Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  “That thing has four thousand reactors in it?” Chen said.

  “No,” Souther said. “Most of the engines are chemical rockets or compressed-gas thrusters. Many of them are hardly more than environment-suit thrusters welded to a steel box. That is part of the reason they’re being carried to the edge of the ring before they’re ever deployed. These aren’t long-range craft. At a guess, I’d say half of them would be hard-pressed to make the trip from the ring gate to Medina under the best of circumstances. There are also several thousand torpedoes with a mixed but generally low-yield assortment of warheads.”

  “So, chaff,” Chen said. “Cannon fodder.”

  “We’re not putting people on all of them,” Avasarala said. “Even the OPA’s not that suicidal.”

  Souther went on. “A fraction—the best ships—will carry a ground-attack group, whose mission will be to take control, not of Medina but of the rail-gun emplacements themselves. Once our forces control those, we expect Medina Station to capitulate. And since the rail guns were intended to defend Medina from more than thirteen hundred gates, and we’re only going to focus on the Sol and Laconia gates, we have reason to expect a relatively strong defensive position, which we can reinforce not only from Sol but with the colony ships that have already passed through and are willing and able to come to our assistance.”

  “All right,” Chen said.

  “You sound skeptical,” Avasarala said.

  “No offense, ma’am,” Chen said. “But I’m looking at this, and it doesn’t square. If Inaros has been trying to tempt the fleet into overreach—spreading our forces too thin—then this run out to the edge of the system seems like his dream scenario. Unless you’re planning to send it unescorted, in which case you might as well not send it at all.”

  “The escort will be a salvaged Martian corvette with a keel-mounted rail gun of its own,” Souther said. “The Rocinante is already burning on an intercept course. It’s going from Tycho Station, so it’s in the neighborhood. Relatively speaking.”

  “There are also advantages to having that particular asset in place on Medina when we take it,” Avasarala said.

  Chen’s laugh was thin and despairing. Avasarala stretched her right leg, feeling the ache in it. It would be worse in the morning. Lifting weights was an argument against a benign God. As if that needed more evidence.

  “Why bother, then?” Chen asked. “A single escort ship and an old ice hauler heading out to the most sensitive strategic position in the system? I don’t mean to be rude, but I have to think you don’t like the people in those ships very much. They’re going to have the whole Free Navy chasing them out and turning them to slag before they’re a million klicks from the ring gate.”

  “That,” Souther said, “remains to be seen.”

  If Chen had been a dog, his ears would have gone up just then. Avasarala saw it in his face and the set of his shoulders. “This,” she said, “is why we need to talk. In private. Securely. I need assurances, Mr. Chen, that the rot at the heart of your navy was well and truly burned out. I trust Emily Richards to look out for her own best interests and Mars’ too. In that order. And I’ve done a deep background check on you.”

  “You’ve … excuse me?”

  Avasarala put out her hands, palms facing each other about a meter apart. “I’ve got a report on you this thick. I know every pimple you’ve popped since your voice broke. Everything. Praiseworthy, shameful, indifferent. Everything. I have violated your privacy in ways you can’t imagine.”

  Chen went white, then red. “Well,” he said.

  “I don’t give a shit about any of it,” she said. “The only thing I cared about was whether you had the stink of Duarte on your fingers. You don’t. It’s why you’re in this room. Because I trust you to take this back to Richards and no one else. And I need to know if you trust Mars.”

  The silence in the room was profound. Chen pressed his fingers to his lips. “With this? Maybe. I get the sense you’re making some kind of request here. You should be very clear and explicit if that’s the case.”

  “I want Richards to instruct the remnants of the Martian Navy—the ships in the consolidated fleet and the ones you have in reserve as well—to coordinate closely with Earth and the OPA and the fucking pirate fleet.”

  “To do what?”

  “Run a distraction campaign,” Souther said.

  Avasarala waved him back, leaned in toward Chen, a smile on her lips. “Inaros isn’t going to chase after the Giambattista and Rocinante, because he’ll be distracted by the largest and most aggressive fleet action in history kicking his balls up into his throat. By the time he understands what we were really after, it’ll be too late for him to do anything but hold his dick and cry. But I need to know that you’re in.”

  Chen blinked. His reserve cracked, just a little.

  “Well,” he said, “when you put it like that.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Naomi

  The Rocinante burned, but not straight for the ring gate. That would have been too obvious. The intention was to rendezvous with the Giambattista in an ambiguous orbit, leaving it unclear to anyone watching whether they were looking to position themselves in a long burn spinward toward Saturn, turn out toward the science station on Neptune, or make for the gate. Let Marco wonder a little bit, and be in position when the distractions started pulling his attention away. Assuming he was even watching where the Roci went.

  Naomi assumed Marco was watching where the Roci went. She assumed everyone was. She understood how much her old friends hated her now.

  Even in this moment of relative calm, Jim was spending ten- and twelve-hour shifts on the comms. When he wasn’t sending out or receiving messages, he’d watch newsfeeds. The Free Navy presence was growing on Ganymede and Titan. The consolidated fleet splitting its forces in order to send guard ships to Tycho. Angry voices coming off Pallas to denounce the traitors who’d colluded with the inner planets; not just Michio Pa and her pirate fleet anymore but also the OPA factions that Fred Johnson had put together. It was how Jim tried to have control over something he couldn’t actually control. The messages he watched and sent out were a kind of prayer for him, though he wouldn’t have said it that way. Something that brought peace and the illusion that what they were caught up in wasn’t so massively bigger than their own individual wills and hopes and intentions.

  So even though it set her teeth on edge, she let him go on with it. She got used to falling asleep to the musical voices of Earth newsfeeds, waking up to the hard cadences of Chrisjen Avasarala and Michio Pa in her cabin.

  “We will burn after we see the consolidated fleet commit,” Pa said, her distant, muted voice sliding into Naomi’s half-dream. She sounded so weary, it made Naomi want to go back to sleep in sympathy. “I understand that’s not a popular decision, but I’m not interested in having my people be the worm on Earth’s hook.”

  “I never understood that,” Naomi said. Jim closed his hand terminal display and settled the earphones down around his neck, his expression guilty. Naomi shifted, and the crash couch swung under them like one of the hammocks she’d grown up sleeping in. “How do hookworms figure into catching fish, anyway?”

  “Not hookworms,” Jim said. “Worms, like earthworms. Or insects. Crickets. You’d put them on metal hooks with a barb on the end, tie a really thin line to the metal hook, and throw the whole thing out into a lake or a river. Hope that a fish would eat the worm, and then you could haul the fish out with the hook that was caught in its mouth.”

  “Sounds inefficient and needlessly cruel.”

  “It really sort of is.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “The fishing part? No. The standing out on the edge of a lake or being in a boat while the sun’s just coming up? That a little bit.”

  This was the other thing he did. Reminiscing about being a boy on Earth, talking about it as if she’d ever had experiences like his. As if just because she loved him, she’d understand. She pretended that
she did, but she also changed the subject when she could.

  “How long was I asleep?”

  “It’s still six hours until we’re close enough to start docking,” Jim said, answering her real question without having to check. “Bobbie’s down in the machine shop with Clarissa and Amos doing some last-minute fixes to her combat armor. I get the feeling she’s looking to suit up and stay suited up until she’s on Medina.”

  “It has to be strange for her to lead OPA fighters.”

  Jim lowered himself to the gel of the crash couch, one arm bent behind his head. Naomi put her hand on his chest, just under his collarbone. His skin was warm. In the shadows, he looked vulnerable. Lost.

  “Did she say something to you about it?” he asked.

  “No. I was only thinking. She’s spent so much of her life with Belters as the enemy, and now she’s going to an OPA ship filled with OPA soldiers. We aren’t her people. Or we weren’t before now.”

  Jim nodded, squeezed her hand, and then slid out from under it. She watched him dress in silence for almost a minute.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Jim,” she said. Then, gently, “What is it?”

  When he did his little, percussive, surrendering sigh, she knew he’d given up trying to protect her from whatever it was. He pulled on his undershirt and leaned against the wall.

  “There was something I meant to talk about with you. About the ambush where Fred died?”

  “Go ahead.”

  He did. Connecting to the Pella, trying to distract Marco, seeing Filip, disarming the torpedoes. He told it all with a sheepishness like a kid confessing that he ate the last bit of sweet. Even when she turned up the cabin lights and started pulling on her own clothes, he didn’t meet her eyes. Amos had called him on it, offered to lock him out of the torpedo controls. Jim had said no. His silence was the only sign that he was done.

  Naomi stood for a moment, watching her emotions like they were objects scattered by an unexpected turn. Horror at the idea of Filip’s death. Rage at Marco for putting their child in harm’s way. Guilt, not only for Filip but for Jim too. For the position she’d put him in and the reflexive compromises he’d made on her behalf. All those she’d known to expect, but there was an impatience too. Not with Jim exactly, or herself, or Filip. With the need to mourn again what she’d mourned so many times before.

  “Thank you,” she said, her heart thick and heavy. “For caring. For trying to watch out for me. But I lost Filip. I couldn’t save him when he was a baby. I couldn’t save him now that he’s essentially a man. That’s twice, and twice is always. I can’t stop hoping that he’ll be all right in all this. But if he’s going to get saved, he’s going to have to do it himself.”

  She pushed away a betraying tear. Jim took a half step toward her.

  “He’ll have to do it himself,” she said again, her voice a degree harder to keep him from touching her or saying something soft and consoling. “Same as everyone.”

  When the Giambattista got into clear visual range, she wasn’t a pretty ship. Longer than the Canterbury had been back in the day, thicker through the middle, with a score of massive storage cells open to the vacuum where it had stored the ice harvested from Saturn’s rings or captured comets or any of the other sources around the system. Between the floodlit work shelves, the external mech storage sheds, attitude thrusters and sensor arrays and antennas, there were so many sources of drag that even the thinnest atmosphere would have ripped the ship to scrap. But no torpedo tubes. No PDCs. There were thousands of tiny boats tucked into the huge ship, and nothing more than a winsome smile and a handgun to protect them.

  On the command deck, Bobbie put one hand on Naomi’s shoulder, another on Jim’s. “Freaking out yet?”

  “I’m fine,” Naomi said in the same moment that Jim said, “Yes.”

  Bobbie’s chuckle was warm. She was as happy as Naomi had seen her since she’d come back to the ship. She walked across the deck, mag boots clicking with each contact and release. It made Naomi nervous. If something happened to make the Roci move suddenly, either the boots would hold the deck and break her shinbones or they’d release and leave her bouncing against the walls of the ship. Not that the danger was real. It was only that, like Jim, she was probably freaking out. At least a little bit.

  She watched the Giambattista’s braking pathway. The main engines turned off, the plume cooling and speeding away from the ship. It coasted toward them. Six thousand klicks. Five and three-quarters. Five and a half.

  “All right,” Alex said across the ship’s comm. “Everyone hold on to your feathers. We’re maneuvering to dock.”

  To Naomi’s relief, she heard Bobbie strapping into a couch behind her as Amos and Clarissa announced that they were secure.

  “Can you knock?” Jim asked.

  She opened a tightbeam connection. Waited a long moment, and found herself face-to-face with a man whose white beard and salt-and-pepper hair made him look like something out of a children’s story about wolves in human skin.

  “Que sa, Giambattista,” she said. “Rocinante, wir. Go es gut alles la?”

  The wolf grinned. “Bist bien, sera Nagata suer. Give us your warriors girl, and let us kick these cocks à l’envers a pukis.”

  Naomi laughed, less at the vulgarity of the image than at the glee with which the old man said it. “Bien. Prepare for docking.” She cut the connection and called up to Alex. “We have permission to dock.”

  Behind them, Bobbie was humming a melody Naomi didn’t recognize, but it was syncopated, upbeat, even playful. The Roci lurched, the couches all shifting a few degrees to compensate. They were almost in matching orbit. Only a few meters’ drift, and the thrusters under Alex’s care were drawing that down to nothing.

  “He knew your name,” Jim said.

  “You’re not the only one people recognize,” she said as the docking tube extended from the Roci and fixed itself to an outer airlock on the Giambattista. So close in, the hauler dwarfed the corvette. A horsefly and a horse. The scale of what they were about to try came home to her then and took her breath away. These two ships were the stealthy, small force. Easy to overlook in a system wracked with violence. Tiny to the point, they all hoped, of insignificance. And still huge.

  “Are we going to be knocking around anymore?” Bobbie asked. “Because otherwise, I’m going to go get dressed and head over.”

  “You wearing your power armor just walking across the tube?” Alex asked.

  “You know how it is,” Bobbie said. “Never get a second chance to make a first impression.”

  “Awesome,” Alex said.

  “I’ll meet you in the lock,” Amos said.

  Naomi looked over to Jim. He was frowning. “Say again, Amos?”

  “Yeah,” Amos said. She could hear the smile in his voice. “I thought I’d head over with Bobbie. These OPA fuckers are our best buddies and all, but we’re still us and they’re still them. Someone oughta watch Bobbie’s six while she’s out among them English. Besides which, I’m going to be as good as any of them at breaking heads.”

  “Might need you on the Roci, big guy,” Jim said, his voice light. “With the whole heading-into-battle thing, I’d kind of like to keep my mechanic close to hand.”

  Bobbie retreated down the lift tube, pulling herself hand over hand, her floating feet disappearing last.

  “That’s sweet, but you don’t need me, Cap,” Amos said. “Peaches here knows the ship as well as I do. Anything you need done, she can do it.”

  Jim grunted, and she put her hand out, grabbing the edge of his couch and spinning it until they were facing. Jim saw the message in her expression. “Copy that, Amos,” he said. “Bobbie? Make sure you bring enough of him back we can regrow the missing bits.”

  “Roger. Wilco,” Bobbie said. Her voice sounded close and echoing. She already had her helmet on. Naomi wanted to be reassured by the joy that Bobbie took in the anticipated violence, but
she couldn’t quite manage. All she could do was hunker down and endure and see what happened next. At least she had practice with it.

  Over the next hours, Bobbie and Amos inspected their new allies—the ship’s reports and logs, the ships in their berths, the OPA fighters they’d be leading on the attack—while Naomi, watching through Bobbie’s suit camera, cataloged it all. Racks of guns and boxes of ammunition. The motley assortment of boats and soldiers. Bobbie’s assessments were calm, rational, professional, and fueled the dread growing in Naomi’s gut.

  Her mind wandered a little bit during the slow moments. Human violence as a kind of fractal—self-similar on all scales from bar fight to system-wide war. The buildup of insults and lost face that swelled over the course of an evening or a century. The shoving and shoving back, neither side sure they wanted to escalate and uncertain how to back down. All of that was the history of the inner planets and the Belt since the beginning. Then Marco had thrown his sucker punch and sent the system reeling back. Since then, feints and evaluations, flurries of violence that weren’t meant to end anything so much as find position, test the opponent.

  Everything since the rocks fell on Earth had been preparation for this: a counterattack made in earnest and without reservation. Each side hoping to engineer a punch that the other didn’t see coming. Forgotten arm. Maybe it was in their blood, their bones. A shared human heritage. The pattern they were exporting to the stars now. It left her tired.

  “Well, it’s not what I’d pick, but it’s better than I’d hoped,” Bobbie said from her new, cramped quarters on the Giambattista. In the background, Naomi could make out Amos’ voice, lifted and laughing among others. Fitting in with the new group. Or no, that wasn’t right. Letting the new group think he fit in. She had a terrible sense that he wouldn’t come back on the Rocinante; the empty premonitions of anxiety and impatience.

  “Do you want to check the boats in more depth?” Naomi asked.

  “No,” Bobbie said. “I can do that on the way. Pull the trigger. Let’s get this apocalypse on the road.”