Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  He waited outside the utility airlock, holding on to the wall with one hand as he floated. He saw Sandra before she saw him. A cluster of engineers and mechanical techs in environment suits floating together at a wall display, four different conversations going among the seven of them. Her hair was in a ponytail that waved like a flag when she shook her head, impatient with what the man beside her was saying. When she glanced in Alex’s direction, she did a quick double take. He saw the smile start on her lips, saw it wilt. She finished her discussions, pushed herself off, gliding through the air toward him. By the time she grabbed a handhold and pulled herself to a halt, the knowledge was already in her eyes.

  “Well,” she said. “Orders came through?”

  “Yeah.”

  Her expression softened, her gaze tracing the curves of his face. He looked at her, memorizing the shape of her eyes, her mouth, the little scar at her temple, the mole tucked almost behind her ear. All the details of her body. A bad habit in the back of his head fed him all the wrong things to say: You should ship out with us and I can resign and stay here with you and I’ll come back if you wait for me. All the things that would make her feel better right then in the moment and break her trust in him later. All the things he’d said to women he loved before and not meant then either. She laughed gently, like she’d heard him thinking.

  “I was never looking for a husband,” she said. “I’ve had husbands. They’re never what they’re cracked up to be.”

  “My track record is I make a pretty shitty one anyway,” Alex said.

  “I am glad you’re my friend,” she said. “You make a great friend.”

  “You make a great lover,” Alex said.

  “Yeah,” Sandra said. “You too. So how long?”

  “Captain’s called a meeting in”—he checked the time—“a little over three hours. Says we’re heading out in a little less than thirty.”

  “You know where?”

  “I expect he’ll tell me when I get there,” Alex said. He took her gloved hand. She squeezed his fingers gently and then let them go.

  “So I get a lunch break in about an hour and a half,” she said. They were casual words, spoken carefully. Like if she bit down too hard, she might break them. “I could take it a little early. You want to meet up at my place? Freshen up the luck one last time before you go?”

  Alex put his hand to her cheek. She braced a leg against the wall so she could press into his palm. How many millions of times had people had this exact conversation before? How many wars had put two people together for a moment and then washed them apart? There had to be a tradition of it. A secret history of vulnerability and want and all the things that sex promised and only occasionally delivered. They were just one more couple among all the countless others. It only hurt this time because it was them.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’d love that.”

  The galley of the Rocinante smelled like coffee and maple-flavored syrup. Naomi shifted when Alex came in, making room for him on the bench. Amos sat on her other side, looking into nothing and scooping scrambled eggs from a bowl with two fingers. His eyes were still puffy from sleep, but he seemed alert otherwise. Clarissa stood in the doorway, uncertain but present. Alex thought about getting some food, but he wasn’t hungry. It would only have been so he had something to do with his hands.

  A conversation between Bobbie and Holden echoed down the lift as they approached, their voices hard and competent and businesslike. Maybe even a little excited. There was an anticipation in the air that didn’t feel like joy, but wasn’t entirely unlike it either.

  The melancholy in Alex’s chest and throat eased a little as they came in, Bobbie taking the bench across from him while Holden headed for the coffee. When he’d left Sandra’s quarters to come here, he’d carried a sense of loss with him. He still felt it. Would feel it for maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe forever. But not as strongly. And his people were here. His crew, his ship. The worst of the sting was already over and the sweet, he thought, would last. For him. Hopefully for Sandra. It was great sharing a moment with a genuinely good woman. There was a pleasure in coming home again too.

  Holden took a sip of his coffee, coughed, and took another one. Clarissa slid in and took a seat behind Amos as if she could hide behind him. As Holden ambled over—head down, expression distracted—Bobbie reached across and tapped Alex on the wrist.

  “You good?”

  “Right as rain,” Alex said. “Said my goodbyes.”

  Bobbie nodded once. Holden sat down facing them all, sideways on the bench. His hair was unkempt, his eyes focused on something only he could see. The attention of the room—Naomi’s, Amos’, Alex’s own—turned toward him. An ancient and barely familiar anticipation shifted in Alex’s chest, like a fragment of childhood beginning of school year.

  “So, Cap,” he said. “What’s the plan?”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Avasarala

  Avasarala screamed.

  Her breath ripped out of her throat, abrading her flesh as it passed. She tasted bile in the back of her mouth, and her legs trembled, ached, burned as she tried to push the steel plate another centimeter away.

  “Come on,” Pieter said. “You can do this.”

  She screamed again, and the plate moved away. Her legs went almost straight. The impulse to push through and lock her knees took effort to resist. It might snap her knees back the other way, but then at least this would be done.

  “That’s eleven,” Pieter said. “Go for twelve. One more.”

  “Fuck your mother.”

  “Come on. Just one more rep. I’ll be here to help.”

  “You’re an asshole and nobody loves you,” she gasped, lowering her head. The worst was the nausea. Leg day always seemed to mean nausea. Pieter didn’t care. He was paid not to care.

  “You’re going down the well in twelve days,” he said. “If you want the leader of Earth, the hope and light of civilization, to get wheeled off the shuttle in a chair, you can stop. If you want her to stride out in front of the cameras like a Valkyrie returned from the underworld and ready for battle, you’ll go for twelve.”

  “Sadistic fuck.”

  “You’re the one who fell behind on your exercise schedule.”

  “I’ve been saving the fucking species.”

  “Saving humanity doesn’t prevent bone-density loss or muscular atrophy,” he said. “And you’re stalling. One more.”

  “I hate you so much,” she said, letting her knees bend, easing the steel plate back closer to her. She wanted to cry. She wanted to puke all over Pieter’s pretty white exercise shoes. She wanted to be doing anything else at all.

  “I know, sweetie. But you can do this,” he said. “Come on.”

  Avasarala screamed and pushed the steel plate away.

  Afterward, she sat on the fake-wood bench in the locker room with her head in her hands until the idea of moving didn’t disgust her. When she did finally stand up, the gray-clad woman in the mirror seemed unfamiliar. Not foreign precisely, but certainly not her. Thinner, for one thing, with sweat stains at the armpits and under the breasts. White hair that didn’t fall to her shoulders so much as flow out, the thin lunar gravity too weak to pull it down. The woman in the mirror looked Avasarala up and down with dark, judgmental eyes.

  “Some fucking Valkyrie,” Avasarala said, then headed for the shower. “You’ll have to do.”

  The good news was that Mars had finally slogged its way through its constitutional crisis, done the obvious thing, and put Emily Richards in as prime minister. No, that wasn’t fair. There was more going well than just that. The rioting in Paris was under control now, and the racist cells in Colombia had been identified and isolated without any more murders. Saint Petersburg had fixed its water-recycling problem, at least for the moment. Gorman Le’s mystery yeast was doing everything it had claimed on the tin, which increased the overall food supply for the survivors, and the reactors in Cairo and Seoul were working again so they could make use of
it. Fewer dead people. Or at least fewer dead right now. Next week was always next week, and always would be.

  The bad news still outweighed the good. The second wave of deaths hadn’t slowed yet. The medical infrastructure was saturated. Thousands of people were dying every week from conditions that even a year ago would have been easily treated or cured. The violence over resources hadn’t by any means stopped either. There were vigilante raids in Boston and Mumbai. Reports of whole police forces going rogue and hoarding relief supplies in Denver and Phoenix. The oceans were being choked. The sludge of dust and debris wasn’t sinking as quickly as the models had suggested, and the light-eating plants and microbiota were dying off as a result. If there hadn’t been so many fucking human beings stressing the food webs over the last few centuries, the system might have been more robust. Or it might not have. It wasn’t as though they had a second Earth to use as a control. History itself was a massive n=1 study, irreproducible. It was what made it so difficult to learn from.

  After her shower, she changed into a lime-green sari, did her hair and her makeup. She was starting to feel a little better. It was the pattern she was noticing. The actual exercise left her miserable, but once she’d recovered, the rest of her day seemed to go a little better. If it was only the placebo effect, that was enough. She’d take what she could get, even if it was only tricks of the mind.

  When she was almost ready to face the rest of her day, she opened an audio-only connection to Said. “Where do we stand?” she said instead of hello.

  “The security group from Mars is finishing their meal,” Said answered without missing a beat. “They’ll be in the conference hall in half an hour. Admiral Souther will be there with you if you need him.”

  “Always good to have a penis in uniform in the room,” Avasarala said sourly. “God knows they might not take me seriously otherwise.”

  “If you say so, ma’am.”

  “It was a joke.”

  “If you say so, ma’am. There’s also a report in from Ceres Station. Admiral Coen has confirmed that the Giambattista is under burn just the way Aimee Ostman promised.”

  Avasarala held a pearl earring to her left ear, considering it. Nice. Understated. Didn’t go with the sari, though.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am?” Said’s voice was confused.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You … ah … you growled.”

  “Did I? Probably just an editorial comment about how pleased I am that we’re trusting the fucking OPA now. Ignore it and continue.”

  “That’s all you have on the schedule for today,” he said, almost apologetically. “You did ask me to keep the afternoon clear in case the security briefing went long.”

  “So I did,” she said, trying a pair of aquamarine studs that were much better. “Word from The Hague?”

  “They say your office will be ready and the critical staff will be in place. We’re on track to move the seat of governance back to the planet surface on schedule.”

  She imagined she heard a certain pride in Said’s voice at that. Well, good. He ought to be proud. They all ought to be. Earth might be a pile of corpses and shit, but it was their pile of corpses and shit, and she was tired of looking up at it from the moon.

  “About fucking time,” she said. “All right. Tell Souther I’m on my way. And to bring me a sandwich or something.”

  “What sort would you like? I can meet you with—”

  “No, tell Souther to do it,” she said. “He’ll think it’s funny.”

  The conference room was the single most secure chamber in the solar system, but it didn’t wear that on its sleeve. It was small enough for six people to sit comfortably. Red curtains on the walls to hide the air recyclers and the heaters. The table was wide, dark, and set just a little low to give a few centimeters more room for the holographic display. Not that anyone ever used holographic displays. Showy, but not functional. The Martian military attaché wasn’t here to be wowed by graphic design, and Avasarala liked him for that.

  The man himself—Rhodes Chen—sat on one side of the table with his secretary and assistant to either hand. Souther was already there too when she arrived, leaning back in his chair and laughing with Rhodes. A small tin plate waited at her chair—white bread and cucumbers. When Chen saw her, he stood, and all the others with him. She waved him back down.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said. “I wanted to be sure our allies on Mars were entirely up-to-date on the situation with the Free Navy.”

  “Prime Minister Richards sends her regrets,” Chen said, taking his seat. “Things are still unsettled back at home, and she didn’t feel comfortable being physically absent from the government building.”

  “I understand,” Avasarala said. “And your wife? Michaela? Is she feeling better?”

  Chen blinked. “Why … yes. Yes, she’s doing much better. Thank you.”

  Avasarala turned to Souther. “Admiral Chen’s wife went to the cooperative school with my daughter Ashanti when they were girls,” she said. Not that Chen remembered that, or had even known. In fairness, the girls hadn’t been particularly close, but you played the angles the universe gave you. She picked up her sandwich, took a bite, and put it back down to give Chen a moment to hide his discomfort.

  “I’m going to have to ask your staff to leave,” Avasarala said.

  “They can be trusted,” Chen said, nodding as if he’d agreed.

  “Not by me, they can’t,” Avasarala said. “We won’t hurt them. But they can’t stay.”

  Chen sighed. His secretary and assistant politely gathered up their things, nodded to Souther and Avasarala, and left. Souther lowered his head, waiting for the system to report whether either had left anything behind. It would be sad to come this far and have a bug in the room. A moment later he shook his head.

  “Now then,” she said. “Shall we get down to business?”

  Chen didn’t object, and Souther pulled up a schematic of the solar system in its present state. The sun and the ring gate as the major axis, and the planets and moons, stations and asteroids, scattered as the laws of orbital mechanics had placed them. As with any tactical map on that scale, the proportionality had suffered a little in favor of visibility. In truth, all of humanity’s children lived on scattered stones smaller than dust on the face of the ocean. They hid the fact with graphics and highlighted lists of ship names and vectors. Had the map matched the territory, there would have been nothing to see. Even the Earth with her suffering billions would have been less than a pixel.

  But the Free Navy showed there in yellow. The consolidated fleet in red. Michio Pa’s breakaway ships and their new OPA let’s-call-them-allies in gold. It was rough and ugly. Souther pulled up a pointer, and drew the room’s attention to the ring gate at the system’s edge.

  “Our target is Medina Station,” he said in his oddly high-pitched, musical voice. “There are several reasons for that, but critically, it’s the choke point for passage through to the colony systems, including Laconia, where former Martian naval officer Winston Duarte appears to have set up shop. Whoever has possession of Medina and its defenses controls the ring gates and traffic through them. It will reopen trade and colonization ships for us, and cut Inaros’ supply lines from his ally.”

  Chen leaned forward, his elbows on the table, eyes glittering with the reflection of the display. He hadn’t reacted at all to Duarte’s name. Good poker face, and he’d expected to hear it. Richards wasn’t trying to deny the Martian Navy’s role in this clusterfuck. That was good. She took another bite of the sandwich and wished she’d thought to bring some pistachios. She didn’t have much appetite right after lifting weights, but when it returned, she was ravenous.

  “Inaros’ method of operation up to now has relied on strategic retreat,” Souther continued. “Stripping and abandoning territory rather than trying to hold it and leaving the support of the people left behind to the consolidated fleet. It has served him well in that we have been reluctant
to overextend our defensive force, and the Free Navy has been able to carry out raids and attacks of opportunity on both Earth and Martian forces and dissenting factions on their own side.”

  “The pirates,” Chen said.

  “The pirates,” Avasarala agreed. No need to beat around that particular bush.

  “We believe that strategy will fail with Medina,” Souther said. “Its importance is too great to abandon. And if we’re wrong and the Free Navy does abandon it … Well, then we have all the advantages we were hoping for and he looks like a joke.”

  “He won’t abandon it,” Avasarala said.

  “What about the rail guns?” Chen asked. An interesting move, showing that Mars already knew about the defensive artillery. She wasn’t quite certain what letting her know they knew that was meant to achieve. Souther glanced at her. She nodded. No reason to pretend ignorance.

  “Our best intelligence on that comes from the defectors from the Free Navy. Captain Pa of the Connaught was one of Inaros’ inner circle. Our understanding is that the rail guns set up on the alien station are Medina’s first line of defense. The station proper also had PDCs and a supply of torpedoes left by Duarte, but the rail guns are set to defend and destroy any unauthorized ships that pass through the ring gates.”

  “That seems like a problem,” Chen said. “Your thoughts on how to overcome that?”

  “We’re going to send a shitload of ships through the ring gates,” Avasarala said as Souther shifted from tactical to an image of the Giambattista. It wasn’t a pretty ship: large, boxy, and awkward.

  “This is a converted water hauler crewed by the Ostman-Jasinzki faction of the Outer Planets Alliance,” Souther said. “It has been loaded with slightly under four thousand small craft. Breaching pods, small transports, prospecting skiffs. A devil’s brew. We’re calling it our Surinam toad, but the ship’s registered as the Giambattista.”