Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  “All right,” Naomi said. “Stay safe.”

  “Good hunting. We say, ‘Good hunting.’”

  “Good hunting, then.”

  The words were powerfully inadequate. She dropped the connection, unstrapped, braced herself against the handholds on the wall, and stretched her arms, her legs, worked the kinks in her spine. When she was done, she realized it was the same routine she did before she worked out. Preparing for great effort.

  She went down to the galley where Alex and Jim and Clarissa were eating together. They all looked over at her as she pulled herself into the room. “Bobbie says we’re good to go.”

  “Well, shit and yahoo,” Alex said.

  Jim pulled his hand terminal out of his pocket, tapped through a set of commands including one with a double password, then pressed a button.

  “Okay,” he said. “Signal’s out. As soon as the attack’s under way, we’ll burn for the ring and hope no one notices us.”

  They were all quiet for a moment. Naomi felt like there should have been some kind of fanfare. Gongs and trumpets to announce the coming death and destruction. Instead, it was just the galley, the four of them, the sound of the air recyclers, and the smell of chicken.

  “Looks like a shit night for sleeping,” Naomi said. “I’m going to be up watching the newsfeeds.” Jim didn’t say anything. His eyes were sunken with exhaustion and something else. Not fear. Worse than fear. Resignation. Naomi pushed off, braced beside him, and put her hand on his. He managed a smile. “I’ll bring drinks and snacks. We can watch the fireworks start.”

  “I don’t know,” Jim said.

  “It ain’t sulking if we all do it together, Hoss,” Alex said. And then, to Naomi, “Count me in.”

  “Me too,” Clarissa said, and then didn’t add if I’m invited. Against the backdrop of the war, it was such a small thing, and Naomi was still glad to see it.

  “Yeah,” Jim said, “okay.”

  It took hours. All across the system, drive plumes flared. Around Ceres and Mars and Tycho, the consolidated fleet leaped away from their defensive positions and into the Belt. The scattering of Michio Pa’s pirate fleet joined in, and the OPA. By the time the last of them reported that they were on the burn, the ships of the Free Navy were starting to react. The Rocinante traced vectors and travel groups, threads of light tangling the emptiness between stations and planets. Battle lines. The newsfeeds lit up—civilian, government, corporate, and union all becoming aware that something was happening and leaping to make sense of what it could be.

  It was just after midnight, ship time, that the Roci raised the alarm.

  “What do we have, Alex?” Jim asked.

  “Bad news. I’m seeing a couple of fast-attack ships headed our way out from Ganymede.”

  “Well, so much for not being noticed. How long before they reach us?” Jim asked, but Naomi had already queried the system.

  “Five days if they’re just buzzing us and looping back,” she said. “Twelve if they try to match orbit while we’re on the burn.”

  “Can we take them?” Clarissa said.

  “If it was just us, might could,” Alex said. “Problem is we’re guarding this cow. But if we burn hard enough, we might make the ring before they get us.”

  “Figure it out on the way,” Jim said. “Right now, we need to get the Giambattista up and burning as hard as it can and still let Bobbie do her inspections.”

  “No plan survives contact with the enemy,” Alex said, unstrapping and pulling himself up toward the cockpit. “I’m warming her up.”

  “I’ll tell our friends across the way to do the same,” Holden said, taking comm control.

  On Naomi’s monitor, the thousands of hair-thin lines marked where the battles were, and where they were expected to be. On impulse, she took down the tactical display, leaving just the wide scatter of drive plumes all around the system, and then added in the star field.

  It was the widest concerted attack ever. Hundreds of ships on at least four sides. Dozens of stations, millions of lives.

  Among the stars, it didn’t stand out.

  Chapter Forty: Prax

  The more time passed, the clearer it became how little Ganymede’s official neutrality meant. The ships in the docks and orbiting the moon were more and more Free Navy ships, fewer and fewer anything else. The soldiers in Free Navy uniform appeared more often at the tube stations, in the markets, in the public halls and corridors, first with the apparent casualness of citizens, then in larger groups with more aggressive demeanors. Then with armored emplacements that would allow them to shoot in safety whoever happened by.

  Djuna had stopped letting him watch the local newsfeeds at breakfast on the weekends. Too many stories about bodies being found in unfortunate conditions. Too many missing people, too many espionage claims, too many reminders from the still-official security apparatus that Pinkwater was an unaffiliated corporate entity with no political litmus tests and only the safety and well-being of the citizens of Ganymede at heart. The sorts of things people said because they weren’t true.

  For Prax, the official news and the gun-wielding soldiers weren’t the most disturbing things. There were smaller things that he noticed. The way that the girls didn’t fight against being home by curfew anymore. The wistful conversations Djuna would start about taking positions somewhere else, emigrating off Ganymede entirely, and then end without ever drawing a conclusion. The small things carried more weight. Yes, a dissident circle was killed. Yes, people disappeared. But—apart from Karvonides—they weren’t people he knew. And the change in the station was also changing his family. It was also changing him.

  Prax went about his work because there was nothing else to do. It wasn’t as if things would be made better by hiding in his bed. And the appearance of normalcy was sometimes almost as good as the real thing. So he went to the meetings in the mornings, worked with his plants in the afternoons. Some of the runs had to be scaled back. Research and development weren’t a priority as much as generating food to resupply the warships. Prax thought that was shortsighted. If anything, disruptions like this were an argument for more research, especially with the radioplast work that Khana and Brice had under proposal. He tried bringing the point up now and again. He’d even gone so far as to ask whether there was a contact with the Free Navy that the labs could talk to about it. No one was enthusiastic about it, though. So that was something else the occupation had taken away.

  Under it all, the fear of what he’d done in sending the data to Earth hung over him. It was almost a relief when the security forces finally came.

  He was in the overflow hydroponics lab at midafternoon. Rows of black-leaved plants rose up from the tanks toward the light banks. The roots that pushed through the underlying aqueous gel were pale as snow. Prax was moving from plant to plant, his hands in light-blue NBR gloves. He checked each leaf gently, looking for sprays of yellow and orange where the radioplasts were dying. Until the man called his name, his afternoon had been going pretty well.

  “Dr. Meng?”

  There were four people, all of them men. Two wore simple uniforms with the Pinkwater logo on the breast and shoulder. The other two were Free Navy. Prax felt his heart thud against his chest as the adrenaline hit, but he tried not to look more than a little uncomfortable. Anyone would be a little anxious when the Free Navy came asking for them. Even the innocent. He thought that was right.

  “Can I help you?”

  “We need you to come with us now,” the taller of the two Free Navy men said.

  “I can’t,” Prax said, gesturing toward the plants he hadn’t checked. As if that were explanation enough.

  They stepped closer, moving around him. They all had sidearms. Handcuffs. Canisters of restraint spray.

  “You have to come with us now,” the tall man said again.

  “Do … do I need my union representative?” he asked, but he wasn’t surprised when the shorter of the Free Navy men pushed him in the small of the bac
k. I could run, he thought. It wouldn’t help, but I could do it.

  They marched him out through the front office. When they passed Brice in the hall, she looked away, pretending not to notice. The front desk was abandoned, everyone suddenly called to the restroom or a coffee break at the same moment. None of the people he worked with would actually see him leave. That’s how quickly the right kinds of power could make someone disappear. Walking out the front door for what he had to assume was the last time, it felt like an epiphany. He’d wondered, watching the newsfeeds, how so many could go missing in a station with people and cameras everywhere. He understood now.

  All they had to do was make it too dangerous for others to watch.

  They loaded him into a cart, drove off down the main corridor, down the southern exchange ramp, and into a well-lit concrete hallway. He had the sudden, visceral memory of waiting here back after the mirrors fell, when the survival of Ganymede Station had been an open question. He’d waited in line right there, trying to find Mei. It would be her turn now to wonder what had happened to him. Symmetry.

  At the Pinkwater office, they took him to a small, cold room. Green walls. Green floor. Everything stank of industrial cleaner. The kind they used to clean up blood and spit. Biohazard stuff. A chair bolted in place in front of a cheap, plastic desk. Black dots along the wall shifted toward him like the eyes of a spider. Not cameras, but the same multifrequency image arrays he used in the labs. They were sensitive enough to pick up his heart rate from changes in his skin and track the heat in every part of his body. He’d used them extensively on last year’s soybean experiments, and seeing them here felt almost like betrayal.

  The taller Free Navy man came in. A dark-skinned woman in a Pinkwater uniform with him. Prax looked up. He’d imagined this moment so many times in the middle of dread-soaked nights that now that it was happening he was almost curious to see how well it met his expectations. Would they beat him? Threaten him with violence? Would they threaten Mei and Djuna and Natalia? He’d heard that sometimes they would addict prisoners to drugs and then threaten to withhold their supply and let withdrawals do the work.

  “Dr. Meng,” the tall man said, sitting across from him. Did they take focus drugs? Prax had heard of focus drugs, but he didn’t know how they worked. “You were supervisor for Quiana Karvonides? You’re on record as identifying her body.”

  “I am,” Prax said. Was there a way to pretend his way out of this? Would they believe him if he denied everything he could deny? Or would he give himself away? All the black, mechanical eyes on him, and the tall man’s pale-brown ones too. Only the Pinkwater woman was looking at her hand terminal. “I did. Karvonides didn’t have family on the station, I think. I’m not sure about that, though. Is something wrong?”

  “She was working on proprietary yeast? Is that right?”

  “That’s one of the projects we do,” Prax said, nodding. He was being too anxious. They’d know.

  “She was working on it particularly?”

  Prax’s mouth was dry, and the cold of the room seemed to creep up his legs and into the base of his spine. What had he done? Why hadn’t he kept his head down? But no, that wasn’t right. He had reasons for taking every action he took. And he’d known there were risks. Being here in this room was one, even if he hadn’t known which room in particular. He wondered whether there were other people watching him, or if the spider eyes fed into some sort of software that analyzed him and fed them the answers.

  “Dr. Meng?”

  “Yes, sorry. Yes, she worked on the harvester yeast. It’s an organism, um, that harvests a very broad range of electromagnetic radiation, the way that a plant uses light. It’s reverse-engineered from the protomolecule data. It lets the yeast generate its own sugars from the radioplasts, and then, um, its native systems can convert that into higher-complexity nutrients.”

  The two shared a look. He couldn’t tell what its significance was. How would Mei do without him? She was older now. Nearly adolescent. She was going to start pulling away from the family unit soon anyway. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad time to lose him. Would they put his body back in the recycler? He couldn’t think like that. Not now.

  “What can you tell us about Hy1810?” the woman asked, and Prax felt like she was looking through him. Seeing his bones and the shape of his blood vessels. He’d never felt more naked. He tried to lean back in his chair, to rock it a little back and forth, but the bolts only grated a little. There were notches and scrapes on the wall he hadn’t noticed until now. Painted over, yes, but there. He didn’t want to think about what had made them.

  “It’s the tenth variation using protocol eighteen,” he said. “It’s proprietary. I’m not supposed to talk about that. I’m sorry.”

  “Why did you move the Hy1810 data out of Karvonides’ partition?”

  And there it was. They knew. He took a breath, and he could hear it shaking in his throat. They wouldn’t need focus drugs or psych computers. He was readable as plain text. It had been a dream that he might avoid the worst. All that was left was watching it play out. He felt a vestigial, unreasoning hope. There had to be a way. He had to get back home, or else who would make pancakes for the girls?

  “I moved it on the request of some of the other project engineers. With Karvonides’ passing, they needed to have access to the run data. Otherwise there was no way to move forward. So, yes, I put it in a partition where they could reach it.”

  “Did you review the permissions on that partition?”

  “The information was proprietary,” Prax said, clinging to the idea like it was the last, water-logged fragment of the ship that had sunk beneath him. It sounded weak, even to him.

  The man leaned forward. “That data was sent to Earth. We’ve isolated the tracking data on it, and it came from the partition you put it in.”

  Lies and denials bubbled in his mind. Anyone could have accessed that data. I was sloppy. Careless with security, maybe. That’s all. I didn’t do anything wrong.

  In his mind’s eye, he saw Karvonides again. The wounds on her neck and head. Yes, he could deny her again, but it wouldn’t make any difference. They already knew, or near enough. They’d push him, torture him, and he would break. It didn’t matter what he said now. He was dead. No more pancakes. No more evenings coaxing the girls into doing their homework or Sunday mornings waking up late with Djuna. Someone else would have to take over his research. Everything he’d loved, everything he’d lived for, was gone.

  To his surprise, it felt less like fear than a sort of terrible freedom. He could say anything he wanted now. Including the truth.

  “The thing you need to understand,” he said, an irrational, intoxicating courage blooming in his heart. “Biological equilibria? They’re not straightforward. Never.”

  “Equilibria,” the man repeated.

  “Yes. Exactly. Everyone thinks that it’s simple. New, invasive species comes in and it has an advantage and it outcompetes, right? That’s the story, but there’s another part to that. Always, always, the local environment resists. Yes, yes, maybe badly. Maybe without a clear idea of coping with novelty. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but I am saying it’s there. Even when an invasive species takes over, even when it wins, there is a counterbalancing process it has to overcome to do that. And—” The tall man was scowling, and his discomfort made Prax want to speak faster. To say everything he had in his heart before the hammer fell. “And that counterprocess is so deep in the fabric of living systems, it can never be absent. However well the new species is designed, however overwhelming its advantages seem to be, the pushback will always be there. If one native impulse is overcome, there will be another. You understand? Conspecifics are outcompeted? Fine, the bacterial and viral microecologies will push back. Adapt to those, and it’ll be micronutrient levels and salinity and light. And the thing is, the thing is, even when the novel species does win? Even when it takes over every niche there is, that struggle alone changes what it is. Even when you wipe out
or co-opt the local environment completely, you’re changed by the pushback. Even when the previous organisms are driven to extinction, they leave markers behind. What they are can never, never be completely erased.”

  Prax sat back in his chair, chin high, breath deep and fast, nostrils flared. You can kill me. You can wipe me from the rolls of history. But you can never change the mark I’ve made. I stood against you, and even when you’ve killed me, it won’t undo the things I’ve done.

  The man’s scowl deepened. “Are we still talking about the yeast?”

  “Yes,” Prax said. “Of course we’re talking about the yeast.”

  “All right,” the man said. “That’s great, but what we need to know is who had access to that partition.”

  “What?”

  “The partition you put the data in,” said the Pinkwater woman. “Who could have linked to it from there?”

  “Anyone with access to the workstations in the research group could have,” Prax said. “What does that have to do with it?”

  The man’s hand terminal chimed, and he pulled it out from his pocket. The red backsplash on an alert made him look almost like he was blushing, but when he put the hand terminal away, his face had gone pale.

  “I have to step back,” the Free Navy man said. “You finish this, yeah?” His voice was tight. Prax thought he was shaking. The woman nodded and checked her own hand terminal. Prax watched him go, confused. Wanting, almost, to call him back and insist that they finish. This was important. This was his martyrdom in the cause of freedom and science. The interrogator couldn’t just walk away in the middle of it. When the door closed, he turned to the woman, but she was still looking at her terminal. A newsfeed with something about the war.

  She whistled softly, her eyes going wide. When she looked up at him, it was like she was surprised to see him.

  “The yeast data,” he said, reminding her.

  “Dr. Meng, you have to be more careful. You can’t do that anymore.”