“If you need new parts, then buy new parts,” Marco said, his voice taking on a dangerous buzz.
“Aber …” The harbormaster swallowed.
“But you used to buy from Earth,” Marco said. “And our money doesn’t spend there.”
The harbormaster lifted a fist in acknowledgment.
Marco’s smile was gentle and open. Sympathetic. “No one’s money spends there. Not anymore. You buy from the Belt now. Just the Belt.”
“Belt don’t make good parts,” the harbormaster whined.
“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.