Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  “Hey,” she said, not looking at him. Thud. Reset.

  “Hey,” Holden said. “How’re you doing?”

  “Fine.” Thud. Reset.

  “Anything you want to talk about?”

  Thud. Reset. “Nope.”

  “Okay. Well. If you ah”—Thud. Reset.—“change your mind.”

  “I’ll track you down.” Thud. Reset. Thud.

  “Great,” Holden said, and stepped back out of the room. Bobbie hadn’t looked at him once.

  In the galley, Naomi had a bulb of coffee waiting for him. He sat across from her while Alex dropped the last of his food into the recycler. Holden drank. The Roci’s processors were calibrated once a week, and they’d stocked up before leaving Luna, so it was almost certainly his imagination that made the coffee more bitter than usual. He put a pinch of salt in it anyway, swirling the bulb to stir it.

  “You knew that wasn’t going to work,” he said.

  “I expected it wasn’t,” Naomi said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Just suspected.”

  “Strongly suspected,” she said. It was almost an apology. “I could have been surprised.”

  “You got to give Bobbie her room, Cap,” Alex said. “She’ll come out the other side of it.”

  “I just … I wish I understood what’s bothering her so much.”

  Alex blinked. “She’s been spoiling to take the fight to some bad guys ever since Io. Now she got one, and she was stuck in a box while the rest of us did the shooting.”

  “But we won.”

  “We did,” Naomi said. “And she watched us do it while we tried to figure out how to get her out of a trap. By the time she was free, it was over.”

  Holden sipped at the coffee. It was a little better. That didn’t help. “Okay, so what I meant was I wish I understood what was bothering her in hopes that then there’d be something I could do about it.”

  “We know,” Naomi said. “The difficulty isn’t lost on us.”

  Amos’ voice came over the ship’s comm. “Anybody there? I’ve been paging ops for the last ten minutes.”

  Alex thumbed the system on. “On my way up now.”

  “Okay. I think I tracked down the last leak. Let me know what it looks like from your end.”

  “Will do,” Alex said, nodded to the two of them, and headed up toward ops and the ongoing repair effort. The Azure Dragon’s crew hadn’t had all that long, but they hadn’t been trying for clean either. It was easier to cut through a lot of hull quickly when you didn’t care what broke while you did it. Knowing that the ship wasn’t right yet was like an itch he couldn’t quite reach. Part of that came from knowing how strapped the shipyards on Luna were going to be. The days of sloping into Tycho and having Fred Johnson’s teams patch the ship up were probably gone, and Luna had Earth’s navy to take precedence over Holden and his crew.

  It wasn’t just that, though. It was also the same thing he’d felt driving him to talk to Bobbie. And to Clarissa Mao before that. He wanted things to be all right, and he had the growing feeling that they weren’t. That they weren’t going to be.

  “What about you?” Naomi said, looking at him from under a spill of dark, gently curled hair. “Want to talk?”

  He chuckled. “I do, but I don’t know what to say. Here we are, the conquering heroes with prisoners and a salvaged data core, and it doesn’t feel like enough.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Always so comforting.”

  “I mean you’re not wrong. You aren’t uneasy and disturbed by all this because there’s something wrong with you. This is all uneasing and disturbing. You aren’t fucked up. The situation is.”

  “That doesn’t … You know, that actually does make me feel a little better.”

  “Good,” she said. “Because I need to know this isn’t about Marco and Filip. That … all that isn’t making it hard for you to have me around.”

  “No,” Holden said. “We covered that.”

  “And we’ll cover it again after this, I’m sure. But if you’d just keep saying it?”

  “I would put everyone else that exists headfirst out an airlock just to keep you around. It isn’t that. The only concern I have about you and Marco Inaros is that he’ll try to hurt you again.”

  “That’s nice to know.”

  “I still love you. I will always love you.”

  He was answering the question he thought she was asking, but her gaze cut away. Her smile was rueful, but it was also real. “Always is a long time.”

  “I’m captain of this ship. Technically, I could marry us right now.”

  Now she laughed. “Would you want to?”

  “I’m easy. It seems a little redundant. Husband and wife seems like a less interesting and committed relationship than Holden and Naomi,” he said. “He can’t win, you know.”

  “Of course he can. Marco’s the one who decides when he wins.”

  “No, I’ve been thinking about it. The Free Navy … is untenable. They did a lot of damage. They killed a lot of people. But all of this is really about the gates. If it wasn’t for all the people rushing out to try to found a new colony, Mars wouldn’t be collapsing. The Belters wouldn’t be worried that they’ll get marginalized out of existence. None of the things that gave Marco a toehold would have happened. But the gates aren’t going away. So all the pressures he’s fighting against? They’ll outlast him. People are still going to want to get out to the new systems, and they’re going to find ways to do it. And the colonies that are already out there are going to want to keep in contact and trade with us. At least until they’re really on their feet, and that could take generations.”

  “You think he’s on the wrong side of history.”

  “He is,” Holden said.

  “Then what does that say about people like me? I grew up in the Belt. I wouldn’t want to live down a gravity well. The gates aren’t going away, but neither are the Belters. Unless they are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged. “Human history has seen plenty of genocides. If you’re right, then the long term is either the gates or the Belters. And Belters … We’re human. We’re fragile. We die. The gates? Even if we could destroy them, we wouldn’t. There’s too much real estate involved.”

  Holden looked down. “All right. That was my turn.”

  Naomi lifted a questioning eyebrow.

  “That was less comforting than I meant it to be,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. Anyway, that’s not what I meant when I said Marco decides when he wins. You don’t understand how slippery he can be. Whatever happens, he’ll shift so it was his plan all along. If he were the last person alive, he’d say we needed the apocalypse and declare victory. It’s what he is.”

  Even though they were the agents of Chrisjen Avasarala’s will, it took seventeen hours for the Rocinante and the Azure Dragon to get berths on Luna. When they finally did, they were at a military yard outside Patsaev complex, where the civilian relief ships were landing. The docks were crowded with people in bunches and lines, some of them staring blankly ahead like victims of a fever, some weeping with relief or exhaustion or both. The air stank of sweat and felt stale, even where the intakes made the greatest breeze.

  The Luna Station complex—shipyards and convention centers, hotels and residence centers, schools and office complexes and warehouses—was big enough to fit a hundred million bodies, but the environmental infrastructure would overload at something like half that, even with the advantage of the moon’s mass and conduction to soak up waste heat. The Lagrange stations had less margin. Holden tried to do the math in his head as they forged their path through the crowd. The estimates said that one-half of Earth was dead already. Fifteen billion gone or going so fast there was no way to save them. Of those still alive, two-thirds were living in what the newsfeeds were calling “distressed situations.” Ten billion people who needed food or water or shelter. And up the well, there were places for maybe as man
y as a quarter million. Two-and-a-half-hundred-thousandths of a percent of the people in need. He couldn’t believe that was right, and tried to figure it again. He came to the same number.

  And a thousand worlds out there, just on the other side of the gates. Hostile worlds, most of them, but not more hostile than Earth. Not now. If there were a way to teleport them from Boston and Lisbon and Bangkok, maybe they’d be saved. Maybe they’d go on to raise something new and beautiful out of the ruins of Earth, and if one system didn’t, there’d be a thousand other chances.

  Except that there wouldn’t be, because the transportation was too hard. So they’d die where they stood because there was no way to get them all someplace better fast enough for it to matter.

  “You okay, Cap?” Amos asked.

  “Fine. Why?”

  “Looks like you’re getting ready to hit someone.”

  “No,” Holden said. “Wouldn’t help.”

  “Over here,” Bobbie said.

  The guards outside the administrative offices carried small automatic weapons and wore body armor. They stood aside and let Bobbie shuffle through the wide gray door, and all of the others behind her in a line like ducklings. The offices could have been a different world. Full-spectrum lights glowed like Holden’s memory of a summer afternoon. Ferns and ivy bobbed in the gentle breeze from the air recyclers. The hallways were half a meter wider than the corridors of the Rocinante, and felt luxurious. Only the faint gunpowder stink of moondust and the one-tenth g spoke of Luna. Everything else would have looked at home in the UN offices at The Hague.

  Bobbie led them like she knew where she was going, down one hall, past another pair of armed guards, and through a set of frosted glass doors. The room was built like a lounge—chairs and divans around low tables. Eight or ten people were scattered around in pairs and small groups, and for a few seconds, Holden didn’t understand who they were.

  At some point, everything had been either black or white, but use had left splashes of color. The brown ring of a coffee stain on a cushion, the greenish scrape along the side of a chair. Avasarala stood at the far side of the room, her orange sari blazing like a torch while she talked to a white-haired woman with dark skin and narrow hips. When Avasarala looked up to smile at him, the woman turned. Holden stumbled.

  “Momma Sophie?” he said, and then, like a lens coming into focus, he saw all the others for who they were. The years had changed them all, and seeing them through cameras and screens wasn’t the same. Father Tom had gained weight, and Father Cesar had lost it, but they were there, hand in hand, walking toward him. Father Anton had gone bald, and Mother Elise seemed older, and frailer in person than she had on the screen. And shorter. Everyone seemed shorter, because the system at the farmhouse had been on a desk. He’d been looking up at all of them from that desktop for years and hadn’t realized it until just now.

  All eight of his parents crowded around him, their bodies pressing gently against his, their arms around each other, the way they had when he’d been a child. Holden found himself weeping, swept away by the memory of being a little boy surrounded and protected by the loving bodies of eight strong adults. He stood among them now, the strongest of the lot, shaken by the love and the joy and the terrible understanding that both the boy he’d been and the men and women they were then were gone and would never come back. They were all crying too. Father Dimitri, Mother Tamara, Father Joseph. And his new family too.

  Naomi pressed her hand to her lips, like she was trying to hold words or emotions in. Alex was grinning as widely as any of Holden’s family, his eyes shining. Avasarala and Bobbie seemed pleased, like people who’d pulled off a good surprise party. Weirdly, Clarissa Mao, standing alone with a pressure cast on her wounded arm, was shaking with barely controlled sobs. Amos looked at all of them like he’d walked in on the last line of a joke, then shrugged and let them get on with whatever the hell this was. Holden felt a rush of affection for the man.

  “Wait,” he said. “Wait. Everyone, I need you to meet … everyone else. I guess. This is Naomi, everyone.”

  His parents all turned toward her. Naomi’s eyes widened a degree. The little, panicked flare of her nostrils was probably something only he could see. There was a pause he hadn’t expected, a stuttering moment when he saw her through their eyes: Here is the Belter girl their son was sleeping with. Here is the ex-lover of the man who killed the world, the representative of everything that had happened. One of them. It lasted a heartbeat, then another. It was vast as the space between worlds.

  “I’ve heard so much about you, dear,” Mother Elise said, moving to Naomi and taking her in a wide embrace. The others followed, queuing up to welcome her to the family. But it wasn’t an illusion. The moment had been there. Even when his two families diffused into each other—Father Dimitri and Father Anton and Alex talking about the ship, Mother Tamara and Amos looking at each other with a kind of amused bewilderment—Holden felt the hesitation. They would love her if he said so, but she wasn’t one of their kind.

  He barely noticed Bobbie at his side until she spoke. “This is how she does it. She finds a way to pay you.”

  She nodded toward the back of the room. Avasarala stood alone, watching with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. Holden went to her.

  “They told me they were all right,” he said. “When I talked to them, they said they weren’t in danger.”

  “It was true, as far as it went,” Avasarala said. “The reactors hadn’t failed there yet. And they had more food stored than most. They might have lasted another … month? How should I know? Canning. Who the fuck does their own canning anymore?”

  “But you evacuated them.”

  “Another week, another month. Not another year. They wouldn’t have been safe forever, and once they realized they were fucked, all the slots would have been filled. I flagged them as priority evacuees. I get to do that kind of shit. I’m the boss.”

  “Where …”

  She shrugged. “They’ll have quarters here or on L-4. Not as big as they had in Montana, but together. I can do that much. Maybe they’ll even go back to their farm someday when all this is done. Stranger things have happened.”

  Holden took her hand. It was cool and hard and stronger than he’d expected. She turned to look him in the eye for the first time since he’d come into the room. The smile edged into the corners of her eyes.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I owe you one.”

  Her smile shifted, losing the formality and coolness and distance it had carried beneath the surface. She chuckled deep in her throat.

  “I know,” she said.

  Chapter Ten: Avasarala

  She didn’t sleep anymore, or at least it didn’t help when she did. The bed in her suite was spongy, but she didn’t sink into it the way that a lifetime at normal gravity made her body expect, so it felt too soft and too hard at the same time. And sleep was supposed to mean rest. There was no rest anymore. She closed her eyes and her mind stumbled on like it was falling down stairs. Mortality rates and supply windows and security briefings—all the things that filled her so-called waking hours filled her nights as well. Being asleep only meant they lost what little coherence they had. It didn’t feel like sleeping. It felt like going mad and catatonic for a few hours and then regaining enough sanity to push through for eighteen or twenty hours more before collapsing into herself again. It was shit. But it needed doing, so she did it.

  At least she had a shower.

  “It seems like Bobbie Draper managed to keep Holden from screwing the mission up,” she said, drying her hair. The suite glowed a soft blue, like the promise of dawn. Not that any dawn looked like that on Earth now. But it had once. “I like that girl. I worry for her. She’s been sitting behind a desk too long. It doesn’t suit her.”

  She considered the saris in her dresser, running her finger across the cloth and listening to the sound of skin against fabric. She opted for a green one that shimmered like a beetle’s carapace. Gold em
broidery along the edges that caught the false sunlight made it look cheerful and powerful at the same time. And she had the amber necklace with the jade that went with it. Fashion. All humanity shitting itself to death, and she still had to worry what she looked like going into the meetings. Pathetic.

  Aloud, she said, “Gies and Basrat sent word today. Everyone thought they were dead, but they were holed up under a mountain in the Julian Alps. Probably didn’t plan to pop their heads above ground until everything was settled, but you know how Amanda is. It’s never real with her unless someone knows she has it better. I don’t know why you liked them.”

  She caught her mistake too late, and something vast and dangerous shifted in her heart. She took a deep breath, bit her lip, and went back to wrapping her sari in place.

  “Once we have the Free Navy under control, we’ll have to do something about emigration. No one’s going to want to stay on Earth. At this rate, I may take off. Retire on some alien ocean where I don’t have to feel like I’m responsible for making the waves go up and down. Mars will never sort itself out. Smith? He puts a brave face on it, but he’s not a prime minister. He’s hospice nurse for a republic. Anytime I start feeling like my job’s bad, I just have a drink with him.”

  They were all things she’d said before, in some variation. There were new things every day—reports from the planetary surface, from the surveillance drones around Venus, from her covert service agents on Iapetus and Ceres and Pallas. With the Free Navy busy making the OPA look measured and rational, Fred Johnson could still be of use making contact with the reservoirs of the Belt that understood how dangerous Marco Inaros was and how the damage already done could spiral into something even worse. God knew he never brought in good news. But for everything new, for every irrevocable tick of the clock, there were the things she cycled back to. The ones she revisited again and again like rereading a favorite book. Or poem. Things she said because she had said them before.