Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  “Probably not,” Holden said. “I mean, weird, dead alien technology with effects we don’t understand sweeping whole ships away without leaving a trace or explanation. That’s probably safe to play with, right?”

  The Pella and her fourteen warships—all that was left of the Free Navy—came closer to the ring, already past their halfway point and on their braking burn. Avasarala had sent a list of the tactics she was using to try to slow or stop the attack days before, and with a heaviness that said she knew it was all bullshit even before she got around to making it explicit. She’d ended with I’ll do whatever I can, but you might have to make do with being avenged. Sorry about that. He wondered what she’d have thought about Naomi’s discovery and their plan.

  Holden felt every hour that passed, knowing Inaros and his soldiers were a little nearer. It was like someone pushing at his back, making him hurry. It would almost have been easier if it had been hours and days. At least it would have been over.

  The captain of the Giambattista misunderstood at first, thinking that his ship would be lost to the whatever-it-was that the gates did. Naomi had to explain to him four different times that if it went well, the Giambattista would just sail into some other system, loaf around there for a few days, and then come back, unharmed. Once she convinced him that, even if it failed, it meant he and his crew would miss the battle, his objections evaporated.

  Naomi coordinated it all—loading the boats back into their positions in the hold, retuning the reactor so that both the bottle and the reaction were working almost at the edge of their capacity. She took Amos and Clarissa with her to backload the Giambattista’s internal power grid so that everything was on the verge of overload without ever quite tripping. It reminded Holden of Father Tom telling him about bears when he was young. If a black bear wandered onto the ranch, the thing to do was to open your coat and raise your arms over your head, shout and make noise. If it was a grizzly, the only thing to do was very quietly to get as far away as you could. Only this felt like they were making noise at a grizzly in hopes that it would eat the other guy.

  While Naomi made her preparations, he tried to make himself useful.

  There were backlogs of communications from the colony worlds. Status reports and threats and begging. It was sobering to remember how many planets humanity had already spread to. How many seeds they’d planted in strange soils. With Naomi’s flood of information just gone out, a lot of the colonies were only now beginning to understand why they’d been cut off. Only now hearing about what had happened to Earth and its solar system. The messages coming back flooded the comm buffers with rage and sorrow, threats of vengeance and offers of aid.

  Those last were the hardest. New colonies still trying to force their way into local ecosystems so exotic that their bodies could hardly recognize them as life at all, isolated, exhausted, sometimes at the edge of their resources. And what they wanted was to send back help. He listened to their voices, saw the distress in their eyes. He couldn’t help but love them a little bit.

  Under the best conditions, disasters and plagues did that. It wasn’t universally true. There would always be hoarders and price gouging, people who closed their doors to refugees and left them freezing and starving. But the impulse to help was there too. To carry a burden together, even if it meant having less for yourself. Humanity had come as far as it had in a haze of war, sickness, violence, and genocide. History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage. The one didn’t come without the other, and Holden had to take comfort in that. The sense that however terrible humanity’s failings were, there was still a little more in them worth admiring.

  He did what he could to answer the most pressing messages, offer what hope he could. The voice, however briefly, of Medina Station. Coordinating supplies for all the colonies was more than he could manage. It would be full-time work for a staff of dozens at least, and he was only one man with a radio. Still, just seeing the need, dipping his toes into the oceanic task of being the physical hub of a thousand different solar systems, gave him a covert sense of hope for the future.

  He’d been right. There was a niche here.

  Providing the plan worked. Providing they didn’t all die. Providing that any of a million things he hadn’t even thought of yet didn’t swing through and destroy everything he was still looking for and planning. There was always the forgotten arm. The thing you didn’t see coming. Hopefully, the thing Marco Inaros wouldn’t see coming either.

  “So how long is this window or wake or whatever it is that we’re shooting for?” Amos asked.

  Time was almost out. The question now was just how fast Inaros wanted to be going when they came through the gate. If he cut the braking thrust and came through fast, it would throw off the timing. If the Giambattista went through the Arcadia gate too late, it would be the one to quickly, quietly vanish away. If it went through too early, Naomi’s curve would already have decayed down to nothing and the Free Navy would pass into the slow zone in safety.

  They’d gone back to the Rocinante. Alex and Bobbie in the cockpit, ready for battle if battle came. Holden and Naomi were strapped into the couches in the command deck. Amos, on float, had come up for the company as much as anything else. They weren’t at battle stations yet. If it came to that, this was probably the last time he’d see Amos in the flesh. Holden tried not to think about it.

  “It’ll be maybe five minutes,” Naomi said. “Part of that’s going to depend on the mass and energy of the ships they bring through. If we’re lucky, maybe as much as … ten?”

  “That ain’t much,” Amos said with an amiable smile. He put a hand on the ladder up to the cockpit to keep himself from drifting. “You good up there?”

  “Good as gold,” Alex said.

  “If this trick of Naomi’s doesn’t go, you think we can take ’em?” Amos said.

  “All of them, probably not,” Bobbie called down. “Some of them, for sure.”

  Clarissa rose up from the lift, a pale smile on her lips. She’d spent enough time on the float now to be natural with it. She moved from grip to grip along the wall like she’d been born a Belter. When she got to Holden, she held out a bulb from the galley.

  “You said you hadn’t been able to sleep,” she said. “I thought you’d want some coffee.”

  Holden took it; her smile widened a degree. The bulb was warm against his palm. Probably it wasn’t poisoned. She wasn’t really likely to do that anymore. He steeled himself a little before he took a sip.

  Medina Station was in the hands of the OPA fighters from the Giambattista, not that it would do much good. Its PDCs and torpedoes had, for the most part, been spent defending against Holden. What was left was a rounding error on what they’d have needed to hold back Inaros. The Roci was waiting almost behind the blue station at the center of the slow zone. If he’d trained the ship’s cameras on it, he could have seen the ruins of the rail guns as clearly as if he’d been standing over them.

  “Anything coming out of Laconia?” he asked.

  “We don’t have a repeater on the far side of that gate, but just peeping through the keyhole? Nothing,” Naomi said. “No signal. No sign of approaching drives.”

  The Roci chirped out an alert. Holden pulled it up.

  “Got something, Cap?” Amos asked.

  “Incoming ships have changed their burn a little. They’ll be coming in fast.”

  “And early,” Naomi said. Her voice was like someone talking through pain. The Roci’s countdown timer adjusted itself, estimating that the enemy would come through the ring gate in twenty minutes. Holden washed the lump in his throat with Clarissa’s coffee.

  Clarissa pushed over to Naomi’s couch, her sharp face bent by a frown. Naomi looked up at her and wiped her eyes. A droplet of a tear floated in the air, drifted toward the recycler intake.

  “I’ll be all right,” Naomi said. “It’s just that my son’s on one of those ships.”

  Clarissa’s
eyes sheened over too and she put a hand on Naomi’s arm. “I know,” Clarissa said. “If you need me, you can find me.”

  “It’s okay, Peaches,” Amos said. “Me and the captain had a talk about it. We’re good.” He gave Holden a cheerful thumbs-up.

  The timer ticked down. Holden took a long, slow breath and opened his channel to the Giambattista.

  “Okay,” he said. “This is Captain Holden of the Rocinante. Please begin your passage burn now. I need you to go through the gate in”—he checked the timer—“eighteen minutes.”

  “Tchuss, røvul!” the Giambattista’s captain said. “It has been, sí no?”

  The connection dropped. On the screen, the Giambattista reported a hard burn starting. Holden shifted the display to show it. A single bright star in the blackness. A drive plume wider than the ice hauler that it was driving. He wanted to believe there was something off about the color of the light, as if the high-energy tuning Naomi had done with it was visible to him, but that was just his mind playing tricks. A new counter appeared on the display. The Giambattista’s expected passage through the Arcadia ring went from seventeen minutes to sixteen. The Free Navy’s arrival—unless they altered course—through the Sol gate in nineteen. Eighteen.

  Holden’s gut was tight. His breath shuddered, and he drank another sip of coffee. He opened a second window, sensors trained at the Sol gate. From where they were, the Free Navy wouldn’t be visible. Not yet. The angle was off just enough to hide them.

  “Do we have the rail gun ready in case they get through?”

  “Yes, sir,” Bobbie answered smartly.

  “Well,” Amos said. “Me and Peaches better go strap in. You know. In case.”

  Clarissa touched Naomi’s shoulder one last time, then turned and launched herself, following Amos down the lift toward engineering. Holden took a long, last drink and stowed the coffee bulb. He wanted it over. He wanted this moment to last forever in case it was the last one he had with Naomi. And Alex and Amos. Bobbie. Hell, even Clarissa. With the Rocinante. You couldn’t be in a place like the Roci for as long as he had been and not be changed by it. Not have it be home.

  When Naomi cleared her throat, he thought she was going to talk to him.

  “Giambattista,” she said. “This is the Rocinante. I’m not showing your internal power grid above normal.”

  “Perdona,” a woman’s voice came back. “Fixing that now.”

  “Thank you, Giambattista,” Naomi said and dropped the connection. She smiled over at Holden. The horror of the situation was only a line at the corner of her mouth, but his heart ached to see it all the same. “Amateurs. You’d think they’d never done this before.”

  He laughed, and then she laughed with him. The timers ticked down. The Giambattista’s reached zero. The brightness of the drive plume blinked out, hidden by the curve of the Arcadia ring and the profound weirdness that was distance and space here. Where that timer had been, Naomi put up a display of a mathematical model she’d built. The spike of the Giambattista’s passage already starting to decay.

  The line sloped down as, beside it, the timer for Marco’s arrival turned to seconds. In the cockpit, Bobbie said something and Alex answered. He couldn’t make out the words. Naomi’s breath sounded fast and shallow. He wanted to reach over to her. To take her hand. It would have meant taking his eyes off the monitor, and so he couldn’t.

  The Sol gate flickered. Holden increased the magnification until the ring filled his screen. The weird, almost biological structures of the ring itself seemed to shift and writhe. An illusion of light. The drive plumes of the Free Navy ships packed in together so tightly that it looked like one massive blaze of fire appeared on the edge of the ring, tracking in toward its center.

  “You want me to take a potshot at them?” Bobbie asked. “Rail gun could probably reach them at this point.”

  “No,” Naomi said before Holden could answer. “I don’t know what sending mass through the gates right now would do.”

  A line appeared on the model, low on the scale. Moving toward the dying curve. The ring gate grew brighter with the braking burns of the enemy, until it looked like the negative image of an eye—black, star-specked sclera and intensely white, burning iris. The timer reached zero. The lights grew brighter.

  Chapter Fifty-One: Marco

  Marco’s jaw ached. His chest hurt. The joints in his spine hovered at the edge of dislocation without ever passing through to it. The high-g burn scourged him, and he welcomed the pain. The pressure and the discomfort were the price his body paid. They were slowing on approach. The core of the Free Navy was going to reach Medina unopposed, and there was literally no one to stop it.

  At a civilized thrust—an eighth, a tenth—and with some time coasting on the float to conserve mass, the journey out to the ring gate would have taken months. He didn’t have months. Everything depended on reaching Medina before the scattered forces of the consolidated fleet could reach him. Yes, it meant driving the ships he had to the edge of their ability. Yes, it would mean putting some of the reserves from Medina under conscript to fuel his return to the system, and the people of Medina would have to make do with a little less until he could stabilize the situation enough to allow resupply.

  This was wartime. The days for scrimping and saving and safety were gone. Peace was a time for efficiency. War was a time for power. If it meant he drove his fighters to the ragged edge of their ability, that was how victory came. Those who held back the most reserves for tomorrow were the ones least likely to see it. If the price was long days of unrelieved discomfort and pain, he’d pay that price and glory in it. Because at the end, there was rebirth. A shedding away of all his little missteps, a purification, and the seat of his final, permanent victory. And it was coming soon.

  His error—he saw it now—was in thinking too small.

  He had conceived the revolution that the Free Navy represented as a balancing of the scales. The inners had taken and taken and taken from the Belt, and when they didn’t need it anymore, they’d dropped it and fled off to new, shinier toys. Marco had meant to put that right. Let the inners be the ones in need and the Belt find its independence and its strength. It was anger that had kept his view too small. Righteous anger. Appropriate anger. But blinding all the same.

  Medina was the key, and always had been. But it was only now that he saw what it was the key to. He’d meant to close the gates and force the inner planets to address the consequences of generations of injustice. Looking at it now, it almost seemed like a gesture of nostalgia. A harkening back to previous generations. He’d made the classic mistake—he wasn’t too proud to admit it—of trying to fight the last war on the next battleground. The power of Medina wasn’t that it could stop the flow of money and material out to the new worlds. It was that it could control it.

  The fate of the Belt wasn’t around Jupiter and Saturn, or at least not those alone. In every one of the thirteen hundred systems that the gates led to, there were planets as vulnerable as Earth. The Belt itself would spread to all the systems, float like kings above all their subject worlds. If he had it all to do again, he’d have thrown three times as many rocks on Earth, destroyed Mars while he was at it, and taken his ships and his people to the colony worlds where there were no vestigial fleets to consolidate. With only Medina and the fifteen ships at his disposal, he could exert power over all the worlds there were. It was all about placement, audacity, and will.

  He needed to find a way to talk Duarte into giving him a few more ships. But the promise to keep Laconia undisturbed had earned him everything he’d needed up to now. He didn’t think another small request would be too much, especially given how much he’d sacrificed already. And if Duarte did object—

  The Pella shuddered as the drive passed through some resonance frequency. Normally when that happened they weren’t under high burn. It was strange how something that was hardly more than a chime at a third of a g could sound like the coming apocalypse at two and a third. He tap
ped out a message for Josie down in engineering: KEEP US IN ONE PIECE.

  A few seconds later, Josie wrote back something obscene, and Marco chuckled through the pressure on his throat.

  They’d taken their last respite before the battle four hours earlier, dropping the deceleration to only three-quarters of a g for fifteen minutes to let people eat and visit the head. A longer break would have meant burning harder now, and they were already running at the edge of their tolerances. But the advantages of an unexpected forced march were scattered through the great military strategists of history. Earth and Mars could only look on, eyes pressed to their telescopes, and wail. Earth and Mars and Medina too.

  And on Medina, Naomi and her feckless Earther fuck buddy. James Holden, following in Fred Johnson’s footsteps as condescending, patronizing hero of the poor, helpless Belt. When he died, the story of a Belt that had to be saved by self-congratulatory, faux-enlightened Earthers would bleed out with him, and good riddance. And Naomi …

  He didn’t know yet what to do with Naomi. She was a conundrum. Strong where she should have been weak and weak where she should have been strong. It was like she’d been born inverted. But there was something about her. Even after all these years, there was something about her that begged to be tamed. She’d slipped away from him twice now. Whatever happened, there wouldn’t be a third time. Once he had her in hand, Filip would return on his own. That wasn’t worth worrying about.

  When Filip had missed the launch from Callisto, Marco hadn’t been surprised. The boy had been acting out for weeks. It was normal. Even late, really. Marco had tested Rokku’s authority when he’d been much younger than Filip was now. Rokku had told him when to be there for launch, and Marco had intentionally come late to find the berth empty. He’d had to fend for himself on Pallas Station for seven months before Rokku’s ship came back. The captain had met him on the dock and beaten him until he was bleeding from a dozen places, but Marco had been taken back in. If Filip needed the same experience, that would be fine.