The Sins of Our Fathers Read online

  All around the town, people were doing similar work. The false start at moving left everything half broken down. Or half put together. Depended on how you looked at it. The sky had taken on an almost emerald green. To the west, pure white clouds billowed up so high, they seemed like they’d reach orbit. Filip didn’t like looking at them. He’d gotten to where living without the safety of a ship didn’t panic him, but something about the cloud banks made the scale of planetary life harder to ignore. It was odd, the way that living in an emptiness infinitely vaster than the distance between him and even the tallest cloud could feel comfortable if there was a thin bubble of metal around him. Something about the perspective, probably. The universe was always vast, if he thought about it. The trick was not to see more of it than he could stand at any given moment. And picking the right part to look at.

  He put the last bolt in place, checked that everything was stable, and grabbed up another capacitor. This one was still holding charge, so he set it to a safe-ground cycle and sat back for the minutes-long wait. He heard Leward before he saw him.

  “Put that back. That isn’t yours!”

  Filip leaned forward to get a better look. They were coming from the east side of town, moving in the aisle between the buildings where months of habit had stripped away the plants and left packed dirt behind. Not dignified enough to call a street, but where one would be, given time. Two men in maintenance crew uniforms were pulling a handcart. It was a low thing, with wheels broader than they were deep, like a yellow steel pallet on rollers. The science lead was behind them, chin high, and lifting his knees with every step like he was marching. He looked angry, which Filip had seen before. But he also looked ridiculous, which was new. It wasn’t him, not really. It was the grinning and snickering of the maintenance crew.

  “You stop!” Leward shouted. “We have need of that! You can’t just take it.”

  The taller of the maintenance crew pair leaned over and said something to the shorter one too quietly for Filip to hear. The shorter one chuckled. It wasn’t a kind sound. Around the other buildings, a few people paused to look. Leward made a strangled sound and darted forward. He grabbed the back end of the cart and tried to yank it back. The cart bucked, and the two maintenance men stopped smiling. They let the cart’s lead drop to the ground and turned. The smaller one put his arms out at his sides, widening him.

  “What the fuck are you doing, coyo?” he asked, and Filip felt a little thrill of fear. He knew that tone. He knew what it meant, even if Leward didn’t.

  “This,” Leward said, stabbing a finger at the handcart, “is the property of the bioscience lab. It is not construction equipment. You can’t just come in and take whatever you want whenever you want it!”

  The taller one feigned sadness. When he spoke, his voice was a high, mocking singsong. “Ooh! It’s not construction equipment! Oh no! So sad. So angry.” Then he grinned and stepped forward, speaking in a regular, low voice. “It’s what we say it is.”

  “Take it back now,” Leward said, but he quavered. He was starting to understand what was going on.

  “Or else what?” the shorter one said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I said, ‘Or else what?’ What are you going to do when we don’t, eh?”

  Leward glanced around, saw the eyes on them. Filip felt his humiliation like they were passing through a resonance frequency. Like they were back in the dream together. Like it was his own. Leward stepped forward, reaching for the cart again, ready to take it back himself. The tall one put both hands on Leward’s chest and shoved. In the light gravity, the fall took a few seconds, Leward’s legs flailing as he went down. When he landed, it still knocked the breath out of him. The shorter one laughed and stepped forward, his hands in fists.

  “Hey!” Filip shouted. One syllable, but hard. Sharp. It brought the two maintenance men around. Well, fuck, Filip thought as he stood up. It was too late to think about whether he wanted to be in this. He already was. And as he walked across toward the two men, he didn’t actually regret it.

  The taller one made a show of looking Filip up and down. “You a friend of this one’s?”

  “I don’t know him,” Filip said. “I’m just a subcontractor.”

  “So what are we talking about, subcontractor?”

  Behind them, Leward was coming to his feet. There was finally some real fear in his eyes. Late, but better now than never. Filip considered the two men. They were younger than he was. They’d grown up in gravity wells, he could tell from their builds. In a fight, they’d kick his ass. The smart thing was to back down. He wasn’t feeling smart.

  All around them, work had stopped. The violence against Leward was shocking, maybe, but with everything going on, they had to expect it. The new guy standing up was unexpected. If he weren’t doing it, he’d be keeping a weather eye on it too.

  “Just want to know how you’re going to be when I come take your tools without asking,” Filip said. In the back of his mind, Mose said, We’re union. It was ridiculous, but what else did he have? “Jandro’s pissed at him, that’s not my problem. I don’t care who likes who. I’m just here getting the work done. But you need something, union has rules about how you get it. This isn’t that.”

  “Union?” the short one said, tilting his head.

  For a moment, Filip was sure the man was going to come for him. That there was about to be violence between them. He wasn’t scared. He wanted it. He had a visceral memory of being a child, barely in his adolescence, leading a raid on Martian shipyards. Watching soldiers die, the enemy and his own. He remembered that joy. More than that, he felt it again, just a little. The short one must have seen something change in him because he looked confused for a moment and took a half step back.

  “He’s right, Alyn,” Jackson said, appearing at his elbow. “You know better than this.”

  The taller one shrugged theatrically. Alyn, apparently. Filip really needed to start learning these names. “Whatever, Jacks.”

  “Whatever your whatever,” Jackson said. “It’s a worksite. Not a playground. Get the fuck back to work.”

  When the maintenance men turned back to the cart, Leward was gone. No one mentioned him. They just took the cart by the lead and pulled it off to the north. Filip watched them go.

  “Well, you got balls, Nagata,” Jackson said when they were out of earshot. “I’ll give you that. You want some free advice, don’t get in the middle of this.”

  “I hear you,” Filip said. “Cover for me for a little, okay?”

  “You’ve got something to do?”

  “Yeah,” he said. Then, “Don’t let Cameron—”

  “We’ll wait for you on the power hookups. I’m not stupid,” Jackson said. “Just… be careful.”

  He hadn’t been in Nami Veh’s office since he and Mose had arrived on the shuttle. They’d done their project intake there, affirming all the corporate boilerplate they always affirmed, getting their bunk assignments and the review of local legal policy. He hadn’t paid much attention.

  It was the same space. Just green and gray prefabricated walls with a little window and a light metal desk. All the small details he noticed now had probably been there before. The picture of a man with dark hair and a thin beard in a silver frame on her desk. The little vase with local flowers in the corner. The discreet silver cross on the wall. He hadn’t picked Nami Veh as pious, but it didn’t surprise him.

  The woman herself was the same. He had an image in his mind of what she looked like, but as he talked, as he watched her for signs of how she was hearing him, she didn’t really match the picture. He thought of her as professionally, blandly attractive, with the gentle eyes and hard smile of someone whose job it was to say things were all right even when they were not. But she actually had a much more expressive face, with a webwork of wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes that seemed equally at ease with both sorrow and laughter. Her hair was auburn and touched with gray, but it had more warmth to it than he remembered. He suddenly found himself wanting her to like him.

  “Sit,” she said, gesturing to a rickety stool in front of her desk.

  He did, and spread his hands in an old Belter gesture of passing on a task. “You’re administration here. I don’t know what needs to happen, but I’m not the one to do it.”

  He half expected her to say What am I supposed to do? And it would have been a good question. To her credit, she leaned forward, elbows on the desk, and pursed her lips.

  “Did they hurt him?”

  “I don’t know,” Filip said. “You’d have to ask him. They knocked him down.”

  “And Alejandro wasn’t there.”

  “They were his people. There’s a way people get sometimes, and if it sets in, you can’t get it back. It’s like…”

  “Contempt,” Nami Veh said, and her voice had none of its usual pleasantness. There was exhaustion in its place. And maybe a kind of mordant humor. “It’s contempt.”

  “It’s a problem. Somebody has to do something about it.”

  “And that somebody is me,” she said ruefully. “Thank you, Filip. I may need your help again. But I hear you, and I will take this seriously.”

  “Is that going to be enough?”

  She frowned her question.

  “I mean,” Filip said, “does Jandro still listen to you? You used to have pull, but you had the company behind you then. I had the union. We had… Now, is he going to listen?”

  “We’ll make it work,” she said with enough conviction that he could almost convince himself she had answered the question.

  “You don’t understand what he is,” Filip said, trying to keep the frustration out of his voice.

  To his surprise, Nami Veh didn’t brush him off. Whatever she was seeing on his face made her frown and settle back in her chair. “Tell me, Filip.”

  “Men like him—” he started, then stopped. “My father was like that. Strong. Certain. People loved him, and wanted him to love them. They wanted to have even a tiny piece of his confidence, if they could. It made them do terrible things so that he would notice them.”

  “Like what?” she asked.

  Filip didn’t answer. He suddenly found he couldn’t meet her eyes. She nodded and smiled, then pointed at the cross hanging on the wall.

  “My mother was a saint,” she said. Filip couldn’t tell if that was sarcastic or not. “When she died here a few years ago, I think a lot of the people at this colony were surprised that the sun didn’t go out.”

  “Sorry I never met her.”

  “You say that now,” Nami said with a laugh, “but having anyone care that much and try that hard to save you from yourself can be fucking exhausting.”

  “Do I get to pick? Because—”

  “Look,” Nami said. “I don’t need to hear all the ways your father made life harder for you, and I’m not going to explain how living with Saint Anna broke a few things for me. We have no reason to compete, you and I. The only point is that our parents can lay burdens on us, all without meaning to, that we’ll have to carry around for the rest of our lives and there’s nothing we can do about that. But you and I still get to decide how we carry those burdens.”

  She reached across the table and took his hand. Hers was warm and dry. Her smile was both sad and comforting at the same time. It made Filip want to scream at her.

  “That’s all well and good, but this Jandro problem isn’t going away,” Filip said, and yanked his hand away, needing to break the shared intimacy of the moment and finding himself almost happy to see her smile disappear.

  “I know,” she replied.

  Filip jumped up off the stool and bulled his way out the door, slamming his shoulder into the frame as he went. Once he was back out of her office and into the town, things felt different. He couldn’t tell whether the others were watching him, seeing the junior power tech in a new light, or if he only imagined that they were. His chest felt tight, like he was just a little too far from his ship with not enough air in his tank. He found himself bouncing up with each step, pushing too hard against the ground.

  Mose was waiting for him by the food cylinders, arms crossed. The clouds in the west had come much closer, and the smell of rain was in the air. Jackson and Cameron weren’t there, but their toolboxes were, like Mose had asked them to leave for a little bit. Filip put his back against the steel racks and shoved his hands in his pockets.

  “The fuck are you doing, Nagata?” Mose’s voice was soft, but there was a buzz in it. Anger. Maybe fear. “Are you getting us involved with these people’s problems? Is that what you’re up to?”

  “We’re going to be here. At least for a while, maybe for longer than that. Their problems don’t stop with them.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “It isn’t,” Filip said, and Mose took a step back like the words had been a slap. “I know men like Jandro. People are scared and they’re hurting, yeah? And some big man comes along, and he seems confident. He looks sure of himself. All the things that are eating at your heart, they aren’t eating at his. And yeah, he gets a team. Everyone falls in line behind him, and bad things happen. The worst things.”

  Mose cleared his throat, but Filip kept going before he could speak. “We’re at the start of something here. We can’t let it slide. If it’s okay now, it’s okay forever. You plug a leak when it’s small, or you suffer when it’s big.”

  “And you think you’re going to fix it?”

  “I saw a problem, I took it to administration. But these are not the kind of people who know what to do with this.”

  “What kind are they, then?” Mose asked.

  “Gentle,” Filip said. “They’re gentle.”

  “So maybe it’s not your job to find the toughest son of a bitch in this place and make an enemy out of him?”

  “That’s how it works, Mose. No one stands up, and no one stands up.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck personal shit you’re working through,” Mose said. “I don’t much care. I’m telling you as your supervisor we stay out of local drama. We’re putting in time here until we can get back to Alpha and Diecisiete.”

  “And when I tell you to fuck off? When I tell you your rules don’t matter anymore, and I do what I want, then what, Mose? When I’m like Jandro, what do you do? How do you stop me? Because we both know there’s no union behind you anymore, and don’t fucking mistake me for one of the gentle locals, coyo.”

  Mose’s scowl dug lines into his cheeks.

  “You’re out of line, Nagata,” he said, pointing a finger at the center of Filip’s chest. “You’re way the fuck out of line.”

  But then he walked away. What else was he going to do? Filip turned back to the cylinders. He needed to get them mounted and the walls back up before the storm came.

  Filip walked through the downpour. The rain floated down, moving slowly enough in the fractional gravity for the drops to join each other and become a heavy, unforgiving mist punctuated by water balloons. Somewhere behind the cloud cover, the sun was setting. He could only tell by the world growing slowly darker around him.

  The plaza wasn’t empty. Several of the buildings had walls that swung up and out, making awnings where people could sit with the weather without being in it. Little pools of light, like pictures of street carts on planets Filip had never stood on. He passed the place where the monster had been unmade. Even close up, there was no sign of the blood, but he thought he caught a whiff of something strange, like overheated iron.

  By the time he reached the administration building, he was soaked. He knocked on the door, and Nami Veh called him in. In the hours since he’d been there, the metal desk had been taken out and more chairs had been brought in and put in a little circle. It looked like a very small support group meeting.

  Leward sat with his back to the door. Jandro, across from him, sat with his legs spread and his arms out, resting on the backs of chairs to either side of him. Nami Veh was the professional version of herself again, smiling and gracious. Filip was surprised to realize he was sorry to see that.

  “Hey, Nagata,” Jandro said.

  “Oye, Jandro,” Filip said, then turned his attention to Nami Veh. “You wanted me?”

  “And thank you for being here,” she said, motioning him into one of the empty chairs. “There were some questions about what exactly happened today? I was hoping you could help us with what you remember.”

  Jandro turned a half smile to the space about halfway between Filip and Leward. Leward crossed his arms tight across his chest.

  “Okay,” Filip said. “Sure.”

  He told the story again. Leward, the cart, the push. Jackson coming to back him up. He didn’t look at any of them while he spoke, but he didn’t put his head down either. Just focused on a spot on the wall. When he was done he shrugged.

  “Well,” Nami Veh said. “That doesn’t sound exactly like your experience, Leward?”

  “It was an assault,” the science lead said. “Does it matter how many times they hit me? I was assaulted.”

  “Maybe you were, maybe you weren’t,” Jandro said. “You ever been in a fight, Nagata?”

  Filip felt a surge of something cold. The hum of the rain seemed to go a little quieter. “What are you asking?”

  “You ever been in a fight? Ever seen someone really trying to hurt someone else? You see a few guys messing around. It gets a little physical. If you haven’t been in a real fight, maybe you get mixed up. See some things that aren’t really there.”

  Filip said, “I’ve been in a fight,” but he said it softly, and Nami Veh was talking over him. “Regardless, it’s clear a line was crossed. And we all know who was involved, so the question for us now is how we move forward. Jandro, these were your crew. They need to make this right.”