Babylon's Ashes

  “There was a thing you read me one time. About jack pines,” she said, digging through her jewelry box for her necklace and the gold bracelets that would go with the embroidery. “Do you remember it? All I have is that it ended ‘da-dah, da-dah, da-dah, da-dah, and paved the way to Paradise.’ It was about how the seeds needed a fire before they could spread. I told you it sounded like a sophomore girl trying to make the break up with her abusive boyfriend sound deep. That poem. I can’t get it out of my head now, and I can’t remember it either. It’s annoying.”

  The bracelets slid into place. The necklace settled too lightly on her collarbone. She sat at her table, touching on eyeliner, tapping a nearly homeopathic bit of rouge onto her cheeks. Just enough to make her look more vital than she felt. Not enough to make it seem like she was wearing makeup. The smell of the rouge reminded her of the apartment in Denmark she’d kept during university. God, her mind was everywhere these days. When she finished, she turned to her hand terminal. The indicator showed she was still recording. She smiled into the camera.

  “I have to put the mask on now. Go wade into it all again. They still haven’t found you, but I tell myself that they will. That I would know it if you were dead. I don’t know it, so it isn’t true. But it’s getting harder, love. And if you don’t come back soon, I’ll have saved so many of these messages, you’ll spend half a semester just catching up to me.”

  Except, she thought, there wouldn’t be semesters. Or poetry courses. Or any of the things that had made her life hers before the rocks fell. And then, almost as if he was there, Arjun’s dissenting voice murmured in her mind, There will always be poetry.

  “I love you,” she said to the hand terminal. “I will always love you. Even …” She hadn’t said it before. Hadn’t let herself think it. There was a first time for everything. A last time too. “Even if you’re not here.”

  She stopped recording, repaired the damage her tears had done to the makeup, and lowered her head like an actor preparing to take the stage. When she lifted her eyes again, they were harder. She made the connection request to Said, and he answered immediately. He’d been waiting.

  “Good morning, Madam Secretary,” he said.

  “Cut the bullshit. What fresh hell are we facing today?”

  “You have a meeting with Gorman Le from the scientific service in half an hour. Then breakfast with Prime Minister Smith. An interview with Karol Stepanov of the Eastern Economic Strategic Report, and then the meeting with the Strategy and Response Committee. That will last until lunch, ma’am.”

  “Stepanov. He was the one who got the Cigdem Toker Award three years ago for the piece on Dashiell Moraga?”

  “I … I can check, ma’am.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Said. Try to keep up here. He is. I’m sure of it. I should talk to his wife before I meet with him,” she said. “Is there a place we can push him to in the afternoon?”

  “I can make space, ma’am.”

  “Do that. And make sure Smith is a private audience. I’m sick of every fucking thing I do being under a microscope. If I get an ass polyp, I’ll find out about it on Le Monde.”

  “If you say so, ma’am.”

  “I say so. Send the cart. Let’s get this over with.”

  Gorman Le was a thin man with light brown hair salted with white and jade green eyes that Avasarala guessed were cosmetic. She hadn’t known him before she came to Luna. He’d been promoted above his level of preparation when the rocks fell, and it showed in his overly somber bearing and the way he cleared his throat before he spoke.

  “The ships that … failed to complete the transition tended to be larger in mass,” he said. “The Oleander-Swift, the Barbatana de Tubarão, and the Harmony all follow that pattern. The Casa Azul doesn’t match that, though.”

  The science service had always been a large presence on Luna. It was where the first broad-array telescope had been built, up free from the interference of atmosphere. The first permanent moon base had been equally divided between military posturing and research. But the generations that had risen and fallen since then had left the Luna science service behind, pressing out to the places where the action really was: Ganymede, Titan, Iapetus. God help them all, Phoebe. It left the Luna-based service office hardly more than admin offices and children’s science-fair projects. The meeting room they were in was gray-green with wall screens left cloudy by years of fine abrasion and fake leather chairs.

  “I’m hearing you say there’s no consistent pattern,” Avasarala said.

  Gorman Le pressed his jaw tight and flapped his hands in frustration. “There are patterns. There are any number of patterns. They all had drives built within a twenty-month window. They were all using reaction mass harvested from Saturn. They all went missing in high-traffic periods. They all had the sequence ‘four-five-two-one’ in their long-form registry codes. With this little to go on, I can find as many patterns as you want that match all the missing ships. But which one matters? No, I can’t tell you that.”

  “Any ships with four-five-two-one in the registry code make it through?”

  Gorman Le made a small huffing sound, like an angry hamster, then looked down and blushed. “The Jaquenetta, registered out of Ganymede. It went through between the Oleander-Swift and the Harmony. Reported back from Walton with no trouble.”

  “Well,” Avasarala said, amused that he’d actually tracked that down, “we can at least say that one’s less likely to be it, then.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Gorman Le said. “Ma’am, if we could get further data … I’m certain that Medina Station has flight records for all of these. Maybe others. And for the ones that didn’t have trouble. If we could just—”

  “If we controlled Medina Station,” Avasarala said, “a lot of things would be different. Do we have anything from our Martian friends about why their rogue navy was so interested in the Laconia gate?”

  “Not even confirmation that that’s where the breakaway ships went.”

  Avasarala scowled. “Keeping their knees closed after they’re already fucked. Typical. I’ll talk to Smith. We can’t get Medina, but we should fucking well manage access to all the data we do have.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Gorman Le said, but he said it to her back. She was already moving on.

  Motion helped. The sense of doing things, of progressing, of the problems getting clearer and the solutions—where there were any—getting closer kept the despair at bay. It was harder for Smith. He was a world away from his home and his staff. There just wasn’t as much Martian infrastructure on Luna. When he wasn’t in meetings or trading messages across twelve minutes of light delay, he sat in his suite and watched the newsfeeds calling him an idiot and a buffoon and the man whose inattention had let the Martian Congressional Republic Navy be sold to terrorists and pirates. He didn’t even have managing the worst catastrophe in human history to keep his mind off feeling sorry for himself.

  He met her at the door. In simple sand-colored slacks and a white collarless shirt with the sleeves rolled up, he could have been a salesman or a minor prelate. His smile was professionally genuine and warm, the same way it always was. She stepped into the rooms and glanced around. No one. Not even security. A private audience indeed. Score one for Said.

  Their breakfast waited in the dining room—poached eggs and thick, buttered toast. The sort of simple, elegant fare that she imagined royalty through the ages had enjoyed while the people they ruled died. She also saw the half-empty bottle of wine on the floor by the sofa, the wall screen tuned to an entertainment feed showing a slightly risqué comedy that had come out three years earlier. Shannon Poe and Lakash Hedayat were naked and trying to cover themselves with the same beach towel without looking at the other or touching skin to skin. In context, it might have been funny. Smith followed her gaze and turned off the screen.

  “Laughter,” he said. “A balm in hard times.”

  “I’ll have to try it,” she said. He pulled her chair out for her, and she
let him. “I had a few things I wanted to run past you, but before that? I understand why your intelligence service is hiding information about Duarte, but why the fuck are you keeping the data about the gate-eaten ships to yourself? Are you looking to trade it for something, because unless it’s sexual favors, we haven’t got jack shit.”

  “The eggs are good,” Smith said.

  “You want eggs? I’ll have them squeeze a chicken. I want the data on the missing ships.”

  Smith smiled and nodded as if she’d said something mild and polite. The pale flesh of the egg dripped gold on the way to his mouth. The yolk spattered his shirtfront, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I … You’ll have to take the matter up with my successor. I’ve had word today. The opposition is calling for a vote of no confidence. I will be out of office by this evening.”

  Avasarala took in a deep breath and let it out through her teeth. The silence between them was rich until she broke it. “Fuck.”

  “They’re angry and they’re frightened. They need someone to blame. I’m the obvious choice.”

  “Who are they putting up?”

  “Olivia Liu and Chahaya Nelson were both mentioned. It’s going to be Emily Richards, though.”

  Avasarala chewed a bite of egg, but didn’t taste it. Richards wasn’t bad. She was serious, at least. Liu and Nelson were too entrenched in what Mars had been. They wouldn’t be ready for what it was becoming. Richards women made good policy. Always had.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This must be hard for you.”

  “Politicians are gamblers,” Smith said. “We do our best to bend the odds, but the universe does what it does.”

  Bullshit, she thought. Politicians are the frontal lobes of the body politic. The universe does what it does. They’d be better off without him. Only not yet.

  “You have a day,” she said. “Get me the data before it’s too late.”

  “Chrisjen—”

  “What are they going to do? Fire you? Fuck them—give me the data so I can get the problems fixed. If they give you too much shit, I’ll offer you asylum.”

  He laughed and leaned back in his chair. His eyes shifted to the dead wall screen, then back to her. She wondered if the wine by the sofa had been his first bottle.

  “Promise?” he asked as if it was a joke. She smiled.

  The Strategy and Response Committee. Admirals Pycior and Souther. Parris Kanter from Human Development back at The Hague. Michael Harrow from Aquaculture. Barry Li and Simon Gutierrez from Transportation and Tariffs. Not the dream team she’d have chosen, but the best of who she had left. Sitting around the dark glass table, they all looked as tired as she felt. Good. They should be.

  “Mars,” Avasarala said. “Smith is out on his ass. Emily Richards is taking over. I’m reaching out to her now. I don’t know whether she’ll be more open, but I wouldn’t assume it. What do you have?”

  Li spoke first. Exhaustion made his lisp worse, but the sharpness of his intelligence made his eyes seem brighter. “We’re maintaining relief routes in Africa and Europe. Our next area of focus is East Asia.”

  “There weren’t any strikes there,” Avasarala said.

  “But they took the worst of the ash fall,” Li said. “I have my people working out routes and probable needs. Information from the ground is sketchy.”

  “The Belt?” she said.

  “The Belt’s the Belt,” Pycior said. “There’s a wide variety of response. Ganymede is still maintaining neutrality, but it’s firmly in the Free Navy’s sphere of control. If we could offer protection, it would likely declare for us. The OPA is divided. Tycho Station, Kelso Station, and Rhea are the only ones who’ve condemned the Free Navy. The Trojan stations and Iapetus aren’t declaring anything. Most of the rest of the Belt … It’s for the Free Navy. As long as they keep promising food, material, and protection, it’s going to be hard for moderate Belters to organize, even assuming they want to.”

  Souther cleared his throat. He spoke in a high voice that reminded her of singing. “We’ve taken apart the Azure Dragon’s comm logs. They indicate that there’s a high-level Free Navy meeting on Ceres right now. Inaros and his four captains.”

  “What are they meeting about?” Avasarala snapped.

  “No one seemed to know,” Souther said. “But we don’t have evidence of a second shepherd vessel. We’ve identified seven more major rock strikes that are presently en route to Earth. We’re tracking them, and we’re ready to take them out.”

  Meaning they were unpinned. Avasarala leaned forward, pressing her fingers to her lips. Her mind danced across the solar system. Medina Station. Rhea, declaring against the Free Navy. The food and supplies of Ganymede. The starvation and death on Earth. The Martian Navy divided between the mysterious Duarte and his black market Free Navy and Smith. Now Richards. The lost colonies. Fred Johnson’s OPA and all the factions he couldn’t influence or command. The colony ships being preyed upon by the Free Navy pirates, and the stations and asteroids gaining the benefit of the piracy. And the missing ships. And the stolen protomolecule sample.

  A dozen possibilities shifted in her mind—redeploy forces to Tycho Station and embolden Ganymede, or blockade Pallas and try to cut off the Free Navy’s resupply capabilities, or set up a protected zone for the colony ships out there and running dark. There were a thousand different paths, and she couldn’t be sure where any of them would lead. If she guessed wrong, it could mean the collapse of all that was left.

  But Marco Inaros and his captains were together in one place, and her ships weren’t pinned.

  “Fortune favors the bold, yes?” she said. “Fuck it. Let’s take back Ceres.”

  Chapter Eleven: Pa

  Seven decades before Michio Pa was born, Earth and Mars rewrote the tariff regulations on raw ore from the Belt. The stated reason was that it would encourage the establishment and expansion of refineries in the Belt and around Jupiter and Saturn. It might even have worked. In the short term, it meant that a wave of Belter prospectors and asteroid miners who’d been living at the edge of survival slipped over into the abyss. Ships were impounded or run illegally or lost from not having the scrip to pay for maintenance and repair. Back then, Earth and Mars had walked in each other’s footsteps, and the only option that seemed to have any promise of justice was for the Belt to build a military of its own.

  It was never official. The Outer Planets Alliance survived since then by being diffuse and deniable. But the beginnings were there. Choose a faction, find a place in the chain of command, build the thin but resilient structure that would have muscle one day. That would eventually become an answer to the inner planets projecting their power out to where the sun was hardly more than the brightest star.

  When Michio Pa turned twenty-two, Fred Johnson—the Butcher of Anderson Station—had seemed like her brightest hope. He was an Earther fighting for the Belt. Fighting against his own natural self-interest. It gave a sense of authenticity to someone young enough and still easily swayed. She’d taken a position on Tycho Station, made her contacts first and then her commitment. Trained in the quasi-military that Johnson was hauling up. Put in her years.

  She’d been a true believer, then. She’d been a naïve little prig. But that was before the Behemoth.

  Getting the XO assignment on the Belt’s first genuine warship had been a dream come true for her. The generation ship hadn’t been designed for war, but all of her crew had been. That was what she told herself.

  Captain Ashford had the command. She had been his second. And slotted in beneath them as head of security, Fred Johnson’s personal friend. Carlos C de Baca. Bull. Her babysitter, and the man positioned to step in and take over when she made her first mistake. Her hatred for Bull had been incandescent. Every chance she had to belittle him, she’d taken it. Every misstep he made, she drove a wedge into, prying it open. The Behemoth had gone to the ring to face down Earth and Mars. To show that the Belt wa
s a force to be reckoned with. And as above, so below. She’d made it her personal mission to show Bull that she was better than he was.

  Which was why it had hurt her so badly when Sam sided with him.

  They’d talked about it, her and Sam. How important it was to keep their affair quiet. How not to let anyone—especially anyone in command—guess about them. Sam had agreed, maybe because she actually did agree. Or maybe in order to placate Michio’s insecurities. And then Bull and Sam had fucked around with the budget allocations. It had felt like the deepest betrayal possible. Sam—her Sam—making common cause with an Earther. With the Earther who’d been sent by Fred Johnson to mind the untrustworthy Belters.

  It had been only her first mistake among many. Michio had let her emotions blind her to the wisdom and experience that Bull had offered her until things were badly out of hand. Despite all the casualties after the catastrophe, she hadn’t recognized Ashford’s volatility and violence as symptoms of brain injury. She hadn’t put aside her faith in the chain of command.

  And she hadn’t made peace with Sam before Ashford killed her.

  Fred Johnson had sent her out into the whirlwind because she was a Belter, and he needed a Belter as a figurehead. She hadn’t been ready, but she had been convenient. And because of it, people had died.

  The Behemoth never came back through the gate. They’d stripped her down, spun up the drum, and rechristened her again as Medina Station. Michio Pa, they’d sent back to Tycho on a Martian naval vessel. After the dead had been removed, there’d been plenty of extra space. As soon as she’d gotten back to her quarters, she’d resigned. She didn’t even shower first. She quit her official job on Tycho, her militia rank in the OPA, everything. Fred Johnson had sent her personal messages. She didn’t know what was in them. She’d deleted them without listening.

  And she’d gotten lost, taking one job and another. Trying to keep her nightmares and crying jags to herself. She ran a ship for a salvaging company that sometimes verged over into piracy. She oversaw a trading co-op that didn’t announce itself to the tariff boards, which was technically smuggling. She was managing a supply warehouse complex on Rhea for a half-criminal labor union based out of Titan when Nadia and Bertold found her. It had taken six months before she’d realized that she was in love with them and four more before she understood what it meant that they loved her too. The day they first made a home together in a thin, inexpensive hole half a klick below the moon’s surface was one of the best she’d ever had.