Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Sixteen: Alex

“Seriously,” Arnold Mfume, one of Fred Johnson’s spare pilots, said. “You used a rail gun as a drive? To pull a ship up from a decaying orbit?”

Alex shrugged, but the little bloom of pride in his chest was warm all the same. “Naomi did all the math on it,” he said. “I was mostly babysitting the Roci while it followed her orders. But … well, yeah.”

“That is fucking insane,” Arnold said through his laughter.

“Didn’t really have any other choices,” Alex said. “We wind up doin’ a certain amount of improvisation, one way and another.”

Across the table from him, Sandra Ip smiled. He didn’t know if the way her eyes were locked on his was a sign of how drunk she’d gotten, the beginning of an erotic invitation, or a little bit of both. Either way, he found himself smiling back.

“Wish I’d been there,” Mfume said.

“I kind of wish I hadn’t,” Alex said. “It’s a lot more fun now that it’s not going on anymore. At the time, it was more in the oh-shit-we’re-all-going-to-die category.”

“That’s what adventures are,” Bobbie said, and Ip’s lazy smile tracked over toward her without changing much. So more about drunk maybe. “Shitty things that make for good stories later.”

“I heard you went hand-to-hand with a protomolecule soldier,” Mfume said.

“That’s not even a good story,” Bobbie said. Her smile kept it from being awkward, but that path of conversation was definitely closed. Mfume shifted, and Alex could see the temptation to push. To maybe get Bobbie to elaborate, even if it was only a little bit more.

“Now, you want to talk about flying,” Alex said, “you should hear about when Bobbie and me were trying to outrun the Free Navy.”

“Pretty sure we told that story,” Bobbie said.

Alex blinked and looked into his glass. She was right. He had told that story, and since they’d all sat down, Ip might not be the only one well on her way to tipsy. “Right,” he said. “In that case, you want to talk about flyin’, you should get another drink.”

He lifted his arm and leaned back, trying to catch the server’s eye.

The Blue Frog was a port bar, and if Alex had to guess, he’d say it had seen better days. The round tables hunched together within larger, swooping, glowing structures that defined the booths that he and the others leaned against. Only the lights seemed dirty and the table was chipped. Different menus detailed the services of the bar: food, drink, pharmaceutical, sex. An empty stage promised live music or burlesque or karaoke, only later. Not right now. And more than that, there was a smell to the place. Not unpleasant, not rotten, but tired. Like spent oil or old sealant.

The expanded crew of the Rocinante were scattered among three tables. To Alex’s right, Amos sat grinning like a vaguely ominous Buddha with Clarissa Mao, Sun-yi Steinberg, and a shirtless young man who Alex suspected had been ordered from a menu. To his left, Naomi and Chava Lombaugh were locked in a vigorous conversation, while Gor Droga and Zach Kazantzakis leaned back, keeping out of it. The other tables were dominated by a mixture of Earth and Mars navy crews. The crispness of their military uniforms and haircuts seemed out of place, like they were rebuking the architecture for being only what it was. Here and there locals hunched together like they were defending a position against a siege. Covert glances of the natives of Ceres didn’t carry a sense of threat as much as bewilderment. The music that leaked from hidden speakers stayed lower than the conversation, shimmering major scale notes making an ambiguous wash of sound, neither celebratory nor sad.

The manager—a dark-skinned man with cold blue eyes and a permanent near-smirk—caught Alex’s glance, nodded to him, and sent a server trotting over. The smile on the woman’s face seemed almost genuine. Alex ordered another round for the table, and by the time his attention came back to the conversation, the topic had moved on.

“There were rules about that in the service,” Bobbie said.

“But there were ways to get around them, right?” Ip said. “I mean, you aren’t telling me everyone in the Martian Navy’s celibate.”

Bobbie shrugged. “If you’re in a relationship with someone above you or below you in the chain of command, it’s not a joke. Dishonorable discharge, loss of benefits, maybe jail time. That takes a lot of the shine off. But I wasn’t Navy. I’m—I was a marine. If there was a little cross-training between services, it wasn’t a problem until it started messing up operational efficiency.”

“I heard they put chemicals in the food to lower people’s libido,” Arnold said.

Bobbie shrugged. “If they did, they didn’t put in enough.”

“What about on the Rocinante?” Ip said, turning her full attention to Alex. There was definitely more than just alcohol in the question. “Do you have rules against cheap, sleazy fraternization?”

Alex chuckled, not certain whether he was getting excited or uncomfortable. “Captain and the XO have been together damn near since we got on the ship. It’d be a difficult rule to enforce on the rest of us.”

Ip’s smile shifted. “You used to be a Navy boy, didn’t you? You and the gunny here ever …”

Alex regretted ordering the next round. He was going to need his wits about him pretty soon here. “Me and Bobbie? Nah. That ain’t a thing that happened.”

“We haven’t actually shipped out together that much,” Bobbie said. “And anyway … No offense, Alex.”

“None taken.”

“Really?” Ip said, leaning forward. Her knee pressed against Alex’s in a way that was absolutely innocent. Unless it wasn’t, in which case it absolutely wasn’t. “Never even wanted to?”

“Well,” Bobbie said. “There was one night on Mars. I think we were both feeling a little lonely. I’d probably have made out with him if he’d asked.”

“I can’t know that,” Alex said, suddenly flushed with heat and unable to look Bobbie in the eye. “You can’t tell me that.”

Ip kept her leg pressed to his and cocked her head at him. The question was clear. Is this a thing you’re still working out? Alex smiled back at her. No, it was never really a thing.

Naomi’s voice lifted, carrying over the murmur of conversation and the music both. She was leaning over her table, finger raised to make some boozy point to Chava. He couldn’t make out the words, but he knew her tones of voice well enough to know it wasn’t anger. Not real anger anyway. For that, Naomi got quiet.

The server reappeared with a tray of drinks, and Ip leaned across to get hers, then didn’t lean all the way back. Alex felt something in the back of his mind relax. It had been a long time since he’d made this particular kind of mistake. Figured he was about due.

“Y’all excuse me for just a minute,” he said. “Need to find the head.”

“Hurry back,” Ip said.

“Count on it.”

Walking across the floor, past the bar, and to the back hall, Alex felt like something out of a bawdy joke. Soldiers pairing off after battle was about as old and worn a scenario as there was. But it had gotten that way for a reason. The tension going into battle wasn’t like any other feeling Alex had ever had, and the relief when it let up was bone-deep and intoxicating. It wasn’t only him or Ip. It wasn’t even only sex. He’d known sailors as locked down and shipshape as a training-manual picture who’d come through action and spent the hours afterward weeping or puking. There was one pilot—Genet, her name was—suffered chronic insomnia that even medication could only manage. Every night, she’d be up for an hour between two and three in the morning. Except after an action, when she slept like a baby the whole night through. It was what came of being a primate with a body built for the Pleistocene savanna. Fear and relief and lust and joy were all packed into the same little network of nerves somewhere deep in his amygdalae, and sometimes they touched.

The flight out from Earth had been short and hard and seemed to last forever. The long-range sensors showed no active threats between the ports on Luna and the Belt, but all the way out the thought hung in the air like smoke: Were there rocks falling undetected toward Earth? Toward Mars? Was Marco Inaros three steps ahead of them, the way he always seemed to be? Even Fred Johnson had seemed preoccupied, pacing through the halls with his hands clasped behind his back. The Battle of Ceres was coming. The first fight in the war since the first straight-up ambush. The combined fleet would find out just how badass a bunch of Belters piloting stolen Martian warships really were, and there was reason to expect that would be pretty damned badass.

When the drive plumes had lit up the scans of Ceres, Alex felt it in his throat. Long-range battle. Torpedoes launched at extreme range in unpredictable vectors, designed to come in fast and hard, hoping to slip by the PDCs. He wondered if Mars had ever managed to build a good stealth torpedo, and if the traitors who’d supplied the Free Navy would have traded in them if they did exist. He’d spent hours in his crash couch, chasing every anomaly the Roci’s sensor arrays spat out, whether they were above threat threshold or not. When he did sleep, it was all he dreamed about.

When the data came back that the Free Navy ships were burning away, scattered as seeds, he—like every pilot in the combined fleet—looked for the strategy in it. The loops of gravity and thrust that showed where the battle would come together, what the enemy had in its mind. Every time he came up with nothing felt like a threat. The certainty that there was a pattern and he just wasn’t smart enough to see it knotted at the base of his skull until his eyes throbbed. His only comfort was that the crews of the Earth and Mars navies, who lived and breathed battle tactics, were as frustrated as he was. When the Free Navy’s trap snapped shut, they’d all die surprised together.

Only it kept not happening.

When the first ships reached the docks—two troop carriers from Earth, one from Mars—Alex had held his breath. Ceres was the port city of the Belt, and it was sitting there as unguarded and inviting as bait in a trap. Traffic control gave permission to approach. The combined fleet took berths, soldiers spilled out into the docks, the moment for resistance came and went. Reports started filtering back, many of them to Fred Johnson. The Free Navy was gone. There was no armed resistance. No soldiers, only a handful of booby traps, empty storerooms and reservoirs, and a security force stripped to its skeleton and anxious to surrender to anyone willing to take charge.

The battle for Ceres Station never came. Instead, the combined fleet and the local engineering unions put together an emergency response team that was even now jerry-rigging the environmental systems and recycling plants to keep the station from collapsing. Fred Johnson had spent all his time before the Rocinante docked trading tightbeam messages with Avasarala on Luna and whoever would answer back from Mars, where the no-confidence vote on Smith had ballooned to a full-scale constitutional crisis. After they’d docked, Fred, a security detail in tow, had vanished into a whirlwind of meetings with local OPA groups, unions, and the thin, traumatized remains of the administrative staff.

The rest of the crew went to the bar.

It had been strange at first—still was strange when he thought about it—watching the people of Ceres Station react to their new invaders. Everyone Alex met seemed built out of confusion and relief and anger and a kind of formless grief that spread out through the station hallways like a vapor. Ceres was a huge port, independent of the inner planets for years, and now maybe reconquered by them. Or maybe rescued. No one seemed to know if the combined fleet was the avenging hammer of Earth or the final proof that Fred Johnson’s OPA was a legitimate political force. Or if maybe something bigger and stranger had happened.

The smiles of the Ceres natives were tentative, and they carried shards of rage and loss in their eyes. Even here at the Blue Frog, where the crews were welcomed and served the best of what little remained, the fleet and the natives pulled apart, uncertain of each other. Segregated by choice and history. Alex found himself thinking of it as Belters at the bar and inners at the tables, but that wasn’t true. Ip and Mfume and all of Fred’s people were OPA. Even the divisions between people seemed new, and nobody was quite sure yet which unspoken rules applied.

Alex came out of the men’s room to a wall of sound. In the few minutes he’d been indisposed, someone had cranked up the karaoke and was shouting out a boozy version of Noko Dada’s version of “No Volveré” but without any of the harmony parts. He paused at the end of the bar and looked out over the tables, hoping to find a corner where he could have a quiet word with Sandra Ip away from the stage.

Holden was at a table by himself, hunched over a white mug with a ferocious scowl on his face. Alex felt a tug of anxiety. Back at his table, Bobbie and Ip were talking over each other while Mfume laughed. Ip looked over toward him, grinned, and patted the seat beside her. He held up a finger—one minute—and sloped over toward Holden.

“Hey there, partner,” Alex said. “You holding together all right?”

Holden looked up and around like he was surprised to find himself there. Then, after a moment, “Yeah, no. I’m all right.”

Alex tilted his head. “Seems like you just said three different things in a row.”

“I … ah. Yeah, I did, didn’t I? I’m fine.” He nodded at the small gold packet in Alex’s hand. “What’s that?”

Alex held it up. He’d gotten the packet from a dispenser in the men’s room. The foil had a dragon’s head embossed on it and some nonsense kanji that didn’t mean anything.

Holden’s brow furrowed. “Sobriety meds?”

Alex felt himself blushing and tried to hide it by smiling. “Well, I’m thinking I may be in a situation here pretty soon where everybody needs to be able to agree to whatever they’re agreeing to.”

“Always a gentleman,” Holden said.

“Mama raised me right. But seriously, are you doing okay? Because you’re staring at that coffee like it called you bad names.”

Holden glanced down at his cup. The song sloped down to the rough trill at the end. The applause was scattered and weak. Holden turned his coffee mug on the table, setting the black surface dancing. The porcelain scraped against the tabletop until the chords of a new tune crashed out and a woman’s voice starting on a Belter Creole cover of Cheb Khaled drowned it out. When Holden spoke, his voice barely carried over the music.

“I keep thinking about my dad calling Belters skinnies right in front of Naomi. And the way she took it.”

“Family can be rough,” Alex said. “Especially when emotions are kind of high.”

“True, but that’s not what’s …” Holden opened his hands. A gesture of frustration. “I always thought that if you gave people all the information, they’d do the right thing, you know? Not always, maybe, but usually. More often than when they chose to do the wrong thing anyway.”

“Everybody’s a little naïve sometimes,” Alex said, feeling as the words passed his lips that maybe he wasn’t quite following Holden’s point. Maybe he should have taken the first of the sobriety pills before he’d left the men’s room.

“I meant fact,” Holden went on as if he hadn’t heard Alex at all. “I thought if you told people facts, they’d draw their conclusions, and because the facts were true, the conclusions mostly would be too. But we don’t run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people. Naomi told me that when the rocks fell, the people on Inaros’ ship cheered. They were happy about it.”

“Yeah, well.” Alex paused, rubbing a knuckle across his upper lip. “Consider they might all be a bag of assholes.”

“They weren’t killing people. In their heads? They were striking a blow for freedom or independence. Or making it right for all the Belter kids that got shitty growth hormones. All the ships that got impounded because they were behind on the registration fees. And it’s just the same back home. Father Cesar’s a good man. He’s gentle and he’s kind and he’s funny, and to him Belters are all Free Navy and radical OPA. If someone killed Pallas, he’d be worried about what the drop in refining capacity would do before he thought about how many preschools there are on the station. Or if the station manager’s son liked writing poetry. Or that blowing the station meant that Annie down in Pallas central accounting wasn’t going to get to throw her big birthday party after all.”

“Annie?” Alex asked.

“I made her up. Whoever. The thing is I wasn’t wrong. About telling people the truth? I was right about that. I was wrong about what they needed to know. And … and maybe I can fix that. I mean, I feel like I should at least try.”

“Okay,” Alex said. He was pretty sure he’d lost the thread of whatever they were talking about a while back, but Holden seemed at least less brooding. “So that means you’re about to do something?”

Holden nodded slowly, then drank off all that was left of his coffee at once, put the mug on the table, and clapped Alex’s shoulder. “Yeah. I am. Thank you.”

“Glad I could help,” he said. And then, to Holden’s retreating back. “Least I think I am.”

Back at the table, Sandra Ip had switched to club soda. Bobbie and Arnold were comparing stories about free climbing at different gravities, and Naomi and Clarissa Mao were at the edge of the stage, getting ready to take a turn singing. Ip caught a glimpse of the foil package in Alex’s hand, and her smile was a promise that things were going to go very, very well for him. Still, she must have read something in his expression or the way he held himself when he sat down.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

Alex shrugged. “I’ll tell you when I find out.”