Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  “No savvy. I don’t know.”

  The boy’s eyes flickered, looked away. Vandercaust scratched his arm even though it didn’t itch. Just to be doing something.

  “They all came through within fifteen seconds of each other,” the boy said. “And they were going fast. Any thoughts about that, Mister Vandercaust?”

  “Coordinated,” he said. “Sounds like they been talking con alles, sa sa? Making plans.”

  Which—ah, yes—meant they’d found some way to break lightspeed, bend time, and locate each other in the vastness of the galaxy, or else that conversation had been passing through the rings. Through Medina. It meant somewhere on Medina Station, somebody had been working against the Free Navy. He’d known that the arrest couldn’t just be for missing an emergency shift. Now it came a little clearer what the boy was looking for. Watched the boy watch him understand.

  “Who told you about the attack?”

  “Heard about it in my workgroup. Jakulski. Salis. Roberts. Just chap-chap over coffee, yeah?”

  Another notation made. “Anything you think of I should know about them?”

  A coldness that had nothing to do with the temperature ran up Vandercaust’s back, lifted his skin in bumps. Maybe it wasn’t only that he’d slept through the alarm. He’d been drunk. Drunk men could sleep through anything. But if he hadn’t made the call and he was near to someone with something worth hiding …

  Salis had friends in communication. Bragged about them all the time, how he knew what was going on with Duarte and Inaros, what kinds of barks and whines were floating through the rings. Someone was coordinating an attack on Medina, wouldn’t they be in communications? Have to be, ne? And Roberts talking about Callisto and proxy wars. How Duarte’s people were maybe using them against Earth and Mars, about how much she hated being caught between the powers like that. She’d been the first one Vandercaust knew to squint hard at the advisors from Laconia setting up defenses on the alien station where rail gun housings were. Possible that she’d work with the colonies if it meant shrugging off Laconia and keeping Medina independent. And hadn’t Jakulski been at the greeting when the advisors came? He said it had been as a favor to one of the other supervisors, but what if he’d been engineering a chance to put eyes on the enemy?

  Thousands of people on Medina, living and working. All of them Belters, more or less. Most of them OPA before and Free Navy now. But there were some that hadn’t known what was coming. Maybe some with family still on Earth, dying under the rockfalls. He didn’t know anything about Jakulski’s mother, Salis’ siblings, Roberts’ old lovers. Any of them could just be acting like Free Navy because it was asking for hell to be anything else.

  The boy cocked his head, sucked at the focus drugs. Vandercaust laced his fingers together and forced out a little laugh. “Easy to see how a coyo could get paranoid.”

  “Why don’t we go over this from the start?” the boy said.

  It went on for hours, it felt like. No hand terminal. No screens that he could see. All Vandercaust had to judge by was the animal rhythms of his body. How long it was before he got thirsty again. Hungry. When he started feeling sleepy. When he needed to visit the head. He walked the boy through his whole night before the attack. Where he’d been. Who else had been there. What he’d drunk. How he’d gotten back to his quarters. Over and over, pushing at anything he said a little different from another time, pushing him to remember things he didn’t really remember and then coming at him when he got some detail wrong. The boy asked about Roberts, Salis, Jakulski. He asked about who else Vandercaust knew on Medina. Who he knew on the Sol side of the ring. What he knew about Michio Pa and Susanna Foyle and Ezio Rodriguez. When he’d been at Tycho Station. At Ceres. At Rhea. At Ganymede.

  They showed him images of the attacks. The ships emerging through the gates all around the great sphere of gates. He watched them die as tactical images. As telescopic records of real people, really dying. Then they talked more, and showed it all to him again. He had a sense that the readouts were subtly different the second time out—another attempt to catch him out on something—but he couldn’t say what the changes were.

  It was exhausting. It was meant to be exhausting. After a while, he stopped trying to keep his answers safe. He’d known enough about interrogation to see that this—wearying and harsh and dull though it was—was on the gentler end of that spectrum. He had no reason to protect his friends beyond the vague tribalism of being on a workgroup with them. If they were innocent, the truth would have to be armor enough. For them, and for him too.

  They took him back to his cell. No beating this time. Just a hard shove through the door that left him sprawling and knocked his cheek against the wall hard enough to split it. He slept for a while, woke in darkness, slept again. The second time he woke, there was a bowl of beans and mushrooms congealing beside the door. He ate them anyway. No way to know how long he’d be there. How long it would all go on. Whether it would get worse.

  When the door opened again, five people in Free Navy uniforms came in. The brown-eyed boy wasn’t among them, and for a moment, that made Vandercaust very nervous. Like looking for a friend and not finding them. The leader of the new group was laughing with one of her subordinates, checked her hand terminal by holding it up beside his face without paying much attention to him, tapped her screen.

  “You should go, pampaw,” she said, walking out. “Late for your shift, you.”

  They left the door open behind them, and after a moment, Vandercaust walked out of the cell, out of the security station, into the wide corridors of the drum. His body felt like a rag used for too long. He was certain that he smelled like sick primate and old sweat. The guard had been right. It was almost time for his shift, but he still went back to his hole, showered, shaved, changed into new clothes. He spent a few long minutes admiring the bruises on his face and sides. On a younger man, they could have been badges of endurance. On him, they just looked like an old man who’d caught the toes of a few too many boots. So he was late. He had reason to be. Little rebel, him.

  He found Salis and Roberts deep in the service passageways, testing flow on the sewage intake for the backup recycling plant. Roberts’ eyes lit up as he approached, and she threw her arms around him.

  “Perdíd,” she breathed against his ear. “Are you okay? We were worried.”

  “Es dui?” Salis said, reaching across the table for the wasabi-flavored soy nuts. “They beat you up à nothing?”

  The shift done, the three had retired to their usual bar. The breeze from spinward was as it always was. The thin line of sunlight stretched above them. Vandercaust pushed the bowl toward Salis’ fingers. “Security is police, and police are the same everywhere.”

  “Still,” Roberts said. “Why bother pushing off the inners if it’s just to have a Belter foot stepping on our necks instead?”

  “Wouldn’t talk like that,” Vandercaust said, then drank. Water tonight. Might be some time before he went for a long, solid drunk again. “Anxious times, these.”

  “Talk how I want to talk,” Roberts said, but softly. She turned to her hand terminal. He could see the green and silver of the station feed, same colors it had been before the Free Navy took over. He wondered why they hadn’t changed it. A way to give a sense of continuity, maybe. Anything on the feed would have been vetted, of course. The power of Medina Station was that it was so much not a part of any of the systems on the far sides of the gate. The price of it was that information came from a single source. Back in Sol system, there would be any number of feeds and subfeeds. Some broadcast, some left in storage to be queried and mirrored. Hard to control what got out. Maybe impossible. Medina, one set of jammers blocked every unlicensed receiver and transmitter at once.

  The server came with his gyro—textured fungus and soybean curd instead of lamb and beef. Cucumber yogurt. A sprig of mint. He reached out for it with a little grunt and a sudden ache. It wasn’t the worst beating he’d ever suffered, but he’d still be s
ore for days.

  “Why they set you out?” Salis asked. “Sprecht el la?”

  “No, they didn’t say,” Vandercaust replied. “Or that they wouldn’t be back. Maybe they just needed someone to keep you two on schedule.”

  He’d missed two full shifts and come in during the middle of the third. Three days, almost, lost in the darkness of the security cell. No lawyer, no union representative. He could have asked for one—should have, by the rules and customs—but the certainty was solid as steel that it would have only meant more bruises. Maybe a broken bone. Vandercaust knew enough of history and human nature to know when the rules weren’t the rules anymore. He took a bite of his sandwich, then put it down while he chewed. After this, he’d go home. Sleep in his own bed. Sounded like the promise of paradise. He traced fingertips over the split circle on his wrist. It had been a statement of rebellion once. Now, maybe it only made him seem old. Still taking sides in the last generation’s fight.

  “My friend in comms?” Salis said. “You know what they say? Found a hidden dump in the data core. Walled off. Think it was what they used to coordinate with the colonies. Confirmations came in from all the gates just before the attack hit. Only funny thing? Two ships didn’t come through.”

  Salis cranked his eyebrows up toward his hairline.

  Vandercaust grunted. “Were asking me about how many ships came through. Like they wanted a number.”

  “Probably why. See if you knew how many came through or how many were supposed to, yeah? Trip you up if you were in on.”

  “But didn’t have nothing,” Vandercaust said, tapping his forehead with two fingers. “Bon besse for me.”

  Salis put a hand on his arm. The young man looked pained. Aching, but not in the muscles and joints. Not the way he was. “You should let me buy you a drink, coyo. You had a shit week.”

  Vandercaust shrugged. He didn’t know how to explain himself to Salis or Roberts. They were young. They hadn’t seen the things he’d seen. Hadn’t done the thing he’d done. Being picked up by security, locked away, beaten, interrogated. They didn’t scare him in themselves. They scared him for what they said about how it came next. They scared him because they meant that Medina Station wasn’t a new beginning in history. It was and would be as red in the gutter as everyplace else humanity had set its flags.

  Roberts sat up, her eyes going wide. “They got!”

  Salis let his hand drop, turned to her. “Que?”

  “The mole? The coordinator. They got.”

  She turned her hand terminal toward them. On it, station security in Free Navy uniforms were walking, eight of them, around a broad-shouldered, squat man with dark hair and a scruff of beard. Vandercaust thought he looked familiar, but couldn’t place him. The image jumped to Captain Samuels, with Jon Amash standing behind her on one side. Political power and security service, one beside the other, and no light between them.

  Samuels’ lips began to move.

  “Turn it up,” Salis said. Roberts fumbled with her terminal, then shifted around between them so they could all see the screen.

  “—ties not only to the settlements that chose aggression against us but also with regressive forces back in Sol system. He will be questioned fully before execution. While we have to keep eyes open and alert, I am convinced, given all I have seen, that the immediate threat to Medina Station is under control.”

  “Execution,” Roberts said.

  Salis shrugged. “You put the ship at risk, that’s what happens. Those colony bastards weren’t coming to play dice and make happy.”

  “Least it’s over,” Vandercaust said.

  “Is why they let you go,” Roberts said, shaking her hand terminal. “Found him. Saw you weren’t involved.”

  Or picked someone to play the goat, Vandercaust thought. Only I got lucky enough it wasn’t me. It wasn’t the sort of thing you said out loud. Not at times like these.

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Holden

  The room they were using as an anteroom was larger than the Rocinante’s galley. Wide tables with built-in monitors and tall metal stools. Soft, indirect lighting in a manipulated spectrum that reminded Holden of early mornings in his childhood. He didn’t have a rank or a uniform, but the ship jumpsuit had seemed wrong for the occasion. He’d decided on a dark, collarless shirt and pants that echoed the sense of a military uniform without making any specific claims.

  Naomi, pacing now along the wall by the yellow double doors, had matched him, but he had the creeping sense that they looked better on her. So of the three of them, only Bobbie was in uniform, and hers had the insignia left off. The cut and the fitting all screamed Martian Marine Corps. And the people they were going to meet with—the ones gathering right now down the hall—knew who she was anyway.

  “You keep pulling at that sleeve,” Bobbie said. “It bothering you?”

  “It? No, it’s fine,” Holden said. “I’m bothering me. Do you know how many times I’ve done this kind of diplomatic work? I’ve been in battles and I’ve put together video feeds, but to walk in, look down the table at a bunch of OPA operatives, and tell them how they all need to listen to me? I’ve done that exactly no times. Never.”

  “Ilus,” Naomi said.

  “You mean when that one guy killed the other guy in the street and then burned a bunch of people alive?”

  Naomi sighed. “Yeah. Then.”

  Bobbie flexed her hands, put them palm down on the table display. The monitor glowed for a moment, waiting for a command, then dimmed again when nothing came. Muffled voices came through the doorway. A woman with a Belter’s accent asking something about chairs. A man replying, his voice too low to make out. “I’ve been in rooms like this before,” Bobbie said. “Political work. A lot of different agendas and no one saying out loud what they were actually thinking.”

  “Yeah?” Holden said.

  “It sucked.”

  The Rocinante had decelerated toward Tycho harder than they’d planned, burning off the speed they’d poured on during the battle and pressing them all down a little more than usual, like an illness or a regret. Holden held a little ceremony in the galley where each of them shared some memory of Fred Johnson and they let their various griefs blur together. The only ones not to speak were Amos, smiling his amiable and meaningless smile, and Clarissa, her brow furrowed in concentration like it was all a puzzle she was trying to solve.

  When they broke up, Holden noticed that Alex and Sandra Ip went off together, but he didn’t have time or enough moral high ground to worry about fraternization. Every hour that passed had taken them a few thousand klicks closer to Tycho and the meeting there. All of his spare time was in his cabin with the door closed trading messages across the emptiness of the system. Michio Pa. Drummer on Tycho. A man named Damian Short, who’d taken the reins on Ceres. But mostly Chrisjen Avasarala.

  Every long, heavy day, he traded messages with Luna. Long lectures from Avasarala on how to conduct a meeting, how to present himself and his arguments. More importantly, how to listen to what the others said and didn’t say. She sent him dossiers on all the major OPA players who would be there: Aimee Ostman, Micah al-Dujaili, Liang Goodfortune, Carlos Walker. Everything Avasarala knew about them—who their families were, what their factions within the OPA had done and what she only suspected they’d done. The depth of background was overwhelming, group loyalties intersecting and drawing apart, personal insults affecting political agreements, and political agreements shaping relationships. And along with it, Avasarala pouring the distilled insights of a lifetime of political life into his ears until he was drunk with it to the edge of nausea.

  Strength by itself is just bullying, capitulation by itself is an invitation to get fucked; only mixed strategies survive. Everything is personal, but they know that too. They can smell pandering like a fart. If you treat them like they’re a treasure box where if you just tweak them the right way, the policy you want falls out, you’re already fucked. They’ll misjudge you, so be ready to use t
hat.

  By the time he walked into the meeting room on Tycho, he intended to have a little, simplified version of Avasarala that lived in the back of his mind. It felt like doing a decade of work in a few days because it sort of was. He got to where he couldn’t sleep and he couldn’t stay awake. When they finally reached Tycho Station, it was hard to say whether the dread was more powerful or the relief.

  Walking the habitation ring of Tycho the first time after their return had been eerie. Everything was perfectly familiar—the pale foam of the walls, the slightly astringent smell in the air, the sound of bhangra music leaking from some distant workroom—but it all meant something different now. Tycho was Fred Johnson’s house, only now it wasn’t. Holden kept having the nagging sense that someone was missing, and then remembering who it was.

  Drummer had done her mourning in private. When she escorted them in, she was the head of security that she’d been before: sharp and aware and businesslike. She’d met them at the docks with a convoy of carts, each one with a pair of armed guards. That didn’t make Holden feel better.

  “So who’s in charge here now?” he’d asked as they paused at the bulkhead that marked the administrative section.

  “Technically, Bredon Tycho and the board of directors,” she said. “Except they’re mostly on Earth or Luna. Never been out here. Always pleased to keep their hands clean. We’re here, so until someone comes and makes a strong opposing case, we run it.”

  “We?”

  Drummer nodded. Her eyes got a little harder, and he couldn’t say if it was grief in them or anger. “Johnson wanted me to keep an eye on the place until he got back. That’s what I plan to do.”

  There were supposed to be four people waiting for him.

  There were five.

  He recognized all the faces that Avasarala had prepared him for. Carlos Walker, wide shoulders and face, even shorter than Clarissa, had an uncanny air of stillness. Aimee Ostman could have passed for a middle-grade science teacher, but was responsible for more attacks against inner-planet military targets than all the rest combined. Liang Goodfortune, who Fred had only managed to lure to the table by offering amnesty for their daughter, a former OPA hitter still housed in a numbers-only prison on Luna. Micah al-Dujaili, with his fat, red-veined drunkard’s nose, who’d spent half his lifetime coordinating free schools and medical clinics throughout the Belt. Whose brother had been captain of the Witch of Endor when the Free Navy destroyed it.