Part 21 (2/2)
And if I ever get the chance to leave you behind in a fire, Karal, then good G.o.d you will burn.
A chime sounded, then the acceleration warning came on. She hadn't noticed when the s.h.i.+p had made its flip. Might have been when she was asleep, or slowly over the course of hours so that the rotation was subliminal. It didn't matter. She was cargo here. It didn't matter what she knew.
”Strap in, yeah?” Karal said.
”On my way,” she said, launching herself gently to the ceiling, and then back to the deck at the crash couch between Cyn and Wings. It had turned out Wings' real name was Alex, but that s.p.a.ce was taken in her mind, so he was Wings forever to her. He smiled to her and she smiled back as she strapped herself in against the gel.
The warning went from an amber glow to a ten-count in soft amber numbers, and at zero the couch lurched up against her, folding her a few centimeters in. The deceleration burn had started. When it stopped, they'd be where Marco was.
After the pa.s.sageway linked the airlocks, she'd thought there would be some kind of farewell. Hugs and lies and all the things people did at the parting after a long journey. When it didn't happen, she understood that it had only been a long journey for her. The flight from Ceres to the empty s.p.a.ce sunward of Mars and the Hungaria asteroids was like going from the couch to the head for them.
Filip emerged from the ops deck looking sharp and hard. No, that wasn't true. Looking like a boy trying to look sharp and hard.
”Check her for weapons,” Filip said, biting at the words.
Cyn looked from Filip to Naomi and back. ”Verdad? Knuckles been packing, she's been for a long time. Doesn't seem -”
”No prisoners on the Pella without a check,” Filip said, pulling a flechette gun from his pocket and not pointing it at her in particular. ”Way it is, yeah?”
Cyn shrugged and turned to her. ”Way it is.”
Filip looked at her, his lips pressed thin. His fingers too aware of the trigger on his gun. He should have looked threatening, but he mostly looked scared. And angry. Sending a son on a kidnap job was the sort of thing Marco would do. It wasn't that it was cruel, though it was cruel. It wasn't that it would corrode any relations.h.i.+p that they might have had, though it did that too. It was only that it would work. Even putting Filip on Ceres looked like a manipulation now. Here is your son, where you left him. Come into the mousetrap and take him back.
And she'd done it. She didn't know if she was more disappointed in Filip or herself. They were two very different kinds of disappointment, and the one pointed at her had more poison in it. She could forgive Filip anything. He was a boy, and living with Marco in his head. Forgiving herself was going to be harder, and she didn't have much practice.
When the outer airlock cycled, she suffered a wave of disorientation. The pa.s.sage was the usual design of inflated Mylar and t.i.tanium ribs. There was nothing about it that looked strange. It wasn't until they'd nearly reached the other side that she recognized the smell of it: tangy and deep and probably carcinogenic. The outga.s.sing of volatile organics from the cloth.
”This is new?” she said.
”We don't talk about it,” Filip said.
”We don't talk about much, do we?” she snapped, and he looked back at her, surprised by the bite in her voice. You think you know what I am, she thought, but all you've got is stories.
The airlock of the other s.h.i.+p was weirdly familiar. The curve was like the airlock on the Roci, and the design of the latch. Martian design. And more than that, Martian Navy. Marco had come into a military s.h.i.+p. Inside, soldiers waited. Unlike the ragged group on Ceres, they wore a rough kind of uniform: gray jumpsuits with the split circle on their arms and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Against the clean design of the s.h.i.+p's corridor, they looked like bad costumes in a play with good set design. The guns were real though, and she didn't doubt they'd use them.
The bridge looked like the Rocinante's younger brother. After the cheap, barely-enough aesthetic of the Chetzemoka, military-grade crash couches and terminal displays looked solid and rea.s.suring. And there, in the center of it all like he'd posed himself, floated Marco. He wore something like a military uniform, but without any insignia.
He was beautiful as a statue. Even now, she had to give him that. She could still remember when those lips and the softness in those eyes had made her feel safe. Lifetimes ago, that was. Now he smiled, and a strange relief spread through her. She was with him again, and unquestionably in his power. Her nightmare had come true, so at least she didn't have to dread it anymore.
”I've brought her, sir,” Filip said, all his consonants sharp enough to cut with. ”Mission accomplished.”
”I never had a doubt,” Marco said. In person, his voice had a richness that recorded messages lost. ”Good work, mijo.”
Filip gave a little salute, and spun to leave.
”Ah!” Marco said, pulling the boy up short. ”Don't be rude, Filip. Kiss your mother before you go.”
”You don't have to do that,” Naomi said, but eyes blank and empty Filip floated over and pecked her cheek with dry lips before returning to the lift. The guards went with him, except for two that took up stations behind her.
”It's been a long time,” Marco said. ”You look good. The years have been kind to you.”
”You too,” she said. ”Sound different too. When did you stop talking like a Belter?”
Marco spread his hands. ”In order to be heard by the oppressing cla.s.s, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. The accusation of tyranny, however well-founded in fact, is dismissed unless it is delivered in the manner that power recognizes as powerful. That's why Fred Johnson was useful. He was already iconic of an authority that the authorities understood.”
”So you've been practicing, then,” she said, folding her arms.
”It's my job.” Marco reached up, pushed his fingertips against the upper deck, and floated down toward the control couches. ”Thank you for coming.”
Naomi didn't answer that. She could feel him already rewriting the past. Treating her like she'd chosen to join him. Like she was responsible for being here. Instead, she nodded toward the ops deck. ”Nice ride. Where'd you get it?”
”Friends in high places,” Marco said, and then chuckled. ”And strange, strange alliances. There are always people who understand that when the world changes, the rules change with it.”
Naomi tugged at her hair, pulling it down over her eyes, and then, angry with herself, pushed it back. ”So then. To what do I owe this setup bulls.h.i.+t?”
Marco's hurt expression could have pa.s.sed for genuine. ”No setup. Filip was in trouble, you were in a position to get our son out of a bad place that had the potential to get a whole lot worse.”
”And paid for it by being pulled on your s.h.i.+p against my will? I can't really thank you for that.”
”You should,” Marco said. ”We brought you because you're one of ours. To keep you safe. If we could have explained it all, we would have, but things are delicate, and you don't stop to explain why you're protecting someone when the danger's close. The stakes are the lives of millions of Belters, and -”
”Oh please,” Naomi said.
”You don't think so?” Marco said, a harshness coming into his voice. ”You're the one who killed us. You and your new captain. The minute those gates opened, all the rest of us were dead.”
”You're still breathing,” Naomi said, but her anger sounded like petulance even to herself. He heard it that way too.
”You didn't grow up down a well. You know how little the inners cared about us. The Chesed. Anderson Station. The Cielo mine fire. Belter lives don't mean s.h.i.+t to inners. Never have. You know that.”
”They're not all like that.”
”Some that pretend they aren't, yeah?” The accents of the Belt slipped into his voice. And a rattling anger with them. ”But they can still go down the wells. There're a thousand new worlds, and billions of inners who can just step onto them. No training, no rehab, no drugs. You know how many Belters can tolerate a full g? Give them everything, all the medical care, the exoskeleton support mechs, nursing homes? Two-thirds. Two-thirds of us could go be cripples on these brave neo worlds, if the inners pulled together and threw all their money at it. You think that's going to happen? Never has before. Last year, three pharmaceutical plants stopped even making their low-end bone density c.o.c.ktails. Didn't open the patents. Didn't apologize to any s.h.i.+ps don't have budget for the high-end stuff. Just stopped. Needed the capacity for colony s.h.i.+ps and all the new ganga they're making with the data coming back from the rings.
”We're leftovers, Naomi. You and me and Karal and Cyn. Tia Margolis. Filip. They're moving on, and they're forgetting us because they can. They write the histories, you know what we'll be? A paragraph about how much it sucks when a race of people go obsolete, and how it would have been more humane to put us down.
”Come. Tell me I'm wrong.”
It was the same ranting he'd done before, but perfected by years. A new variation of the same arguments he'd made on Ceres. She half expected him to say The Gamarra had it coming. This is war, and anyone who helps choke out the enemy is a soldier whether they know it or not. Her gut felt like it was made from water. It was a feeling she remembered from the dark times. Something in the back of her head s.h.i.+fted. The serpent of learned helplessness long asleep starting to wake. She pretended it wasn't there, in hopes that if she denied it enough, it wouldn't exist.
”What's it got to do with me?” Naomi asked, less forcefully than she intended.
Marco smiled. When he spoke, it was back in the voice of the cultured leader. The rough-cut Belter thug vanished behind his mask. ”You're one of us. Estranged, yes, but one of us all the same. You're the mother of my son. I didn't want you in harm's way.”
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