Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Forty-Six: Holden

“You know what I’d like?” Alex yelled down from the cockpit.

“If we could get out of here?” Holden yelled back.

“If we could get out of here. At this rate we’re going to be sitting here with our jumpsuits around our ankles when the bad guys get back,” Alex said. “There’s a reason they don’t call those things slow-attack ships.”

Even though Naomi was strapped into the couch beside Holden’s, she answered over the headsets so she at least wasn’t shouting about it. “The Giambattista’s a big ship, Alex. You’re just spoiled because you haven’t had to drive a cow like that in years.”

“Shit,” Alex said. “I could have spun the Canterbury around in half the time this is taking.”

Naomi’s sigh was as close as she was going to get to agreeing with them. “Well, you were good at your job.”

On the screen, the Giambattista slid slowly sideways toward the ring gate. The damage from the attack ships’ first run had done something to unbalance the maneuvering thrusters, so a lot of the piloting involved rotating the ship and then waiting until the working thrusters spun into the right position to fire. The plumes of the returning attack ships were already visible. It wouldn’t be long before the torpedo barrage would kick in again, unless the Free Navy was going for a wait-till-you-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes approach. The enemy had split, curving back toward them in an almost hundred-degree spread. It wasn’t quite as bad as it could have been. If they’d taken the time to bring their attacks from opposite directions, defending the Giambattista with the Roci would have been almost impossible. But it would also have taken enough time to play the vectors and get in position that the Giambattista would have cleared the ring gate before they arrived. It was like they were all being forced to find a min/max point in a complex curve of inertia, acceleration, and a lot of dead people.

The Giambattista’s main drive fired, the plume dwarfing the ship, and Alex crowed in celebration.

“About time,” Naomi said. “I’m matching course. We’ll be through in twenty minutes.”

Holden opened a connection to Bobbie. The seconds stretched out long enough that he started to feel his gut tighten. The connection came through, dropped, then reestablished just as Naomi said, “One of them’s burning to pass through the gate with us.” He’d get right back to that.

“We’re looking at twenty minutes to get through the gate. Where do you stand?”

The weird interference of the gates made her reply thick and creepy. She was breathing hard, and until there were words with it, he was picturing her gut-shot and on the float. Or drifting down onto the surface of the alien station. He was reaching to switch over to Amos when she spoke.

“Amos’s holding position against the enemy,” she said. “I’m almost back to them. Suit ran out of propellant mass, so I’m hoofing it with the mag boots.”

“You’re running back to the fight?”

“Well, call it a fast shuffle,” Bobbie said between breaths, “but it’s fine. They put in. A big metal road. Goes right to ’em.”

“Okay. We’ll get some backup to you as soon as we can. Just don’t get killed before we get there.”

“No promises, sir,” Bobbie said, and he would have sworn from her voice she was smiling when she said it. A blast of static, and the connection dropped.

“Okay,” Holden said. “What have we got?”

“They’re both shooting at us,” Naomi said.

“You sound calm about that.”

She looked over at him. Her smile was sudden and bright and made his heart ache a little bit. “It’s all Hail Mary bullshit. It’s not even an attack so much as an opportunity to let us screw up.”

“Okay. So, not worried about that. What are we worried about?”

Naomi flipped the drive analysis of their pursuers over to his monitor. The nearer of the ships had altered its path, and the projected curve put them through the ring and into the slow zone five minutes after the Roci and Giambattista made the transit. They weren’t breaking off. That was too bad.

“Do we have a plan for dealing with that?”

Alex answered over the ship comm. “I’d vote for shooting them.” And a moment later, Clarissa, “Seconded.”

Holden nodded to himself. It still felt weird hearing her. Maybe it always would.

“Okay, let’s lay in a targeting solution.”

“Did it while you were talking to Bobbie,” Naomi said.

The PDCs chattered for a moment, then went silent. Cleaning up the Hail Mary attacks. Holden rubbed his hands on his thighs. Tapped his fingers together. Pulled up the tactical to see the ring and the alien station, Medina and the fast-attack ships.

“We’ll have enough to defend everything even if both ships follow us in, right?”

“Hush,” Naomi said.

Looking through the exterior cameras, the ring seemed to wipe away the stars as they passed through it. Alex did a short, hard braking burn, turning their nose toward the gate and the narrowing circle of stars beyond it. The Giambattista twisted and burned and twisted again, its remaining hatches opening. Pinpoint drive plumes streaked out from it, less than fireflies compared with the wide, glowing burst of the hauler’s Epstein drive. Holden watched as a handful, and then a dozen, and then a hundred poured down toward Medina. The OPA coming to finish the job. The remaining landing boats spread out, a wide, diffuse target. At this distance, Medina’s PDCs were useless, and the Roci could probably take out any torpedoes. But even if they did fire, they’d only take out a handful of soldiers and leave an army still behind.

He tried opening a tightbeam to the incoming attack ship, but the interference from the ring was too thick, so he switched to broadcast. “Attention incoming attack ship,” he said. Naomi looked over at him, a question in her eyes. Not concern or worry, though. She trusted him. “This is James Holden of the Rocinante. Please break off your approach. We don’t have to do it this way.”

He waited. The tactical display was thinner than it had been. All they knew of what was happening in the solar system was what leaked through the gate. The Free Navy’s attack ship didn’t answer, but dove toward them.

“He ain’t thinking this through, Hoss,” Alex shouted down. “What do you want me to do?”

“Give them a chance,” Holden said.

“And if they don’t take it?”

“Then they don’t,” Holden said.

The ring grew smaller as they fell away from it, like looking up at the circle of a well from down in the water. The attack ship was braking hard toward the ring. Just as the first of the Giambattista’s second-wave ships were about to reach Medina and the alien station, the attack ship passed through the ring, launched a half dozen torpedoes, and exploded in a star-bright failure of their drive’s magnetic bottle when Alex fired the Roci’s rail gun through it. Holden watched in silence as the expanding cloud of gas that had been a ship full of men and women spread out and began to fade.

He tried to feel some sense of victory in it, but mostly it just seemed absurd. The slow zone, the gates, even the merely human ships that had carried them out so far. They were miracles. The universe was filled with mysteries and beauty and awe, and all that they could manage to do with it was this. Chase each other down and see who was the faster draw.

Everything in the slow zone—the Giambattista, its cloud of attack boats, Medina Station, the Rocinante—seemed to pause for a moment. A connection request from Bobbie interrupted him, and he accepted it.

“We’re secure down here,” Bobbie said. She was still breathing hard. “Enemy has surrendered.”

“We took them alive?”

“Some of them,” Amos said.

“They put up a hell of a fight, even after it was hopeless,” Bobbie said. “We lost some too.”

“I’m sorry,” Holden said, and was a little surprised to notice how much that was true. Not just something you said at times like this. “I wish there’d been another way.”

“Yes, sir,” Bobbie said. “I’m going to oversee putting the prisoners in a transport. But there’s something you should know.”

“Yes?”

“These aren’t Free Navy down here. The people defending the rail gun network were Martian.”

Holden let that sink in. “The ones from the coup? Duarte’s people?”

“They’re not saying anything, but that’s my assumption. This could be important.”

“See they’re kept safe and treated well,” Holden said.

“Already on it,” Bobbie said and dropped the connection.

Holden shifted his monitor to the exterior cameras and shifted the view until he could see the Giambattista, the alien station, and—far enough away that it hardly seemed like more than a shaving of metal, invisible without the Roci enhancing it—Medina Station. He folded a hand over his mouth, turned on identification markers for all the landing skiffs and jerry-rigged boats, watched the display vanish under the cloud of pale green text, turned them off again and stared into the blackness. His eyes felt gritty. It was like all the anxiety and tension that he’d built up during the burn out to the ring had collapsed. Turned into something else.

“You all right?” Naomi asked.

“I was thinking about Fred,” he said. “This? It’s what he did. Lead armies. Take stations. This is what his life was like.”

“This is what he retired from,” Naomi said. “When he decided to start trying to get people to talk things out instead of shooting people, this is what he left behind.”

“Well, let’s see how that works,” he said. He set up the camera, considered himself on his screen, and ran his fingers through his hair until he looked a little better. Still worn-out. Still tired. But better. He set the system to broadcast.

“Medina Station. This is James Holden of the Rocinante. We’re here to take administration of the station and the slow zone and the gates back from the Free Navy. If you really want, we can spend a while shooting your PDCs and torpedo arrays until they don’t work and then land all these boats. We’ve got a lot of people with guns. I figure you do too. We could all kill a bunch more of each other, but I’d really prefer that we do this without losing anyone else. Surrender, lay down arms, and I promise humane treatment for the Free Navy’s command structure and any other prisoners.”

He tried to think of something else. Something more. A sweeping speech about how they were all one species after all, and that they could shrug off the weight of history if they chose to. They could all come together and make something new, and all it would really take was doing it. But all the words he could think of sounded false and unconvincing in his mind, so he cut the feed instead and waited to see what happened.

Naomi slipped out of her crash couch, floated to the lift and down. She came back a few minutes later with a bulb of tea. Slipped back into her couch. Waited. If it went on much longer, Holden knew he’d have to launch the attack. The boats weren’t built for much more than scooting from one ship to another. They’d start running out of air and fuel before long. But maybe a few minutes more …

The response came. Clear, unencrypted radio signal, as open as his demand for surrender had been. The woman in the Free Navy uniform was on the float in a very familiar room. The religious images on the wall behind her were like symbols from a recurring dream about violence and blood and loss.

Only maybe this time would be different.

“Captain Holden. I am Captain Christina Huang Samuels of the Free Navy. I will accept the terms of your surrender on the condition that you guarantee the safety and humane treatment of my people. We reserve the right to record and broadcast your boarding action to assure that all of humanity will bear witness to your behavior. I do this out of necessity and loyalty to my people. The Free Navy is the military arm of the people of the Belt, and I will not sacrifice the lives of my people or the unaffiliated civilians of Medina Station when there is no profit to be had from it. But I myself will stand now and forever against the tyranny of the inner planets and their exploitation and slow genocide of my people.”

She saluted the camera and the message ended. Holden sighed, started up his broadcast again.

“Sounds good,” he said. “We’ll be right over.” He killed the broadcast.

“Seriously?” Alex called from above. “‘Sounds good, we’ll be right over’?”

“I may kind of suck at this job,” Holden called back.

The voice over the ship’s comm was Clarissa’s: “I thought it was sweet.”

The fall of Medina Station took twenty hours from the first OPA ships docking to the last Free Navy operative being locked in a cell. Medina’s brig wasn’t anywhere near big enough, so it was reserved for the higher officials—the command staff, the department heads, the security officers and agents. The others—mostly technicians and maintenance—were confined to their quarters with the doors locked by the station system. Which meant, in the end, by Holden. He couldn’t help feeling like he’d just sent a thousand people to their rooms to really think about what they’d done.

He set up his command post in the central security office in the drum. The spin gravity wasn’t so high it would bother Naomi, and there was something restful about being able to collapse into his chair while they watched the newsfeeds from Earth. Bobbie Draper, now the acting head of security for Medina, sprawled at her desk, legs up, hands behind her head, looking as relaxed as he’d seen her since she and Amos had come on board the Roci again. One sleeve was rolled up, and a bright, blistered burn ringed her elbow in the shape of a vac suit’s seal. She rubbed it gently. Caressed it. There was something unnervingly postcoital about her response to violence. Alex and Amos were in the next room where Naomi was combing through the station logs with an OPA engineer named Costas, arguing about something that involved yogurt and black beans. Only Clarissa hadn’t come on the station, and Holden hadn’t asked why. His memories of the Behemoth were bad enough. He couldn’t imagine hers.

On the newsfeed, The Hague looked like a battered, sepia-soaked version of itself. The sky above the UN building was white with haze, but it wasn’t dark. And Avasarala stood without a podium. Her bright-orange sari looked like a victory banner.

“The liberation of Medina means more than freeing one station from violent tyranny,” she said, reaching the crescendo of the half-hour-long speech. “It means the reopening of the path to all the colonies and all the worlds that the Free Navy tried to lock away. It means the reconnection to the motive force of history, and proof that the spirit of humanity will never bow to fear and cruelty. And yes, since you’ve all behaved so nicely, I’ll take some questions. Takeshi?”

A thin reporter in a gray suit stood up, a reed among the ranks of his professional fraternity.

“Shit,” Alex said from the doorway. “Are there reporters anywhere else, or does she have all of them?”

“Shh,” Bobbie said.

“Madam Secretary-General, you said that the attack on Earth was not an act of war but the lashing out of a criminal conspiracy. Now that you have captured prisoners, how will they be handled?”

“The conspirators will be brought to Luna and introduced to their lawyers,” Avasarala said. “Next quest—”

“Just the ones from Medina? Or Pallas and Europa too? Won’t that create a burden on the court system?” the gray man pressed.

Avasarala’s smile was sweet. “Oh, that guy’s fucked,” Bobbie said.

“Oh yeah,” Holden agreed.

“It will take some time to process everyone,” Avasarala said. “But I have to put some blame for the delay on the Free Navy itself. If they wanted a faster trial, they shouldn’t have leveled so many courthouses. Next question. Lindsey?”

“She shouldn’t be milking this so much,” Bobbie said while a blond woman stood in the gray man’s place and asked something about reconstruction and the role of the OPA. “It’s going to bite her.”

“It’s the biggest unambiguous victory we’ve had against Inaros,” Holden said. “Everything else, he stripped to the studs and walked away from. Or left for us to crawl over, disarming his booby traps. Even the thing at Titan looks like it cost us as much as it got back. Earth needs a win. Hell, Mars needs a win. I’m just glad it’s one that had Belters fighting on our side too.”

“But if she builds it up too much, it’s just going to be worse when we lose Medina again.”

Holden looked over. “Why do you think we’re going to lose it?”

“Because I had to kill the rail guns,” Bobbie said. “Holding on to this place assumed we could take over the defenses. We didn’t. We broke them. If we can get a dozen ships in here with guns like the Roci or maybe a pair of Donnager-class battleships, we can hold it. But that means getting them here, and we have to assume Inaros is throwing every spare grenade and bullet into whatever ships he has to burn here and kick our asses. And that’s if his patron out past the Laconia gate isn’t already sending the MCRN ships he stole to clear us out.”

The knot in Holden’s gut that had loosened a couple notches since he’d stepped onto Medina tightened back up. “Oh,” he said. “So. Do we have a plan to address that?”

“Fight like hell and hope the bad guys spend so much time killing us they can’t finish rebuilding before whoever Avasarala and Richards send next gets here.”

“Ah.”

“We’ve been screwed since the minute I blew up that reactor. Doesn’t take away from the essential dignity of the situation. And this is a fine hill.”

“A what?”

Bobbie looked over, surprised he hadn’t followed the idiom. “Fine hill to die on.”