Babylon's Ashes

  Lister cleared his throat. “Rocinante’s not on Tycho, though.”

  Marco frowned. A little stab of confusion and resentment pricked his heart. “What?”

  “Los dué ships we sent after Ostman’s ice hauler? Giambattista? No transponders, but came close enough they got drive signatures off the escort ship. Esá es la Rocinante.”

  The room was silent. Marco felt something crawling up the back of his neck. All the years he’d kept quiet track of where Naomi was, what she was doing, and now she and her lover had slipped away without his knowledge. It felt like a threat. Like a trap.

  “The Rocinante,” he said, speaking each word carefully, “is running escort on Ostman’s old, broken-down ice hauler?”

  “Looks like,” Lister said.

  Something was wrong with the air mix. Marco wasn’t getting enough oxygen. His heart was beating fast, his breath coming faster.

  “Where are they going?”

  Chapter Forty-Three: Holden

  Inertia was one problem. Location was the other.

  The Giambattista was a massive ship, hard to bring up to speed and hard to slow down. A testament to the inconvenience of mass and Newton’s first law. It was already braking toward the ring gate, pouring out energy and reaction mass in order to bring it to an orbit matching the gate. Between those two datapoints—where it was going and how quickly it was shedding momentum to get there—the fast-attack ships knew within a narrow range of possibilities where they would be and when they would be there.

  Holden’s calculus was built from unknowns. How many gs could the Giambattista endure during a hard brake? How many of the ships she carried in her vast belly would fail under that strain? The cold equations of velocity, energy transfer, and relative motion could draw idealized curves to describe any number of scenarios, but experience added on a permanent and indelible unless something unexpected happens, and then who the hell knows.

  “Best guess, Alex,” Holden said. “What are we looking at?”

  Alex rubbed a hand over his thinning hair and made a distressed chuffing sound under his breath. The galley smelled like chamomile tea and cinnamon, but Naomi and Clarissa were both empty-handed. The Roci’s deceleration was about a g and a half, matching the Giambattista. It made Holden feel like he was tired even though he wasn’t.

  “If I was them,” Alex said, “I’d plan to overshoot. Time my braking run so that I’d go by just before that big bastard out there got to the ring. Group both ships together, because there’s an attack opportunity during that pass. Drop a shitload of torpedoes that could use my velocity as a boost, hope I got a few good hits in. Once I’d passed, my torpedoes would be fighting against my velocity instead of building on it, so I’d likely save my powder until I could kill off what was left of my speed. Then come back to finish up anything that survived that first pass.”

  “Sounds plausible,” Naomi said. “And what would you do if you were us?”

  “Get to the ring as quick as I could,” Alex said, more quickly this time. “Make them hurry to catch up to us so that the loop back took as long as possible. Then use whatever that window was to get Bobbie and her forces in through the gate, let her take over the rail guns, and get our butts into the slow zone so she could splash those bastards when they got back.”

  “Going to be unpleasant trying to keep the Giambattista alive once they get back,” Clarissa said. “Two of them. One of us. That boat’s a big target.”

  “All right,” Holden said. “What about their drive plumes? If they’re braking toward us, how big a threat are they?”

  Alex shook his head. “The speeds we’re looking at, if we get in their plume, we’ll be in their laps.”

  Clarissa’s voice was small, calm. “If it’s a suicide mission?”

  Alex sobered. “Well, ah, then … Yeah, that would suck.”

  “If we break the Giambattista with too hard a burn,” Naomi said, “we can still stage the attacks from out here. We’re already unloading the first wave from outside the gate. There’s no reason we can’t launch the second one from here too. The command crew can’t be much larger than the Canterbury’s was. We’ll evacuate them on the Roci if we have to.”

  “Unless whatever we break interferes with us deploying the boats,” Clarissa said. “Then Naomi and I are out there with welding torches trying to pop Bobbie’s stuff loose when the attack ships get back, and everyone has a bad day.” It was weird hearing Amos’ idioms spoken in her voice. The two had spent a lot of time together, though. So maybe it wasn’t.

  Holden rubbed his palm across the cool surface of the table. The weight of the moment pressed on his shoulders. “I’ll talk to Bobbie and Amos. They’re there. They can make our case. Cut the deceleration now, go on the float until the last minute, and then burn like hell to brake. Make them chase us.”

  “Going to be hard selling that to Belters,” Naomi said. “My people aren’t fans of high g.”

  “Alternative being torpedo strikes makes a compelling argument, though.”

  Naomi shrugged. “It does.”

  After that, the hours stretched. Sleeping would have been a good idea, but it wasn’t possible. He hit the gym, pulling against resistance bands until the ache distracted him from the attack ships bearing down on them. But as soon as he stopped, it flooded back in on him. Wondering whether the enemy would target the Giambattista because it was the larger target or the Rocinante as the bigger threat. If the plan to take Medina would work. If it would work in time. What the Free Navy would do if it worked, if it failed.

  If they won and the passage to the colony worlds opened again, what it would mean for the Belters, for Earth, for Mars. What the shape of human history would look like if the Free Navy beat them. Anticipation soured to anxiety and fear, and then impatience and back to anticipation again. Usually, the Roci was comfortable as an old shirt. Under the guns this way, he felt closed in. Claustrophobic. He couldn’t quite forget, the way he usually could, that they were a bubble of air and metal in an unthinkably huge emptiness.

  Naomi found him in their cabin after his exercise. Her hair was tied back, away from her face, and her eyes were calm and serious.

  “Was looking for you,” she said.

  He waved a little gamely. “Present.”

  “You doing all right?”

  “I don’t know. Yes?” He held out his hands, a gesture of helplessness. “I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time with this. Not like it’s the first war I’ve started.”

  Her laugh was rueful and warm. She launched across the room, caught onto the handholds where she could look over his shoulder at the monitor. The two enemy ships on approach. The Giambattista and the Roci. A red field where the braking burn would start. A white line where the Roci thought the attack would come. The first attack. Violence reduced to spare and well-presented graphic design.

  “You didn’t start this one,” Naomi said. “Marco did that.”

  “Maybe,” Holden said. “Or maybe Duarte did. Or the protomolecule. Or Earth and Mars over the last couple of centuries of not giving a shit about the Belt. I don’t know anymore. I feel like I understand what I have to do in the next … I don’t know. Five minutes? Maybe ten? Then after that, things get muddy.”

  “Next is enough,” Naomi said. “As long as you always see the next step, you can walk the whole way.”

  She put a hand on his shoulder, her palm warm against his skin. He laced his fingers with hers and braced as she pulled herself down beside him. A simple maneuver they’d done a million times before. The long practice of trivial intimacy.

  “I keep wondering if this was inevitable,” he said. “There are so many things we could have done differently. Maybe we could have kept this from happening.”

  “We you-and-me, or we humanity?”

  “I was thinking humanity. But you-and-me too. If you’d killed Marco when you were kids together. If I’d kept my temper and not gotten kicked out of the Navy. If … I don’t know. If any o
f the things that got us here hadn’t happened, would none of this be happening?”

  “Don’t see how it could.”

  On the screen, the two enemy ships ticked closer to them while they shifted—not as quickly—toward the red warning of the hard burn. “I keep thinking it would have, though,” Holden said. “If it wasn’t me or you or Amos or Alex, if it wasn’t the Roci, it would be someone or something else. The Belt didn’t get screwed because of you or me. Whatever it was that made the protomolecule didn’t throw it at us because of anything that we’d done.”

  “Seeing as we were single cells at the time.”

  “Right? The details would be different, but the … the shape of it all would be the same.”

  “That’s the problem with things you can’t do twice,” Naomi said. “You can’t ever know how it would have gone if it had been the other way.”

  “No. But you can say that if we don’t do something different, it’ll happen again. And again. And again, over and over until something changes the game.”

  “Like the protomolecule?”

  “It didn’t change anything,” Holden said. “Here we are, still doing all the same things we did before. We’ve got a bigger battleground. Some of the sides have shifted around. But it’s all the crap we’ve been doing since that first guy sharpened a rock.”

  Naomi pulled herself closer, tucked her head against his shoulder. Probably people had been doing that since the dawn of time too, just not in freefall.

  “You’ve changed,” she said. “The man I met on the Canterbury wouldn’t have said that it was everyone’s business. That whatever anyone did counted.”

  “Well. I’ve had really a lot of people shooting at me since then.”

  “And you’ve grown up some. It’s all right. I have too. We’re both still doing it. That’s not something you stop. Not until you’re dead.”

  “Mm,” Holden said. Then, “So I’m guessing this kind of thing doesn’t bother you?”

  “Nature of history? No, it doesn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  He felt Naomi’s shrug against his body, familiar as if he’d done it himself. “I know what I need to deal with next. I’ve got two attack ships crawling up my ass, ready to kill me and all the people I love most in life. And if they manage it, my evil ex-boyfriend may very well grind all human civilization in the system into a new dark age.”

  “Yeah. That guy’s an asshole.”

  “Yup.”

  They watched it coming, knew it would come. It didn’t make it any less frightening when it came.

  Alex put the Roci just ahead of the Giambattista’s nose, offset enough not to melt her with their exhaust, but close enough to maybe stop the enemy torpedoes before they hit. The two incoming plumes were like stars—fixed and steady. Holden remembered being a boy in Montana, learning to catch a baseball. The way that the ball seemed to float almost motionless when it was coming straight for him. This was the same.

  “Status?” Holden said.

  “Sixty-three seconds to effective range,” Naomi said. “Roci’s watching them.”

  Holden breathed out. The captain of the Giambattista insisted that her ship wouldn’t suffer more than three and a half gs, so that’s what they were at. The enemy was slowing at a little over eight, but still going so fast that they would only spend a fraction of a second in range.

  “Forty,” Naomi said, and coughed. A painful sound that made Holden aware of the weight on his own throat. Maybe they should have gone on the juice after all. Behind them, the ring gate would have been visible to the naked eye by now. Even a very low-power scope would be showing the weird, almost organic, moving-but-stationary nonmaterial of its frame. Signal was leaking through the bare thousand kilometers of its diameter, distorted like ocean waves seen from beneath—radio, light, all the electromagnetic spectrum, only warped and made strange. And beyond that, the rail guns waiting to kill them all.

  “Starting to think this may not have been a great plan,” he said.

  “Five seconds. Four …”

  Holden braced. Not that it was going to help, just that he couldn’t keep from doing it. On the external cameras, the enemy drive plumes grew larger, thicker, brighter, and then in a blink, faster than the frame refresh, they were gone and the Rocinante bucked hard around him, slamming him into his crash couch like he’d fallen off a ladder. The ship rang like a struck gong, deafening. For a confused second, he thought they’d been thrown around by the enemy’s wake. That they were going to capsize.

  The Roci steadied. An alarm was sounding, brash and demanding.

  “What have we got?” Holden shouted.

  “I don’t know,” Clarissa shouted. “I haven’t been looking at this any longer than you. Just … All right. Looks like we ate a couple PDC rounds or … No, hold on. That doesn’t make sense.”

  The alarm shut off. The silence seemed more ominous. Maybe the shaking hadn’t been the Roci’s maneuvering thrusters getting them out of the way. They’d been hit. They might be spewing out their spare air into vacuum.

  “‘Doesn’t make sense’ is not good, Clarissa,” he said, trying to make his panic sound cheerful. “Something that made me feel like we weren’t dying would be really nice.”

  “Well, we got a little beat up,” Clarissa said. “I thought it was PDCs, but … No. We took out a torpedo close enough that we caught some debris.”

  “They launched four torpedoes at us and two at the Giambattista,” Naomi said from behind him. “We got them all, but there was a little damage to both ships. I’m waiting to get a solid report from Amos.”

  In that blink, Holden thought. That moment of shaking had been a whole battle too abrupt for a human mind to follow. He wasn’t sure if that was amazing or terrifying. Maybe there was room for both.

  “Not dying, though,” Holden said.

  “Not any faster than usual, anyway,” Clarissa said. “I’ll need to swap out some sensor arrays and plug a couple holes on the outer hull when we get a chance.”

  “Alex?” Holden said. “What’s it look like up there?”

  “I got a bloody nose,” Alex said. He sounded affronted. Like bloody noses were something you got when you were a kid and beneath his dignity now.

  “I’m sorry about that, but I was thinking more about the ships that were trying to kill us?”

  “Oh. Right,” Alex said, sniffing back the blood. “Like I said, that first window’s closed. Anything they throw at us now, we can knock down easy. And it doesn’t look like they’re changing much about their burn.”

  “How long does that give us?”

  Alex sniffed again. “We’ll get to a matching point beside the gate in a little less than an hour. If our little friends do a straight-line burn to come back to us and don’t change their burn rate? We’ll have six and a half hours. If they loop around so they can come at us from different directions, a little more.”

  “What’s the most?”

  “Eight,” Alex said. “Best-case scenario, we’re going to need to get all our folks through that gate and under protection of our shiny new rail gun artillery inside of eight hours. Seven’s more realistic. Six would mean we didn’t have to sweat it.”

  “Amos is saying they got knocked around a little, but only lost some plating in the storage decks and maybe half a dozen boats,” Naomi said. “Bobbie’s calling it a win, and they’re scrambling the first wave.”

  Between the three and a half gs and the violence of the Roci’s defense, Holden’s jaw and back ached. He couldn’t imagine how unpleasant this had to be for Naomi and the Belters in the Giambattista. Including the first-wave team that Bobbie was about to lead down the enemy’s throat. One wave to take the rail guns, then a second to secure Medina. By then, maybe he’d know what he needed to do next.

  If it didn’t work out, they’d try to keep the Giambattista and the OPA soldiers still on her alive long enough to come up with some other plan.

  The ring gate grew larger on the scope
s, looming up until they were so close, it dwarfed the ships. A thousand kilometers from one side to the other, and beyond it, the weird nonplace of the slow zone, the other gates, and the ruins of a thirteen-hundred-world galactic empire that humanity aspired to salvage. Naomi was right. It didn’t matter whether they were servants of some greater historical movement or individual, disconnected lives suffering the consequences of their own choices. It didn’t change what they had to do.

  The Giambattista reached a minimum in their vector curve and shut down their drive. A few seconds later, the Roci did the same, but by then, the sides of the giant ship were already sliding open. In the starlight, the thousands of tiny cheap boats looked like spores being thrown to the wind by a dark fungus, visible more by the starlight they blocked than by any actual color or shape of their own. This close, the ring gate dwarfed them. He couldn’t keep from seeing it as a massive milky eye, staring blindly down at a sun that was hardly more than the brightest star among billions.

  The connection request came to his monitor. Bobbie Draper. He accepted, and her face appeared on his screen. Her powered armor made her unhelmeted head seem small. Voices behind her spoke in Belter cant so fast that he couldn’t make out the words.

  “First wave’s ready to go,” she said. “Permission to deploy?”

  “Granted,” Holden said. “But, Bobbie? Really, really don’t die out there.”

  “No one lives forever, sir,” Bobbie said, “but as long as it doesn’t compromise the mission, I’ll try to live through it.”

  “Thanks.”

  One by one, and then in ragged groups, the small, weak chemical rockets began to ignite. All of them together didn’t have the power of the Roci’s reactor, but they didn’t need it. Their whole lives were the space from the ring gate to the station in the center of the slow zone. For most of them, less than that. And only one of them had Bobbie and Amos and their ground force. As Holden watched, the boats shifted like a flock of starlings, became a single, moving shape on an imaginary, tactical wind, and burned toward the gate.