Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  “Hoy,” Karal said after an awkward moment.

  “He send you?” Filip asked.

  “No one send me, aber se savvy I ought to come.”

  Filip stirred his noodles. The bowl was hardly half empty, but his appetite was already gone. The slow, rolling anger in his gut seemed to take up all the space that food might want. “No need. Solid as stone, me, and twice as hard.”

  It sounded like a boast. Like an accusation. Filip wasn’t even sure what he’d wanted the words to be, but not this. He ground his fork into the mash of noodles and sauce, shoved the bowl to the edge of the table for the server to take away. He kept the stout, though.

  “Not throwing signs, me,” Karal said. “But was a time I was your age. Long time, but I remember it. Me y mis papá used to have it out sometimes. He’d get high and I’d get drunk and we’d spend the whole day sometimes yelling at each other about who was the dumbest asshole. Throw punches sometimes. Pulled a knife once, me.” Karal chuckled. “He cracked my ass the other way for that one. All I’m saying, fathers and sons, they fight. But you and yours? It’s different, yeah?”

  “If you say,” Filip said.

  “Your da? He’s not just your da. Marco Inaros, leader of the Free Navy. Big man, him. So much on his shoulders. So much he’s thinking on, worrying on, planning on, and it’s not like tu y la can scrap it out like the rest of us.”

  “That’s not what it is,” Filip said.

  “No? Bist bien, then. What’s it?” Karal said, and his voice was soft and warm and gentle.

  The anger in Filip’s gut was shifting, unsteady as a scab on an infected wound. The rage and righteousness started to feel less authentic, like a wrap tied around something that wasn’t either. That was something worse. Filip gripped his hands in fists so tight they ached, but he lost his hold. The anger—not even anger, petulance—slid to the side and an oceanic sense of guilt rose up in him like a flood. It was too big, too pure, too painful to even have a single event to focus it.

  It wasn’t that he regretted leaving the ship without permission or missing his shots on the Rocinante or killing Earth or wounding Callisto. It was larger than that. Regret was the universe. Guilt was bigger than the sun and the stars and the spaces between them. Whatever it was, all of it, was his fault and his failing. It was more than he’d done something bad. Like the fossil of an ancient animal was flesh that had been replaced by stone, whoever Filip had been once had kept his shape but been replaced by a raw and rising sense of loss.

  “I feel …wrong?” Filip said, scrabbling for words to describe something so much bigger than language. “I feel … I feel like—”

  “Fuck,” Karal said, breathy and sharp. His eyes were fixed behind Filip. Caught by something on the newsfeed. Filip turned, craning to see the screen. Fred Johnson looked out from the wall, dark-eyed, calm, somber. A red banner beneath him read, Confirmed Dead After Free Navy Attack. When he turned back, Karal had already pulled out his hand terminal and was shifting through newsfeeds as quickly as his crooked fingers could manage. Filip waited, then took his own terminal out. It wasn’t hard to find. It was all over the feeds—Belt and inner planets both. Sources from Tycho Manufacturing Collective on Earth were confirming the death of Frederick Lucius Johnson, formerly of UN Navy and longtime political activist, community organizer, and spokesman of the Outer Planets Alliance. He’d died as a result of injuries sustained during an ambush by forces of the Free Navy …

  Filip read it all, aware that there was something to it he wasn’t understanding. It was only a wash of words and images, disconnected from his life, until Karal, across the table from him and grinning, spoke.

  “Gratulacje, Filipito. Guess you got him after all.”

  Back on the Pella, music was playing over the ship system. A bright mix of steel drum and guitar and men’s ululating voices raised together in celebration. Sárta, one of the first to see Filip when he came down the corridor from the airlock, scooped him up in her arms, pressing his cheek against hers and leaving him uncomfortably aware of her breasts. When she kissed him—briefly, but on the lips—she tasted of cheap mint liquor.

  The galley was packed like a party. The whole crew, it seemed, gathered together in front of the newsfeeds that announced the death of the Butcher of Anderson Station. The heat of their bodies made the room feel stifling. His father was in among them, smiling and strutting and clapping people on the shoulder like the groom at a particularly fortunate wedding. All the sulking and menace were gone from his expression. When he caught sight of Filip across the crowded room, he put his hands together in front of his heart making a celebratory double fist.

  This was, Filip realized, the first real victory since the first attack on Earth. Marco had been claiming success after success, but they’d all been for retreats and scuffles or the discipline killing of mutineers like the Witch of Endor. From the moment they’d left Ceres, the Free Navy had needed a solid, unequivocal success, and this was it. No wonder even the sober seemed drunk with it.

  The newsfeed shifted, a Free Navy logo appearing in its place, and the roar of the group grew even louder as each told the others to be quiet. Someone cut the music and put the audio for the newsfeed in its place. When Marco appeared on the screen, more dignified and statesmanlike than the actual grinning man in the room, his voice rang all through the Pella.

  “Fred Johnson claimed to speak for the same people he oppressed. He began his career by slaughtering Belters, then pretended to be our voice. His years as a representative of the OPA were marked by pleas for complacence, patience, and the constant deferment of the freedom of the Belt. And his fate will be the fate of all who stand against us. The Free Navy will defend and protect the Belt from all enemies, internal and external, now and forever.”

  The speech went on, but the crew began cheering so loudly, Filip couldn’t hear it. Marco lifted his arms, not to quiet them but to bathe in the noise. His shining eyes found Filip again. When he spoke, Filip could read the words on his lips: We did it.

  We, Filip thought as Aaman jostled into him, pressed a bulb of something alcoholic into his palm. We did it. When it was a mistake, it was mine. When it was a victory, it was ours.

  In the center of the joyful storm, Filip felt himself growing still. A flicker of memory came to him, strong and rich with import as an image from a dream. He couldn’t place its source. A film he’d watched, he thought. Some drama where a stunningly beautiful woman had looked into the camera and in a voice made from smoke and muscle had said, He put blood on my hands too. He thought it would make me easier to control.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Alex

  Good morning, Sunshine,” Sandra Ip said.

  Alex blinked, closed his eyes, cracked open just the left one. He’d been in the middle of a dream where apple juice had gotten into the coolant feeds on a ship that was both the Rocinante and his first ship back when he’d been in the Martian Navy. The sense that he was supposed to fix something lingered even as the details faded. Sandra, naked, smiled down at him and he stopped trying to hold on to the dream.

  “Hey to you too, Pookie,” he growled. The night’s sleep left his voice deep and gravelly. He stretched up his arms, palms flat against her headboard, and pressed to stretch down between his shoulder blades. His toes reached out past the edge of the blanket, and she pinched them playfully as she walked back toward the shower. He lifted his head to watch her retreat, and she looked back to watch him watch her.

  “Where you headed?” he asked, partly because he wanted to know, partly just to keep her in the room a few seconds more.

  “I’ve got a shift on the Jammy Rakshasa today,” she said. “Drummer’s making sure all these OPA bigwigs feel like we’re taking care of them.”

  “Jammy Rakshasa,” Alex said, laying his head back down. “That’s a weird name for a ship.”

  “It think it’s some kind of in-joke with Goodfortune’s people. Decent ship, though.” Her voice echoed a little from the bathroom. “The wei
rdest ship I ever worked was called the Inverted Loop. Gravel miner made out of a salvaged luxury yacht. The captain had this thing about open space, so they’d cut all nonstructural walls and decking out.”

  Alex frowned up at the ceiling. “Seriously?”

  “When that thing was under thrust, you could drop a bearing in the cockpit and listen to it hit every deck down to the reactor. It was like flying in a balloon full of sticks.”

  “That ain’t right.”

  “The captain was a guy named Yeats Pratkanis. He had some issues, but his crew loved him. Nothing like the stupid shit people do for a captain when they’re really invested in not seeing how fucked up he is.”

  “S’pose that’s true.”

  The sound of water splashing against metal announced the shower, but Alex could tell by the music of it that her body wasn’t in the flow yet. He looked up again, found her in the doorway, her arms lifted above her to rest against the frame. She was only a little younger than him, and the years showed on her body. Silver ghosts of stretch marks just visible along her belly and breasts. The fuzzy tattoo of a waterfall down the side of her left leg. A jagged scar that puckered the flesh of her right arm. Hers was not the beauty of youth but of experience, same as his. Still, he could see the girl she’d been in the way she lifted her eyebrows, shifted her weight into her hip.

  “You want to take a shower, Sunshine?” she asked with false innocence.

  “Oh hell yes,” Alex said, hauling himself up from the bed. “Yes, I do.”

  Ever since that first night on Ceres, he and Sandra had been spending a chunk of their off hours in each other’s company this way. When they’d been on the Roci, they’d split their time between his cabin and hers. Here on Tycho, her quarters had become their default. She’d been on the station long enough for her seniority and union rules to land her two rooms, a private bath, and a bed that was a lot more comfortable for two than trying to fit into the same crash couch.

  As love affairs went, Alex had been surprised at first and a little wary. Sandra’s sexuality was joyful and unrestrained. It had taken him a little time to knock the rust off and join her in it. He’d had a few lovers before he’d gotten married, one—shamefully—while he was, and a couple dalliances afterward. A woman’s full and delighted attention wasn’t something he’d ever expected to have again. Once he convinced himself that, yes, this was really happening, he fell into it like he was sixteen.

  After the shower, they toweled each other dry and he helped put lotion on her back where she couldn’t reach, and a little where she probably could too. She put on her uniform, tied back her hair, then brushed and gargled while he crawled back into the bed.

  “Another day of sloth for you?” she asked.

  “I’m a pilot with nowhere to go,” he said, stretching his arms out in a gesture that said, It’s not my fault. She laughed.

  “This is why I’m not one,” she said. “Engineers always have something to do.”

  “You need to learn to relax.”

  “Well,” she said, her voice taking on a low purr that was come-on and laughing at the come-on both, “you keep setting me an example and maybe some of it’ll rub off on me.”

  “Maybe when your shift’s over, we could order in.”

  “It’s a plan,” she said, then checked the time on her hand terminal and grunted. “Okay. I’ve got to run.”

  “I’ll lock up when I go,” Alex said.

  “You’ll sleep in my bed all day like a lion.”

  “Or that.”

  She kissed him before she left. He let himself sink into the pillows after the door closed, rested there for a long moment, then stood up and gathered his clothes from the floor. Sandra’s quarters were soft and welcoming in a way he wasn’t used to. The comforter wadded and shaped at the foot of the bed was a pale blue with a pattern of lace at the edges. Sandra had hung draping cloth at the corners of the room to soften the light and disguise the edges. Her desk had a small glass vase with dried roses arranged in it. The peppery smell of spent perfume sank into his clothes when he was here, so that hours later he’d walk through a draft and be suddenly and viscerally reminded of her. The women he’d lived with these last years—Naomi, Bobbie, even Clarissa Mao now—weren’t the sort for frills and softness. Plush pillows and rosewater. Being around that particular kind of femininity was familiar enough to be comfortable, exotic enough to make this time, this moment, this relationship something all his own. Turned out some part of him had wanted something all his own.

  Or maybe—pulling on the same sock he’d worn yesterday—it wasn’t even that. Maybe it was only that he knew how much the war might take from them all, and Sandra Ip was his chance to refill some cistern of his heart and body that there wasn’t going to be time for later. A place of gentleness and affection and pleasure like a hurricane eye. He hoped she felt the same about him. That they were stocking up good memories, him and Sandra both, against the history that was about to unfold around them.

  It was getting harder and harder to shrug off the sense of dread back on the Rocinante. The days since they’d arrived on Tycho had been one endless meeting for Holden. When he wasn’t fencing with Carlos Walker about what supplies and support the OPA could provide, he was trading long recorded messages with Michio Pa about the firing rate of the Free Navy’s rail gun artillery in the slow zone. When he wasn’t reporting to or getting reports from Avasarala, he and Naomi and Bobbie were comparing positional maps of the system with Aimee Ostman and Micah al-Dujaili. Holden never seemed to lose his temper, never seemed to rest. Every time Alex saw him, Holden smiled and was pleasant and upbeat. If he hadn’t spent years with the man, he might almost have been fooled into thinking things were going well.

  But the man in the meetings, pacing the corridors of the Rocinante or the docks outside them, sitting hunched over his flickering hand terminal, wasn’t really James Holden at all. It was like Holden had become an actor and his role was James Holden. The surface was whatever it needed to be at the moment. That wasn’t the man he knew. Alex could feel the howling void of desperation and despair behind everything he said.

  It showed in the others too. Naomi had become quieter, more focused. Like she was always in the middle of puzzling through an impossible problem. Even Amos seemed on edge, though what it was about was so subtle that Alex couldn’t have said for certain if that was even true. It might just have been his own fears projected against Amos’ blank slate. And if Bobbie and Clarissa seemed immune from it all, it was only because they were relatively new to the ship. They didn’t know the feel and rhythm of the Rocinante well enough yet to hear when she went slightly out of tune.

  And every story of the Free Navy—another ship captured or killed, another Earth spy caught and executed on Pallas or Ganymede or Hall Station, another rock intercepted before it could hit Earth—turned the ratchet one more notch. The consolidated fleet was going to have to do something. And soon.

  The little restaurant just off the main hall. Bright lights, a little redder spectrum than the sun. Syncopated harp-and-dulcimer music, which was apparently in fashion these days. Tall stools around a white ceramic bar. A plate of something not entirely unlike chicken in a vindaloo that was better than it had any right to be. Sandra had introduced the place to him the first night on Tycho, and he’d become a regular since.

  His hand terminal chimed the connection request, and Alex accepted it with his thumb. Holden appeared on the screen. It might just have been the dim light on the command deck or the blue of the monitor the captain was sitting in front of, but his skin looked waxy, his eyes flat and exhausted. “Hey,” Holden said. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

  “Thanks for askin’,” Alex said, maybe a little too heartily. He felt like he needed to haul the energy of the conversation up when he talked to Holden these days. As if he could inject health into the man by being so damned chipper at him. “I’m just finishing some breakfast. What’s up?”

  “Um,” Holde
n said, and blinked. For a moment, he looked surprised. Like what he was about to say seemed a little implausible to him. “We’re looking to ship out in about thirty hours. Clarissa and Amos are in the middle of their sleep shifts, but I’m calling an all-hands meeting in four hours so we can make sure we’ve got everything in order.”

  The way he said it sounded like an apology. Alex felt the words land like he was drinking something cold on an empty stomach. “I’ll be there,” he said.

  “We’re good?”

  “Cap,” Alex said, “this is the Roci. I made sure we were topped up and ready as soon as the docking clamps were in place. We could take off five minutes from now and be fine.”

  Holden’s smile said he’d understood all Alex’s subtext. “Still, good to get everyone together and double-check.”

  “No argument,” Alex agreed. “Four hours?”

  “Four and change,” Holden said. “If Amos sleeps in, I’m going to let him.”

  “See you on board then,” Alex said, and they dropped the connection. He took another bite of the vindaloo. It didn’t taste as good. He slid bowl and fork to the recycler, stood up, waited a few seconds just so he wouldn’t be going to find Sandra quite yet.

  He went off to find Sandra.

  Despite its name, the Jammy Rakshasa was an unexceptional-looking ship. Wide at the front, boxy, with a random studding of PDCs and thrusters scattered over her skin in a way that spoke of generations of use and modifications, the design growing and changing and leaving artifacts of its previous incarnations like a house altered by tenant after tenant until the original architecture was all but lost. A Belter ship. If it hadn’t been for the high security presence, both on the dock and floating around the ship itself, he’d have wondered if he was looking at the right one.