Part 14 (1/2)

”You've got them on Tycho.”

Chapter Fourteen: Naomi.

Terryon Lock was supposed to be a new kind of place in the emptiness of the Jovian system. A Belter home world, they figured. Modular, so it could grow or contract at need. Outside the control of Earth or Mars or anybody. A free city in s.p.a.ce, with its own governance, its own environmental controls. Naomi had seen the plans when they first spilled out over the networks. Rokku had them printed on thin plastics and stuck to the walls of the s.h.i.+p. Terryon Lock was the new Jerusalem until the security forces at Ganymede shut it down. No colonies without permission. No homes. No safe havens, not even if they built it themselves.

She hadn't even been pregnant when it happened. She didn't know that it would define her.

Filip was eight months old when the Augustin Gamarra died. The Gamarra had left Ceres Station, burning for a Coalition Navy research station on Os.h.i.+ma with a payload of organics and hydroponic equipment. Ten hours out, burning at a leisurely one-quarter g, the s.h.i.+p's magnetic bottle lost containment, spilling the fusion core into the s.h.i.+p. For a fraction of a second, the Gamarra had been as bright as the sun and two hundred thirty-four people died. No wreckage survived, and the official investigation into the event had never been closed because no conclusion could be reached. Accident or sabotage. Mischance or murder.

They had gone from the hidden cell at the back of the club to a private apartment up even nearer the center of spin. The air had the too-clean ozone smell of a recently replaced recycling filter. Filip sat at the small table, his hands folded. She sat on the edge of the tiny foam-and-gel sofa. She looked at the boy's dark eyes and tried to connect them in her mind with the ones she remembered. His lips with the toothless, delighted smile. She couldn't tell if the resemblance was really there, or if it was only her imagination. How much did someone change between not-quite-a-toddler and not-quite-an-adult? Could it really be the same boy? It wasn't anyone else.

The hole wasn't abandoned. There were clothes in the locker, food and beer in the little refrigerator. The pale walls showed chips at the corners where the damage of minor accidents had built up over the course of years. He didn't tell her who the apartment belonged to, and she didn't ask.

”Why didn't you bring the Rocinante?” Filip asked. There was a tentative quality to his voice. Like the question was only a stand-in for other ones he wanted to ask. That she wanted to be able to answer. Why did you go? Didn't you love us?

”It's in dock for repairs. Will be for months.”

Filip nodded once, sharply. She could see Marco in the movement.

”That's going to complicate things.”

”Marco didn't tell me you wanted the s.h.i.+p,” Naomi said, hating the implicit apology in the words. ”All he said was that you were in trouble. That you were avoiding the law, and that I could... that I could help.”

”We'll have to come up with something,” he said.

The hospitals at Ceres Station were some of the best in the Belt when Naomi had been coming near to term. Neither of them had the money to travel to Europa or Ganymede for the duration of a pregnancy. Ceres had been closer to Rokku's claims than Tycho Station. Childbirth was a greater danger for Belters than for someone who'd lived under constant gravity, and Naomi's pregnancy had already had two scares. She and Marco had lived in a cheap rental near the hospital, one of dozens that catered to Belters who came for the medical care. The terms of the agreement were open-ended, letting them stay until they didn't need the doctors, nurses, expert systems, and pharmaceuticals that the medical complex boasted.

Naomi could still remember the shape of the bed there, the cheap plastic curtains with a printed starscape that Marco hung across the doorway. The smell of it made her sick, but he'd been so pleased with himself she'd tolerated it. And even that late in the process, almost everything made her sick. She'd spent her days sleeping and feeling the baby s.h.i.+fting inside her. Filip had been restless as a fetus. She hadn't felt like a child having a child. She'd felt like a woman in control of her fate.

”How many do you need to get out?” Naomi asked.

”Fifteen, all told.”

”Including you?”

”Sixteen.”

She nodded. ”Any cargo?”

”No,” he said, and then seemed about to go on. After a moment, he looked away.

Ceres had still been under Earth control back then. Most of the people living on the base were Belters who'd taken contract with one of the Martian or Earther corporations. Earth security by Belters. Earth traffic control by Belters. Martian bioresearch by Belters. Marco had laughed at it all, but the laughter had an edge. He'd called Ceres humanity's largest shrine to Stockholm syndrome.

Everyone flying with Rokku had paid part of their share into the OPA, Naomi included. And the OPA looked after them in the last days of her pregnancy, local women bringing food to the hole, local men taking Marco out to the bars so that he had someone besides her to talk to. Naomi didn't think anything of it apart from being grateful. Those nights when Marco was out drinking with the local men and she was alone in her bed with Filip, her mind moving in the silence had carried an almost transcendent contentment. Or at least that was how she remembered it now. At the time, without knowing what was still to come, the experience might have been different.

”Where do you need to be?”

”We don't talk about that,” Filip said.

Naomi brushed her hair back from her eyes. ”You brought me here because it's secure, sa sa? So is it that you don't want to be overheard by someone else, or that you think telling me compromises you? Because if you don't trust me enough to ask for what you want, you don't trust me enough for me to be here.”

The words seemed to carry more nuance than they could bear, as if the simple logistical facts also meant something about why she'd left. About who they were to each other. It was like she could feel the words creaking, but she didn't know what Filip heard in them, or what she should have said differently. For a moment, there was a flicker in his expression. Sorrow or hatred or pain, it was gone too quickly to identify. A new stratum of guilt settled onto her, bearing her down. Compared to what she already had, it was trivial.

”He said I should tell you once we were off the station,” Filip said.

”Apparently he didn't know I'd be arranging pa.s.sage on a different s.h.i.+p. Plans change. It's what they do.”

Filip's gaze fixed on her, his eyes hard as marbles. She realized she'd been quoting Marco without meaning to. Maybe Filip thought it was a slap, that she was making a claim on his father by using his words. She didn't know. She didn't know him. She had to keep reminding herself of that.

”There's a rendezvous point.”

”Is there a time?”

”Yes.”

”How long?”

She saw We don't talk about it floating in his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was smaller, younger. More vulnerable. ”Soon.”

”How soon?”

He looked away.

”Very.”

She'd known, back then, that there were hard-core OPA factions on Ceres, but it hadn't bothered her. Radical OPA was still OPA, and that made them family. The crazy uncle who got drunk and started fights, maybe, but with Earth cranking up tariffs and Mars lowering the prices it would pay for ore, the sense of being under siege put Belters on the side of Belters first. And after s.h.i.+pping with Rokku for a while, talk of killing Earthers and Martians became a kind of white noise.

The birth had been hard. Thirty hours of labor. The muscles of her abdominal wall, made weaker by a lifetime of inconstant g, had shredded themselves. If they had been in Rokku's s.h.i.+p or even back on Hygeia Station, she might have died, and the baby with her. But the medical complex on Ceres had seen it all before, and worse. A gray-haired woman with a cathedral of tattoos on her hands and arms had been in her room the whole time, singing little tunes in Swahili and Arabic. Naomi could still see her and hear her voice, though she'd forgotten the woman's name. If she'd ever known it.

Filip had drawn his first, exhausted, angry breath at five in the morning, the day after she'd gone into the complex. The pediatric autodoc scanned him, considered for the longest five seconds of Naomi's life, and declared the baby safely within standard error. The gray-haired woman had placed him on Naomi's breast and sung a blessing.

It hadn't occurred to her then to wonder where Marco was. She had a.s.sumed he was in a waiting area somewhere, ready to pa.s.s out some equivalent of cigars as soon as news of her came. Of her and their son. Maybe that had even been true.

”Do we need to be there, or is off station enough?” Naomi asked.

”Off station at minimum. Better to be there, but not here solid.”

”And where are we going?”

”Hungaria cl.u.s.ter.” They were a group of minor asteroids. High albedo. No station, but an open-access storage facility. As close to the inner planets as Belt rocks got.

”Are we meeting someone there?”

”Not there. There's a s.h.i.+p a few days in. Sunward. But locked to Hungaria. Pella, it's called.”

”And after that?”