Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  Avasarala raised her hand, palm out. Le’s mouth kept moving for a few seconds, part of him still speaking while the rest was reined in. “I care deeply about all the fine details,” she said, “only actually, I don’t. Sum it up.”

  “If the numbers are right, we could feed maybe half a million more people on this base right now. The first runs we did looked really good. But if it’s something that doesn’t scale and the farms crash, we could lose days cleaning it back out.”

  “And then people starve.”

  Gorman nodded some more. Maybe he didn’t mean anything by it. “Resetting would definitely mean missing some production goals.”

  She leaned forward, plucked the glass from his hand, and looked into his eyes. “Then people starve. We’re grown-ups here. You should be able to say it.”

  “Then people starve.”

  She nodded and leaned back. The terrible thing was that her back felt better. She’d been at one-tenth of a g for so long, she was getting used to it. When she went back down the well, she’d have to reacclimatize. When. Not if. Gorman was looking at her, his jaw set, his nostrils flared like a panicky horse. She had to restrain herself from patting his head. She wanted some fucking pistachios.

  “What’s your doctorate in?” she asked.

  “Um. Structural biochemistry?”

  “Do you know what mine’s in?”

  He shook his head for a change.

  “Not structural biochemistry,” she said gently. “I don’t know anything about whether this magic yeast recipe is bullshit or not. So if you can’t tell, I’m less than fucking useless. So what are we here for?”

  “I don’t know what to do.” He looked young. He looked lost.

  The impulse to snap at him fought with the impulse to hug him. She closed her eyes, and damn it but they felt good closed. This morning, it had been a coordination meeting with the Lagrange stations talking about refugee loads, then security and resources talking about policing guidelines for the people still coming up the well. Over lunch, reports of an armed uprising in what was left of Sevastopol—people panicking as food and water ran low. It was all bleeding together in her mind, one long, ongoing, weary sense of urgency.

  She wanted to be angry with Le, but either she understood his frozen panic too well or else she just didn’t have the energy anymore. “Is it a good bet?”

  “I think so,” he said, almost at once. “The data looks—”

  “Then implement it. If it doesn’t work, you can blame me.”

  “That’s not what I was … I mean … If a larger scale production run works here, we should really look at sending this down the well.” Down to Earth. Where they were even hungrier.

  She opened her eyes. Something in them made Gorman look away.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ll see that it’s done.”

  She rose. The meeting was over. Only when she was out the door and shuffling across the yellow-gray paving toward her cart did she think about giving Le some kind of encouragement. A pat on the shoulder. A gentle word. She’d backed him down out of habit, not because he needed to be brought into line. She used to be better at this.

  As the cart lurched forward, she pulled up a connection to Said. He appeared in a half-sized window that left room for her calendar and notes, almost too small to make out more than his V-shaped face and high, curly hair floating above a collarless blue shirt. “Ma’am?”

  “Where do we stand?”

  “You have a report from Admiral Pycior on the Enceladus situation waiting for review.”

  “Is it going to say anything besides ‘The Free Navy fucked off before we got there and now we have more people we need to feed,’ or do I already have the gist of it?”

  “That’s the gist. There were some casualties on our side. The Edward Carr is also going to need extensive repairs.”

  She nodded. Another fucking battle like trying to grab water in her fist. The cart turned, dipped into an access tunnel. Two security guards saluted as she passed. The cart turned down another ramp, slotted itself into the highspeed toward the government and administration centers at Aldrin, and turned again so that she could look back down the throat of the passageway. Gray walls with white archways retreating back and up. The air like an eternal exhalation. The architecture seemed small in context. Insignificant against the tremendous scope of Luna and Earth. She clung to it like a lifeline. “Reports from Ceres are that the Rocinante was ambushed, but escaped. It’s on course toward Tycho Station.”

  “Small favors,” she said.

  “You also have a personal meeting on the schedule, ma’am.”

  Personal meeting? For a long moment, she couldn’t remember what it was, but as the highspeed line lurched, pulled her cart in, and began its acceleration run, she remembered that Ashanti had been asking to see her. Somehow, her daughter had wheedled Said into putting her on the calendar.

  “Cancel that,” Avasarala said.

  “Are you certain, ma’am?”

  “I don’t want to spend half an hour listening to a girl whose diapers I changed lecture me about taking care of myself. Tell her I’m tired and napping.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do you have something you want to say, Mr. Said?”

  Said coughed. “She’s your daughter, ma’am.”

  Avasarala smiled. It was the first time Said had pushed back at her. Maybe there was hope for the little fucker yet. “Fine. Give her the first dinner slot that’s still open.”

  “That’s three days.”

  “Three days, then,” Avasarala said. The highspeed stopped accelerating, leaving her rocketing through the evacuated tunnel at however many hundreds of kilometers per hour it went. Enough to take her halfway across the face of the moon in half an hour. A body in motion remained in motion. It was a metaphor as much as anything. Stay in motion, because once she rested, she didn’t know how she would bring herself to ever start again.

  She couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d meditated. It used to be that when things were bad at work, she spent more time sitting, not less. Listening to her own breath rattle through the complex spaces at the back of her nose, being with her body in a deep and connected way that let all the shit settle. If she’d been keeping up, she’d have remembered to encourage Gorman Le, for instance. She hated to guess how many other little fuckups she’d passed by without even noticing.

  The highspeed tunnel curved, pushing her gently against the cart’s door. She told herself that between the war and the recovery, there was just too much to do. That was accurate as far as it went, but she’d spent too many years becoming familiar with her own mind to entirely ignore the fact that she was bullshitting herself. Meditation was there so that she could be with herself, experience what it meant to be Chrisjen Avasarala more deeply. And since she was fairly certain Chrisjen Avasarala was a bag of sorrow and glass right now, fuck that. Meditating deeply so that she could really, clearly experience being angry and lonesome and hurt and horror-struck never seemed as good as a strong gin and tonic and another hour of work.

  She could be a basket case later. When things were under control.

  The highspeed had just started slowing down when her hand terminal chimed. Said looked contrite, but not so much that he’d left her alone.

  “Priority message for you from the Rocinante, ma’am.”

  “The fuck does Johnson want now?”

  “It’s not from Colonel Johnson. Captain Holden sent it.”

  She hesitated. In his window, Said waited. “Send it to me,” she said.

  Said nodded as she closed his window. She threw the readout to the cart’s screen. Whatever was going on, she wanted to be able to see it without squinting. The message appeared, flagged with red. As soon as she opened it, she knew. Death was on Holden’s face as clearly as if it had been written there. When he spoke, his voice was careful and controlled. Hospital tones. Funeral.

  He laid out what had happened briefly, not giving any details she di
dn’t need. The Pella had led the attack. They’d managed to fend off the Free Navy. Fred Johnson was dead. And then, as if Holden were having a stroke of his own, he stared for a long moment into the camera. Into her eyes, without seeing her.

  “All the OPA groups Fred called together at Tycho are waiting there. We’re on course and starting our deceleration burn. But I’m not sure if we should still be going there or if there’s someone you want to send. Or how long they’ll wait. I don’t know what to do next.”

  He shook his head. He looked young. Holden always looked young, but usually it was young and impulsive. The lost expression around his eyes was new. If it was even there. Maybe she was only seeing it because she felt it in her own heart, her own belly.

  The message ended. The terminal prompted her for a response, but she only sat with it in her hand as the highspeed came to a halt, the cart pouring itself into more familiar corridors. She looked at her hands, and they seemed to belong to some other woman. She tried sobbing, but it seemed forced and inauthentic. More like playacting than grief. If she’d been in control of the cart, she might have let it drift into the wall or down any random corridor, all unaware. But it knew where to go, and she didn’t think to take it to manual.

  Fred Johnson. Butcher of Anderson Station. Hero of the UN Navy and traitorous voice of the OPA. She’d known him in person and by reputation for decades. He’d been her enemy and opposite and occasional untrusted ally. The part of her that was still thinking noticed how odd it was—how implausible—that his death should be the drop that made her cup overflow. She’d lost her world. Her home. Her husband. If she’d kept any of those, maybe this wouldn’t have destroyed her.

  Her sternum ached. Actually ached. Like there was a physical bruise there, and not only emotion left too long pressing at her flesh. She probed it with her fingertips, tracing the boundaries of the pain like a child fascinated by a dying insect. She didn’t notice the cart had stopped until Said opened the door.

  “Ma’am?” he said.

  She stood. The lunar gravity seemed less like a force of nature and more like a suggestion. As if she could rise against it through simple force of will or the beating of her heart. She noticed Said again, noticed that she’d forgotten he was there. He looked distressed in an officious, too-pretty way.

  “Please cancel everything,” she said. “I’ll be in my rooms.”

  “Do you need anything, ma’am? Should I get a doctor?”

  She frowned at him, the muscles in her cheeks seeming to exist at a distance. She was piloting her body like it was a mech with failing controls. “What would that help?”

  In her rooms, she sat on the divan, her hands cupped in her lap, palms up. Like she was holding something. The air recycler’s fan had a little noise to it, resonant and unsteady. Wind passing over a bottle’s mouth. Mindless, idiot music. She wondered if she’d ever noticed it before, and then forgot it. Her mind was empty. She wondered if there was something coming. Some overwhelming flood that would carry her away. Or if this was simply who she was now. An empty woman.

  She ignored the knock at her door. Whoever they were, they’d go away. Only they didn’t. Her door slid a few centimeters open. And then a few more. She thought it would be Said. Or one of the admirals. Some functionary of governance come, like Gorman Le, to ask her to carry the weight of loss and uncertainty for them. It wasn’t.

  Kiki wasn’t a little girl anymore. Her granddaughter was a woman in her own right, though a young one. Her skin was deep brown like her father’s, but she had Ashanti’s eyes and nose. A glimmer of Arjun in the color of her eyes. As much as Avasarala tried to hide it, Kiki wasn’t her favorite granddaughter. The girl always had an air of observing judgment that made being with her difficult. Kiki cleared her throat. For a long moment, they looked at each other.

  “What are you doing here?” Avasarala asked. She’d meant it to drive the girl away, but it didn’t. Kiki came in and closed the door behind her.

  “Mother’s hurt that you rescheduled us again,” Kiki said.

  Avasarala twitched her hands, fingers splayed, palms up. Exasperation without the energy behind it. “Did she send you to lecture me?”

  “No,” Kiki said.

  “What, then?”

  “I was worried about you.”

  Avasarala snorted in derision. “Why would you worry about me? I’m the most powerful person in the system right now.”

  “That’s why I’m worried about you.”

  That’s not your fucking job floated at the back of her throat, but she couldn’t say it. The ache in Avasarala’s sternum sank deeper, pressing in past bone and cartilage. Her vision went blurry, tears sheeting across her eyes with too little weight to pull them down. Kiki stood by the doorway, her face expressionless. A schoolgirl before her principal, waiting to be scolded. Without speaking she shuffled forward in the scant gravity, sat at Avasarala’s side, and lowered her head to her grandmother’s lap.

  “Mother loves you,” Kiki said. “She just doesn’t know how to say it.”

  “It was never her job to,” Avasarala said, her fingers smoothing her granddaughter’s hair the way they had her daughter’s once when they’d all been younger. Some other time before the world had shattered under them all. “Love was always your grandfather’s work. I loved”—her breath caught—“I loved him very much.”

  “He was a good man,” Kiki said.

  “Yes,” she said, running her fingertips through the girl’s hair. Tracing the paler line of her scalp.

  Minutes passed. Kiki shifted a little, but only a little. Grandmother and granddaughter were quiet. The tears in Avasarala’s eyes weren’t thick. Didn’t fall. When she blinked them away, none rose to take their place. She considered the curve of Kiki’s ear the way she once had Ashanti’s, when her daughter had been a little girl. And Charnapal, when he’d been a child. Before he’d died.

  “I do the best I can,” Avasarala said.

  “I know.”

  “It isn’t enough.”

  “I know.”

  A weird peace seemed to flow over her. Into her. For a moment, it was as if Arjun were there. As if he’d spoken some perfect bloom of a poem to her instead of only her least favorite granddaughter bearing witness to her failures. Everyone had their beauty and their way of expressing it. It was only hard for her to love Kiki because they were so much like each other. Exactly alike, if she were being honest. That made loving her too much dangerous sometimes. She knew what being herself had cost her, and so seeing herself in Kiki made her so very afraid for the girl. Avasarala heaved a great sigh, plucked at the girl’s shoulder.

  “Go tell your mother I had something fall through, and we should eat together. Tell Said too.”

  “He was the one that let me in,” Kiki said, sitting up.

  “He’s a fucking busybody and he should stop putting his fingers in my shit,” Avasarala said. “But this one time, I’m glad he did.”

  “So you won’t punish him?”

  “Fucking right, I’ll punish him,” she said. Then, almost to her surprise, she kissed Kiki’s smooth, unlined forehead. “It’s just this time I won’t mean it. Go now. I have something I need to do.”

  She’d expected her makeup to be ruined, but it really wasn’t. A touch of eyeliner and a stray lock of hair tucked down was all she needed to look like herself again. She pulled Holden’s message back up, let it play while she composed herself in the eye of her terminal’s camera.

  When the prompt to reply came, she squared her shoulders, imagined herself looking into Holden’s eyes, and started the recording.

  “I’m sorry to hear about Fred. He was a good man. Not perfect, but who is? I’ll miss him. What we do next is simpler. You get your sorry ass to Tycho Station and make this work.”

  Chapter Thirty: Filip

  The Pella limped along at a third of a g. After so long on the float, Filip felt even that in his knees and spine. Or maybe it was only that he was still bruised by the god-awfu
l forces of the battle now behind them.

  The battle they’d lost.

  He stood in the galley, a bowl of Martian-designed rice noodles and mushrooms in his hand, and looked for a place to sit, but the benches were all filled. The Koto had taken it worse than the Pella—a rail gun round holing the reactor and cracking the hull from stem to stern. Most of the ships Filip had lived on would have died in that same second, but the Martian Navy had built with battle in mind. In a slice of a second so thin you could see through it, the Koto had registered the hit and dropped core, leaving the crew trapped and helpless, with only the battery backups to keep them alive.

  The Shinsakuto had been driven away from them, hounded and harassed by fighting ships and torpedoes from the consolidated fleet and Ceres. If the Rocinante had finished its job on the Pella, the crew of the Koto would still be out there on the float. Or maybe they’d be dead by now, the air recyclers finally failing and leaving them all to gasp and choke and claw each other in their death panic. Instead, they were all on the Pella, hot-bunking with the usual crew, taking up space on the galley and pointedly not making eye contact with Filip as he looked for his place among them.

  His own crew was there too. Men and women he’d been shipping with since before it all began. Aaman. Miral. Wings. Karal. Josie. They were looking away as much as the others. Only about half of them were wearing their Free Navy uniforms. Koto and Pella both had dropped back to the simple functional clothes that any crew might wear, and some of the ones still in uniform had rolled up their sleeves or left their collars open. Filip felt his own uniform, crisp and fresh and done to the neck, and for the first time he felt a little foolish in it. Like a kid dressed in his father’s clothes as a costume.

  The murmur of conversation was a wall that excluded him. He hesitated. He could just take the bowl back to his quarters. It wasn’t really that they were keeping him apart. It was only that they were so crowded now, and stung from having lost a fight. He took a step toward the corridor, intending to go. Meaning to. And then stopping and looking back in case there was some slot, some corner of bench, that he’d overlooked. Some place for him.