Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Nineteen: Pa

Iapetus Station wasn’t on the moon itself, but in locked orbit around it. The station’s design was old: two long counter-rotating arms supporting habitation rings, a central docking station on the axis. Lights glittered on the surface of the moon, marking automated stations where the ice was quarried and split. On their approach, there was a point where the station and moon and the ringed bulk of Saturn behind it were all the same size on the screen. An illusion of perspective.

The docks were almost filled with ancient water haulers that the tariffs had kept from harvesting the moon. No one was enforcing the fees anymore, and all the ships that could were taking advantage of the opportunity. Tugs flying teakettle rose up from the surface or dropped down toward it. Shipping containers filled with ice studded the hulls of the haulers like a crust of salt. The administration of Iapetus hadn’t sided with Marco and the Free Navy or against them, but they weren’t losing the chance to shrug off the strictures of Earth and Mars either. Michio watched the traffic control data and tried to see it more as liberty and freedom, less as grabbing what there was to take and getting away while the getting was good.

The comm channel opened. A request from Iapetus control. She could have let Oksana answer it, but impatience won out. “This is the Connaught,” she said.

“Bien, Connaught. Iapetus bei hier. We’re slotting the Hornblower into berth sixteen. Good to go in half an hour, yeah?”

“That’ll do.”

“Hear tús have prisoners, yeah?”

“Do. Refugees too. Hornblower’s original crew.”

“Pissed off, them?”

“Not happy,” Michio said. “Think they’ll be grateful to be in rooms that aren’t welded shut, though. Your supply officer said you’d be able to take them.”

“Can take contract here, can book passage to Earth or Mars. Or refugees, can etwas. Prisoners are their own thing.”

“Won’t have them hurt,” Michio said. “Don’t want them let free either.”

“Guests of the station,” Iapetus control said. “All marked. Good and good. And … not official, yeah? ’Gato for the load. Hydroponics were getting mighty strained with the shipments from Earth dead.”

“Glad we could help,” Michio said before she dropped the connection.

It was true too. There was something in her chest—a soft, golden feeling—that came from knowing that the people who would have suffered without her would at least suffer less. She’d spent more time on Rhea than on Iapetus, but she’d had enough experience to know what shortages of hydroponic equipment meant to a station like this. At the least, her shipments would mean the difference between uncertainty and stability. At most, between death and life.

It wouldn’t have been this way if the Belt had been allowed to grow and become independent. But Earth and Mars had kept the labor here on a leash made of soil analogues and complex organics. Now, thanks to Marco, the Belt would have a chance to bootstrap itself up into a sustainable future. Unless, thanks to Marco, it starved and collapsed in the attempt.

She hadn’t heard back from him one way or the other since she’d called her ships to refuse his orders. Statements of allegiance had come from eight of her sixteen ships. Acknowledgment from four more. Only the Ando and the Dagny Taggart had rejected her outright, and even they hadn’t taken action yet. Everyone was waiting for Marco to make an announcement. Even her. And every hour he didn’t made it seem more possible that he wouldn’t.

Other voices, though. Oh, there were others. A collective of independent prospecting vessels out of Titania needed replacement parts for their drives. A cargo ship that was also home to a family crew of twenty people suffered a catastrophic failure of their Epstein drive’s power systems and were on the drift. Vesta was putting its population on protein rationing until the food relief Michio had promised them actually arrived. Kelso Station, in an irrational fit of altruism, had sent relief supplies to Earth and was now facing shortages of water and helium-3 for the reactors.

Centuries of technology and progress had allowed humanity to create a place for itself in the vacuum and radiation of space, but nothing had overcome entropy or ideology or bad judgment. The millions of skin-bound complications of salt water and minerals that were human bodies scattered throughout the Belt still needed food and air and clean water, energy and shelter. Ways to keep from drowning in their own shit or cooking in their waste heat. And through accidents of Marco’s charisma and her own idealism, she’d become responsible for it all.

But here was her start. The supplies of the Hornblower, instead of flying through gates and away forever, would feed Iapetus and give the station there the reserves to help others. The Connaught and her sister ships didn’t need to solve every distribution issue. Only get the supplies, make them available, and let market forces and the communal nature of the Belt take over from there.

She hoped it was enough.

Oksana, at her station, laughed. It wasn’t mirth, so much as a kind of amazed disbelief.

“Que?” Evans asked.

Oksana shook her head. Michio had known her long enough to read the gesture and the ghost of shame that came with it. Not while I’m on duty. Keeping that division between being family during family time and crew during crew time had always been important to Oksana. Usually, it was important to Michio too, but between waiting for a berth and dreading news of Marco, any distraction was a gift.

“What is it, Oksana?” Michio said.

“Just something odd on the newsfeeds out of Ceres, sir,” she said.

“Well, I don’t think it’s going to disrupt us. Put it on screen.”

“Sir,” Oksana said, and Michio’s controls vanished, replaced by a professional-looking news video, crawl at the bottom and filtering options along the side. And looking out of her screen, the earnest, open face of James Holden. For a moment, Michio was on the Behemoth again, and then she was back. Like a long-forgotten smell or the taste of a food eaten only in childhood, James Holden carried an echo of the guilt and fear, a reminder of violence.

Images flickered as Holden spoke: a terribly old Belter man with merry eyes, two women—one young and one older—clapping hands together in some game like batbat or pattycake or shin-sin, a professionally dressed woman with dark skin and a sober expression standing at a hydroponics tank so long it curved up in the distance with the body of the station. My name is James Holden, and I want to introduce you to some of the people I’ve met here on Ceres. I want you to hear their stories. Come to know them the way you do your shipmates and neighbors. I hope you’ll carry a little bit of these people with you the way I do now.

“Fuck is this?” Evans asked, laughter in his voice. “Watch the trained Belter dancing for your fun?”

“No, it’s Holden,” Oksana said. “He’s OPA.”

“En serio?”

“Johnson’s OPA,” Michio said. “He works for Earth too. And Mars.”

On the screen, Holden was handing a bulb of beer to the ancient-looking man. The Belter’s cheeks were already a little flushed, but his voice wasn’t slurred at all. Were five men for every woman on the station, back then. Five to one.

“You shipped with him, sí?” Oksana asked. “Back in the slow zone?”

“Little bit,” Michio said. “He’s also waking up next to Filip Inaros’ mother. The one Marco didn’t manage to kill? That’s him.”

“And he’s announcing to Big Himself y alles where he’s bunking?” Oksana said. “So. Brave o crazy, him?”

“Not sure I get to criticize,” Michio said, just before the fear hit her system. For a fraction of a second, she didn’t know why, and then she realized what she was seeing. In the text crawl at the bottom of the screen, and just marching off the side. Witch of Endor. She grabbed the crawl, pulled it back. Ship destroyed by Free Navy identified as Witch of Endor.

She selected the feed. Her screen flickered. Holden and the old Belter laughed about Ceres Station before it had been spun up, but she didn’t hear them. On her screen, the hyperreal image of an intelligence telescope showed a ship under high burn, streams of PDC fire seeming to bend as the ship accelerated away from the rounds. From the shape of the curve, she guessed it had been pulling almost ten gs. The picture didn’t show what she was fleeing from, and the torpedo that managed to penetrate the defenses was moving too fast to see. The ship shifted, spinning for a tenth of a second, and then blossomed into light. It is unclear, the announcer said, why the Free Navy forces appear to have attacked one of their own ships, but reports confirm drive plumes from several other known enemy locations on vectors inconsistent with an attack of consolidated fleet positions—

“Sir?” Oksana said, and Michio realized she must have said something aloud.

She considered Oksana’s eyes, respectful and hard. Evans’ soft and alarmed. Her crew and her family.

“We have Marco’s answer,” she said.

“Shift in language is shift in consciousness, yeah,” Josep said. He was dressed in his jumpsuit, as was she. But he was strapped into the crash couch. A complex schematic showed the state of the system as best she knew it. The ships loyal to the inners clustered around Earth and Mars and Ceres in red. The Free Navy loyal to Marco in blue. Her own handful of pirates and idealists in green. The independent stations and ships—Ganymede, Iapetus—were white. And a dusting of gold over it all showing where Marco had buried his treasure chests in the void.

“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.