Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Fifty: Holden

“It’s not a huge dataset,” Naomi said, turning as she reached the edge of the room and pacing back toward him. “I mean, it’s the largest there is. There’s not more out there we could get.”

“Is that a problem?” Holden asked.

She stopped, stared at him, her hands wide and hard in a universal gesture of Of course it’s a problem. “It may not scale. There may be other variables at work that just haven’t come into play in these instances. If you wanted me to build an engine based around data like this, I wouldn’t do it. Shit, an engine. I wouldn’t trust a ladder based on this. Except that …”

She started pacing again and chewing at the nail of one thumb. Whatever her exception was, she’d already moved on in her mind. Holden folded his arms, waited. He knew her well enough to recognize when she needed a little mental space. He looked down at the graphs on her screen. They reminded him of a heart monitor, but the shapes of the curves were very different. He was pretty sure that with an EKG, the initial spike went back down under the baseline. With this, there was a rapid rise, then a slow, sloping falling away.

No one else had come to the security station yet. Probably, they were all still on the Rocinante, eating breakfast in the galley. Or maybe stopping at one of the little kiosks in the docks where the locals still took their scrip.

Naomi stopped beside him, her gaze on the screen with his. Her lips twitched like she was talking to herself, having a heated conversation no one else was welcome to. Not even him. She shook her head, disagreeing with herself. She’d seemed calmer when she’d first called, but the more they talked about it, the more agitated she became. The more frightened, even.

It looked like she was starting to hope.

“So this thing. Is it a thing we can use?”

“I don’t know what it is. The mechanism? I’ve got no idea. All we have is this pattern, but it looks so consistent.”

He tried again. “Is this a consistent pattern we can use? And specifically, is there something here that maybe gives us a third alternative in that ‘stay here and be slaughtered versus run away through one of the gates and be slaughtered’ conversation?”

She took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly between her teeth. He’d kind of hoped she’d laugh, but she didn’t. She sat at her workstation again, pulled up a complex equation that Holden couldn’t follow.

“I think,” she said, “we can simulate a high-traffic interval. Load the Giambattista with as much junk as we can weld on it. Overload the reactor a little so it’s generating more energy. Then, when we run it through a gate”—she tapped the spike-and-decay curve—“we should get one of these. Not a big one, though. Even a massive ship is only one ship …”

“And one of these is what?”

“It’s an obstacle. It’s something that the Free Navy ships may run into. If their ships have enough mass and enough energy that this line crosses the curve before it dies away … I think they just stop.”

“Meaning they go where all the other eaten ships go?”

Naomi nodded. “We could put extra mass in the Giambattista. We’ve still got those attack boats. Some of them have fuel left in their drives. If we put them through at the same time, we could increase the curve a little. And Marco will almost certainly bring all his ships through at once, so that might help us. But I don’t know the mechanism—”

“Hey,” Holden said. “Do you know what Planck’s constant is?”

“Six point six two six plus change times ten to the negative thirty-fourth meters squared kilos per second?”

“Sure, why not,” Holden said, raising one finger. “But do you know why it’s that and not six point seven whatever the rest of it was?”

Naomi shook her head.

“Neither does anyone else. They still call it science. Most of what we know isn’t why things are what they are. We just figure out enough about how they work that we can predict the next thing that’s going to happen. That’s what you’ve got. Enough to predict. And if you think you’re right, then I do too. So let’s do this.”

She shook her head, but not at him. “A massive n equals one study where our null hypothesis is that we all get killed.”

“Not necessarily,” Holden said. “They only have fifteen to our one. We might still take them. We have Bobbie and Amos.”

This time she did laugh. He put his arm under hers, and she leaned against him. “If it doesn’t work, we won’t be any more fucked than we are now,” she said.

“Probably not,” Holden said. “I mean, weird, dead alien technology with effects we don’t understand sweeping whole ships away without leaving a trace or explanation. That’s probably safe to play with, right?”

The Pella and her fourteen warships—all that was left of the Free Navy—came closer to the ring, already past their halfway point and on their braking burn. Avasarala had sent a list of the tactics she was using to try to slow or stop the attack days before, and with a heaviness that said she knew it was all bullshit even before she got around to making it explicit. She’d ended with I’ll do whatever I can, but you might have to make do with being avenged. Sorry about that. He wondered what she’d have thought about Naomi’s discovery and their plan.

Holden felt every hour that passed, knowing Inaros and his soldiers were a little nearer. It was like someone pushing at his back, making him hurry. It would almost have been easier if it had been hours and days. At least it would have been over.

The captain of the Giambattista misunderstood at first, thinking that his ship would be lost to the whatever-it-was that the gates did. Naomi had to explain to him four different times that if it went well, the Giambattista would just sail into some other system, loaf around there for a few days, and then come back, unharmed. Once she convinced him that, even if it failed, it meant he and his crew would miss the battle, his objections evaporated.

Naomi coordinated it all—loading the boats back into their positions in the hold, retuning the reactor so that both the bottle and the reaction were working almost at the edge of their capacity. She took Amos and Clarissa with her to backload the Giambattista’s internal power grid so that everything was on the verge of overload without ever quite tripping. It reminded Holden of Father Tom telling him about bears when he was young. If a black bear wandered onto the ranch, the thing to do was to open your coat and raise your arms over your head, shout and make noise. If it was a grizzly, the only thing to do was very quietly to get as far away as you could. Only this felt like they were making noise at a grizzly in hopes that it would eat the other guy.

While Naomi made her preparations, he tried to make himself useful.

There were backlogs of communications from the colony worlds. Status reports and threats and begging. It was sobering to remember how many planets humanity had already spread to. How many seeds they’d planted in strange soils. With Naomi’s flood of information just gone out, a lot of the colonies were only now beginning to understand why they’d been cut off. Only now hearing about what had happened to Earth and its solar system. The messages coming back flooded the comm buffers with rage and sorrow, threats of vengeance and offers of aid.

Those last were the hardest. New colonies still trying to force their way into local ecosystems so exotic that their bodies could hardly recognize them as life at all, isolated, exhausted, sometimes at the edge of their resources. And what they wanted was to send back help. He listened to their voices, saw the distress in their eyes. He couldn’t help but love them a little bit.

Under the best conditions, disasters and plagues did that. It wasn’t universally true. There would always be hoarders and price gouging, people who closed their doors to refugees and left them freezing and starving. But the impulse to help was there too. To carry a burden together, even if it meant having less for yourself. Humanity had come as far as it had in a haze of war, sickness, violence, and genocide. History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage. The one didn’t come without the other, and Holden had to take comfort in that. The sense that however terrible humanity’s failings were, there was still a little more in them worth admiring.

He did what he could to answer the most pressing messages, offer what hope he could. The voice, however briefly, of Medina Station. Coordinating supplies for all the colonies was more than he could manage. It would be full-time work for a staff of dozens at least, and he was only one man with a radio. Still, just seeing the need, dipping his toes into the oceanic task of being the physical hub of a thousand different solar systems, gave him a covert sense of hope for the future.

He’d been right. There was a niche here.

Providing the plan worked. Providing they didn’t all die. Providing that any of a million things he hadn’t even thought of yet didn’t swing through and destroy everything he was still looking for and planning. There was always the forgotten arm. The thing you didn’t see coming. Hopefully, the thing Marco Inaros wouldn’t see coming either.

“So how long is this window or wake or whatever it is that we’re shooting for?” Amos asked.

Time was almost out. The question now was just how fast Inaros wanted to be going when they came through the gate. If he cut the braking thrust and came through fast, it would throw off the timing. If the Giambattista went through the Arcadia gate too late, it would be the one to quickly, quietly vanish away. If it went through too early, Naomi’s curve would already have decayed down to nothing and the Free Navy would pass into the slow zone in safety.

They’d gone back to the Rocinante. Alex and Bobbie in the cockpit, ready for battle if battle came. Holden and Naomi were strapped into the couches in the command deck. Amos, on float, had come up for the company as much as anything else. They weren’t at battle stations yet. If it came to that, this was probably the last time he’d see Amos in the flesh. Holden tried not to think about it.

“It’ll be maybe five minutes,” Naomi said. “Part of that’s going to depend on the mass and energy of the ships they bring through. If we’re lucky, maybe as much as … ten?”

“That ain’t much,” Amos said with an amiable smile. He put a hand on the ladder up to the cockpit to keep himself from drifting. “You good up there?”

“Good as gold,” Alex said.

“If this trick of Naomi’s doesn’t go, you think we can take ’em?” Amos said.

“All of them, probably not,” Bobbie called down. “Some of them, for sure.”

Clarissa rose up from the lift, a pale smile on her lips. She’d spent enough time on the float now to be natural with it. She moved from grip to grip along the wall like she’d been born a Belter. When she got to Holden, she held out a bulb from the galley.

“You said you hadn’t been able to sleep,” she said. “I thought you’d want some coffee.”

Holden took it; her smile widened a degree. The bulb was warm against his palm. Probably it wasn’t poisoned. She wasn’t really likely to do that anymore. He steeled himself a little before he took a sip.

Medina Station was in the hands of the OPA fighters from the Giambattista, not that it would do much good. Its PDCs and torpedoes had, for the most part, been spent defending against Holden. What was left was a rounding error on what they’d have needed to hold back Inaros. The Roci was waiting almost behind the blue station at the center of the slow zone. If he’d trained the ship’s cameras on it, he could have seen the ruins of the rail guns as clearly as if he’d been standing over them.

“Anything coming out of Laconia?” he asked.

“We don’t have a repeater on the far side of that gate, but just peeping through the keyhole? Nothing,” Naomi said. “No signal. No sign of approaching drives.”

The Roci chirped out an alert. Holden pulled it up.

“Got something, Cap?” Amos asked.

“Incoming ships have changed their burn a little. They’ll be coming in fast.”

“And early,” Naomi said. Her voice was like someone talking through pain. The Roci’s countdown timer adjusted itself, estimating that the enemy would come through the ring gate in twenty minutes. Holden washed the lump in his throat with Clarissa’s coffee.

Clarissa pushed over to Naomi’s couch, her sharp face bent by a frown. Naomi looked up at her and wiped her eyes. A droplet of a tear floated in the air, drifted toward the recycler intake.

“I’ll be all right,” Naomi said. “It’s just that my son’s on one of those ships.”

Clarissa’s eyes sheened over too and she put a hand on Naomi’s arm. “I know,” Clarissa said. “If you need me, you can find me.”

“It’s okay, Peaches,” Amos said. “Me and the captain had a talk about it. We’re good.” He gave Holden a cheerful thumbs-up.

The timer ticked down. Holden took a long, slow breath and opened his channel to the Giambattista.

“Okay,” he said. “This is Captain Holden of the Rocinante. Please begin your passage burn now. I need you to go through the gate in”—he checked the timer—“eighteen minutes.”

“Tchuss, røvul!” the Giambattista’s captain said. “It has been, sí no?”

The connection dropped. On the screen, the Giambattista reported a hard burn starting. Holden shifted the display to show it. A single bright star in the blackness. A drive plume wider than the ice hauler that it was driving. He wanted to believe there was something off about the color of the light, as if the high-energy tuning Naomi had done with it was visible to him, but that was just his mind playing tricks. A new counter appeared on the display. The Giambattista’s expected passage through the Arcadia ring went from seventeen minutes to sixteen. The Free Navy’s arrival—unless they altered course—through the Sol gate in nineteen. Eighteen.

Holden’s gut was tight. His breath shuddered, and he drank another sip of coffee. He opened a second window, sensors trained at the Sol gate. From where they were, the Free Navy wouldn’t be visible. Not yet. The angle was off just enough to hide them.

“Do we have the rail gun ready in case they get through?”

“Yes, sir,” Bobbie answered smartly.

“Well,” Amos said. “Me and Peaches better go strap in. You know. In case.”

Clarissa touched Naomi’s shoulder one last time, then turned and launched herself, following Amos down the lift toward engineering. Holden took a long, last drink and stowed the coffee bulb. He wanted it over. He wanted this moment to last forever in case it was the last one he had with Naomi. And Alex and Amos. Bobbie. Hell, even Clarissa. With the Rocinante. You couldn’t be in a place like the Roci for as long as he had been and not be changed by it. Not have it be home.

When Naomi cleared her throat, he thought she was going to talk to him.

“Giambattista,” she said. “This is the Rocinante. I’m not showing your internal power grid above normal.”

“Perdona,” a woman’s voice came back. “Fixing that now.”

“Thank you, Giambattista,” Naomi said and dropped the connection. She smiled over at Holden. The horror of the situation was only a line at the corner of her mouth, but his heart ached to see it all the same. “Amateurs. You’d think they’d never done this before.”

He laughed, and then she laughed with him. The timers ticked down. The Giambattista’s reached zero. The brightness of the drive plume blinked out, hidden by the curve of the Arcadia ring and the profound weirdness that was distance and space here. Where that timer had been, Naomi put up a display of a mathematical model she’d built. The spike of the Giambattista’s passage already starting to decay.

The line sloped down as, beside it, the timer for Marco’s arrival turned to seconds. In the cockpit, Bobbie said something and Alex answered. He couldn’t make out the words. Naomi’s breath sounded fast and shallow. He wanted to reach over to her. To take her hand. It would have meant taking his eyes off the monitor, and so he couldn’t.

The Sol gate flickered. Holden increased the magnification until the ring filled his screen. The weird, almost biological structures of the ring itself seemed to shift and writhe. An illusion of light. The drive plumes of the Free Navy ships packed in together so tightly that it looked like one massive blaze of fire appeared on the edge of the ring, tracking in toward its center.

“You want me to take a potshot at them?” Bobbie asked. “Rail gun could probably reach them at this point.”

“No,” Naomi said before Holden could answer. “I don’t know what sending mass through the gates right now would do.”

A line appeared on the model, low on the scale. Moving toward the dying curve. The ring gate grew brighter with the braking burns of the enemy, until it looked like the negative image of an eye—black, star-specked sclera and intensely white, burning iris. The timer reached zero. The lights grew brighter.