Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Twenty: Naomi

“The danger is overreach,” Bobbie said, hunching over the table and making it seem small. “They sucker-punched us. We got a couple easy wins coming back. It’s tempting to drive it as far as we can, and try to break them. Seems like we’ve got them on the back foot. But the truth is, we’re still sizing his forces up. He’s still seeing what we do.”

“And what are we doing?” Naomi asked, handing across a bowl of scrambled egg and tofu with hot sauce.

Bobbie scooped up a bite and chewed thoughtfully. Naomi sat across from her and tried a bite from her own bowl. Ever since Maura Patel had upgraded the food systems, the Roci’s hot sauce tasted a little different, but Naomi was coming to like it. There was a pleasure in the novelty. And also a sense of nostalgia for what had changed. That wasn’t only food. That was everything.

“I don’t think anyone knows,” Bobbie said. “My tactics teacher back in bootcamp? Sergeant Kapoor. He was an entomologist—”

“Your sergeant in bootcamp was an entomologist?”

“It’s Mars,” Bobbie said, shrugging. “That isn’t weird there. Anyway, he talked about shifting strategies like they were the middle part of metamorphosis. Apparently when a caterpillar makes a cocoon, the next thing it does is melt. Completely liquefies. And then all the little bits of what used to be caterpillar come back together as a moth or a butterfly or something. Finds a different way to assemble all the same pieces and make it something else.”

“Sounds like the protomolecule.”

“Huh. Yeah. Guess it kind of does.” Bobbie took another bite of her eggs, her gaze on the far wall. She was quiet for long enough that Naomi didn’t know if she’d come back.

“But he meant something tactical?” Naomi said.

“Yes. That pivoting your strategy was like that too. You go into a situation thinking about it a particular way, and then something changes. Then either you stick with the ideas you had before or you look at everything you have to work with and find a new shape. We’re in the find-a-new-shape part. Avasarala’s busy trying to keep what’s left of Earth out of environmental collapse, but once that’s stabilized, she’s going to try to capture Inaros and everyone else who ever breathed his air and put them all on trial. She wants it to be crime.”

Sandra Ip came in from the lift, nodded at the two of them, and pulled a bulb of tea from the dispenser.

“Why, do you think?” Naomi asked. “I mean, why treat it like a criminal act and not war?”

“I think it’s a statement of contempt. But in the meantime, Mars is … I don’t know. I think it’s finding out that for all our strength, we were brittle. I’m not sure how we come back from that, but we’ll never be what we were. Not any more than Earth will. And Fred? He’s trying to build consensus and coalitions, because that’s what he’s been doing for decades.”

“But you don’t think he can.” It wasn’t a question. Ip left the galley, her footsteps retreating as Bobbie thought.

“I think putting people together’s a good thing. Generally useful. But … I probably shouldn’t be talking about this. I’m supposed to be his representative for Mars. Junior league ambassador or something.”

“But he’s trying to rebuild his caterpillar when we need a butterfly,” Naomi said.

Bobbie sighed, took a last bite of egg, and tossed the bowl into the recycler. “I could be wrong,” she said. “Maybe it’ll work.”

“We can hope.”

Bobbie’s hand terminal chirped. She considered the incoming message with a frown. The way she moved, even little motions like this, had the strength and economy of training. And more than that. A frustration.

“Oh joy,” Bobbie said dryly. “Another important meeting.”

“Price of being central.”

“I guess,” Bobbie said, hauling herself to her feet. “I’ll be back when I can. Thanks again for letting me bunk here.”

As Bobbie stepped past, Naomi put a hand on her arm. Stopped her. She didn’t know exactly what she was going to say until she said it. Only that it was tied up with the ideas of crew and family and trying not to betray who you were. “Do you want to do this junior ambassador thing?”

“I don’t know. It needs doing, I guess,” Bobbie said. “I’ve been trying to reinvent myself since Io. Maybe since Ganymede. I really liked working veterans’ outreach, but now that I’m not doing it, I don’t miss it. I figure this’ll be the same. It’s something to do. Why?”

“You don’t need to thank anyone that you’re bunking here. If you like that cabin, it’s yours.”

Bobbie blinked. Her smile was small and rueful. She took a half step away, but didn’t turn her body. The physical expression of hesitation. Naomi let the silence between them stretch. “I appreciate the thought,” Bobbie said. “But adding someone into a crew? That’s a big deal. I don’t know what Holden would think about it.”

“We’ve talked about it. He already thinks you’re crew.”

“But I’m doing this ambassador thing.”

“Yeah. He thinks our gunner is Fred’s ambassador from Mars.” Naomi knew she was stretching the truth a little there, but it was worth it. Bobbie was still for the space of a heartbeat. And then another one.

“I didn’t know that,” she said, and then with no other words, stepped back toward the lift, the airlock, Ceres Station. Naomi watched her go.

Fires on shipboard were dangerous. There were any number of ship processes that could rise up past the point of spontaneous oxidation. The trick was knowing when letting a breeze through would start combustion and when it wouldn’t. Sometimes talking to Bobbie was like putting her hand on a ceramic panel to see how hot it was. Trying to guess whether a little air would cool the big woman down or start up flames.

Alone in the galley, Naomi went through a little casual maintenance: wiping down the tables and benches, checking the status of the air filters, clearing the recycler feed. Having so many people on the ship left them running through supplies faster than she’d become accustomed to. Gor Droga’s fondness for chai drove down their supply of tea analogue. Sun-yi Steinberg preferred a citrus drink that ate into the acids and texturing proteins. Clarissa Mao ate kibble and water. Prison food.

Looking over the supply levels, Naomi had to remind herself that the Roci was carrying three times the crew it was used to. Still well within the ship’s specs and abilities. The Tachi had been designed for two full flight crews and cabins full of Martian marines. Renaming it hadn’t changed that. It had only changed her expectations. But they were still going to have to resupply again soon.

The aromatics and spices that kept everyone from eating like Clarissa were going to be hard to get. Supplies were thin on Ceres. Supplies were going to be thin all through the Belt, and now the inner planets too. Any of the complex organics that Earth used to supply could be synthesized in labs or grown in hydroponics on Ganymede and Ceres and Pallas. The touristy resorts on Titan. The problem, she thought as she replaced the injection nozzle on the coffee machine, was capacity. They could make anything, but they couldn’t make it all at once. Humanity was going to get by on the minimum until there was a way to increase production, and a lot of people living on the margin wouldn’t make it. They’d die on Earth, yes, but keeping the Belt fed wasn’t going to be trivial either.

As she dropped the old injection nozzle into the recycler, she wondered if Marco had thought about that or if his dreams of glory had swept away any realistic plan for taking care of all the lives he’d disrupted. She had a guess about that. Marco was a creature of the grand gesture. His stories were about the single critical moment that changed everything, not all the moments that came after. Somewhere in the system right now, Karal or Wings or—thinking the name was like touching a sore—or Filip might be doing the same kind of maintenance she was doing on the Pella. She wondered how long it would take them to realize that the spoils of war wouldn’t restock their ships forever.

Probably it wouldn’t come clear until they’d used up everything. Kings were always the last to feel the famine. That wasn’t just the Belt. That was all of history. The people who’d just been going about their lives were the ones who could speak to the actual cost of war. They paid it first. Men like Marco could orchestrate vast battles, order the looting and destruction of worlds, and never run out of coffee.

When the galley was done, she took herself back to the lift, and up to the command deck. There was new analysis of the ships that had gone missing in the ring gates. No new data, just a rechewing of the old. Her fascination came from a sense of dread. She’d been through those rings, traveled the weird not-space that linked solar systems, and of all the dangers she’d faced, just quietly vanishing away hadn’t even been on her scopes. For a few hundred people—maybe more than that—something else had happened. The best minds of Earth and Mars that weren’t occupied with trying to deal with their environment and governing bodies collapsing around them were looking at this. Naomi didn’t have their resources or the depth of background expertise they did, but she had her own experience. Maybe she’d see something they hadn’t.

And so she looked. Like an amateur detective, she followed clues and hunches, and like most investigations like that, she found nothing. The new conversation on the feeds was a theory surrounding the Casa Azul’s drive signature showing that the reactor was probably misconfigured, but apart from it being a rookie mistake that transferred a lot of energy into waste heat, Naomi didn’t see anything in it. Certainly no reason that it or the other missing ships should have gone dark.

The analysis had just shifted into speculation over the plausibility of failed internal sensors in the Casa Azul increasing the pressure from the reactor bottle—which was what she assumed from the start—when her hand terminal chimed. Bobbie. She accepted the connection, and Bobbie’s face appeared on her screen. Naomi felt a twinge of alarm.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

Bobbie shook her head. It was probably meant to defuse the tension, but it reminded Naomi of a video of a bull getting ready to charge. “Do you know where Holden is? He’s not answering his comm.”

“Might be sleeping. He was up late going over footage for his broadcast thing with Monica.”

“Could you go wake him up for me?” Bobbie asked. The wall behind her was sculpted stone with recessed lighting. Naomi thought it was the governor’s palace. Fred Johnson’s distant voice, low and graveled by annoyance, confirmed that.

Naomi rose, taking the terminal with her. “On my way,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t understand why you’re part of this,” Fred Johnson said.

Across the desk from him, Jim still looked sleepy. Puffy-eyed and his hair still a little mashed from the crash couch. Bobbie, her arms crossed, sat off to one side. Before Jim could come up with an answer, she stepped in.

“He knew this Captain Pa,” Bobbie said. “Worked with her on Medina before it was Medina.”

“When she was in my chain of command,” he said. “She isn’t an unknown quantity. She was one of mine. I assigned her to that ship. I don’t need anyone telling me about who she is or what they think of her.”

Bobbie’s face darkened. “Fair enough. I got Holden here because maybe you’d listen to him.”

Jim raised a finger. “I don’t actually know what’s going on here,” he said. “So. You know. What’s going on here?”

“Michio Pa is one of Inaros’ inner circle,” Bobbie said. “Only it seems like she figured out that he’s a great big asshole, because she broke ranks. Started sending relief supplies places without the Free Navy’s say so. And now Inaros is shooting at her and she wants us to help her out.”

“Relief supplies?” Fred said, his voice hard as stone. “That’s what you’re calling them?”

“That’s what she’s calling them,” Bobbie bit back.

Jim glanced at Naomi. His expression said, This is not going well.

Naomi smiled back. I know, right?

“Michio Pa is stealing colony ships for the Free Navy,” Fred said. “Even if she isn’t complicit in the destruction of Earth, she has the blood of every colonist lost to her piracy on her hands. Those aren’t relief supplies. They’re the spoils of war. A war against us.”

“Marco’s shooting at her?” Jim said, trying to catch the conversation’s reins. But Fred was locked on Bobbie and he wouldn’t disengage.

“This is my best-case scenario, Draper. Inaros’ coalition is falling apart. They’re shooting at each other, not at us. If Pa degrades Inaros’ fleet, that means they’re that much easier for us to face. Every ship of Pa’s that Inaros turns to slag is one less that’s hunting down innocent people and stealing their property. There is no advantage to me or to Earth or to Mars that comes of getting involved in it, and I personally resent you calling in your friends here to try to bully me into thinking anything different.”

“You aren’t the only one here with military training,” Bobbie said. “You aren’t the only one who’s had to weigh taking on problematic allies. You aren’t the only one with command experience. But you are the one in this room who’s fucking wrong.”

Fred rose to his feet, and Naomi pushed back into the cushions of her chair. Bobbie stepped toward the man, her hands in fists, her chin jutting. Fred narrowed his eyes.

“I am not interested—” he began.

“If you want me to come here and wear a Martian uniform and puppet back whatever you say, you got the wrong girl,” Bobbie half said, half shouted. “You think your magic OPA coalition pajama party is going to step in here and fix this? It’s failing. They aren’t coming to you anymore. You got Ceres and you got a fleet and you got me as your goddamn window dressing, and it’s not enough. Stop acting like it is!”

The words hit Fred like a blow. He rocked back a little on his heels, his lips pressed together. Was it like this when Marco’s coalition fell apart? Naomi wondered.

When Fred spoke, his voice was quieter, but cold. “I see why Avasarala likes you so much.”

“Is that true?” Holden said. This time they heard him. “The OPA isn’t coming?”

“It’s taking a little longer to arrange than I’d hoped. I may need to change venue for it. Find a place that’s neutral territory.”

“Neutral territory,” Jim said, skepticism in his voice.

“Some of these people are lifelong enemies of the inner planets,” Fred said. “The combined fleet makes them nervous. They need to be reassured that our whole focus is on the Free Navy and not them. That’s all.”

Fred and Bobbie stood awkwardly, the momentum of their anger spent but both resisting being the first one to step back from it. Naomi coughed, though she didn’t need to, then rose and went to the sideboard to pour herself a glass of water. It was enough. Bobbie took her seat, and then a moment later, Fred did as well. Jim hunched in his chair. She poured a glass for him too and brought it to him when she sat back down.

“This Captain Pa?” Bobbie said, speaking now to Jim directly. “She’s an in. If we can get her to where she’s willing to provide intelligence for protection, she might be able to give us something we need to crack Inaros.”

Fred shook his head. The anger was gone from his voice, but not the resolve. “Pa is a loose cannon. She has a history of mutiny and defection.”

“The last time she mutinied, she saved my life,” Holden said. “And just maybe every human in existence. A little context here.”

“She isn’t coming to us as an ally. She isn’t offering to stop her piracy or even slow it down. Cooperating with her means every ship she hijacks from now on will be our fault too!” Fred punctuated the end of his tirade by slapping his thick hand on the table.

“She’s offering to give supplies to Ceres,” Bobbie said.

“That she stole—maybe killed—to get.”

Fred spread his hands, but Jim wasn’t looking at him. Naomi sipped her water. It was cold with the bite of minerals, and it did nothing to loosen the lump in her throat. She had to resist the urge to pluck her hair down over her eyes. Bobbie had brought him here as someone to fight beside her. Someone Fred Johnson knew and respected. But the Martian didn’t know Jim the way she did. Even loyalty—even love—wouldn’t let him compromise his sense of right and wrong. She wondered if Bobbie would stay on the Rocinante after this. She hoped so.

Anyone who didn’t know him better would have said he looked thoughtful. Naomi could see the grief in the corners of his mouth and the angle of his eyebrows. The sense of loss. She put down her glass. Took his hand. He glanced up at her like he was remembering she was there. She was looking into his eyes, and imagined that she saw a light within them go out. Or no, not out. Not extinguished. Only wrapped in something. Armor. Or regret.

“Okay,” he said. “How do we get in touch with Pa?”

Naomi blinked. Fred mirrored her surprise and confusion.

“You’re going to try to force my hand?” Fred said. “We aren’t going to do it.”

“You can pull your people off the Roci if you need to,” Jim said, nodding as if he were agreeing with something. Fred scowled in a way that said he thought talking to Pa himself might only be the second-worst plan on the table. “If we have to do this alone, we’ll be less effective. But we’ll do what we can.”

“We will?” Naomi asked.

He squeezed her fingers. “We’re going to need someone like her,” he said so gently it was like someone whispering a love song.

She wasn’t sure what he meant, and it didn’t make her feel better.