On the screen, Marco Inaros lifted his hand in the Belter idiom of greeting, militarizing the motion with his precision and focus. His face was an icon of resolve and strength and masculine beauty.

“We are your arm,” he said. “And we will strike your enemies wherever they are. We are the Free Navy. Citizens of the Belt and of the new humanity, we are yours.”

A rising chord picked up and broke into a traditional Belter protest song transformed into something martial and rousing. The new anthem of an invented nation. The image faded to a split circle and then to white. The crew of the Razorback were quiet.

“Well,” Bobbie said. “He’s pretty. And he’s really charismatic. But, wow, that speech.”

“It probably sounded good in his head,” Alex said. “And really, when your prelude is you kill a couple billion people, anything you say is going to sound a little megalomaniacal and creepy, right?”

Smith’s voice was calm, but the dread in it carried through. “He wasn’t talking to us.” He stood in the door to the cabin, his arms stretched to brace against the frame. His amiable smile hadn’t changed, but its meaning had. “That was meant for the Belters. And what they heard in him – what they saw in him – won’t be anything like what we did. For them, he just declared victory.”

Chapter Thirty-eight: Amos

Ash sifted down, coating everything with a few millimeters of gray. Everything stank of it. They got off the road to let relief convoys go by twice, and then once when an old electric service truck whined by, its bed filled with six or seven huddled figures. They slept when it got too dark to see, hauling the bikes into the bushes or alleys. The dead guy’s emergency rations tasted like crap, but they didn’t seem to be toxic.

After four days, the plants along the roadside started showing signs of dying: green leaves turning brown and curving toward the earth. The birds, on the other hand, were going crazy. They filled the air with chirps and trills and songs. It was probably sparrow for Holy shit, what’s going on, we’re all gonna die, but it sounded pretty. Amos tried to keep clear of the bigger cities, but there wasn’t a lot of space left in that part of the world that wasn’t paved.

Passing through Harrisonburg they were followed by a dozen dogs for about ten kilometers, the pack building up its nerve to attack. He let Peaches go ahead for that part, but it never got serious enough to make him spend bullets. When they started getting in toward Baltimore, there stopped being a way to keep clear of people.