Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  And it informed some of her decisions.

  “Um,” Jim said, sloping in through the door of his office. “So, sweetie? Did you mean to have the data feeds go out through all the rings? Because I’m noticing that you’ve started sending everything to everyone.”

  “I meant to,” Naomi said, brushing the hair back from her eyes. It was almost the end of her second shift. Her back ached a little from sitting too long in the same position, and her eyes were dry and scratchy. “I don’t know what’s going to be useful, or who it’s going to be useful to. And since it doesn’t look like we’ll be on Medina long enough to go through everything, I thought I’d send copies out everywhere. Give other people a chance to find whatever I’m missing.”

  “That’s … ah.”

  “I know,” she said. “I may have been spending too much time with you. I’m starting to think like you. Only, well. The way you used to, anyhow.”

  “I still think like that,” Jim said, pulling a chair over behind hers and sitting. He rested his head on her shoulder. When he spoke, she could feel the vibration in his throat against her skin. “I worry more that it’s going to do something unexpected and terrible and huge that I’ll be responsible for, but I still think that way.”

  “An unshakable faith in humanity.”

  “It’s true,” he said, shaking his head. Or maybe nuzzling a little. “Against all evidence, I keep thinking the assholes are outliers.”

  She leaned her head against him, taking a little pleasure in his simple presence. He had a peculiar scent, low and complex and pleasant as potting soil. She didn’t think she’d ever get tired of it. And he hadn’t shaved recently. The stubble of ragged whiskers tickled her ear like a cat’s tongue. On the monitor, the data broadcasts ticked over another tenth of a percent. Somewhere in the office, Bobbie was talking, her voice familiar and strong. The air recyclers clicked and hummed to themselves, the soft breeze smelling like plastic and dust.

  She didn’t want to ask the question, but she couldn’t hold it in either.

  “Any news from home?”

  She felt him tighten. He sat back, and the part of her skin he’d been against felt cooler without him. She turned her chair so she could look at him. His face had the artificial mildness that meant he was trying to downplay something, as if by treating it casually he could diminish it. She’d seen all his expressions so many times, she knew what he meant, whatever he said.

  “They’re coming. Free Navy. There’s still no sign of activity from Laconia at all, but Avasarala’s tracking fifteen ships converging on the gate. Mostly from the Jovian moons.”

  “Any chance they’ll come through one at a time so Alex and Bobbie can shoot them?” she asked with a feigned innocence. It worked the way she hoped. Jim laughed.

  “I’m pretty sure they’re all going to come through like a rugby team. If we could get a couple of the rail guns from the station working again, I think we’d have a chance. And some more rounds for them. Turns out shooting down a couple thousand targets can kind of burn through your supplies.”

  “Do we have a plan?”

  “A couple,” Jim said.

  “Either of them good?”

  “Oh, no. Not at all. Just different flavors of terrible.”

  The data feed chimed. The batch sent off, and waiting for Naomi to pick something else. More messages, more bottles. “All right. What are they?”

  “The classics. Fight or flight. We’ve got the Roci and the boats that still work as boarding craft. One option is that we fill up the boats with troops, place them around the edge of the ring, and try to get people onto the Free Navy ships. It won’t matter that they have ten times as many torpedoes as us if all the fighting’s corridor to corridor. The Roci and Medina’s defenses go after the ships we can’t take control of. Massive slugfest, and hopefully we come out on top.”

  “And the chances that’ll work?”

  “Terrible, terrible chances. Very low. Dumb plan on every level. Much more likely that the boats will all get turned into metal shavings by Marco’s PDCs before they even get close to boarding. And even if they do, those ships are going to have full crews to fight our people back.”

  “And flight?”

  “Stock up the Roci, pick a gate, and get the hell out of Dodge before the bad guys show up in the first place.”

  “And leave Medina?”

  “Medina. The Giambattista. Everything. Just turn tail and run like hell. Let the Free Navy hole back up in the slow zone and hope that the next wave the consolidated fleet sends can take it all back again and hold it next time.”

  “Where’s the Pella?”

  Jim sighed. “Oh, leading the howling pack.”

  Naomi turned back to her screen. “Then we’re staying here.”

  “I haven’t decided,” Holden said.

  “No, you haven’t talked yourself into it yet,” she said. “You know if we go, Marco’s going to follow us. Maybe if we were a different ship or Marco was a different man, things wouldn’t play out this way. We’ve got the choice of fighting here, with a few allies and insufficient supplies, or fighting on the far side of a ring gate with even less. That’s the only distinction.”

  “I … well …” Jim took a deep breath, blew out. “Shit.”

  “How much of the debris from the wave of decoys can we police up?”

  “Anything that hasn’t drifted out past the rings,” Holden said. “You’re thinking put it all just inside the Sol ring and hope the Free Navy runs into it?”

  “The gate’s not that big,” Naomi said.

  “Three-quarters of a million square klicks,” Holden said. “And fifteen ships coming through it. Even if we turned all our scrap metal into sand, the Free Navy’s more likely to miss them and not even know they were there.”

  “I know,” Naomi said. “But maybe one will get a lucky hit. And then there’ll be one less. If we aren’t playing the long shots, we’re giving up. Long shots are all we’ve got left. And even if we lose—”

  “I’m not looking at—”

  “Even if we lose,” Naomi said, “how we lose matters. You didn’t set yourself to be a symbol of anything. I know that. It’s just something that happened. But after it happened, you used it. All those video essays you put out, trying to show everyone that the people on Ceres were just people?”

  “Those weren’t about me,” Jim said, but the guilt in his voice said he didn’t believe it.

  “They were you using the famous Captain James Holden to make people look at what you needed them to see. Don’t be ashamed of that. It was the right thing to do. But everyone out there who saw them? Who made their own versions of them and added to the project of trying to remind each other that war isn’t all ships and torpedoes and battle lines? If we’re going to …” Her throat was tight now. The words stuck there. “If we’re going to die, we should make it mean at least as much as your video pieces did.”

  “I don’t know that those mattered,” Jim said. “Did they do anything?”

  “You don’t get to know that,” Naomi said. “They did or they didn’t. You didn’t put them out so that someone would send you a message about how important and influential you are. You tried to change some minds. Inspire some actions. Even if it didn’t work, it was a good thing to try. And maybe it did. Maybe those saved someone, and if they did, that’s more important than making sure you get to know about it.”

  Jim sank down into himself. The mask of himself that he’d worn since Tycho slipped a little. She saw the despair under it.

  “I shouldn’t have come here,” he said.

  “You took this on because it was the risky job,” she said. “You did it because it needed doing, and you don’t ask people to take things on you wouldn’t do yourself. Just like when you ran onto the Agatha King. You don’t change, Jim. And I knew that coming in. We all did. We thought we’d make it, but we knew we might be wrong. We were wrong. Now we have to do this next part well too.”

  “Ge
tting killed. This next part is getting killed.”

  “I know,” she said.

  They were silent, the two of them. Bobbie’s voice, as far away as the stars, turned briefly to laughter.

  “The videos were just stupid little art projects,” Jim said. “Dying’s not an art project.”

  “Maybe it should be.”

  He hung his head. She put her hand on it, feeling the individual strands of hair against her fingertips. The tears in her eyes didn’t sting. They flowed gently, like a brook. There was no way to tell him all of it. The guilt she felt for bringing them all into Marco’s orbit. The certainty in her heart that if she’d just seen what Marco Inaros was in time, none of them would have been in this position. If she said it, Jim would feel like he had to comfort her, to be strong for her. He’d close back up into himself. Or no. Not himself. Into James Holden. She liked Jim better. One long breath. Another. Another. The quiet intimacy of a perfect moment.

  “Hey,” Bobbie said, stepping into the room. “Do either of you—um. Sorry.”

  “No,” Jim said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “What’s up?”

  Bobbie lifted her hand terminal. “Do either of you know if we sent the incident reports on the missing ships to Luna? Avasarala said her science monkeys are really champing at the bit for those.”

  Naomi took a long, shuddering breath and then smiled. Perfect moment over. Back to work. “I’ll get right on it.”

  “Okay,” Bobbie said, stepping backward out of the room. “Sorry if I … you know.”

  “Have you eaten yet?” Jim said, standing up. “I don’t think I’ve had anything since breakfast.”

  “I was going to after I was done here.”

  “Could you two bring me a bowl of something?” Naomi said, turning to her monitor again.

  The BATCH COMPLETE message had given up on her and dropped back to her file-system prompt. She spooled through the traffic logs as Jim and Bobbie called back to the Roci. Their voices—Jim, Amos, Alex, Bobbie—mixed together. A little conversation about food and beer, who wanted to be together and who wanted to be apart. She had to force herself to concentrate. The log structure was a mess, one manager doing things one way, the next picking another.

  It took the better part of an hour to be sure she’d gotten the data from all the times ships had gone missing. Some of them, she’d already seen back on Luna, but there were more that she hadn’t. Almost two dozen ships had vanished, including, it seemed, one of the stolen Martian ships heading for Laconia. Ships from the colonies. One of the transport ships delivering for the Free Navy too. All sides had lost something.

  Which was interesting.

  She prepped the data package for Luna. This one, she encrypted. But as it sent, she reviewed her own copy again. The missing ships tended to be larger, but weren’t always. They seemed to vanish most in high-traffic times …

  Alex brought her a bowl of noodles and mushrooms and a bottle of Medina-brewed beer. She was pretty sure eating it that she’d remembered to thank him. Not positive, though. There was a correlation if she plotted the high-traffic times to the incidents … No. This was wrong. She was looking at it the wrong way. They didn’t just need to look at when things had happened. They needed to look at all the times Medina had seen similar conditions—high traffic, large-mass ships, mistuned reactors—and nothing had gone wrong. She scooped up the full flight data partition and started streaming it down toward Luna too, but she couldn’t let it go.

  Her back ached. Her eyes hurt. She didn’t really notice. Here was a dataset built of high-traffic periods with and without mysterious disappearances. Here was one mapping the energy output and mass of the missing ships and trying to fit that curve against ships that had sailed through safely. The full encrypted dataset sent to Luna announced it was complete, which seemed awfully fast until she checked how long she’d been sitting there.

  Five variables—preceding mass, preceding energy, mass of the ship, energy of the ship, and time. No single-point solution, but a range. A moving system of curves, rising with preceding mass and energy, falling with time, and, where the mass and energy curve of the other ships intersected it, disappearances. It was as if traffic passing through the gates created a wake, and when something large enough and energetic enough struck that wake, it vanished.

  Her hands were trembling as she pulled her terminal out of her pocket. She didn’t know if it was emotion or exhaustion or if the noodles and mushrooms had been so long ago she just needed to eat. Jim picked up the connection almost as soon as she requested it.

  “Hey,” he said. “Are you all right? You didn’t come back to the ship last night.”

  “No,” she said, meaning no she hadn’t gone back to the ship, not no she wasn’t all right. She waved the imprecision of the word away. “I think I have something interesting here. I need someone to look at it for me in case I’m just hallucinating from exhaustion.”

  “I’ll be right there. Should I grab anyone else? What sort of ‘interesting’ are you looking at?”

  “It’s about the missing ships.”

  On the little screen, Jim’s eyebrows rose. His eyes went a degree wider. “Do you know what’s eating them?”

  She blinked. On her monitor, two equations, five variables. Years of traffic logs to draw from. It was a perfect fit. Surely Luna would be able to confirm it.

  But Do you know what’s eating them?

  “I don’t,” she said. “I know something better.”

  Chapter Fifty: Holden

  It’s not a huge dataset,” Naomi said, turning as she reached the edge of the room and pacing back toward him. “I mean, it’s the largest there is. There’s not more out there we could get.”

  “Is that a problem?” Holden asked.

  She stopped, stared at him, her hands wide and hard in a universal gesture of Of course it’s a problem. “It may not scale. There may be other variables at work that just haven’t come into play in these instances. If you wanted me to build an engine based around data like this, I wouldn’t do it. Shit, an engine. I wouldn’t trust a ladder based on this. Except that …”

  She started pacing again and chewing at the nail of one thumb. Whatever her exception was, she’d already moved on in her mind. Holden folded his arms, waited. He knew her well enough to recognize when she needed a little mental space. He looked down at the graphs on her screen. They reminded him of a heart monitor, but the shapes of the curves were very different. He was pretty sure that with an EKG, the initial spike went back down under the baseline. With this, there was a rapid rise, then a slow, sloping falling away.

  No one else had come to the security station yet. Probably, they were all still on the Rocinante, eating breakfast in the galley. Or maybe stopping at one of the little kiosks in the docks where the locals still took their scrip.

  Naomi stopped beside him, her gaze on the screen with his. Her lips twitched like she was talking to herself, having a heated conversation no one else was welcome to. Not even him. She shook her head, disagreeing with herself. She’d seemed calmer when she’d first called, but the more they talked about it, the more agitated she became. The more frightened, even.

  It looked like she was starting to hope.

  “So this thing. Is it a thing we can use?”

  “I don’t know what it is. The mechanism? I’ve got no idea. All we have is this pattern, but it looks so consistent.”

  He tried again. “Is this a consistent pattern we can use? And specifically, is there something here that maybe gives us a third alternative in that ‘stay here and be slaughtered versus run away through one of the gates and be slaughtered’ conversation?”

  She took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly between her teeth. He’d kind of hoped she’d laugh, but she didn’t. She sat at her workstation again, pulled up a complex equation that Holden couldn’t follow.

  “I think,” she said, “we can simulate a high-traffic interval. Load the Giambattista with as much junk
as we can weld on it. Overload the reactor a little so it’s generating more energy. Then, when we run it through a gate”—she tapped the spike-and-decay curve—“we should get one of these. Not a big one, though. Even a massive ship is only one ship …”

  “And one of these is what?”

  “It’s an obstacle. It’s something that the Free Navy ships may run into. If their ships have enough mass and enough energy that this line crosses the curve before it dies away … I think they just stop.”

  “Meaning they go where all the other eaten ships go?”

  Naomi nodded. “We could put extra mass in the Giambattista. We’ve still got those attack boats. Some of them have fuel left in their drives. If we put them through at the same time, we could increase the curve a little. And Marco will almost certainly bring all his ships through at once, so that might help us. But I don’t know the mechanism—”

  “Hey,” Holden said. “Do you know what Planck’s constant is?”

  “Six point six two six plus change times ten to the negative thirty-fourth meters squared kilos per second?”

  “Sure, why not,” Holden said, raising one finger. “But do you know why it’s that and not six point seven whatever the rest of it was?”

  Naomi shook her head.

  “Neither does anyone else. They still call it science. Most of what we know isn’t why things are what they are. We just figure out enough about how they work that we can predict the next thing that’s going to happen. That’s what you’ve got. Enough to predict. And if you think you’re right, then I do too. So let’s do this.”

  She shook her head, but not at him. “A massive n equals one study where our null hypothesis is that we all get killed.”

  “Not necessarily,” Holden said. “They only have fifteen to our one. We might still take them. We have Bobbie and Amos.”

  This time she did laugh. He put his arm under hers, and she leaned against him. “If it doesn’t work, we won’t be any more fucked than we are now,” she said.