Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

Footsteps sounded on the terrace behind her. She turned, winced, and then kept turning despite the pain. The burns on her back only itched now if she kept still. She was afraid, despite all the doctors had said, that she’d scar up and lose her ability to move if she didn’t keep stretching the wounds.

  Nadia’s smile was weary, but real. She carried fresh bandages and a white tube of cream in one hand and a hand terminal in the other. Michio grimaced, then laughed ruefully.

  “Is it that time again?” she asked.

  “Such,” Nadia said, “such are the joys. I brought you something to take your mind off it, though.”

  “Something good?”

  “No,” Nadia said, taking a seat behind her. “The Earther woman wants to talk to you again.”

  Michio shrugged off the paper robe from the hospital and leaned forward. Nadia passed the hand terminal to her and began examining the edges of the false skin that covered her wounds. The nerves that let her experience light touch were smothered by living bandage. The ones that reported pain were terribly sensitive. It was like being numb and skinned alive at the same time. Michio gritted her teeth. Waited. When she had made the full circuit—across Michio’s back and down her left side and arm—Nadia sighed.

  “It looks good?” Michio said.

  “It looks terrible, but it’s healing well. Basal growth all the way around.”

  “Well,” Michio said. “Thank God for small favors.”

  Nadia made a small sound in the back of her throat, neither agreement nor dissent. Michio heard the soft crack as Nadia opened the tube of medicated lotion. Michio scooped up the hand terminal, opened her message queue. The new message from Earth was waiting for her, flagged as critical. Chrisjen Avasarala. The leader of Earth, and the greatest enemy Michio Pa had ever had. And yet here they were.

  “We did this wrong,” she said.

  “What?” Nadia asked.

  Michio lifted the hand terminal for Nadia to see. “We’re working with the people we used to be fighting against.”

  “We’ll fight them again later,” Nadia said, like she was promising a sweet to a child, but only after she ate her real food. “Are you ready?”

  Michio nodded, and Nadia smeared on the first finger-load of ointment. The pain was bright, like she was burning again. She started the message, tried to focus on it.

  The old woman appeared, sitting at a desk. It wasn’t the first time Michio had gotten a message directly from her or from the new prime minister of Mars, but more often she’d heard from generals or functionaries. They only seemed to include Michio when they were asking for something big. It very much gave her the sense of being the least important person at their table.

  “Captain Pa,” Avasarala said, and if there was an undertone of contempt in the words, it was only to be expected. Nadia moved lower on her back, new pain blooming just as the first swath began to fade. “The situation on Medina has gone pear-shaped. Holden and the OPA forces have succeeded in taking the station, but saw fit to annihilate the rail gun defenses. Which leaves them undefended. The Free Navy has deployed what appears to be every functioning ship they have left—fifteen in all—burning hard for the gate. The good news is that Inaros has essentially retreated from every other port and base in the system. The bad news, of course, is that he’ll get Medina back, his supply lines to Laconia reestablished, and in a defensible position. Unless, of course, we find a way to stop him.”

  Avasarala took a deep breath, looked down, and when she looked up again, something had changed in her face. She looked wearier? Older? More determined?

  “I am very, very sorry for the loss you suffered. It strikes close to home. I lost a spouse to this war as well. I can’t imagine how devastating it must be to lose two. I would not ask this if it were not critical, but if you have any ships or influence with any factions that can help us to stop or slow Inaros before he reaches the gate, we need your help now.

  “Nothing I can offer you will address the sacrifice you have already made, but I hope you will walk this last kilometer with me. And that we can end this together. Please let me know as soon as you can. The Free Navy is already burning.”

  The message ended, and the terminal dropped back to her queue. Nadia moved on to her side, and Michio flinched.

  “Almost done,” Nadia said.

  “This is the second time one of our enemies has called me to pull them out of a fire.”

  “Can we do it again?”

  “All we did last time was burn ourselves trying.”

  She’d known going in that there might be a price for leaving the Panshin behind. Titan was the largest of Saturn’s moons. The Free Navy had its strongest presence outside the Jovian system there, projecting threat toward Enceladus, Rhea, Iapetus, Tethys. The ice buckers in the rings. Controlling the space without occupying it.

  The Connaught and the Serrio Mal burned in spinward, looping up out of the ecliptic to come down on the Free Navy’s ships from an unexpected angle. The burn hadn’t been as hard as Michio had hoped. There hadn’t been a chance to add reaction mass, and she’d had the sick fear that they’d end up losing the fight at Titan and not be able to retreat. Fifteen Free Navy ships had been stationed there. For most of her life, that wouldn’t have been a very large number, but after so much war and so many people taking their ships out through the rings to new systems, it was respectable. It was more than the nine that the consolidated fleet threw at it. But then the point of all the attacks wasn’t to win. It was to keep Marco’s eye off the two ships skinning off toward Medina.

  The Martian Congressional Republic Navy had taken point in the battle, engaging early and trying to pull the Free Navy’s ships out of position in hopes that her own attack from the side would come unexpectedly. She remembered Oksana getting the tactical display. Fifteen of the enemy, nine friendlies. Oksana made a joke about how every ship in the battle had probably been built in the same shipyard. Evans had laughed, then sobered and said they were getting painted.

  After that, Michio’s memory became less reliable. She’d gone over the logs. Things hadn’t turned on her that early, but the strike, when it came, was like a shotgun blast in her life. It took out a massive hole, but stray pellets had traveled forward and back in time, made smaller holes in her experience. She remembered giving the order to retreat, and Josep saying they’d lost core, but she didn’t remember the hit that had made her decide to run. She remembered the smell of her clothing and hair burning. But the long, terrible moments between identifying the torpedo that cracked the Connaught’s back and the actual impact were gone.

  What she knew from the logs was that the Serrio Mal and the Connaught had fired down into the heart of the Free Navy formation, drawing the enemy fire and scattering their position to open up corridors and blinds where the enemy PDCs weren’t reinforcing each other. The Martian ships, being closer, had fired a massive barrage of torpedoes that managed to disable two Free Navy ships. She didn’t know if the round that took out her drive was from the Free Navy or from a stray from the MCRN, but an enemy torpedo had managed to thread its way through their defenses and blow hours out of Michio’s consciousness.

  She had the strong impression of a broad-shouldered man with a shaved head and dark skin telling her he was going to make the pain stop but she had to put down the knife. She couldn’t place when that had happened. She vividly recalled waking in a hospital room, and then waking there again without any sense of having fallen asleep in between the two.

  The beginning of what she thought of as “after” was when she came to and found Bertold sitting at the edge of her bed, massaging her feet and singing a low dirge under his breath. She’d asked about Laura first, which in retrospect made her think she’d known something was wrong with her.

  Bertold said Laura had been hurt. Was in a medical coma. They’d need to regrow part of her liver and one of her kidneys, but Laura was the wife of the pirate queen, and the doctors promised she’d be fine, given time.

  Then he’
d told her about Evans and Oksana, and they’d cried together until she slept.

  The quarters they’d assigned this new, smaller version of her family were beautiful. Three bedrooms with wide, soft beds enough like crash couches that they were comfortable and different enough to seem like luxury. A food station with a narrower range of options than they’d had on the Connaught and brighter chrome. What the resort called a “conversation pit” that looked like a long, curved couch that had burrowed into the floor. Skylights opened to the dome, boasting natural light. A soaking bath big enough for two. Bertold, Nadia, and Josep the only ones to share it with her. Everything about it seemed too large and too small at the same time.

  She waited until the ointment had soaked deep into her new, artificial skin, then put on what she called her “captain’s uniform.” Nothing really more than a formal shirt and a jacket with a vaguely military cut. She pulled on pants and boots, even though they wouldn’t show in the message she sent back. Her mind was still fuzzy from the pain medications, and she didn’t understand quite why being formal about the message felt so important to her until she sat down, framed herself, and began her recording.

  It felt important because it was a surrender.

  “Madam Secretary-General, I am very sorry to say that I don’t have any aid to give. The ships I had to command are either dead or broken or scattered so far from the ring gate that they couldn’t catch up to the Pella without killing everyone on board before they got to it.”

  The version of her on the screen looked tired. Bertold had cut her hair short so that the places where it had burned didn’t stand out. She didn’t like how it looked. A wave of grief washed over her, the way they often did now. The way they would on and off for the rest of her life.

  “Thank you for your kind words about our casualties. They knew the risks when we took up this work. They were willing to die for the Belt. I wish they hadn’t. I would like them here with me.

  “I wish I could have done more.”

  There was nothing else to say, so she sent the message. Then, like prodding at an infected wound, she pulled up a tactical report. The whole system lay before her. The Panshin still lived and a handful of others. The nakliye at Eugenia. And there, vector-mapped from the Jovian system out toward the ring, the Pella. The remnants of the Free Navy. Two other smaller dots were on intersecting paths, but when she checked their estimated course, it was clear they were all on the same mission. Marco and his loyalists would pour through the gate together. An unstoppable force. If the rail gun defenses had still been in place, it still would have been a hell of a fight. Without them, it would be a slaughter.

  Then, station by station, ship by ship, she scrolled through the system. It was the equivalent of the grease-pencil grid she’d drawn in some other lifetime, on a ship that was scrap and bad memories now. All of the things that people needed. Filters. Hydroponic supplies. Recycler teeth. Centrifuges for refining ore. Centrifuges for testing water. For working with blood.

  She wondered if there were any colony ships still hiding out there in the emptiness, dark and watching in horror as humanity tore itself apart. She remembered the Doctrine of the One Ship. Remembered thinking of all the vessels in the Belt as being cells of a single being. She couldn’t see it that way now. At best, they were all their own desperate bacteria floating on a vacuum sea that didn’t care if they lived and didn’t notice when they died.

  And if Sanjrani was right, a worse collapse was only clearing its throat.

  The door to the common corridor opened, and Josep slouched in. Nadia kissed him on her way to bed. Those were the shifts now. One to sit with Laura, one to sit with her, and one to sleep. A cycle of shared grief. Josep went to the food station, slid open a panel she hadn’t noticed, and poured himself a glass of whiskey before he came to sit in the pit across from her.

  “Skol,” he said, raising his glass. The rim clinked against his teeth as he drank. For a moment, they sat there together in silence.

  “Oops,” she said.

  Josep raised his eyebrows. “La magic word la.”

  “It was me,” she said, wiping at her eyes with the cuff of her shirt. “I did what I always do, and I drove us straight to hell with it.”

  Josep’s eyes were sunk back into his head. Exhaustion showed in his skin and the angle of his shoulders. “Don’t follow your mind, me.”

  “I find someone, and I put my faith in them, and I go where they lead. And then all the gold turns to shit. Johnson and Ashford and Inaros. And now Holden. I don’t know how I didn’t see it coming, but I fell into it again with him. And now …”

  “Now,” Josep agreed.

  “And the stupid thing,” she said, her voice rising a little, growing thin and sharp as the drone of a violin, “is that I look at all this? I look at everything I was trying to do, and none of it happened. Wanted to make the Belt for Belters, and it won’t be. I wanted to build a place where we could live and call our own, and there isn’t one. Isn’t a way to build one even. I don’t even remember now why I thought I should be on Holden’s side. To open the gates again? Get the flow of colony ships freed up? Make sure that none of the people I cared about would live?”

  Josep nodded, his expression thoughtful and distant. “What would it mean if you’d dreamed it?” Josep asked.

  “Dreamed what?” Michio said, shifting until her back hurt, and then shifting some more.

  “This,” he said. “That you’d fought for Inaros and then for Holden. That you’d lost people precious to you and ended in a place of luxury and healing?”

  “It wouldn’t mean shit.”

  Josep grunted. “Could be prophecy.”

  “Could be that the universe doesn’t give a shit about us or anything we do and your mystic bullshit’s just a way we try to pretend otherwise.”

  “Could be that too,” he agreed with an equanimity that made her ashamed she’d said it. He took another drink of his whiskey, then put the glass on the floor and lay out full on the curving couch, his head coming to rest in her lap. His smile was warm and beautiful and filled with a humor and gentleness that made her heart ache.

  “Didn’t follow Holden, us. Standing against Marco put Holden beside you, yeah. But you were never his. We didn’t fight Marco because of Holden. We fought because Marco said he was the champion the Belt needed, only turned out he wasn’t.”

  “Yeah,” she said, stroking his hair.

  He closed his eyes in exhaustion. “Aber, God damn but we’re still gonna need a champion.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine: Naomi

  Medina’s system logs were huge, larger than anything Naomi had expected. And, what was worse, not very well organized. It was an artifact of history in a way. The physical design had been intended for a generation ship cruising through the still-unknown ocean of interstellar space, but the logic systems came from Fred Johnson’s military refit, which had then been repurposed when the ship went from battleship to permanent city in space. The old security systems hadn’t all been cracked when the Free Navy took over, so there were partial records here and there, scattered by a variety of engineers trying to force their will on an already complex system.

  Like cities back on Earth where era had built on era had built on the era before, the systems of Medina were shaped by long-forgotten forces. The thinking behind each decision was lost now in a tangle of database hierarchies and complex reference structures. Finding something interesting was easy. It was all interesting on some level. Finding some particular piece of information—and knowing whether it was the most recent or complete version of the data—was very, very difficult.

  She used her office in the security station like it was a medieval monk’s cell, only leaving it to go back to the Rocinante to sleep, then coming back to it when she woke. Instead of copying ancient texts with pen and ink, she spelunked the datasets, poked through file systems, asked Medina to find things, and then watched to see where it didn’t search. Anything that seemed like it might be useful
she copied or stripped out and then sent back. Work report logs from the days under the Free Navy’s control, sent back to Earth and Mars. Landing papers outlining the supply flow in from and back out to Laconia. Accident reports from the medical systems. Traffic control comm logs from the ships that had come and gone. Anything might be useful, so she took everything and sent it back at the speed of light to Earth and Luna and Mars and Ceres.

  It kept the fear at bay. Not perfectly, but nothing short of death was going to end fear perfectly. No matter how she distracted herself, there was a timer ticking down in the back of her mind. The days and hours until Marco and his ships arrived. There were other problems, other risks—the Free Navy loyalists still on the station, the strobing do-not-approach signal that was the only thing coming out of the Laconia gate—but none of them would matter once Marco arrived. All of it pushed her to get her work done quickly, efficiently. When the next thing came—and she didn’t look what that would be straight in its eyes—she wanted to know that she’d gotten her work done.

  And still, sometimes she paused. She found a personal journal tucked among the environmental reports like printed pornography tucked under a mattress. Entry after entry of a young man’s private struggles with his longings and ambitions and feelings of betrayal. Another time, she was trying to recover what she could from a half-erased partition and came up with a short video of a girl—four years old at most—leaping off a bed somewhere on the station, landing on a pile of pillows, and dissolving into laughter. Reviewing the traffic-control logs, she listened to the voices of desperate men and women from the systems on the far sides of the ring gates demand and beg and plead for the supplies they felt they deserved, wanted, and sometimes needed to survive.

  It was the first time she’d really understood the scale of the destruction Marco had brought. All the lives he’d traumatized and ended, all the plans he’d shattered. Most of the time, it was too big to wrap her mind around, but little glimpses like this made it all comprehensible. Terrible and sad and enraging, but comprehensible.