Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Forty-Four: Roberts

She’d known it was coming. Even before they’d pried the specific information out of Jakulski, she’d known something was coming. It was a feeling that came up like a bad dream she couldn’t shake. A premonition or just the kind of fear that seeped through anytime she had something important and too clear an imagination about how it would be to lose it. Knowing that the war was coming to Medina was almost a relief. At least she knew in broad strokes what to be afraid of.

The fear had made small changes feel large. When Jakulski brought them the news that their work schedule was shifting, Roberts couldn’t keep from interpreting each change like tarot cards. Tracking down the signal drop on the interior of the drum was pushed off for a month, so maybe Captain Samuels thought it wasn’t important for defense from the invasion. The retrofit of the water supply for lower g moved up, so maybe they wanted extra capacity ready in case the environmental systems were damaged. They spent a day installing redundant comm lasers so that they could always have a tightbeam line to Montemayor and the rest of Duarte’s advisors and guards on the alien station. Everything that she could fit into the idea of fortifying against coming violence became more evidence that her fear was justified; the more evidence she had, the easier it became to see things as further proof.

It wasn’t only her, either. The others in her workgroup were all suffering from the same dread. Jakulski was gone more often than not now, not supervising them except to tell them at the start what to do and ask at the end if they’d done it. And when he did come out after shift, he left early without giving any excuses beyond Things need doing. Salis was drinking more, showing up for shift hungover and angry and then not wanting to head back to his quarters when the day was done. Vandercaust … well, ever since the false alarm with the mole, Vandercaust had been a smaller man. Not in his body, but the way he moved through his life. Careful, amenable, tucking into himself like a snail. Once, just after they’d heard about the ice hauler burning out toward the Sol gate, they’d been in the bar when some young coya, drunk off her ass, had started off shouting about how the colony planets didn’t deserve aid or attention. They don’t like being treated that way, they shouldn’t have done it to us and They’re just as bad as Mars only without the stones to back it and Come back five generations from now and maybe we’ll be close to even. Vandercaust had finished his drink fast and left without saying goodbye. Anything political got his back up now, even if it was something they all agreed with.

And still, Roberts found she needed the company. When the leaks and rumors got bad enough that Captain Samuels had to make an announcement—Enemy ships associated with OPA factions outside the Free Navy are sending a large cargo ship and escort. We don’t know their intentions. The Free Navy has dispatched fighters to back Medina up, but with the fighting so hot in the system, it is a minimum force. —Roberts was almost relieved. At least they could talk about it all openly now and not get Jakulski’s balls in a vice.

When the enemy was on close approach to the far side of the ring, all the work on Medina ground to a halt. There were schedules and lists and work reports, but there were also enemies at the gate. Jakulski didn’t show up to give them their daily orders, and even their freedom seemed ominous. They shifted to a bar where the wall screens were set to a local security newsfeed—the latest on the siege of Medina Station as it happened.

Diagrams of the positions of enemy ships and their Free Navy defenders. Analysis of who Aimee Ostman and Carlos Walker were and why they hadn’t joined the Free Navy. Confirmation that the escort ship was James Holden’s Rocinante. Beer. Dried tofu with wasabi powder. The camaraderie of the mob. It felt almost like gathering up to watch football, except their home was the pitch, and loss would mean the deaths of more than only people. The autonomy and freedom the Free Navy promised was balanced on the head of a pin.

“Did they get them?” Salis asked breathlessly. “Did we kill them?”

Roberts reached across the table, grabbing his hand and squeezing, waiting for the feed to update. For fresh information to come through. There wasn’t any romance in the gesture. Not even a sexual invitation. There just wasn’t a better way to express hope and fear and oh holy shit all at the same moment. Across the bar, three dozen people—maybe more—stared at the thick, confused images bleeding through the gate. If it hadn’t been a live image, it could have gotten cleaned up almost to where the gate’s weirdness didn’t show at all. But jagged and bent right now was better than clear as nothing later on.

A flash of the Rocinante, blooming fire-bright. The whole room took in its breath. Waited. But when the glow faded, the enemy was still there. Salis spat out an obscenity and let her hand go. On the feed, the Free Navy attack ships were already gone, carried off into the black by their own rush to get to the Giambattista and Rocinante before they’d reached the gate. For all the fucking good it had done.

“Es bien, es bien, yeah?” Vandercaust said. “Took a shot, bruised them. Make them rush is the thing. Keep them from going slow, being careful.”

“You don’t know what they’ve got on that ship,” Roberts said. “Could be anything.”

Vandercaust nodded, took a bit of tofu between his finger and thumb and squeezed it until it cracked. “Whatever it is, we’ll put rail gun rounds through it until it’s dust.” He held out his green-powdered thumb like he was demonstrating the idea of dust. She nodded so tight and fast it was more like rocking back and forth.

“Dui,” she said, wanting to believe it. Needing to. On the feed, the looming mass of the ice hauler had come to a relative stop on the far side of the gate and just off to the side where the rail guns couldn’t fire through at it. So they knew that the defenses were there and to keep their heads down. That was too bad.

“What are they doing?” Salis said, not expecting an answer. In the feed, a hundred faint new stars bloomed around the ice hauler, wavering and inconstant. Then a thousand. Then double that. Roberts felt some part of herself step back, shock pulling her away from herself.

“Mé scopar,” she breathed. “Are those drive plumes?”

The dots of light surged, all moving at once. A swarm of bright wasps, swirling, curving, and passing through the ring gate and out into their space. Her space. Here and there, a light flickered and died, one of the thousands sputtering and dying, but most flowed around each other, flight systems taking in the situation—their position, the alien station, Medina, the rings.

There were safe spaces where the rail guns wouldn’t fire. Not behind cover, because apart from Medina itself there was nothing in the slow zone to hide behind. But the rail gun rounds wouldn’t stop once they passed through the tiny attacking ships. Any of the enemy that could put themselves between the end of a rail gun and the ring of a gate or Medina itself would be safe. At least until the PDC and torpedoes of Medina Station could reach it. Like slivers of iron showing a magnetic field, the swarm burned for the lines defined by geometry and tactics. Or, most of them, anyway. The few that had failed spun helplessly in the void, threatening no one. And others …

“Those fast-movers aren’t ships,” Salis said. “Those are torpedoes.”

Roberts’ hand terminal alerted in the same moment as Vandercaust’s and Salis’. She was the first to pull hers from her pocket. The screen was red-bannered. The battle alert. She acknowledged, reporting her position. The assignment put her in a floating damage-control team. Jakulski and the rest of the higher powers in technical were waiting to see where they were needed. Where the damage came. It was worse than a hard assignment because her blood was fizzing with the need to flee or fight, and there was nowhere to go. If she could have run to a post, she’d have been able to pretend that she was doing something. That she could affect the wave of destruction flying toward her.

“Ah!” Vandercaust said. “There we go!”

On the wall screen, the rail guns had opened up. At first, it was only motion, the emplaced barrels—her barrels, the ones she’d put in their housings—quivering. Then the newsfeed overlaid the paths of the rounds, bright lines that vanished as quickly as they appeared, and with each flicker one of the enemy died. Roberts felt her jaw starting to ache from clenching it, but she couldn’t relax. Salis grunted, his expression dismayed.

“Que?” Roberts asked.

“Wish we weren’t doing, that is all,” he said.

“Doing what?”

He gestured to the wall screen with his chin. “Sending stuff out past the gates. To where it goes away.”

She knew what he meant. The starless nothing—not even space—on the other side of the gates was eerie when you thought about it too much. Matter and energy could be converted into each other, but not destroyed. So when something that went out beyond the sphere of the slow zone seemed to vanish, it had to go somewhere or be changed into something. But no one knew what.

“No option,” she said. “Esá coyos making us.”

“Yeah, it’s only …”

Long, terrible minutes stretched. Roberts fell into something half panic and half trance. The lines flashed on the feed. Another dead enemy. Another slug of tungsten accelerated out of reality and into the blackness stranger than space. Now that she saw it through Salis’ eyes, it made her nervous too. It was so easy to forget the profound strangeness all around them. They lived there, it was their home, so of course they had to defend it. But it was also a mystery they lived inside.

The timelessness of her attention and focus broke as a shudder passed through the incoming swarm, and her heart doubled its beat. A swirling motion that went through the drive plumes even as they winked out. The muttering in the room got louder.

“How fast they burning?” Vandercaust said, awe in his voice. He switched his hand terminal from the alert screen to a tracking program, streaming the data into it. “Esá can’t have crew on. Jelly and smash if they were, juice or no juice.”

Medina shuddered. The vibration was small but unmistakable. The first of the enemy were inside effective range. On the feed, the flicker of the rail guns was joined by slower, sweeping arcs of PDC fire, the bright pinpoints of Medina’s own torpedoes. Roberts found herself muttering curses like they were prayer, and didn’t know how long she’d been doing it. The flickers of enemy drive plumes began to thicken and coalesce into a single bright shaft, drawing a line between the alien station and Medina.

“They’re getting between us,” she said. “They got to stop them, they’re getting between us. They’re going to get here. They’re going to board us.”

“No one on them to board us,” Vandercaust said again. “No es ships, those. Fists with engines to push them is all. Rams.”

“We’re still picking them off,” Salis said. “Look, rail guns still firing.”

It was true. The shots were careful, dangerous. They slid past Medina’s drum so close Roberts imagined she heard them hiss on the way past. But the enemy kept dying, exploding into scrap and vapor. The wave of enemy torpedoes was already gone, turned to debris and bad intentions. And the ships, closer and closer but fewer every minute.

“We’re taking hits,” Vandercaust said, glowering into his hand terminal.

Roberts pulled up her own terminal. Pressure loss on the outermost layers of the drum. Not everywhere, but scattered. A hall here, a warehouse there. A water reservoir was holed, throwing mist and ice out in a pinwheel as the drum spun it away. The Mormons had built the outer parts of the drum thick against the hard radiation of space. But no one was dying. Not yet.

“How are they hitting us?”

“Dead scraps,” Salis said. “It’s the debris from the torpedoes. It’s nothing.”

It might have been true that it was only debris, but it wasn’t nothing. As she watched, another alert opened, was flagged, assigned out. Her team wasn’t called yet. Wouldn’t be, she thought, until the bombardment stopped or something important enough to be worth risking all three of their lives took a hit. Around them, the other people cheered, and she looked up to see a spreading sphere in among the fading swarm. They got a big one, and the detonation had been enough to knock out a few of its nearest neighbors.

The thousands of wasps were fewer now. Two, maybe three hundred, and fading by the moment. The ones there were diving hard for Medina, dodging arcs of PDC fire, fleeing from the torpedo strikes, slipping outside their corridor of safety and being ripped apart by the rail guns. As the glittering lights fell to black, Roberts felt something in her gut and her throat. The laughter came out as barely a chuckle, but warm and full as tears, and grew to something deep.

They had come to take Medina, and they were failing. Yes, the station was taking its hits. Yes, they would be bloodied. But they would not fall. Medina was Free Navy now, and it would be Free Navy forever. Salis was grinning too. All around them, cheers started to go up with every rail-gun strike that plucked away another invader. Of them all, only Vandercaust seemed uncertain.

“Que sa?” Roberts asked him. “Visé like you’re trying to rub your asshole with your elbow.”

Vandercaust shook his head. Another flicker from the rail guns, another light gone out.

“Keep drifting, them,” Vandercaust said. “Visé. They’re in the shadow, yeah? Station’s far enough away the rail guns can cover them and us with the same thumbnail. But then they … drift. Get where the rail guns can pick them off. What for they drifting?”

“Who cares, as long as they all die?” Salis said around a mouthful of grinning.

“Maybe they want to get killed,” Roberts said. Joking. She’d only been joking.

The words hung there, floating over the table like smoke pooling when the luck was about to turn. She shifted her attention back to the screen, her joy and relief gone like they’d never been there. Cold washed her lungs and heart, a totally different fear than the tenseness and anxiety of the run-up. Another ship that should have died under Medina’s PDCs or torpedoes died to a rail gun instead.

“What am I looking at, Vandercaust?” Roberts said, her voice hard but trembling. Vandercaust didn’t answer, but hunched over his hand terminal, working it furiously with his thick, workman’s fingers.

Another ship. Another. Less than a hundred of the enemy left, and they were peeling away like a flower blooming. Not even trying to keep course for Medina. All around, the room erupted in shouts and celebration. Over the cacophony, she barely heard Vandercaust say Shit.

She asked the question with her hand, and he passed the hand terminal to her. Already, the start of the battle looked like something out of history. The thousands of drive plumes flooding through the ring gate. Most—almost all—falling hard toward Medina.

Almost all. But a few failed. Their drives stuttering. Maneuvering thrusters blinking, throwing them into rough, cartwheeling spins. She remembered seeing them, discounting them. The enemy was so many, so cobbled together, so among the thousands, there were a few malfunctions. It only meant a handful they didn’t have to worry about.

Except Vandercaust had flagged one. It glowed blue on his display as the battle proceeded. The rail guns turned toward the torpedoes that threatened Medina. The rounds spitting out. The enemy dying. But not the little green malfunction. It drifted, tumbling and dead.

Until it didn’t.

When its drive burst back into life, it wasn’t flying for Medina or retreating back for the Sol gate. It darted toward the alien sphere. The blue, faintly glowing artifact at the center of the slow zone where all their guns were placed. Roberts was trembling so hard now that the green dot seemed to dance in her hand, leaving bright traces behind it. A jittering afterimage of how they’d been tricked. Thousands of boats and torpedoes arcing through the vacuum like a magician’s gesture meant only to pull the eye. And God damn, but it had worked.

She handed back the hand terminal, plucked up her own, put in an emergency connection request to Jakulski. Every second he didn’t answer felt like another clod of dirt landing on her coffin. When he did appear, he was in the administration offices, outside the drum and on the float. His sated grin told her that even Captain Samuels hadn’t figured it out yet.

“Que hast, Roberts?” Jakulski said, and for a moment, she couldn’t talk. The longing to be in the world Jakulski and all the others around here were in—the world where they’d won—was a lump in her throat. The words wouldn’t fit past it.

And then they did.

“Get a tightbeam to Mondragon,” she said.

“Who?”

“No. Shit. Montemayor. Whatever la coyo la’s name is. Duarte’s people. Warn him. Warn all of them.”

Jakulski’s brow furrowed. He leaned closer to the camera, though where he was there was no pull to lean into. “No savvy me,” he said.

“Consolidated-fleet jodidas just landed on the other station. They were never after Medina. They were coming for the rail guns.”