Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  And that was all. So far. Four interviews, none of them terribly long. Hopefully it was enough for Monica to work with. She’d promised him that a lot could be saved in editing.

  The docks weren’t as busy as he was used to seeing them. Especially after the press and barely controlled chaos of Luna, Ceres seemed wounded. Still reeling from the blows it had suffered. The carts and loading mechs stood idle, waiting for a ship to arrive with supplies or some warehouse on the station that still had something worth sending away.

  He’d heard once about reperfusion injuries. When a limb had been pressed until all the blood was gone, the flood when it came back could break vessels, bleed into the cellular matrix. He remembered thinking at the time how strange it was for something normal, necessary, and life-giving to cause damage just by showing back up. Ceres was like that now, but he couldn’t tell if the combined fleet was the blood returning or if some other flood would have to come before Ceres could take stock of how badly it had been wounded.

  On his way back in, he passed Gor Droga and Amos in the locker room running down a short that was making one of the ventilation fans run slow. Clarissa Mao was talking to them both from down in engineering. It was the sort of problem that a ship with a full crew had the spare cycles to address. At the lift, he had to wait for Chava Lombaugh to squeeze past him before he got on.

  The truth was that with all of Fred’s people and Holden’s, the Rocinante still had a little less than the full crew she’d been meant to carry. That it felt crowded to him wasn’t the ship design, but his own habits and expectations. A full crew would be tighter, more compressed, more like a normal Navy ship. Holden knew that. He even knew that in some ways having the extra people would keep them all safer. The Rocinante was built with a lot of redundant backups. The crew was supposed to be the same way. It hadn’t worked out that way, though. Another mechanic wouldn’t be Amos. Another pilot wouldn’t be Alex. People were more than the roles they played in the function of the ship, and they weren’t replaceable. And what was true of the Rocinante held for the larger field of humanity as well.

  The lift stopped. Fred Johnson looked up from the ship controls, nodding to Holden. The lights were at the same dim settings that Alex preferred, and the backsplash from the screens left Fred’s skin looking darker than it was. Maura Patel sat across the deck, diagnostics spooling across the communications controls on her screen and headphones over her ears. Holden dropped into a couch beside Fred’s and swiveled to face him.

  “You wanted me?”

  “Couple things. I’m setting up shop on Ceres for now. Avasarala’s going to recognize me as acting governor,” Fred said. “I’m pulling in all my favors. Everyone I know with any influence from the OPA. I’ll bring them here.”

  “That sounds like an invitation to assassinate you.”

  “The risk is necessary. I don’t know if my crew will be staying here or going to Tycho without me. I’m waiting on word from Drummer about that. One way or the other, I’ll get them out of your hair.”

  “That’s … I mean, okay. But they’re sort of growing on me. So what did you really want to talk about?”

  Fred nodded once, a short, hard motion. “Do you think Draper will be able to speak for Mars?”

  Holden laughed. “Like speak for ambassador speak for? Negotiate with the OPA? Because I was pretty sure that was up to Mars.”

  “We may not be in a position to wait for them to get their ducks in a row. Smith’s out, and Richards is in, but an opposition coalition’s formed that want to put investigating the remaining military ahead of anything else.”

  “You mean like ahead of fighting the war?”

  “For example. Richards and Avasarala are working on it, but I need a Martian face with me if I’m going to make this combined navy hold together. With my background, I can represent the best of Earth to the Belt. I’ve been doing that for years, and I’ve built up a lot of trust. But unless I have a representative of Mars, I won’t be bringing anything new to the table. Especially with the Free Navy flying Martian ships. Inaros’ stock is very high right now.”

  “Seriously? Because it looks a lot like he just walked away from the biggest port in the Belt.”

  Fred shrugged eloquently. “His apologists are good at their jobs. And everything is in the shadow of what he did to Earth. Sorrento-Gillis, Gao, all of them. They underestimated the anger in the Belt. And the desperation. People want Inaros to be a hero, and so what he does, they interpret as heroism.”

  “Even running away?”

  “He won’t only run away. Don’t know what he’s got in mind, but he isn’t about to retire. And Ceres Station … it’s a white elephant now. Just keeping the environmental systems running isn’t going to be trivial. We may have to consolidate. Concentrate people physically and abandon parts of the station. Which will be interpreted as Earth and Mars kicking Belters out of their homes by Inaros and his cabal.”

  Holden ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah, that’s messed up.”

  “It’s politics. And it’s why we need the OPA. There is support for us in the Belt, but it needs cultivation. And we have a few things going for us. They can call themselves a navy, but they’re amateurs. The kind of roughshod that thinks discipline is the same as punishment. Rumor is there’s already some dissent in Marco’s leadership. Probably, it’s over his tactics with Ceres. I still don’t understand why Dawes would let him walk away from the station, but … well, clearly he did. And Avasarala’s keeping a lid on Earth. If the UN had crumbled the way Mars has, I don’t know what we’d do.”

  “This,” Holden said. “Try to gather some allies. Pretty much the same thing you’re going to do anyway. Only with less hope that it would work.”

  Fred stretched, his joints popping, then sighed back down into the gel of the couch. The diagnostics on the comm panel flickered, and Patel tapped the run results. As far as she was concerned, the two of them might as well not have been there.

  “You’re probably right,” Fred said. “Still, I’m glad it’s not worse. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky and Inaros will get himself killed without us.”

  “It wouldn’t be enough,” Fred said. “Earth’s broken. It will be for generations. Mars may or may not collapse, but there’s still the gates. Still the colony worlds. Still all the pressures that keep the Belt on the edge of starvation and even less of what makes it valuable. There’s no getting back to status quo ante. We’ve got to move forward. Which brings us back to Draper. You’ve worked with her. Can she do the job?”

  “Honestly, I think the best person to ask is her. We all know her. We all like her. I’d trust her with my ship, and I wouldn’t trust you with that. If she thinks she can, then I think she can.”

  “And if she thinks she can’t?”

  “Then ask Avasarala,” Holden said.

  “I already know her opinion. All right, thank you. And … I’m going to regret asking. Do I want to know what you were doing with those two women in the galley?”

  Maura Patel shifted in her chair. The first sign that she was listening to them at all.

  “Filming them. That thing with clapping and marbles? It was really visually interesting, and Monica said that was something to be looking for. I’m doing these interviews, and she’s helping me edit and distribute them.”

  “And why are you doing that?”

  “It’s what’s missing in all of this,” Holden said. “It’s what let things get this bad. We don’t see each other as people. Even the feeds are always about weird things. Aberrations. All the times that a Belt station doesn’t have a riot? Those days aren’t news. It has to be an uprising or a protest or a system failure. Just being here, living a normal life? That’s not part of what the people on Earth or Mars hear about.”

  “So you—” Fred closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re reaching for more unapproved press releases? You remember starting a war that way once?”

  “Exa
ctly. That was talking about an aberration, because I thought that was what people needed to know. But they need all the context too. What it’s like to be a teenager with his first crush on Ceres. Or to worry about your dad getting old on Pallas Station. The things that make people here the same as people everywhere.”

  “Belters rain hell down on Earth,” Fred said slowly, “and you respond by trying to humanize Belters? You know there’s going to be a raft of people who call you a traitor for that.”

  “I’d be doing the same thing on Earth, but I’m not there right now. If people call me names, they do. I’m just trying to make it a little harder for people to feel comfortable killing each other.”

  Fred’s screen put up an alert. He glanced at it, dismissed it. “You know if anyone else came up with the idea that they ought to put themselves in the middle of a war so they could sing songs and hold hands and sow peace for all mankind, I’d call it narcissistic opportunism. Maybe megalomania.”

  “But it’s not anyone else, so we’re good?”

  Fred lifted his hands. A gesture made of equal weights amusement and despair. “I’ll want a private word with Draper.”

  “I’ll let her know,” Holden said, standing up.

  “I can reach her myself. And Holden …”

  He turned back. In the dimness, Fred’s eyes were so dark the iris and the pupil were the same shade of black. He looked old. Weary. Focused. “Yes?” Holden said.

  “The song those two were singing? Get the lyrics translated before you broadcast it. Just in case.”

  Chapter Eighteen: Filip

  The Pella coasted through the black, one node in a network of dark ships that traded tightbeams and compared strategies and planned. Stealth wasn’t possible in the strict sense. The enemy would be scanning the vault of the heavens for the Free Navy’s ships just as much as they were tracking the drive plumes of Earth and Mars and everyone else in the system. The universe was billions of points of unwavering light—stars and galaxies stretching out through time and space, their photon streams bent by gravity lensing and shifted by the speed of the universe’s expansion. The flicker of a drive might be overlooked or confused with another light source or hidden by one of the widely scattered asteroids that inhabited the system like dust motes in a cathedral.

  There was no way to know how many of their ships the inners had managed to identify and track. There was no certainty that their own sensor arrays had targeted all of the so-called combined navy’s vessels. The scale of the vacuum alone built uncertainty.

  The inners were easier, since so many of theirs had burned for Ceres. But who was to say there weren’t a few scattered hunters, dark and ballistic in the void? Marco had a handful of Free Navy like that, or at least that was what Karal said. Ships that hadn’t even been used in the first attacks, cruising in their own orbits like warm asteroids. Sleepers waiting for their moment. And maybe that was even true, though Filip hadn’t heard it directly from his father yet. And he liked to think his father would tell him anything.

  The days were long and empty, wound tightly around a single, overwhelming question. The counterstrike would come. The attack that would prove that stepping back from Ceres was a tactical choice and not a show of weakness. More than anything that had come before, it would be the event—Marco said this, and Filip believed it—that made clear what made the Free Navy unbeatable. In the gym and the galley, the crew speculated. Tycho Station was the heart of the collaborationist wing of the OPA. Mars had suffered least in the initial attack, and deserved the same punishment as Earth. Luna had become the new center of UN power. Kelso Station and Rhea had rejected the Free Navy and shown their true colors.

  Or there were the mining operations scattered throughout the Belt that answered to Earth-based corporations. They were easy pickings and couldn’t be defended. Or taking a solid hold on Ganymede, claiming and protecting the food supply of the Belt. There was even some talk of sending recovery forces out through the ring. Take back from the colonies what should never have been there in the first place. Or install platforms above the new planets and extract tribute from them. Reverse the political order and put all the bastards at the bottom of all the wells in chains.

  Filip only smiled and shrugged, letting it look like he knew more than he did. Marco hadn’t told even him what the plan was. Not yet.

  And then the message came.

  I always respected you. That was how she began. Michio Pa, the head of the conscription effort. Filip remembered her, but he hadn’t had an opinion about her before now. She was a competent leader, a little famous for stepping in when the Behemoth’s captain had lost his mind in the slow zone. His father liked her because she hated Fred Johnson, had defected from him, and because she was a Belter and pretty to look at and the face that the Belt would see when the colony ships cracked their guts open and spilled out their treasures. Only now she stared into a camera on her ship, her hair pulled back, her dark eyes serious. She didn’t look pretty.

  “I have always respected you, sir. The work you have done for the independence of the Belt has been critical, and I’m proud to be part of it. I want to make it very clear before we go forward that my loyalty to our cause is unwavering and complete. On sober reflection and after a great deal of consideration, I find I have to disagree with the change in the plan for the conscription. While I understand the strategic importance of denying materiel to the enemy, I can’t in good conscience withhold it from the citizens of the Belt who are in immediate need. Because of this, I have chosen to proceed with the conscription efforts as originally outlined.

  “Technically, this is disobeying an order, but I have great faith that when you reflect on how the needs of our people brought us to form the Free Navy, you’ll agree it is the best way forward.”

  She signed off with a Free Navy salute. The one his father had created when he made everything else. Filip queued it up again, watching from the start to the end again, aware of Marco’s gaze on him as much as the woman on the screen. The galley around them was empty. No, not just empty. Emptied. Whether they’d been ordered to or not, the crew of the Pella had evacuated the space and left it for Marco and Filip. If it hadn’t been for a smell of curry lingering in the air, the stains of coffee on the table, it might have been their first time on the ship.

  He didn’t know how many times his father had viewed the message, how he had taken it the first time he’d seen it, or what the mild expression he wore now meant. Filip’s uncertainty knotted at the bottom of his abdomen. Being shown the message was a test, and he didn’t know quite what he was meant to do with it.

  After the second time Michio Pa saluted, Marco stretched his shoulders back, a physical symbol that they were switching to the next part of whatever their conversation was.

  “It’s mutiny,” Filip said.

  “It is,” Marco said, his voice and expression reasonable and calm. “Do you think she’s right?”

  No leapt to Filip’s throat, but he stopped it there. It was too obvious an answer. He tried Yes in his mind, feeling the pressure of his father’s attention like it was heat radiating from him. He discarded it too.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said slowly. “Whether she’s right or wrong is beside the point. She broke with your authority.”

  Marco reached out and tapped the tip of Filip’s nose the way he’d done when they were only father and son, not war leader and lieutenant. Marco’s eyes softened, his focus shifting elsewhere. Filip felt a momentary and irrational stab of loneliness.

  “She did,” Marco said. “Even if she were right—she isn’t, but if—how could I let this go? It would be an invitation to chaos. Chaos.” He chuckled, shaking his head. Anger would have been less frightening.

  Filip’s uncertainty shifted in his gut. Were they destroyed, then? Was it all falling apart? The vision of the system his father had dreamed—void cities, the Belt blooming into a new kind of humanity free from the oppression of Earth and Mars, the Free Navy as the order of the
worlds—stuttered. He caught a glimpse of what the other future could look like. The death and the struggle and the war. The corpse Earth and the ghost town Mars and the shards of the Free Navy picking at each other until nothing was left. It was what Marco meant when he said chaos, Filip was sure of that. Nausea welled up in him. Someone should have kept that from happening. He shook his head.

  “Some day,” Marco said, and then again, still without finishing the thought, “some day.”

  “Do we do?” Filip asked.

  Marco shrugged with his hands. “Stop trusting women,” he said, then flicked a foot against the wall, launching himself to the doorway. Filip watched as Marco grabbed a handhold and pulled himself away down the hall toward his cabin. All the questions he hadn’t answered floated invisibly behind him.

  Left alone, Filip killed the sound to the screen and replayed her message again. He’d met this woman. He’d been in a room with her, and heard her voice, and he hadn’t seen her for the traitor she was. For the agent of chaos. She saluted, and he tried to see fear in her. Or malice. Anything more than a professional delivering a message she expected to be badly received. He played the message again. Her eyes were black and hate-filled, or steeled against dread. Her gestures were soaked in contempt, or controlled like a fighter preparing to lose a match.

  With a little practice and will, he found he could see anything he chose in her.

  A soft sound came from behind him. Sárta sloped into the room feetfirst, and caught herself in a foothold on the wall, locking her ankle in place and absorbing the inertia with her knees. Her smile had the same bleakness that Filip felt, and he suffered a moment’s anger that she should feel what he did. Karal’s voice came from the lift, talking in low, careful tones. Rosenfeld answered, too low to make out the words. They knew Marco was gone, then. The private audience concluded.