Babylon's Ashes

  “Mind is made from analogies,” Josep said, not needing her to contribute to the conversation. “Change in ages, change in the frame. Was in against out before. Turning into connected against unconnected now. Free Navy. Consolidated fleet. The ones who shrug off the chains against the ones who tie themselves together.”

  A direct one-to-one battle against Marco wasn’t plausible. He had too many ships, and Michio’s appeals to Rosenfeld and Dawes and Sanjrani hadn’t won her any replies. Though they also hadn’t been rejected. Marco was the only one calling her traitor to the cause thus far. The others, she assumed, were only following his lead.

  Didn’t help her in the short term.

  She traced routes and burns for her green ships, arcs that would keep them out of range of the Free Navy’s wrath and still allow them to send supplies where the need was worst. It was like solving a complex math puzzle without any promise that an optimal solution existed. The search for the least-bad answer.

  “Us, freest of the free. Disconnected from the disconnected,” Josep went on. “And because of that, coming into connection. Alienated because of our commitment to community, yeah? The yang inside the yin, the growing light from inside the dark. Had to be this way. Rule of the universe. Thermodynamics of meaning, us. Shikata ga nai. So free we have only one option. Because that’s how the mind of God is shaped. Minimums and maximums sheeting together like a curve. Like a skin made from interpretation.”

  Michio moved the tactical display into her personal data and reached out, turning herself with one handhold until she faced the crash couch. Josep gazed at her with an expression of childlike joy. His pupils were so dilated, his eyes looked black.

  “Got to go do something,” she said. “You going to be all right without a babysitter?”

  Josep chuckled. “Been a citizen of the mind since before you were born, child-bride. I can swim in vacuum and never die.”

  “All right,” she said, and set the straps on the couch to restraint with her password as the release. “I’m going to set the system to watch your vitals. May have Laura come sit with you.”

  “Tell her to bring her go set. Play better when I’m stoned.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Michio said. Josep took her hand in his, squeezing her fingers gently. He meant something by it—something deep and subtle and probably not comprehensible by a sober mind. All she saw was the love in it. She dimmed the lights, had the system play soft music—harp and a woman’s voice so perfect she assumed it was artificial—and left him alone. On her way up to the command deck, she sent a message to Laura and got a response. Josep probably didn’t need a minder, but better to be safe. She laughed at herself as she steadied her ankle against a foothold. Safe in the little things, reckless in the big ones.

  Bertold was in Pa’s usual crash couch, music leaking from the earphones on his head and the ship’s status monitors showing green and happy on his screen. Everything was fine as long as he didn’t look out too far.

  He lifted his chin to her as she pulled herself into Oksana’s customary station instead. It still felt strange, being in a ship designed by Mars. It was all built with a sensibility she couldn’t quite put her finger on: military and rigorous and straight. She couldn’t help thinking it was because the designers had grown up with a constant gravity pulling them down, but maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe it was just Martian because Mars was like that. Not inners against outers, but the rigid and brittle against the flowing and free.

  “Matter? Geht gut?” Bertold asked as she retrieved the tactical schematic.

  “Fine. But Josep decided to get stoned, and I’m just not doing work that goes well with intoxicated mysticism.”

  She felt a stab of regret as soon as she’d said it, though she knew Bertold wouldn’t take her snapishness as more than it was. Still, if the family fell apart in the middle of everything else failing, she wouldn’t be able to do this. She needed her rock.

  Good, then, that she had it.

  “You mind if I …?” Bertold asked, and she mirrored her display to his. All the ships, all their vectors. The final refutation of the one-ship. Here was humanity in all its fissures and disconnections. She went back to her analysis. Here was how to get a quarter of the lost resources back and only lose two of her ships. Here was how to deliver a tenth, but not to the people most in need. Here was how to keep her ships safe and achieve nothing else.

  “Looks like an amoeba giving birth to twins,” Bertold said. “Sehr feo.”

  “Ugly indeed,” Michio said, running another scenario. “Stupid, wasteful, and cruel.”

  Bertold sighed. When they’d first been married, Michio had been deeply infatuated with him and Nadia both. Their shared passions had mellowed since then into an intimacy that she appreciated more than sex. It was the trust that let her say what she was seeing, what she was thinking. Let her hear the hard truth spoken in her own voice. “If we’re going to do this, I’m going to have to do some things I don’t like.”

  “Knew that going in, didn’t we?”

  “Didn’t see the details.”

  “Bad?”

  In answer, she flipped a variable in the tactical readout. New options opened that hadn’t been there before: Recover sixty percent and lose nothing. Supply the five stations at greatest risk of collapse and keep Marco away from Iapetus. Open and possibly control a path to Ganymede for a few weeks at least. Bertold scowled, working out what she’d done and how she’d done it. When he saw, he grunted.

  “That’s a dream,” he said.

  “It’s not,” Michio said. “It’s an agreement, and two enemies willing to respect it as long as their interests align.”

  “It’s putting your back to the Butcher of Anderson Station.”

  “Well, yes. It is that. But I know what he is. I won’t make the mistake of trusting him. He’ll use us if he can. I’d be stupid not to repay that in kind. If Marco wasn’t putting us as his top priority, it would be different, but he’s burning hard for our ships.”

  “Injured his pride, sa sa?”

  “All we need is that the consolidated fleet agree not to fire on us and we don’t fire on them, and it opens up zones where Marco won’t follow. Safe havens.”

  “‘Safe’ meaning huddled underneath Fred Johnson’s guns. Waiting for him to turn them on us.”

  “I know,” Michio said. “And with Johnson, that time will come. When it does, we won’t be there.”

  “This is a bad plan, Captain,” Bertold said. His voice was gentle, though. He already understood.

  “It is. It’s the best bad plan I’ve got.”

  He sighed. “Yeah.”

  “Well,” she said. “We could have done things Marco’s way.”

  “Don’t think we could have,” Bertold said.

  “Don’t either.”

  “What about the stations and ships we’re giving to? Some of them going to have guns. Have guards.”

  “Withhold aid unless they agree to fight and die for us?” Michio said. “Let them starve if they won’t? No, don’t. I’m not saying no to that. I’m asking. Which is worse? Extort people into being soldiers for us, or negotiate with Fred fucking Johnson?”

  Bertold pressed a palm to his forehead. “No third side to that coin?”

  “Die noble?” Michio said.

  Bertold laughed, and then he didn’t. “Depends on what the Butcher wants.”

  “It does,” Michio said. “So we should ask him.”

  “Yeah, fuck,” Bertold said. She saw her own dread and anger and humiliation reflected in his eyes. He knew what even considering this was costing her. And the ruthlessness she treated herself with that made it necessary. “I love you. You know that. Always.”

  “You too,” she said.

  “Doesn’t take much before we have to compromise ourselves, does it?”

  “Get born,” Michio said, pulling the comm controls and setting the tightbeam for Ceres.

  Chapter Twenty: Naomi

  The danger is
overreach,” Bobbie said, hunching over the table and making it seem small. “They sucker-punched us. We got a couple easy wins coming back. It’s tempting to drive it as far as we can, and try to break them. Seems like we’ve got them on the back foot. But the truth is, we’re still sizing his forces up. He’s still seeing what we do.”

  “And what are we doing?” Naomi asked, handing across a bowl of scrambled egg and tofu with hot sauce.

  Bobbie scooped up a bite and chewed thoughtfully. Naomi sat across from her and tried a bite from her own bowl. Ever since Maura Patel had upgraded the food systems, the Roci’s hot sauce tasted a little different, but Naomi was coming to like it. There was a pleasure in the novelty. And also a sense of nostalgia for what had changed. That wasn’t only food. That was everything.

  “I don’t think anyone knows,” Bobbie said. “My tactics teacher back in bootcamp? Sergeant Kapoor. He was an entomologist—”

  “Your sergeant in bootcamp was an entomologist?”

  “It’s Mars,” Bobbie said, shrugging. “That isn’t weird there. Anyway, he talked about shifting strategies like they were the middle part of metamorphosis. Apparently when a caterpillar makes a cocoon, the next thing it does is melt. Completely liquefies. And then all the little bits of what used to be caterpillar come back together as a moth or a butterfly or something. Finds a different way to assemble all the same pieces and make it something else.”

  “Sounds like the protomolecule.”

  “Huh. Yeah. Guess it kind of does.” Bobbie took another bite of her eggs, her gaze on the far wall. She was quiet for long enough that Naomi didn’t know if she’d come back.

  “But he meant something tactical?” Naomi said.

  “Yes. That pivoting your strategy was like that too. You go into a situation thinking about it a particular way, and then something changes. Then either you stick with the ideas you had before or you look at everything you have to work with and find a new shape. We’re in the find-a-new-shape part. Avasarala’s busy trying to keep what’s left of Earth out of environmental collapse, but once that’s stabilized, she’s going to try to capture Inaros and everyone else who ever breathed his air and put them all on trial. She wants it to be crime.”

  Sandra Ip came in from the lift, nodded at the two of them, and pulled a bulb of tea from the dispenser.

  “Why, do you think?” Naomi asked. “I mean, why treat it like a criminal act and not war?”

  “I think it’s a statement of contempt. But in the meantime, Mars is … I don’t know. I think it’s finding out that for all our strength, we were brittle. I’m not sure how we come back from that, but we’ll never be what we were. Not any more than Earth will. And Fred? He’s trying to build consensus and coalitions, because that’s what he’s been doing for decades.”

  “But you don’t think he can.” It wasn’t a question. Ip left the galley, her footsteps retreating as Bobbie thought.

  “I think putting people together’s a good thing. Generally useful. But … I probably shouldn’t be talking about this. I’m supposed to be his representative for Mars. Junior league ambassador or something.”

  “But he’s trying to rebuild his caterpillar when we need a butterfly,” Naomi said.

  Bobbie sighed, took a last bite of egg, and tossed the bowl into the recycler. “I could be wrong,” she said. “Maybe it’ll work.”

  “We can hope.”

  Bobbie’s hand terminal chirped. She considered the incoming message with a frown. The way she moved, even little motions like this, had the strength and economy of training. And more than that. A frustration.

  “Oh joy,” Bobbie said dryly. “Another important meeting.”

  “Price of being central.”

  “I guess,” Bobbie said, hauling herself to her feet. “I’ll be back when I can. Thanks again for letting me bunk here.”

  As Bobbie stepped past, Naomi put a hand on her arm. Stopped her. She didn’t know exactly what she was going to say until she said it. Only that it was tied up with the ideas of crew and family and trying not to betray who you were. “Do you want to do this junior ambassador thing?”

  “I don’t know. It needs doing, I guess,” Bobbie said. “I’ve been trying to reinvent myself since Io. Maybe since Ganymede. I really liked working veterans’ outreach, but now that I’m not doing it, I don’t miss it. I figure this’ll be the same. It’s something to do. Why?”

  “You don’t need to thank anyone that you’re bunking here. If you like that cabin, it’s yours.”

  Bobbie blinked. Her smile was small and rueful. She took a half step away, but didn’t turn her body. The physical expression of hesitation. Naomi let the silence between them stretch. “I appreciate the thought,” Bobbie said. “But adding someone into a crew? That’s a big deal. I don’t know what Holden would think about it.”

  “We’ve talked about it. He already thinks you’re crew.”

  “But I’m doing this ambassador thing.”

  “Yeah. He thinks our gunner is Fred’s ambassador from Mars.” Naomi knew she was stretching the truth a little there, but it was worth it. Bobbie was still for the space of a heartbeat. And then another one.

  “I didn’t know that,” she said, and then with no other words, stepped back toward the lift, the airlock, Ceres Station. Naomi watched her go.

  Fires on shipboard were dangerous. There were any number of ship processes that could rise up past the point of spontaneous oxidation. The trick was knowing when letting a breeze through would start combustion and when it wouldn’t. Sometimes talking to Bobbie was like putting her hand on a ceramic panel to see how hot it was. Trying to guess whether a little air would cool the big woman down or start up flames.

  Alone in the galley, Naomi went through a little casual maintenance: wiping down the tables and benches, checking the status of the air filters, clearing the recycler feed. Having so many people on the ship left them running through supplies faster than she’d become accustomed to. Gor Droga’s fondness for chai drove down their supply of tea analogue. Sun-yi Steinberg preferred a citrus drink that ate into the acids and texturing proteins. Clarissa Mao ate kibble and water. Prison food.

  Looking over the supply levels, Naomi had to remind herself that the Roci was carrying three times the crew it was used to. Still well within the ship’s specs and abilities. The Tachi had been designed for two full flight crews and cabins full of Martian marines. Renaming it hadn’t changed that. It had only changed her expectations. But they were still going to have to resupply again soon.

  The aromatics and spices that kept everyone from eating like Clarissa were going to be hard to get. Supplies were thin on Ceres. Supplies were going to be thin all through the Belt, and now the inner planets too. Any of the complex organics that Earth used to supply could be synthesized in labs or grown in hydroponics on Ganymede and Ceres and Pallas. The touristy resorts on Titan. The problem, she thought as she replaced the injection nozzle on the coffee machine, was capacity. They could make anything, but they couldn’t make it all at once. Humanity was going to get by on the minimum until there was a way to increase production, and a lot of people living on the margin wouldn’t make it. They’d die on Earth, yes, but keeping the Belt fed wasn’t going to be trivial either.

  As she dropped the old injection nozzle into the recycler, she wondered if Marco had thought about that or if his dreams of glory had swept away any realistic plan for taking care of all the lives he’d disrupted. She had a guess about that. Marco was a creature of the grand gesture. His stories were about the single critical moment that changed everything, not all the moments that came after. Somewhere in the system right now, Karal or Wings or—thinking the name was like touching a sore—or Filip might be doing the same kind of maintenance she was doing on the Pella. She wondered how long it would take them to realize that the spoils of war wouldn’t restock their ships forever.

  Probably it wouldn’t come clear until they’d used up everything. Kings were always the last to feel the
famine. That wasn’t just the Belt. That was all of history. The people who’d just been going about their lives were the ones who could speak to the actual cost of war. They paid it first. Men like Marco could orchestrate vast battles, order the looting and destruction of worlds, and never run out of coffee.

  When the galley was done, she took herself back to the lift, and up to the command deck. There was new analysis of the ships that had gone missing in the ring gates. No new data, just a rechewing of the old. Her fascination came from a sense of dread. She’d been through those rings, traveled the weird not-space that linked solar systems, and of all the dangers she’d faced, just quietly vanishing away hadn’t even been on her scopes. For a few hundred people—maybe more than that—something else had happened. The best minds of Earth and Mars that weren’t occupied with trying to deal with their environment and governing bodies collapsing around them were looking at this. Naomi didn’t have their resources or the depth of background expertise they did, but she had her own experience. Maybe she’d see something they hadn’t.

  And so she looked. Like an amateur detective, she followed clues and hunches, and like most investigations like that, she found nothing. The new conversation on the feeds was a theory surrounding the Casa Azul’s drive signature showing that the reactor was probably misconfigured, but apart from it being a rookie mistake that transferred a lot of energy into waste heat, Naomi didn’t see anything in it. Certainly no reason that it or the other missing ships should have gone dark.

  The analysis had just shifted into speculation over the plausibility of failed internal sensors in the Casa Azul increasing the pressure from the reactor bottle—which was what she assumed from the start—when her hand terminal chimed. Bobbie. She accepted the connection, and Bobbie’s face appeared on her screen. Naomi felt a twinge of alarm.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  Bobbie shook her head. It was probably meant to defuse the tension, but it reminded Naomi of a video of a bull getting ready to charge. “Do you know where Holden is? He’s not answering his comm.”