Babylon's Ashes
“I’ll leave you one,” Amos said, “but I think we’ll get a head start without you.”
“Wait,” Holden said. “We?”
“We’re cycling out now,” Clarissa Mao said. “Wish us luck.”
Chapter Seven: Clarissa
Her second year in prison, Clarissa had agreed to participate in a poetry course that the prison chaplain had put together. She hadn’t had much hope for anything to come out of it, but it was half an hour every week she could sit in a gray-green room with steel chairs bolted to the floor and half a dozen of her fellow inmates and do something that wasn’t watching censored entertainment feeds or sleeping.
It had been a disaster from the start.
Of the men and women who came there each week, only she and the chaplain had been to university. Two of the women were so dosed with antipsychotics that they were barely present at all. One of the men—a serial rapist who’d killed his stepdaughters by torturing them with a chemical stun spray until they stopped breathing—was so taken with a section of Pope’s Essay on Man that he’d compose hour-long epics in rhyming couplets that didn’t quite scan. His favorite subjects were the injustice of a legal system that didn’t allow enough for character and his own sexual prowess. And there was a round-faced boy who seemed too young to have done anything deserving a life in the hole who wrote sonnets about gardens and sunlight that were more painful than any of the rest, though for different reasons.
Clarissa’s own contributions had been minimal at first. She’d tried some free verse about the possibility of redemption, but she’d read Carlos Pinnani and Anneke Swinehart and HD at her literature tutor’s insistence, so she knew her work wasn’t good. Worse, she knew why it wasn’t good: She didn’t really believe her thesis. On the few occasions she considered shifting to a different subject—fathers, regret, grief—it seemed less like catharsis and more like strict reportage. Her life had been squandered, and whether she said it in pentameter or not didn’t seem to matter much.
She quit because of the nightmares. She didn’t talk about those to anyone, but the medics knew. She might be able to keep the exact content of the dreams to herself, but the medical monitor logged her heartbeats and the activity in the various parts of her brain. The poetry made them come more often and more vividly. Usually, they were of her digging through something repulsive—shit or rotting meat or something—trying to reach someone buried in it before they ran out of air. When she stopped attending, they faded back. Once a week, say, instead of nightly.
Which wasn’t to say that the course hadn’t borne fruit. Three weeks after she’d told the chaplain that she didn’t want to be part of his little study anymore, she’d woken up in the middle of the night fully rested and alert and calm with a sentence in her head as clear as if she’d just heard it spoken. I have killed, but I am not a killer because a killer is a monster, and monsters aren’t afraid. She’d never spoken the words aloud. Never written them down. They’d become her words of power, a private prayer too sacred to give form. She went back to them when she needed them.
I have killed, but I am not a killer …
“We’re cycling out now,” she said, her mouth dry and sticky, her heart fluttering in her chest.
… because a killer is a monster …
“Wish us luck.”
… and monsters aren’t afraid. She cut the transmission, hoisted the recoilless rifle, and nodded to Amos. His grin, half hidden by the curve of his helmet, was boyish and calm. The outer door of the airlock slid soundlessly open on an abyss filled with starlight. Amos took the edge of the airlock, hauling himself forward and then ducking back in case someone was there waiting to shoot. When no one did, he grabbed a handhold and swung himself out, spinning so that the suit’s mag boots would land on the ship’s skin. She followed less gracefully. And less certain of herself.
The body of the Rocinante under her feet, she looked back at the drive cone. The hull of the ship was smooth and hard, studded here and there with blocky PDC mounts, the clustered mouths of thrusters, the black and deep-sighted eyes of sensor arrays. She held her rifle at the ready, finger near the trigger, but not on it the way that the Martian marine had shown her. Trigger discipline, she’d called it. Clarissa wished that she was the one trapped in the airlock and Bobbie Draper could be here instead.
“Moving forward, Peaches. You watch our six.”
“Understood,” she said, and started walking slowly backward, her boots grabbing to the ship and then letting go only to grab hold again. It felt like the ship itself was trying to keep her from spinning away into the stars. No enemies popped up as they moved around the curve of the ship, but to her right, the body of the Azure Dragon appeared like a whale rising up from the deep. It was so close to the Roci, she could have turned off her boots and jumped to it. The light of the sun streaming up from below threw harsh shadows across a hull scarred and flaking in places where too many years of hard radiation had scoured the coatings into a white, fragile glaze. It made the Roci seem solid and new by comparison. Something flickered behind her, throwing her shadow and Amos’ out before her. She took a slow, stuttering breath. Nothing had attacked them yet.
They were the attackers.
“Well, shit,” Amos said, and at once, Naomi’s voice was on the common channel.
“What are you seeing, Amos?”
A small window appeared in the corner of Clarissa’s helmet, the HUD showing the stretch of hull behind her. The three bright yellow spiders stood in a cloud of sparks. Two were braced against the hull, ready to haul back a section of ceramic and steel, while the third cut it free.
“All right,” Naomi said. “They’re going to get between the hulls.”
“Not if me and Peaches have anything to say about it. Right, Peaches?”
“Right,” Clarissa said, and turned to see the enemy with her own eyes. The brightness of the welding torch forced her helmet to dim, protecting her eyes. It was like the three mechs stayed the same, and the stars all around them winked out. There was nothing left but the people who wanted to hurt her and Amos and the darkness.
“You ready?” Amos asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Not a lot. Let’s see what we can do before they notice.”
Clarissa crouched close to the hull, lifted her rifle, sighted down it. With the magnification on, she could see the human form cradled in the mech—arms, legs, head encased in a suit not so different from her own. She dropped the bright red dot of the sight on the helmet, put her finger on the trigger, and squeezed. The helmet jerked back, like it was startled, and the remaining two mechs turned and pointed yellow steel legs at them.
“Get moving!” Amos shouted as he jumped into the black sky. Clarissa turned off her mag boots and leaped after him, almost too late. A white line appeared on the hull where she’d been, the bullet gone off behind them before her suit could even warn her it was coming. The suit thrusters kicked on, driving her out and shifting her unpredictably as it avoided the string of bullets she couldn’t see except as lines in her HUD.
“Keep ’em busy, Peaches,” Amos said. “I’ll be right back.”
He shot off, angling forward and around the body of the Azure Dragon. Clarissa turned, letting the suit push her in the opposite direction, putting the horizon of the Rocinante between her and the mechs. Her heart sounded like a ticking in her ears; her body shook. The red dot found the welding mech, and she pulled the trigger, missing with the first round. The second struck, and the mech rocked a little under the unexpected thrust of escaping volatile gas. Her suit threw up an alert, and she thought it was malfunctioning until she looked at her leg and saw the blood there. She’d been shot. It was like a point of intellectual interest.
“Report!” Naomi was shouting. Clarissa meant to say something, but the mechs were scuttling across the Roci toward her, and it took all her attention to retreat and return fire.
“I got a boarding party back here, waiting to go,” Amos said.
> “How many?” Naomi barked.
“Five,” Amos said. And then, “Four now. Now three.”
The stars were coming back, but they didn’t seem as bright as before. The hull was glowing under the light of the sun, now almost directly overhead. The mechs crawled toward her faster, like something out of a nightmare. One scuttled past the barrel of a PDC and vanished.
“Got one,” Alex said, and Clarissa laughed. But her attention slipped. She’d pulled out too far from the hull. She had to get back into cover. She dove toward the Roci, but too fast. She hit with her feet, trying to roll with the impact the way she’d learned as a girl in her self-defense classes. Her sense of up and down swam, and for a moment she was falling into the stars.
“How you doing, Peaches?” Amos asked, but she was moving. Rushing backward away from the remaining mech. Their friend’s unexpected death by PDC had slowed them, made them more cautious. She went farther around the Roci, paused to line up a shot, and waited for the enemy to walk into it. It was hard. The sun was in her eyes now, and the helmet struggled to keep it from blinding her. Her leg ached, but it didn’t hurt. She wondered if that was normal. The mech lurched into view, and she fired, driving it back. How many rounds had she used? It was on the HUD someplace, but she couldn’t remember where. She fired again, and saw a small green six become a five. So. Five rounds left. She waited, a hunter in her blind. She could do this. The red dot jittered and shifted. She tried to bring it back in line. She could do this …
“Peaches!” Amos shouted. “Your six!”
Clarissa spun. The Azure Dragon loomed behind her, the sun high above. She’d run back so far, she’d looped. And arcing up over the enemy ship, two bright, moving shapes. The crew of the Azure Dragon wouldn’t be able to force their way onto the Rocinante, but they could have some small vengeance here. There was no place for her to take cover. She could only stand here and face the remnants of the boarding party descending toward her or charge into the guns of the remaining mech.
“Amos?” she said.
“Go to the airlock! Get back inside!”
She raised her gun, aimed at one of the incoming figures. When she fired, they shifted out of the bullet’s path. Her HUD reported fast-movers. It was time to go. She turned toward the drive cone. It seemed farther away than she expected. The suit thrusters kicked in, and she skimmed along, a meter above the hull like a bird flying just above the surface of a lake. Something exploded in her arm, spinning her. Her HUD told her what she already knew. Another wound. The suit was already squeezing at her shoulder to hold as much blood in as it could. To her left, a flash of yellow. The mech, riding plumes of its own thrusters, and coming closer. She dropped her rifle, and it fell away behind her. With one arm, she couldn’t aim it anyway, and a little less mass meant a little more speed.
This was it. This was how she died. The idea was weirdly consoling. She’d end here, under billions of stars. In the unending, unshielded light of the sun, fighting for her friends. It felt bright, like a hero’s death. Not the cold fading away on a hard, gray cot in the prison infirmary she’d expected. How strange that this should feel like victory. Time seemed to slow, and she wondered if maybe she’d triggered her implants by mistake. That would be silly. Amping up her nervous system would do her exactly no good when all her speed came from the thruster’s nozzle. But no. It was only fear and the certainty that she was rushing to her death.
Naomi and Alex were shouting in her ears. Amos too. She couldn’t make sense of any of it. It occurred to her like a conclusion she was watching someone else make that Amos might feel bad when she was gone. She should have told him how grateful she was for every day he’d given her outside the hole. Her helmet alerted. She had to start braking or she’d overshoot the ship. She killed the thrusters and flipped, more from a sense of obligation than from any real hope of living. One of two boarders was spinning away sunward, arms and legs flailing and out of control. The other was above her with their back turned, facing a fast-moving body that had to be Amos. The mech flickered, drawing closer. When she started braking, it seemed to surge toward her, an illusion of relative velocity, but with enough truth to end her.
And then, inexplicably, the mech driver slumped against his harness. The mech arms waved, suddenly uncontrolled. One reached down, gouging the hull and sending the great yellow machine spinning away from the Rocinante and toward the stars. She watched, uncomprehending, until a hand grabbed her uninjured shoulder and an arm looped across her back. In the bright sunlight, the other suit’s helmet was opaque. She didn’t understand what had happened until she heard the voice over her radio.
“It’s all right,” Holden said. “I’ve got you.”
Amos woke her. His wide face and bald head seemed like a dream. But that was likely just the drugs playing with her perceptions.
The regrowth cocktail did strange things to her mind, even if the painkillers didn’t. Given the choice of feeling numb and stupid or alert and in pain, she chose pain. Wide elastic restraints held her to the bed of the medical bay. The autodoc fed her body what it needed, and only occasionally threw out errors, confused by the leakage from her after-market endocrine system. Her humerus was shattered, but growing back together. The first bullet had carved a groove ten centimeters long through the muscles of her thigh and shocked the bone, but didn’t break it.
“You okay, Peaches? I brought you some food, and I was just going to leave it for you, but you were … You looked …” He waved a hand.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I mean all shot up, but I’m fine.”
He sat on the side of her bed, and she realized they were under thrust. The smell of artificial peach cobbler was inviting and nauseating at the same time. She undid her restraints and sat up on her good elbow.
“Did we win?” she asked.
“Oh hell yeah. Two prisoners. Data core off the Azure Dragon. They tried to scrub it, but between Naomi and the Roci, we’ll put it back together. Bobbie’s straight-up pissed that she missed the action.”
“Maybe next time,” she said, and Holden came into the room.
He and Amos nodded to each other. The big man left.
“We should probably have had this talk before,” Holden said.
The Roci’s captain stood at the bedside, looking like he wasn’t sure whether to sit. She couldn’t say whether it was the trauma or the drugs, but she was surprised to notice that he didn’t look like her mental image of him. In her mind, his cheeks were higher, his jaw wider. The blue of his eyes more icy. This man looked—not older. Only different. His hair was messy. There were lines forming around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. Not there yet, but coming. His temples were touched with gray. That wasn’t what made him look different, though. The James Holden who was king of her personal mythology was sure of himself, and this man was profoundly ill at ease.
“Okay,” she said, not certain what else to say.
Holden crossed his arms. “I … um. Yeah, I didn’t really expect you to come on this ship. I’m not comfortable with it.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
He waved the comment away. “It’s made me skip this part, and I shouldn’t have. That’s on me, okay? I know you and Amos trekked across a big part of North America after the rocks came down, and I know that you handled yourself just fine then. And you have experience on ships.”
Experience as a terrorist and murderer, he didn’t say.
“The thing is,” he went on, “you aren’t trained for this kind of action. Going out on the float with a gun in your hand is different from being on the ground. Or being a technician inside a ship. You’ve got those implants, but using them out there, you’d have wound up crashing out and choking to death on your own vomit, right?”
“Probably,” she said.
“So going out again like that’s not something you should do. Amos took you because … because he wants you to know you belong here.”
“But I don’t,” she said. ?
??That’s what you’re saying.”
“Not everyplace Amos goes, no,” Holden said. He met her gaze for the first time. He looked almost sad. She couldn’t understand why. “But as long as you’re on my ship, you’re crew. And it’s my job to protect you. I screwed that up. You don’t go into battle in a vac suit anymore. At least not until I think you’re trained. That’s an order. Understood?”
“Understood,” she said. And then, trying the word out to see how it felt in her mouth, “Understood, sir.”
He had been her sworn enemy. He had been the symbol of her failure. He’d even become a symbol, somehow, of the life she could have had if she’d made different choices. He was only a man in his early middle age that she barely knew, though they had some friends in common. He tried a smile, and she returned it. It was so little. It was something.
She finished her cobbler after he left, then closed her eyes to rest them and didn’t know she’d fallen asleep until the dream came.
She was digging through slick, black mud-sticky shit, trying to get down to where someone was buried. She had to hurry, because they were running out of air. In the dream, she could feel the wet cold against her fingers, the disgust welling up at the back of her throat. And the fear. And the heartbreaking loss that came from knowing she wouldn’t make it in time.
Chapter Eight: Dawes
The first session of Marco’s impromptu summit began when Michio Pa arrived, looking pleasant and implacable in equal measures. Her ship had docked halfway through a day cycle, so Marco only kept them for a few hours. The following three days were more punishing, the meetings lasting over thirteen hours each day without even so much as a break for meals. They’d eaten at the meeting tables while Marco laid out his vision for a grand, system-spanning network of Belter civilization.
Free spin stations, automated factories and farms, power stations hunkered close to the sun and beaming energy to the human habitations, the large-scale stripping of biological resources from the corpse of the Earth. It was a grand and beautiful vision with a scope and depth that dwarfed even the Martian terraforming project. And Marco Inaros presented it all with a ruthlessness and intensity that made the objections the rest of them brought up seem small and petty.