Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Seventeen: Holden

The girl was something like a hundred ninety-two centimeters, and she would have towered over him if she weren’t sitting down. Her hair was cut close to her scalp in what Holden figured was fashionable for adolescent Belter girls these days. There were probably hundreds of microfeeds about it, which he didn’t follow. Or maybe she was a rebel and the hairstyle was all her own. Either way, it made the slightly enlarged head less pronounced. She sat at the edge of the bench, looking around at the Rocinante’s galley like she was regretting that she’d come. The older woman she called Tía stood against the wall, scowling. A chaperone who wasn’t impressed with anything she saw.

“I’ll just be a second here,” Holden said. The software package Monica Stuart had sent him assumed a level of proficiency he didn’t have, and he’d managed somehow to turn off some of its intelligence defaults. The girl nodded tightly and plucked at her sari. Holden hoped his smile was reassuring. Or failing that, amusing. “Really. I’ve just about … Wait, wait, wait. Okay. There.”

Her image appeared in his hand terminal with tiny overlays for color correction, sound correction, and something labeled DS/3 that he didn’t know what it was. Still, she looked good.

“All right,” Holden said. “So, I figure anyone who watches this is going to know who I am. Could you maybe just say your name?”

“Alis Caspár,” she said, her voice flat. She could have been a political prisoner the way she spoke. So, it wasn’t going too well yet.

“Great,” he lied. “Okay, and where do you live?”

“Ceres Station,” she said, and then an awkward pause. “Salutorg District.”

“And, um, what do you do?”

She nodded, settling into herself. “Ever since Ceres broke away from Earth control, my family has been running a financial coordination service. Converting scrip from different corporations and governments into compatible. Mi family bist peace-loving people. The pressure that the inner planets put on the Belters is not the fault of—”

“Let me break in for just a second,” Holden said. Alis went silent, looked down. Somehow Monica made doing this seem really easy. Holden was starting to see how that might actually be the product of years of experience and practice and not something he could jump into without guidance. Except he didn’t have time for that, so he forged ahead. “When we met … we met like four hours ago … you were with some of your friends. In the corridor?”

Alis blinked, confused, and looked at Tía. The little incredulous glance was the first time the girl had looked like herself since she’d come on board.

“It was really amazing,” Holden said. “I mean, I was walking by and I saw you all there. And I was really impressed. Could you tell me about that?”

“Shin-sin?” Alis said.

“Is that what you call it? The thing with the glass balls?”

“Not glass,” Alis said. “Resin.”

“Okay, yes,” Holden said, pouring enthusiasm out toward her like dropping water onto a sponge. It all seemed to just soak in and vanish. But then Alis chuckled. It didn’t matter that it was more at him than with him. “Could you do it again? Here?”

She laughed, covering her mouth with one hand. For a long second, he thought she might call the whole thing to a halt. But then she plucked a little bag from her hip and took out four brightly colored clear spheres a little larger and softer than the marbles Holden had played with as a boy. Carefully, she set them between her fingers, resting between the second knuckles. She started singing, a high, choppy chant, and then stopped, laughed, and shook her head.

“Can’t do this,” she said. “I can’t.”

“Please, just try. It’s really great.”

“It’s dumb,” she said. “It’s kid thing.”

“I’m … really immature.”

When she looked at Tía again, Holden glanced too. The old woman was glowering just as deeply as before, but there was a glimmer of amusement in her ancient eyes. Alis settled, laughed, settled again, and started chanting. When the rhythm was established, she started clapping her hands together gently, and passing the spheres from hand to hand, making them seem to dance independently of her. Every now and then the chant would hit a syncopated passage so that one of the balls could drop into her palm and get tossed across to be captured between her opposite fingers. When she reached the end, she stopped, looked shyly toward Holden, and shook her head.

“Better with two people,” she said.

“Like partners?” he said.

“Dui.” Her glance behind him was no more than a flutter, but Holden knew what it meant, and a touch of glee leapt into his heart. He turned to the stone-faced chaperone, who hoisted an eyebrow at him.

“Do you … Tía?” he said. “Do you know how to do shin-sin?”

She snorted in military-grade derision. When she came forward, Alis made room for her and handed over two of the spheres. They seemed smaller between Tía’s thick fingers. The old woman lifted her chin, and for a moment, Holden knew exactly what she’d looked like at Alis’ age.

The chant was more complex this time, sung as a round with the rhythms of one part informing and supporting whatever was happening in the other woman’s voice. The clear, colored spheres danced between their hands as they clapped palms together, crossing and recrossing, adding their claps to the song. At the moments of syncopation, they tossed the spheres across the space between them and caught them in their knuckles. By the end, both women were grinning. At the end, Tía tossed all the spheres up one after another so quickly they were all in the air at the same moment and then caught them in one hand. It wasn’t a trick that could have worked at a full g.

Holden clapped and the older woman nodded, accepting his applause like a queen.

“That is amazing. It’s wonderful,” Holden said. “How do you learn how to do that?”

Alis shook her head in disbelief at the strange Earther and his childish delights. “Is just shin-sin,” she said. And then her eyes went wide, and the blood drained from her face.

“Mr. Holden,” Fred Johnson said. “When you have a moment?”

“Yes, sure,” Holden said. “We were just … Yeah. Give me a second.”

“I’ll be in Ops.” Fred smiled and nodded to the two Belter women. “Ladies.”

Holden closed down the software, thanked Alis and Tía, and walked them to the airlock, out and into the docks. After they’d gone, he watched the captured video—girl and woman with their voices and hands playing against each other, the not quite marbles weaving between them like a third player in the game. It was exactly the kind of thing he’d hoped for. He ran the compression and sent it to Tycho Station and Monica Stuart, just the same way he had the others.

He’d hoped to get a lot more done. He’d interviewed a researcher who worked on Ceres Station, self-educated through networked tutorials, plying him with yeasty beer until the older man was loose and comfortable enough to wax passionate about the beauty of tardigrades. He’d talked to a nutritionist from the hydroponic fields who’d only agreed if she could explain the water shortage situation on Ceres, and wound up being the clearest voice of grief and fear that he’d heard. He’d talked to a man who was alleged to be the oldest Belter on the station, who told a long and probably apocryphal story about the first licensed brothel to open there.

And that was all. So far. Four interviews, none of them terribly long. Hopefully it was enough for Monica to work with. She’d promised him that a lot could be saved in editing.

The docks weren’t as busy as he was used to seeing them. Especially after the press and barely controlled chaos of Luna, Ceres seemed wounded. Still reeling from the blows it had suffered. The carts and loading mechs stood idle, waiting for a ship to arrive with supplies or some warehouse on the station that still had something worth sending away.

He’d heard once about reperfusion injuries. When a limb had been pressed until all the blood was gone, the flood when it came back could break vessels, bleed into the cellular matrix. He remembered thinking at the time how strange it was for something normal, necessary, and life-giving to cause damage just by showing back up. Ceres was like that now, but he couldn’t tell if the combined fleet was the blood returning or if some other flood would have to come before Ceres could take stock of how badly it had been wounded.

On his way back in, he passed Gor Droga and Amos in the locker room running down a short that was making one of the ventilation fans run slow. Clarissa Mao was talking to them both from down in engineering. It was the sort of problem that a ship with a full crew had the spare cycles to address. At the lift, he had to wait for Chava Lombaugh to squeeze past him before he got on.

The truth was that with all of Fred’s people and Holden’s, the Rocinante still had a little less than the full crew she’d been meant to carry. That it felt crowded to him wasn’t the ship design, but his own habits and expectations. A full crew would be tighter, more compressed, more like a normal Navy ship. Holden knew that. He even knew that in some ways having the extra people would keep them all safer. The Rocinante was built with a lot of redundant backups. The crew was supposed to be the same way. It hadn’t worked out that way, though. Another mechanic wouldn’t be Amos. Another pilot wouldn’t be Alex. People were more than the roles they played in the function of the ship, and they weren’t replaceable. And what was true of the Rocinante held for the larger field of humanity as well.

The lift stopped. Fred Johnson looked up from the ship controls, nodding to Holden. The lights were at the same dim settings that Alex preferred, and the backsplash from the screens left Fred’s skin looking darker than it was. Maura Patel sat across the deck, diagnostics spooling across the communications controls on her screen and headphones over her ears. Holden dropped into a couch beside Fred’s and swiveled to face him.

“You wanted me?”

“Couple things. I’m setting up shop on Ceres for now. Avasarala’s going to recognize me as acting governor,” Fred said. “I’m pulling in all my favors. Everyone I know with any influence from the OPA. I’ll bring them here.”

“That sounds like an invitation to assassinate you.”

“The risk is necessary. I don’t know if my crew will be staying here or going to Tycho without me. I’m waiting on word from Drummer about that. One way or the other, I’ll get them out of your hair.”

“That’s … I mean, okay. But they’re sort of growing on me. So what did you really want to talk about?”

Fred nodded once, a short, hard motion. “Do you think Draper will be able to speak for Mars?”

Holden laughed. “Like speak for ambassador speak for? Negotiate with the OPA? Because I was pretty sure that was up to Mars.”

“We may not be in a position to wait for them to get their ducks in a row. Smith’s out, and Richards is in, but an opposition coalition’s formed that want to put investigating the remaining military ahead of anything else.”

“You mean like ahead of fighting the war?”

“For example. Richards and Avasarala are working on it, but I need a Martian face with me if I’m going to make this combined navy hold together. With my background, I can represent the best of Earth to the Belt. I’ve been doing that for years, and I’ve built up a lot of trust. But unless I have a representative of Mars, I won’t be bringing anything new to the table. Especially with the Free Navy flying Martian ships. Inaros’ stock is very high right now.”

“Seriously? Because it looks a lot like he just walked away from the biggest port in the Belt.”

Fred shrugged eloquently. “His apologists are good at their jobs. And everything is in the shadow of what he did to Earth. Sorrento-Gillis, Gao, all of them. They underestimated the anger in the Belt. And the desperation. People want Inaros to be a hero, and so what he does, they interpret as heroism.”

“Even running away?”

“He won’t only run away. Don’t know what he’s got in mind, but he isn’t about to retire. And Ceres Station … it’s a white elephant now. Just keeping the environmental systems running isn’t going to be trivial. We may have to consolidate. Concentrate people physically and abandon parts of the station. Which will be interpreted as Earth and Mars kicking Belters out of their homes by Inaros and his cabal.”

Holden ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah, that’s messed up.”

“It’s politics. And it’s why we need the OPA. There is support for us in the Belt, but it needs cultivation. And we have a few things going for us. They can call themselves a navy, but they’re amateurs. The kind of roughshod that thinks discipline is the same as punishment. Rumor is there’s already some dissent in Marco’s leadership. Probably, it’s over his tactics with Ceres. I still don’t understand why Dawes would let him walk away from the station, but … well, clearly he did. And Avasarala’s keeping a lid on Earth. If the UN had crumbled the way Mars has, I don’t know what we’d do.”

“This,” Holden said. “Try to gather some allies. Pretty much the same thing you’re going to do anyway. Only with less hope that it would work.”

Fred stretched, his joints popping, then sighed back down into the gel of the couch. The diagnostics on the comm panel flickered, and Patel tapped the run results. As far as she was concerned, the two of them might as well not have been there.

“You’re probably right,” Fred said. “Still, I’m glad it’s not worse. Not yet, anyway.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and Inaros will get himself killed without us.”

“It wouldn’t be enough,” Fred said. “Earth’s broken. It will be for generations. Mars may or may not collapse, but there’s still the gates. Still the colony worlds. Still all the pressures that keep the Belt on the edge of starvation and even less of what makes it valuable. There’s no getting back to status quo ante. We’ve got to move forward. Which brings us back to Draper. You’ve worked with her. Can she do the job?”

“Honestly, I think the best person to ask is her. We all know her. We all like her. I’d trust her with my ship, and I wouldn’t trust you with that. If she thinks she can, then I think she can.”

“And if she thinks she can’t?”

“Then ask Avasarala,” Holden said.

“I already know her opinion. All right, thank you. And … I’m going to regret asking. Do I want to know what you were doing with those two women in the galley?”

Maura Patel shifted in her chair. The first sign that she was listening to them at all.

“Filming them. That thing with clapping and marbles? It was really visually interesting, and Monica said that was something to be looking for. I’m doing these interviews, and she’s helping me edit and distribute them.”

“And why are you doing that?”

“It’s what’s missing in all of this,” Holden said. “It’s what let things get this bad. We don’t see each other as people. Even the feeds are always about weird things. Aberrations. All the times that a Belt station doesn’t have a riot? Those days aren’t news. It has to be an uprising or a protest or a system failure. Just being here, living a normal life? That’s not part of what the people on Earth or Mars hear about.”

“So you—” Fred closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re reaching for more unapproved press releases? You remember starting a war that way once?”

“Exactly. That was talking about an aberration, because I thought that was what people needed to know. But they need all the context too. What it’s like to be a teenager with his first crush on Ceres. Or to worry about your dad getting old on Pallas Station. The things that make people here the same as people everywhere.”

“Belters rain hell down on Earth,” Fred said slowly, “and you respond by trying to humanize Belters? You know there’s going to be a raft of people who call you a traitor for that.”

“I’d be doing the same thing on Earth, but I’m not there right now. If people call me names, they do. I’m just trying to make it a little harder for people to feel comfortable killing each other.”

Fred’s screen put up an alert. He glanced at it, dismissed it. “You know if anyone else came up with the idea that they ought to put themselves in the middle of a war so they could sing songs and hold hands and sow peace for all mankind, I’d call it narcissistic opportunism. Maybe megalomania.”

“But it’s not anyone else, so we’re good?”

Fred lifted his hands. A gesture made of equal weights amusement and despair. “I’ll want a private word with Draper.”

“I’ll let her know,” Holden said, standing up.

“I can reach her myself. And Holden …”

He turned back. In the dimness, Fred’s eyes were so dark the iris and the pupil were the same shade of black. He looked old. Weary. Focused. “Yes?” Holden said.

“The song those two were singing? Get the lyrics translated before you broadcast it. Just in case.”