Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  Nono waited until her wife’s breath was deep and regular before she rose from the bedside. She was almost to the door when Anna spoke, her voice rusty with sleep.

  “Don’t forget Gino.”

  “Going there now,” Nono said softly, and Anna’s breath went back to its deep sleep-slow tide.

  “Can I come too?” Nami asked as Nono went back to their street door. “The terminals are down again, and there’s nothing to do here.”

  Nono considered It’s too dangerous out there and Your mother might need you, but her daughter’s eyes were so hopeful. “Yes, but put your shoes on.”

  The walk back to Gino’s was a dance in shadows. Enough sunlight had struck the emergency lights’ solar panels that half the houses they passed were glowing a little from within. Not much more than a candle’s brightness, but more than there had been. The city itself was still black. No streetlights, no glow in the skyscrapers, and only a few bright points along the sinuous length of the arcology to the south.

  Namono had the sudden, powerful memory of being younger than her own daughter was now and going up to Luna for the first time. The utter brilliance of the stars and the starkly beautiful Milky Way. Even with the dust grit still in the high air above them, there were more stars out now than when the light pollution of the city had drowned them. The moon shone: a crescent of silver cupping a webwork of gold. She took her daughter’s hand.

  The girl’s fingers seemed so thick, so solid compared to what they had once been. She was growing up. Not their little baby anymore. There had been so many plans for her university and traveling together. All of them gone now. The world they’d thought they were raising her in had vanished. She felt a twinge of guilt about that, as if there were something that she could have done to stop all this from happening. As if it were somehow her fault.

  In the deepening darkness, there were voices, though not so many as there had been. Before, there had been some nightlife in the quarter. Pubs and street performers and the hard, rattling music recently come into fashion that clattered out into the street like someone spilling bricks. Now people slept when the darkness came and rose with the light. She caught the smell of something cooking. Strange how even boiled oats could come to mean comfort. She hoped that Old Gino had gone to the van, or that one of Anna’s parishioners had gone for him. Otherwise Anna would insist that he take part of their supplies, and Namono would let her.

  But it hadn’t happened yet. No need to call for trouble before it came. There was enough on the road already. When they reached the turn to Old Gino’s street, the last of the sunlight was gone. The only sign that Zuma Rock was even there was a deeper darkness rising up thousands of meters above the city. The land itself raising a defiant fist to the sky.

  “Oh,” Nami said. Not even a word so much as the intake of breath. “Did you see it?”

  “See what?” Namono asked.

  “Shooting star. There’s another one. Look!”

  And yes, there among the fixed if flickering stars, a brief streak of light. And then another. While they stood there, hand in hand, a half dozen more. It was all she could do not to turn back, not to push her daughter into the shelter of a doorway and try to cover her. There had been an alert, but the remnants of the UN Navy had caught this one. These smears of fire across the upper atmosphere might not even be the debris from it. Or they might.

  Either way, shooting stars had been something beautiful once. Something innocent. They would not be again. Not for her. Not for anyone on Earth. Every bright smear was a whisper of death. The hiss of a bullet. A reminder as clear as a voice. All of this can end, and you cannot stop it.

  Another streak, bright as a torch, that bloomed out into a silent fireball as wide as her thumbnail.

  “That was a big one,” Nami said.

  No, Namono thought. No it wasn’t.

  Chapter One: Pa

  You have no fucking right to this!” the owner of the Hornblower shouted, not for the first time. “We worked for what we have. It’s ours.”

  “We’ve been over this, sir,” Michio Pa, captain of the Connaught, said. “Your ship and its cargo are under conscript order of the Free Navy.”

  “Your relief effort bullshit? Belters need supplies, let them buy some. Mine is mine.”

  “It’s needed. If you’d cooperated with the order—”

  “You shot us! You broke our drive cone!”

  “You tried to evade us. Your passengers and crew—”

  “Free Navy, my fucking ass! You’re thieves. You’re pirates.”

  At her left, Evans—her XO and the most recent addition to her family—grunted like he’d been hit. Michio glanced at him, and his blue eyes were there to meet her. He grinned: white teeth and a too-handsome face. He was pretty, and he knew it. Michio muted her microphone, letting the stream of invective pour from the Hornblower without her, and nodded him on. What is it?

  Evans pointed a thumb toward the console. “So angry,” he said. “Like to hurt a poor coyo’s feelings, he goes on like that.”

  “Be serious,” Michio said, but through a smile.

  “Am serious. Fragé bist.”

  “Fragile. You?”

  “In my heart,” Evans said, pressing a palm to his sculpted chest. “Little boy, me.”

  On the speaker, the owner of the Hornblower had worked himself into a deeper froth. To hear him tell it, Pa was a thief and a whore and the kind of person who didn’t care whose babies died so long as she got her payday. If he was her father, he’d kill her instead of letting her dishonor her family. Evans snickered.

  Despite herself, Michio laughed too. “Did you know your accent gets thicker when you flirt?”

  “Yeah,” Evans said. “I’m just a complex tissue of affectation and vice. Took your mind off him, though. You were starting to lose your temper.”

  “Not done losing it yet,” she said, and turned the mic back to live. “Sir. Sir! Can we at least agree that I’m the pirate who’s offering to lock you in your cabin for the trip to Callisto instead of throwing you into space? Would that be all right?”

  There was a moment of stunned silence on the radio, then a roar of incoherent rage that resolved into phrases like drink your fucking Belter blood and kill you if you try. Michio lifted three fingers. Across the command deck, Oksana Busch waved her own hand in acknowledgment and tapped the weapons controls.

  The Connaught wasn’t a Belter ship. Not originally. She’d been built by the Martian Congressional Republic Navy, and she’d come equipped with a wide variety of military and technical expert systems. They’d been on it for the better part of a year now, training in secret at first. And then when the day came, leading her into the fray. Now Michio watched her own monitor as the Connaught identified and targeted six places on the floating cargo ship where a stream of PDC fire or a well-placed missile would peel open the hull. The targeting lasers came on, painting the Hornblower. Michio waited. Evans’ smile was a little less certain than it had been. Slaughtering civilians wasn’t his first choice. In fairness, it wasn’t what Michio would have picked either, but the Hornblower wasn’t going to make its journey through the gates and out to whatever alien planet they’d thought to colonize. The negotiation now was only what the terms of that failure would be.

  “Want to fire, bossmang?” Busch asked.

  “Not yet,” Michio said. “Watch that drive. If they try to burn out of here? Then.”

  “They try to burn on that busted cone, we can save the ammunition,” Busch said, derision in her voice.

  “There’s people counting on that cargo.”

  “Savvy me,” Busch said. Then, a moment later, “They’re still cold.”

  The radio clicked, spat. On the other ship, someone was shouting, but not at her. Then there was another voice, then several, each trying to cut above the others. The report of a gun rang out, the sound of the attack pressed thin and nonthreatening by the radio.

  A new voice came.

  “Connaught? You
there?”

  “Still here,” Michio said. “To whom am I speaking, please?”

  “Name’s Sergio Plant,” the voice said. “Acting captain of the Hornblower. I’m offering up our surrender. Just no one gets hurt, okay?”

  Evans grinned their triumph and relief.

  “Besse to hear from you, Captain Plant,” Michio said. “I accept your terms. Please prepare for boarding.”

  She killed the connection.

  History, Michio believed, was a long series of surprises that seemed inevitable in retrospect. And what was true of nations and planets and vast corporate-state complexes also applied to the smaller fates of men and women. As above, so below. As the OPA and Earth and the Martian Congressional Republic, so with Oksana Busch and Evans Garner-Choi and Michio Pa. For that matter, so with all the other souls who lived and worked on the Connaught and her sister ships. It was only because she sat where she did, commanded as she did, and carried the weight of keeping the men and women of her crew safe and well and on the right side of history that the smaller personal histories of the Connaught’s crew seemed to have more significance.

  For her, the first surprise in the many that had brought her here was becoming part of the military arm of the Belt at all. As a young woman, she’d expected to be a systems engineer or an administrator on one of the big stations. If she’d loved mathematics more than she did, it might have happened. She’d put herself through upper university because she thought she was supposed to, and failed because it had been a horrible fit. When the counselors sent her the message that she was being disenrolled, it had been a shock. Looking back, it was obvious. The clarifying lens of history.

  She’d fit better with the OPA, or at least the arm of it she’d joined. Within the first month, it became clear that the Outer Planets Alliance was less the unified bureaucracy of the revolution than a kind of franchise title adopted by the people of the Belt who thought that something like it should exist. The Voltaire Collective considered itself OPA, but so did Fred Johnson’s group based on Tycho Station. Anderson Dawes acted as governor of Ceres under the split circle, and Zig Ochoa opposed him under the same symbol.

  For years, Michio had styled herself as a woman with a military career, but with an awareness in the back of her mind that her chain of command was a fragile thing. There was a time it had made her reflexively protective of authority—her authority over her subordinates and the authority of her superiors over her. It was what put her in the XO’s chair of the Behemoth. What put her in the slow zone when humanity first passed through the gate and into the hub of the thirteen-hundred-world empire to which they were heir. It was what had gotten her lover, Sam Rosenberg, killed. After that, her faith in command structures had become a little less absolute.

  Once again obvious in retrospect.

  As to the second surprise, she couldn’t have said exactly what it was. Falling into a collective marriage or her recruitment by Marco Inaros or taking possession of her new ship and its revolutionary mission with the Free Navy. Lives had more turning points than seams of ore, and not every change was obvious, even looking back.

  “Boarding team’s ready,” Carmondy said, his voice flattened by the suit mic. “You want us to breach?”

  As the leader of the assault team, Carmondy was technically in a different branch of command than Michio, but he’d deferred to her as soon as he and his soldiers had come aboard. He’d lived on Mars for a few years, wasn’t part of the plural marriage that formed the core of the Connaught’s crew, and was professional enough to accept his status as an outsider. She liked him for that, if little else.

  “Let’s let them be nice,” Michio said. “If they start shooting at us, do what needs doing.”

  “Savvy,” Carmondy said, and then switched channels.

  Both ships were on the float now, so she couldn’t lean back in her crash couch. If she’d been able to, she would have.

  When the news had come out that the Free Navy was taking control of the system and that the ring gate was closed to through traffic, the fleet of colony ships on the burn for the new worlds beyond faced a choice. Stand down and give their supplies over for redistribution to the stations and ships most in need, and they would be allowed to keep their ships. Run, and they wouldn’t.

  The Hornblower—like who knew how many others—had done the calculation and decided the risk was worth the reward. They’d killed their transponders, spun their ship, and burned like hell, but briefly. Then spun again, burned again, spun again, burned. Hotaru, they called it. The strategy of going bright only for a moment, and then going dark in hopes that the vastness of space would conceal them until the political situation changed. The ships had enough food and supplies to last the would-be colonists for years. The volume of the system was so massive that if they avoided detection at the front, finding them later could be the work of lifetimes.

  The Hornblower’s drive plume had been detected by Free Navy arrays on Ganymede and Titan both. The thing she hated most was that the chase had led them up out of the plane of the ecliptic. The vast majority of the sun’s heliosphere extended above and below the thin disk where the planets and the asteroid belt spun in their orbits. Michio had a superstitious dislike of those reaches, the huge emptiness that, in her mind, loomed above and below human civilization.

  The ring gate and the unreal space beyond it might be stranger—were stranger—but her unease about traveling outside the ecliptic had been with her since childhood. It was part of her personal mythology, and a herald of bad luck.

  She set her monitor to show the boarding team’s suit cameras and play soft music. The Hornblower, as seen through twenty different perspectives while harps and finger drums tried to soothe her. A dark-skinned Earther was in the airlock, his arms spread wide. Half a dozen of the cameras were locked on him, barrels of their weapons visible. The others shifted, watching for movement on the periphery or coming from outside the ship. The man reached up and used a handhold to flip himself around, putting his arms behind him for the zip-tie restraint. It had a sense of practice that left Michio thinking that Captain Plant—if that’s who this was—had been forcibly detained before.

  The boarding team moved into the ship, its eyes and attention shifting down the corridors in teams. Movement on one screen mapped to a figure seen in another. When they reached the galley, the crew of the Hornblower floated in ranks, arms out, ready to accept whatever fate the Connaught had in store for them. Even at the very small size the individual panes had taken to fit her monitor, she could see the clinging sheen of tears creeping over the captives’ faces. Grief masks formed of saline and surface tension.

  “They’re going to be fine,” Evans said. “Esá? It’s our job, yeah?”

  “I know,” Michio said, her gaze fixed on the screen.

  The boarding team moved through the decks, locking down control. Their coordination made them feel like a single organism with twenty eyes. The group consciousness of professionalism and drills. The command deck looked ill kept. A hand terminal and a drinking bulb on the float had been sucked against an air intake. Without thrust gravity to coordinate them, the crash couches lay at a variety of angles. It reminded her of old videos she’d seen of shipwrecks back on Earth. The colony ship was drowning in the endless vacuum.

  She knew that Carmondy would be calling her before he did it, and drew the music gently down. The request came through with a polite chime.

  “We’ve taken control of the ship, Captain,” he said. Two of his men were watching him say it, so she saw his lips and his jaw making the words from two angles even as she heard them. “No resistance. No trouble.”

  “Officer Busch?” Michio said.

  “Their firewalls are already down,” Oksana said. “Toda y alles.”

  Michio nodded, more to herself than to Carmondy. “The Connaught has control of the enemy ship’s systems.”

  “We’re setting a perimeter and securing the prisoners. Automatic check-in set.”

  �
��Understood,” Michio said. Then, to Evans, “Let’s pull back far enough to be outside the blast range if it turns out they’re hiding nukes in the grain silo.”

  “On it,” Evans said.

  The maneuvering thrusters shifted her against her restraints, not even a tenth of a g, for the burn’s scant handful of seconds. Taking the things that other people thought they deserved to keep was dangerous work. The Connaught would watch over the boarding team of course, the ship’s gentle fingers on all their pulses. And in addition, Carmondy would ping every half hour using a onetime pad protocol. If he failed to check in, Michio would turn the Hornblower into a diffuse cloud of hot gas as a warning to the next ship. And a few thousand people on Callisto, Io, and Europa would have to hope the other Free Navy conscription missions came through.

  The Belt had finally shrugged off the yoke of the inner planets. They had Medina Station at the heart of the ring gates, they had the only functioning navy in the solar system, and they had the gratitude of millions of Belters. In the long term, it was the greatest statement of independence and freedom the human race had ever made. In the short term, it was her job to see the victory didn’t starve them all to death.

  For the next two days, Carmondy and his men would see that the would-be colonists were sealed on secured decks, where they could ride out the transit to a stable orbit around Jupiter. Then make a complete inventory of what had been gained by the taking of the Hornblower. Once they were done, it would still be a week before the salvage drives were in place. In that time, the Connaught would stand as guard and captor, and little enough for Michio to do but scan the darkness for other refugees.

  She wasn’t looking forward to it, and she was sure the others in her marriage group weren’t either. Still, there was more than that in Oksana’s voice when she spoke.

  “Bossmang. We got confirmation from Ceres.”

  “Good,” Michio said, but with an uptick in her inflection that meant she’d heard whatever Oksana wasn’t saying. Oksana Busch had been her wife almost as long as the group had been together. They knew each other’s moods well.