"We could have met on Ceres," Anderson Dawes said, and Camina smiled at him, her lips pulled back tight from her teeth in what she hoped—had practiced, even—was a convincing smile.

She was thinking many things, behind that smile: thinking how much she did not want this man on her ship, thinking of how (a lifetime ago) she had accused Ashford of wanting Belters to be like the Inners, smiling false smiles and speaking words they did not mean. Fake. Plastic.

Now she smiled a fake smile and she used what she had learned from Ashford, from Fred, even from Oksana: about diplomacy, about controlling her temper, about saying the right words to make Dawes believe her faction was bigger than it was, and that they could offer him things Marco could not—a direct line to Inner trade, for example.

He still thought of her as a young girl, a runner for the operations on the Ceres docks. She could tell by the way he spoke to her, like she was naive and young, and did not know the things she knew. She kept her back straight and her smile in place and did not hit him. Marco had used her temper to mock her. She would tame it into a spear pointed straight at Marco's cold black heart.

"There is profit in war, ke?" Dawes said, spreading his hands.

"There is no profit in the UN send warships to Ceres, in Mars throw stealth-painted rocks at us, now that Marco has taught them how. There is no profit in die slowly after we lose our source of trade for live soil and biologicals. Marco thinks he will supply the entire Belt from Ganymede. Marco," she said, "is a fool. He has not studied history. Or perhaps he has studied only the wrong history. Nations are not asteroids. They do not exist alone. Power is not make everything we need to live; that is only survival. Power, it mean not waste our time making things we can trade with the Inners for, when we have something that they want."

She raised a hand to the screen with an image of the Ring that she had made sure to have on the wall of the room before Dawes walked in, set up so that it was the first thing he saw. This was an Ashford trick, one that she had learned by watching him and then used to great effect when she first began to carve out her faction's piece of the Belt: let your enemy see your strength and draw his own conclusions. Guide him gently, do not drag him. You can use force later, when you have let his own mind do half the work for you.

So she wrapped her offer in Ashford and seasoned it with a little of Fred Johnson and maybe, just maybe, there was a little bit of Dawes as well—for all the earliest tricks that she knew, that were not her own, had been learned from Dawes on the Ceres docks. Dawes' preferred tactics, of course, were the private room with the drain in the floor, the thugs with big fists and a willingness to do what they were told. But that was not something for today. That was the steel waiting in the velvet glove she offered him, and how much of that was Dawes and how much was Camina, she did not know and did not care to judge.

"Marco is not the future of the Belt," she said, pouring out drinks for them both. "Marco is dead end. Marco care only for Marco. He think only of Marco."

Dawes laughed. "Well, that sure is true."

Camina raised her glass. "Marco is not the Belt. His faction is not the Belt. It only one faction of many. No matter what Marco want."

"You going to run your own faction now, mali? You run whole navy, like Inners do?"

He said it mockingly. And she wanted to say, I already do, sabakawala. I run it right up your ass.

But she did not; she smiled and said the right words and coaxed him around to joining up Ceres with the faction he thought she had.

After, after ...

After, Fred Johnson would smile and say, That's good, Drummer. That's good. Ashford would laugh and crack open a bottle from his private stash and try to top her on insulting names for Dawes until they both collapsed in laughter. Oksana would smile and say So proud of you for not lose temper and kiss her and—

And she had none of them. Because of Marco.

Piece by piece, she was going to chip Marco's support out from under him. She was taking the Belt back, no matter who she had to team up with or whose shit she had to eat, and she would watch Marco Inaros walk vacuum by the time she was done.