Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  He heard his father trying to speak, but the acceleration was affecting him too. The Pella groaned, the superstructure settling and flexing under the acceleration. A high harmonic overtone rang through the air like a struck bell.

  On Filip’s monitor, a message appeared. From his father. His captain. Leader of the Free Navy and liberator of the Belt.

  FIRE AT WILL.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Bobbie

  Confirm I’ve got four more fast-movers,” Alex said, his voice tense and calm at the same time.

  “Got them,” Bobbie said, her jaw aching with the acceleration gravity. The gunner’s control identified the new torpedoes, adding them to the six already on her scopes. Three ships converging on them from different angles were identified as the Pella, the Shinsakuto, and the Koto. Marco Inaros’ personal ship and two gunships for backup, and nothing for the Roci to hide behind but her drive plume. The enemies were a long way off still—millions of klicks—and none on initial vectors that did them any favors. The Roci had already gotten past them. They were like a kid on a football pitch, running the ball with three opposing players sprinting to catch up. Except if the opposing players had guns.

  When the Roci hit the mathematical balance point of velocity, mass, and distance that defined the halfway point, there would be some hard choices to make. Either they’d flip and start braking toward Tycho or commit to letting the chase go on indefinitely. If they let the Free Navy spook them out into the empty spaces between bases and stations, the chase turned into an ugly kind of attrition battle. Who ran out of ammunition or reaction mass first. Given how the outer system looked these days, it would make more sense to brake toward Tycho and hope that backup from the station could reach them before the Free Navy pounded them into scrap metal and blood.

  Her job and Alex’s were to make sure they lived long enough to have that problem. She tracked the torpedoes. With any luck, they’d all be standard issue. They didn’t show the jittering path of point defense countermeasures yet. When they got in effective range, the Roci would start chewing them to pieces, streams of tiny tungsten rounds ripping the torpedoes to nothing. If there were only six, she’d have been confident they could do it. Ten at once was a little more complicated, but as long as they didn’t all hit at the same time, she was pretty sure they wouldn’t be overwhelmed.

  Holden’s voice in her ear sounded anxious. “How long before we can start shooting back?”

  “Fast-movers will be in effective PDC range in sixty-eight minutes,” she said. “Do we have any response from Ceres? Because if they could throw a few spare long-range torpedoes at these sonsofbitches, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings.”

  Fred Johnson’s voice answered, calm and businesslike. “I’m working on that now.”

  “Our new friends are closing,” Alex said. “We may have to get a little less comfortable.”

  “Understood,” Holden said.

  The Rocinante was already under a three-g burn. Bobbie felt it in her joints and eyes. The crappy juice dribbling into her veins gave her a distant, cloudy sort of headache and a taste like formaldehyde in her mouth. Below her, the rest of the crew—Holden’s and Johnson’s both—were strapped in for battle. She could hear Sandra Ip’s voice bleeding out from Alex’s headset, talking on a private channel. Naomi was talking to someone too, her voice rising from the deck below.

  The anxiety and fear in her gut were as familiar as a favorite song. The logic of tactics and violence spread out on the screens, and she found she could see things in them like reading the future. If Ceres fired a barrage of missiles or long-range torpedoes, she knew the Shinsakuto would peel off to stop them. She saw how Alex would curve the Roci’s path to force a few extra seconds between the Free Navy’s incoming torpedoes. The vectors of the enemy ships whispered things in the back of her mind about recklessness and aggression. And she knew that there were other people on each of the incoming ships whose minds were making the same analysis, reaching the same conclusions. Seeing something she didn’t or missing a detail that she picked up. All it took was one critical mistake, and they’d be dead or captured. One oversight from the enemy, and they’d get away.

  And along with it all—the shitty juice, the battle fear, the desperate effort of keeping her mind clear while all the blood tried to pool at the back of her skull—there was something else. A warmth. A sense of being where she belonged. Her team was counting on her, and her life depended on all of them doing their jobs with efficiency and professionalism and an unhesitating competence.

  When she died, she wanted it to be like this. Not in a hospital bed like her grandmother. Not in a sad little hole on Mars with a gun in her mouth or a gut full of pills like the failures of veterans’ outreach. She wanted to win, to protect her tribe and wipe the enemy into a paste of blood and dismay. But failing that, she wanted to die trying. A snippet of something she’d once read popped in her head: Facing fearful odds protecting the bones of her fathers and the temples of her gods. Yeah. Like that.

  “Shit,” Alex said. “I’ve got six more. We’re up to sixteen fast- movers.”

  “I’ve got ’em,” Bobbie said.

  “Why are they spacing them out like that?” Holden asked.

  “The Shinsakuto’s getting ready to flip and burn,” Bobbie said. “I’m guessing Fred talked Ceres into helping.”

  “I did indeed,” Fred said. “Just got confirmation.”

  “If our PDCs are going to have a chance chewing these fuckers up, I’ve got to punch it,” Alex said.

  “Everyone in your couches?” Holden said. There was a chorus of response. No one said no. “Do what you need to do, Alex.”

  He looked over at her. Pilot’s and gunner’s stations were the only ones in the cockpit. It was designed that way because if systems started failing, they could shout to each other. They had to be able to coordinate, because from now to the end of the battle, no one else mattered. Every other life on the ship was about to become cargo.

  “You good for this, Gunny?”

  “Let’s kill these assholes,” she said.

  The Rocinante jumped forward, hitting her in the back like an assault. Her arms slammed into the gel, her fingers against the control barely able to move. The images on the screen went fuzzy, her eyes deforming past her ability to refocus them. She tensed her legs and arms, pushing the blood back to her core. The couch chimed and a fresh blast of cheap juice hit her bloodstream. Her gasps sounded like someone choking. Eight gs, maybe? Maybe more. It had been too fucking long.

  An endless time passed, and then a chime told her the first round of torpedoes were in PDC range, and her targeting solution kicked in. Alex bent the Roci’s path, forced the attackers to shift. Gave her an extra fraction of a second between them. The PDCs lit up, going gold on her display as they fired. The deep chattering tapped through the deck with each one like she was playing music. Four torpedoes flamed out at once, but the other six danced away from the streams of metal, then spiraled closer to the ship. Alex banked hard, catching one with the edge of the drive plume, making the other five maneuver. She caught four. The fifth shifted, evaded, streaked close—

  Alex tried to yell, but it came out as little more than a high squeak. The ship turned the extra three degrees to bring another PDC arc into play, and the enemy torpedo died, falling behind them in bright shards and melting in their plume.

  A message appeared on her screen from Alex. TAKE IT TO THEM?

  The two ships were bearing down on the Roci, pushing hard to narrow the distance. She didn’t know if that was bold or foolhardy. Probably they didn’t either. Ships full of Belters weren’t known for loving high-g burns, but this was war. You took the risks you had to take. But the third ship had peeled off. And two points, her old sergeant used to say, defined an opportunity. Those bad guys were awfully close to each other.

  DONNE, she typed back, and didn’t bother fixing the error.

  She routed the five torpedoes between the Pella and the Koto in a starburst. T
he Free Navy ships were firing PDCs at the Rocinante now, the rounds coming like ropes of pearls on the screen. Alex maneuvered around them easily. Range was too far still for close-quarters battle tactics to apply, but maybe the Belters didn’t know that. Or just meant it as an insult.

  She watched the curving arcs of PDC fire shift to find her torpedoes as they burned for the abstract line between the two ships. Two of hers died. Three. Four. But the fifth curved into the space between the Koto and the Pella where their tracking software would recognize that the PDC fire that would stop the torpedo would also riddle the friendly on the other side. The two ships lurched apart, and the Koto dropped a torpedo that took out Bobbie’s attacker just a few seconds before impact.

  The maneuver had bought them a few moments, but at the cost of one-quarter of their total torpedo stores. It wasn’t a game she could afford to keep playing when the ante was so high. But by then she’d put in her next firing solution and passed it to Alex.

  To his credit, he didn’t question her. In a single instant, the gravity vanished, the Roci’s Epstein dropped to zero. Her couch slammed to the side, the hard spin of the maneuvering thrusters whipped them around. The custom-built keel-mounted rail gun made the ship jump as it fired. It was the one weapon the Roci had that wasn’t standard for a Martian corvette. The rotation continued until they were back on their old course, and then ten gs slammed her back into her couch as the Epstein drive kicked back on and the counterthrusters killed the spin.

  A high-speed three-sixty with a precision-timed rail gun shot halfway through the spin wasn’t exactly standard combat tactics for Martian frigates, but she thought her old combat-tactics instructors would have approved.

  The sudden crushing weight of thrust brought a wave of nausea, and her heart stuttered in a confusion of fluid dynamics and pressure. She must have blacked out for a moment, because she didn’t see the Koto hit. Only the glowing plume of superheated gas expanding behind it where it had dropped core. Even pressed into the crash couch, she managed a smile. She waited to see if the Pella would break off, go to the aid of her fallen comrade.

  It didn’t.

  Bobbie fed a new firing solution, passed it to Alex, and they tried again. A weightless, spinning moment, the kick of the rail gun, and slammed back into the couch like an assault. The Pella knew now. At the vast distances between them, even the fraction of a second that it took to spin the Rocinante around was enough for the enemy to anticipate them and dodge. She threw two more torpedoes at the Pella, but they were shot down well before they could do damage.

  The Pella launched another round of torpedoes, but without the Shinsakuto and the Koto to box them in, Bobbie wasn’t worried. The complexities of the battle looked to be over. Now it became longer and simpler and worse. Something in her trachea slid where it wasn’t meant to be and she forced out a cough, her head spinning a little when she did.

  This was how they’d end now. A long, desperate race to see who ran out of PDC rounds or torpedoes first. Who had allies near enough to complicate the situation. But before any of that, there was the braking threshold. The point of no return at which they wouldn’t have enough reaction mass left to match the thrust they’d already pumped into their vector. They’d be trapped in a desperately long orbit, at the mercy of whoever came for them. That was her hard deadline.

  Fighting to move her fingers against the built-in controls, she sent a message to Holden: DISTRACT THEM.

  A moment later, a reply arrived: ???

  DISTRACT THEM.

  Bobbie waited for the inevitable calls for clarification, but was pleasantly surprised when instead the comm array went active. A tightbeam. To the Pella. She saw the connection accepted. Good. She tried to count down from five, but got lost somewhere around three. She breathed through gritted, aching teeth, and re-sent the firing solution. Float, spin, fire, and slam back into the couch, spine shrieking and mind fluttering on the edge of blackness. It hadn’t done any good. The Pella had dodged again.

  There had to be a way. She couldn’t let the enemy run them out. She couldn’t let her team down again. There had to be a way. They could fire a fraction of a second earlier … but the keel mount meant the Roci could only fire straight ahead. A tear pressed out of her eyes, slamming to the gel beside her ear like a stone. Were they still at eight gs? She looked at the firing solution through blurred eyes. There had to be something. Some other way to draw a straight line between two points.

  She could try again, but the Pella would dodge the way it had before. The rail gun could only draw perfectly straight lines, and now that the Pella knew what their spin meant, its computers would be very good at predicting the slug’s flight path and adjusting.

  Something. Something there. The tiny, shining limn of an idea. The Pella would dodge the way it had before.

  So how did it dodge before?

  Her wrist creaked as she pulled the battle record up, moving back second by second. Twice the Pella had dodged the rail gun. Both times by firing all her port maneuvering thrusters—sidestepping—and then correcting on the starboard. It kept her pointing the same direction, not veering away. But if it was a habit …

  She fed the firing solution in again. The moment of sickening spin, the bang of the rail gun, the crack of the couch taking her in. But the Pella did it again. It dodged the same way. It was a pattern, and patterns were gaps in the armor. She could fit a knife in there.

  The formaldehyde taste in her mouth was heavy and chemical. They were out of PDC range, but that was only convention. PDC rounds didn’t magically evaporate or slow down. Every tungsten slug that hadn’t hit its target in battle was still out there in the black somewhere, speeding on as fast as the moment it had left the barrel. It was only the overwhelming vastness of space that kept every ship out there from being holed at random.

  This wasn’t fucking random, though.

  Her fingers ached. Her head ached. She didn’t care. She pulled up the speeds of everything she had—PDC rounds at so many meters per second. Torpedoes started slower, but followed a sharp acceleration curve. Rail-gun rounds … she rechecked the number. Okay. Rail gun rounds went really fast.

  It was a puzzle. It was only a puzzle. There was an answer, and she could find it. There would be one chance. She keyed in the new firing solution, everything tied together.

  You are mine, you piece of shit. You are mine now.

  She passed it over.

  The Rocinante shuddered, the vibration of the PDCs made more violent by the high-g burn. On her screen, it looked like a cloud of gold. Thousands of rounds spinning out to kill torpedoes that weren’t there. Too imprecise to hit the Pella at this range, and not in the right place anyway. It looked like a misfire. A malfunction. It looked like nothing. Then the torpedoes launched. Three of them, spitting toward the Pella in tight curves. The obvious danger. Shards of white showing internal strain, vector, guiding themselves toward their target and accelerating toward the Pella’s port side. The Pella’s PDCs opened up, spraying toward the incoming, evasion-drunk torpedoes. For long, terrible minutes, the pieces of her puzzle moved into place.

  It wasn’t going to work. They were going to see it. As clear as it was to her, they had to be able to see it too.

  The torpedoes sped in, driving toward the Pella’s flank and the withering fire of her PDCs. The Pella dropped three torpedoes of her own. Bobbie’s golden cloud of PDC rounds was almost in position.

  Alex killed the engine as he had before. Spun them. The rail gun fired in the split second it came to bear on the Pella, the spine of the ship creaking. Before Bobbie could see what had happened, the Roci completed her arc, her drive returning as it had before. And the Pella—flagship of the Free Navy and private gunship of Marco Inaros—dodged the rail gun round just as it had before. Just as it had before. By sidestepping away from the torpedo battle to its port.

  And into the path of the oncoming cloud of PDC rounds.

  There was no way to know how many hit, but the Pella veere
d off course, its main drive still firing full out even as it turned almost orthogonally to the direction of the Rocinante. Alex eased off, and a mere three-g acceleration felt like being light as a balloon. Bobbie checked the stores and noted she’d already fired half her torpedoes, so she fired half of what was left, sending five more after the Pella, one after the other streaming toward the wounded ship’s drive cone. The Pella had lost at least one thruster on her starboard and struggled to bring PDCs to bear.

  And then it got hard to see what happened, because the enemy drive plume was pointing straight at them, the Pella retreating up out of the ecliptic and toward the uncaring stars. Alex cut the drive, leaving them on the float. The back of Bobbie’s head was wet. Either she’d been sweating or the tears pulled from her eyes had pooled. Or her skin split and she was in her own blood. No matter what, it felt great.

  Alex was staring at her, his eyes wide, shaking his head. Slowly a grin pulled at his lips. He started chuckling, and then she did too. Her ribs hurt. Her throat hurt. When she tried to move her left arm, the elbow protested like it had been dislocated and shoved roughly back into place.

  “Holy shit,” Alex said. “I mean just holy fucking shit.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “That was great!” Alex whooped, and punched the air. “We did it! We kicked their butts!”

  “We did,” Bobbie said, closing her eyes and heaving a deep, slow breath. Her sternum popped like a firecracker, and she started laughing again. A thin sound, distant as home, plucked at her awareness. She realized she’d been hearing it for a while, but hadn’t registered it in the heat of battle. Now that she heard it, she recognized it at once.

  It was a medical alarm.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Holden

  When Holden left the Earth Navy, he’d had a dishonorable discharge on his record and a sense of relief and righteous anger stiffening his spine. He’d thought at the time that the greatest irony of his newly fallen position in life was that, while his career options were now substantially narrowed and his status in the world dimmed, he felt freer. Looking back at it now, that freedom only earned second place after the subliminal, barely expressed relief that he wouldn’t see any more ship-to-ship fighting.