Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Twenty-Two: Holden

It hadn’t really been that long since Fred had crewed up the Rocinante for its burn down to Luna, but it had also been a lifetime. Now, with the Tycho-based crew gone, the ship seemed bigger. Emptier. It was like the end of a really long party when all the guests have gone home, and Holden couldn’t quite decide if it left him feeling lonely or relieved. When they headed out this time, they’d only have one pilot. One engineer. Still two mechanics, assuming that was Clarissa’s official title. After flying with the Roci for so many years with just his little family, it was strange to feel the loss of that redundancy, but some deep training was still there in the back of his mind saying that everyone had to be replaceable. As if keeping Chava Lombaugh on the ship would have really made it bearable losing Alex to a badly placed PDC round or a stroke during a high-g burn or any of the other thousand things that could go wrong in space. As if Sandra Ip could ever have taken Naomi’s place.

On one hand, it was unthinkable. On the other, it was reasonable. Alex was Alex, and no one else would ever be. If something did go wrong, though, they’d want a pilot. And the chances of things going wrong seemed pretty high.

The Minsky had started its life burning out of Luna with colonists funded by Royal Charter Energy. The same company that had landed on Ilus and Longdune and New Egypt. If things had gone the way they’d intended, they’d have passed through the ring gates on their way to landfall in a system called San Esteban. Instead, they’d been taken over by the Serrio Mal, looted, and were in a braking burn toward Ceres with what was left of the crew and supplies after Michio Pa and her people were done with it. Food and water, hydroponics and medical supplies, construction mechs and scientific equipment and the people to use them. And burning at its side, a Free Navy gunship as escort. Probably one of Pa’s. Probably not a trap.

Probably not going to get reduced to radioactive gas by Fred. But only probably.

Alone on the command deck, he had the Roci’s inventory schematic pulled up on the screen and the latest edited piece from Monica spooling on his hand terminal. The inventory chirped and updated. It took him a second to find the new data.

“Alex?”

“Right here, Hoss,” Alex replied, his voice coming through the comm and down from the cockpit both.

“Confirm that you’re seeing the juice on your couch topped up?”

A moment passed. “I am showing full-on shitty synthetic juice guaranteed to give a migraine and diarrhea if you use it for more than eight hours.”

“Seriously?”

“We had better than this on the Canterbury,” Alex said.

Holden felt a twitch of concern. “Why did we get third-rate juice?”

Naomi answered as if she were beside him instead of strapped into the loading mech on the dock. “Because the alternative was loading the injectors with morphine so you don’t care so much about being crushed. There’s a war on, you know.”

“So there is,” he said as the inventory chimed another update.

Amos said, “Should show we’re at eighty percent on PDC rounds.”

“Showing eighty-one point seven,” Holden said.

“Really? I’m pretty sure that ain’t right.”

“Track it down,” Holden said. “I’ll let you know if the ship changes her mind in the meantime.”

“We’re on it,” Amos agreed.

We. Meaning Clarissa. He was really going to have to get over that. He felt guilty that he hadn’t already, but he didn’t have a clear idea how to let his discomfort with her go. He pushed the issue back down his priority list again, the way he always did. And who knew? Maybe they’d all die in a hail of gunfire before it came up again and he wouldn’t have to worry about it.

On his hand terminal, the new edit of latest video flickered. This would be the tenth one when it came out. Most of it was an interview with a couple of musicians he’d met up in the shitty part of the station. Two Belters with patois so thick, he’d fed it through a translation program, but their voices were musical and there was an affection in them that transcended the language. Monica had redone the subtitles, putting them at the top of the image, so that the words were beside their faces, close enough to see their expressions as they spoke. They looked like grandfather and grandson, but they called each other “cousin.”

As he watched, they talked about the music scene on Ceres, the difference between live music and recordings, between what they called tényleges performance and using microphones. They didn’t talk about Earth or Mars, the OPA or the Free Navy. Holden hadn’t asked, and the few times that they’d strayed in a political direction, he’d brought it back to the music. Two more reminders that not everyone who lived outside a gravity well had dropped the rocks on Earth. He liked this one a lot, and he wanted to get it approved for release before they left dock. In case, without ever quite letting himself think in case of what. Just in case.

The first nine pieces he’d released had gotten a little traction. Some of that was, he knew, because his name was on it. Being a minor political celebrity had its perks, and one was a small but reliable audience baked in for this project. Better than that, though, he’d started getting copycats. People with their own feeds on Titan and Luna and Earth doing interviews and slice-of-life bits like the ones he’d put out.

Or maybe they’d always been doing that, and he was copying them. Only he hadn’t noticed any of it until now.

“Cap?” Amos said, and Holden realized it wasn’t the first time. “You okay up there?”

“I’m here. I’m fine. Distracted. What’ve you got?”

Clarissa answered. “One of the feeds didn’t zero before. We got it. The count’s confirmed.”

“Great,” Holden said. On his hand terminal, the older man struck a chord on his guitar and the younger man laughed. He closed the file. He couldn’t tell if it was working or not anymore. His brain couldn’t imagine what it would be like to run into it for the first time. Whether the humanity that he saw in it would be there for someone on Earth or Mars or in the colony ships. Or on the far side of the gates.

He heard Naomi coming up before he saw her. He looked back over his shoulder as she stepped off the lift. Her jumpsuit still showed lines of sweat where the loading mech’s straps had held her, and when she leaned over to kiss his forehead, he took her arm. Her eyes were a little bloodshot, the way they got when she was tired. She looked back down at him, laughed a little.

“What?”

“You’re very beautiful,” Holden said. “I hope I tell you that often enough.”

“You do.”

“Then I hope I don’t tell you so often it gets annoying.”

“You don’t,” she said, and sat in the crash couch beside his, stretching her arm as she did so she could keep her fingers twined in his. “Are you all right?”

“A little exhausted.”

“Just a little?”

“I’m not hallucinating yet.”

Naomi shook her head. Just a few millimeters one way and then the other. “You know you’re not responsible for fixing everything.”

“Saving humanity from itself is a group project, yes,” he said. “Really, all I’m doing is trying to show everyone on Earth and Mars and the Belt and Medina and the colonies that really we’re all still just one tribe.”

“So just transcend all lived human experience since before the dawn of history?”

“And keep the part where we kill each other to a minimum,” he said. “Shouldn’t be hard.”

“At least you know why you’re tired.”

She squeezed his fingers and let them go, pulling up a tactical display of Ceres and the space around it. The station itself and the fleet ships that surrounded it like a cloud of blue fireflies were marked as friendlies. The colony ship and its escort slowing toward them were in yellow—status unknown, but of interest. The time to rendezvous was down to hours.

“Part of me hopes that Fred won’t let us go out,” he said. “We request the clamps come off, and they just say no and we’re stuck in here.”

“While the colony ship flips at the last minute and accelerates into the port, exploding in a nuclear fireball,” Naomi said.

He pulled up his hand terminal and sent his approval to Monica on Tycho. At lightspeed, it would still be minutes before she got it. “It does sound less appealing when you put it that way.”

Behind them, the lift cycled down, humming as it went. Alex—his voice still doubled by the headset and the free air—finished his checklist with Amos and Clarissa. Holden stowed his hand terminal in the crash couch’s high-g compartment. If things went poorly, he didn’t want it zooming around the command deck.

Naomi’s voice was low, but focused. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Why are we doing this?”

Holden wished his brain had been a little clearer. After a certain point, he felt like his verbal centers ran straight to his mouth without passing through the rest of his brain. “Because we can’t just blow up enough things that this becomes a good situation. We’re going to need more than that in our toolbox.”

Bobbie stepped off the lift. There was something odd about her, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. She was wearing simple blacks, but the way she held herself made them look like a uniform. Her hands were in fists at her sides, but she didn’t seem angry so much as nervous. That didn’t bode well.

“Hey,” Holden said.

“Sir.”

“Please don’t call me sir. No one on the ship does. Everything all right? Fred want something?”

“Johnson didn’t send me,” Bobbie said. “You’re going out, and I’m reporting for duty.”

“Okay,” Holden said. “You can route tactical and fire control down here, or take the gunner’s seat up by Alex. Wherever feels most comfortable.”

Bobbie took a deep breath and something Holden didn’t understand played out across her wide face. “I’ll take the gunner’s seat,” she finally said, and climbed up to the cockpit. Holden watched her ankles disappear above him, his brow furrowed hard enough to ache a little.

“That was … um,” he said. “Was that a moment?”

“That was a moment,” Naomi said.

“Good moment or bad moment?”

“Very good moment.”

“Well. Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry I missed it.”

“All right, everyone strapped in?” Alex called.

One by one, the crew answered. They were ready. Or as ready as they were likely to get. Holden let his head sink into the gel of the couch, shifting his screen to match Naomi’s. There were an awful lot of ships floating in the vicinity of Ceres right now. He listened as Alex requested that the docking clamps be released. For long, painful seconds, Ceres traffic authority didn’t answer. And then, “Affirmative, Rocinante. You are cleared to leave.”

The ship shuddered and the spin gravity of Ceres vanished as Alex let their momentum fling them out into the vacuum. On his screen, they were a white dot flying off at a tangent to the station’s massive curve. He flipped to external cameras and watched the surface of the dwarf planet curve away.

“Well,” Naomi said. “Looks like Fred didn’t object to this enough to keep us from going out.”

“Yeah,” Holden said. “I hope he knows what he’s doing, trusting delicate work like this to agents of chaos like us.”

Amos chuckled, and Holden realized he’d said that on the full-crew channel.

“Fairly sure he’s making this shit up as he goes too,” Amos said. “Anyway, the worst-case scenario is we all get killed and he gets to feel smart for not having his people on board when we did it. Win-win for him.”

When Bobbie spoke, Holden could hear the smile in it, despite the words. “No one dies while standing watch without permission from the commanding officer.”

“You say so, Babs,” Amos replied.

“Keep braced,” Alex said. “I’m gonna have to get us on course here.”

Normally the shifting of the ship under maneuvering thrusters was almost subliminal to Holden. The subtle dance of vectors and thrust had been part of his life ever since he’d left Earth. It was only that he was so tired and worried and full of so very much coffee that it bothered him. With every adjustment, up and down changed a little and then went back to the float. When Alex fired the Epstein for a few seconds, the Roci sang, harmonics ringing through overtones up and down the hull like a church bell.

“Not too much, Alex,” Holden said. “We don’t want our braking burn to slag anybody. At least I don’t think we do.”

“Not a problem,” Alex said. “We’ll just tap back down to a good coasting speed until we’re right up alongside them. Final braking won’t catch anyone in the plume.”

“And keep the torpedoes and PDCs hot,” Holden said. “Just in case.”

“On it,” Bobbie said. “We’re getting painted by ranging lasers.”

“Whose?” Holden asked, dropping the exterior camera and going back to tactical. The scattering of fleet ships. The surface defenses of Ceres. The slowly approaching captured ship and its Free Navy escort.

“Oh,” Naomi said, tapping through a list of connection reports longer than her screen. “Pretty much everyone.”

“The escort ship?”

“They’re painting us too.”

On his screen, the incoming ships stuttered, the data around them updating as they killed their braking burns, appearing from behind clouds of superheated gas. The Roci’s sensor arrays checked contour and heat signatures, confirming almost instantly. The larger ship matched the Minsky—large, blocky, and awkward with communications satellites meant to bootstrap a network around an alien planet covering its sides like warts. The smaller was a Martian corvette, a generation newer than the Roci, a little lighter, streamlined for atmosphere and probably loaded with similar ordnance. Its transponder wasn’t answering.

“Hate seeing this,” Alex said. “Two good Martian-built ships squaring off? It ain’t right.”

“Well,” Holden said. “Who knows? Maybe we’re on the same side.”

“If it is a fight,” Bobbie said, “let’s win it. Permission to lock target?”

“Has it locked on us?” Holden asked.

“Not yet,” Naomi said.

“Hold off, then,” Holden said. “I don’t want to go first.”

An incoming comm request appeared on his screen from Fred Johnson, and for a confused half second, he wondered what Fred was doing on the gunship, then saw the tightbeam was coming from Ceres. When this was over, he was really going to need to sleep. He accepted the connection, and Fred appeared in a separate window on the side of his screen.

“Regretting this yet?” Fred asked.

“Only a little,” Holden said. “You?”

“I want to make something clear. If—if—you take possession of that colony ship, under no circumstances does it come within three thousand klicks of my dock. If there are people who need medical assistance on board, they stay on board and we’ll send help out to them. Nothing comes off that ship until it’s been examined, scanned, reloaded, disinfected, and sprinkled with holy water by whatever flavor of priest I can put my hands on. I’m not running Troy here.”

“Understood.”

“The only reason I’m letting you do this at all is the chance of recovering prisoners of the Free Navy alive.”

“That’s the only reason?” Holden said. “So you’ll hand all the supplies on the ship back over to the former owners instead of using them to keep Ceres alive?”

Fred’s smile was gentle and warm. “Don’t be an asshole.”

“Okay,” Bobbie said. “Now they’re painting us. Permission to return the favor?”

“Granted,” Holden said.

Bobbie said something under her breath that he couldn’t make out, but it sounded happy.

“Be careful, Holden,” Fred said again. “I don’t like anything about this.”

“Well, if it’s a trap, you can say I told you so to whatever scraps of us are left.”

“I’ve got thirty ships that’ll make sure you have a nuclear funeral pyre big enough they’d see it on Proxima Centauri in four years. You know. If anyone’s there.”

“That’s not comforting,” Holden said.

“We should open comms,” Naomi said.

“Fred? I’ve gotta go do this thing. I’ll let you know how it went when it’s done.”

Fred nodded. The connection dropped. Holden swallowed past the tightness in his throat. “How are we for range?”

“Inside effective torpedo range,” Bobbie said. “And we’ll be good for PDCs in eight minutes and ten seconds.”

“Rail gun all warmed up?”

“Oh hell yes.”

“All right,” Holden said. “Naomi, get me a channel.”

A moment later, a new frame appeared on his screen. Dark but with the yellow border of an open connection. They were so close, there was effectively no light delay. That alone made him nervous.

“Attention, unidentified warship. This is James Holden of the independent freighter Rocinante. We’re here to transfer possession of the Minsky. Hope that’s what brought you here too. I’d appreciate it if you’d identify.”

The screen stayed dark. Anxiety crept up his back. The seconds stretched without a reply. Something was wrong. Without moving, he rehearsed what he’d say to Alex. Get us out of here. Something’s about to blow up. What he’d say to Bobbie. Protect the Roci first. Disable the gunship if you can. Kill it if you have to.

The frame flickered. For a fraction of a second, an unfamiliar blond woman with sharp features appeared, and then immediately the image shifted to a woman with dark hair tied back. A small, cynical smile on her lips. Holden realized he’d been holding his breath and exhaled.

“Rocinante,” she said, “this is Michio Pa of the Connaught. Weird to see you again, Captain Holden.”