Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Six: Holden

“I feel like we should be whispering,” Holden said. “Going around on tiptoes.”

“We’re on the float,” Naomi said.

“Metaphorical tiptoes.”

The ops deck was dark apart from the backsplash glow of their monitors. Alex was sleeping in his cabin, leaving the monitoring to Holden and Naomi. Last he’d seen them, Bobbie and Amos were touring the ship, testing everything but the comms—PDCs, thrusters, the keel-mounted rail gun, the environmental systems. Ever since the mission had begun, Bobbie had been careful not to make Holden feel like she was taking over the ship, but her deference didn’t extend so far that she wouldn’t refamiliarize herself with every centimeter of the Roci before the fighting started. Even if it was just running through how Amos had rerouted the water feeds to the galley, watching the two of them always felt like listening to a conversation about weapons. The serious, professional talk between people who understood that they were working with equipment that could get people killed. It left him feeling like he’d been a little too casual about the ship up to now.

Clarissa … he didn’t know where Clarissa was. Ever since the last hard burn, he’d only caught fleeting glimpses of her, like she was a spirit they’d picked up that couldn’t bear being seen straight on. Most of what he heard about her—that she was building up her strength, that her black market implants were making her less nauseated, that she’d tracked down the bad coupler that was making the machine shop lights dim—he heard from the others in the crew. He didn’t like it, but at least he didn’t have to talk to her.

The plan was simple. The Azure Dragon wasn’t a gunship, but a geological surveyor. The protection she had was that space was vast, the ship was small, and her orbit kept her far enough away from Earth and Luna that she could burn hard back out to the Belt or the Jovian moons if anyone started coming for her. All of her active systems—transponder, radar, ladar, radio—were shut down to keep her from announcing herself. She couldn’t stop the light from bouncing off her hull, and she couldn’t hide her waste heat, but she could run as quietly as possible. It limited her to passive sensors and tightbeam. Enough for her to do the work of coordinating the stones thrown at Earth, but still half-blind.

And that was what Bobbie was counting on.

They’d laid in a course that would put them close to the Azure Dragon, then arranged for a shifting of the combined fleet that would hide the flare of their burn. It was a balance of getting to the enemy quickly but not being able to make the classic halfway-point flip-and-burn. They only built up enough velocity that they could shed it when they got close, and then the Roci went dark and drifted. With no active sensors, the Azure Dragon would have to see them visually—a tiny point in the vastness—and identify them as a threat without radar or ladar.

And they would, eventually. But by then, if it all went the way Bobbie intended, it wouldn’t make a difference.

It was a slower approach than Holden remembered making to anything in all the time they’d had the Roci, and it left him antsy and impatient.

The voices came from the lift: Bobbie serious, sharp, and professional; Amos cheerful and amiable. They floated up into the deck, first Bobbie and then Amos. Bobbie grabbed a handhold and pulled herself to a stop. Amos tapped the deck with his ankle as he passed it and killed his own momentum by planting his feet on the ceiling and absorbing it with his knees. He floated upside down. The Roci usually ran at less than full g to conserve reaction mass and for Naomi’s benefit, but they almost always had a consistent down. Going totally on the float was weird.

“How’s it going?” Bobbie asked.

Holden gestured at his screen. “Nothing new. It doesn’t look like they’ve noticed us yet.”

“Their reactors are still down?”

“The heat signature’s just sitting there.”

Bobbie pressed her lips together and nodded. “That’s not going to last much longer.”

“We could shoot ’em,” Amos said. “It ain’t my call, but in my experience the guy that throws the first punch usually wins.”

“Show me the estimated range,” Bobbie said. Holden pulled up the passive sensor array. At roughly five million klicks out, the Azure Dragon was about ten times as far from them as Luna was from Earth. It probably wouldn’t crew more than a dozen people. In the infinite star field, it would have been invisible to the naked eye. Even if the enemy had been on a full burn, the exhaust plume would have only been one point of light among billions. “How accurate is that?”

“I’m not sure,” Holden said. “Normally we’d be using ladar.”

“Give it ten percent either way,” Naomi said. “At this range and scale, passive sampling errors expand pretty fast.”

“But with the ladar?” Bobbie asked.

“Within a meter,” Naomi said.

“You ever think about how much ammo’s flying around out there?” Amos said, reaching up to brush the floor with outstretched fingers. The contact started him drifting almost imperceptibly toward the ceiling and at the same time rotating back toward consensus upright. “Figure all those PDC rounds that didn’t actually hit something; most of the rail-gun rounds, whether they went through a ship or not. All out there someplace going at the same speed as when they left the barrel.”

“If we shoot them, they’ll still look for who did it,” Naomi said.

“Might not,” Amos said.

Naomi looked at Bobbie. “We’re going to have to start a braking burn soon or we’ll skin right past them.”

“How long?” Bobbie asked.

“Three hours,” Naomi said. “Anything more than that, and we’ll need to go on the juice or risk the deceleration g popping a bunch of blood vessels we’d rather keep whole.”

Bobbie tapped the tips of her right middle finger and thumb together in a rapid stutter. When she nodded, it was more to herself than to them. “Screw this. I’m tired of waiting. I’ll go wake Alex up. Let’s get it over with.”

“All right, boys and girls,” Alex drawled. “Everybody strapped in and ready?”

“Check,” Holden said on the open channel, and then listened as the others reported in. Including Clarissa Mao. It was an illusion built from anticipation, but Holden felt like the lights were a little brighter, as if after weeks in dock, the Roci was excited to be doing something important too.

“Reactor’s good,” Amos reported from the machine deck.

Alex cleared his throat. “All right. We’re good to go in ten … nine …”

“She’s seen us,” Naomi said. “I’ve got action from her maneuvering thrusters.”

“Fine, then. Three-two-one,” Alex said, and Holden fell back into his crash couch hard. The gel pressed in around him, and the ship rumbled the deep bass of the drive as it spilled off speed. To the Azure Dragon, it would be like a bright new star had appeared. A supernova light-years away. Or something less dangerous but much, much closer.

“Ladar’s up,” Naomi said. “And … I’ve got lock.”

“Is their reactor up?” Holden asked, at the same time that Bobbie said, “Give me fire control.”

Naomi answered both. “Their drive’s cycling up. We probably have half a minute. You have control, Bobbie.”

“Holden,” Bobbie snapped, “please ring the doorbell. Alex, surrender maneuvering to fire control.”

“Done,” Alex said.

Holden switched on the tightbeam. The Roci found a lock at once. “Azure Dragon, this is the Rocinante. You may have heard of us. We are on approach. Surrender—”

Thrust gravity cut out and their crash couches hissed as the ship spun on two axes.

“Surrender at once and prepare for boarding.”

Naomi’s voice was calm and focused. “Enemy reactor is coming up.”

The ship seemed to trip, throwing Holden and Naomi up against their straps. The keel-mounted rail gun pushed the whole ship backward in a solid mathematical relationship to the mass of the two-kilo tungsten round moving at a measurable fraction of c. Newton’s third law expressed as violence. Holden’s gut knotted and he tried to lean forward. The long seconds dragged.

Naomi made a small, satisfied sound in the back of her throat. “Okay, their reactor’s shutting down. They’re dumping core. We’re not seeing nitrogen in the plume. I don’t think they’ve lost air.”

“Nice shooting,” Amos said on the open channel.

“God damn,” Bobbie said as the Roci shifted back. “I have missed the hell out of this.”

Thrust gravity returned, pushing Holden back as they slowed toward the drifting science ship. It was harder now—a solid two g he could feel in his jaw and the base of his skull.

“Please respond, Azure Dragon, or we’ll shoot you some more,” he said.

“This doesn’t feel right,” Naomi said.

“They started it,” Alex said from above them in the pilot’s deck. “Every rock that dropped, they had a part in.”

Holden wasn’t sure that was what she’d meant, but Naomi didn’t press it, so maybe it had been. “Not getting any response, Bobbie,” he said. “How do you want to play it?”

In answer, the former Martian marine climbed down from the gunner’s station, hand over hand in the high gravity. The muscles in her arms were like cords of wire, and her grimace said both that the sheer effort hurt and that she kind of liked it. “Let them know that if they open up on us, they won’t get crash couches on the way to jail,” she said, passing down toward the airlock. “I’m just going to slip into something more comfortable.”

The crash couches shifted a little as Alex bent their trajectory so they wouldn’t melt the Azure Dragon to slag in their drive plume. Bobbie grunted and took a new grip on the handholds.

“You know there’s a lift, right?” Holden said.

“Where’s the fun in that?” Bobbie said as she sank out of sight.

Naomi shifted against the high gravity so that he could see her face. Her smile was complex—discomfort and pleasure and something that looked like foreboding. “So that’s what she looks like when she takes herself off the leash.”

Shedding the last of their velocity and matching orbit wasn’t fast. Holden listened with half an ear while Alex, Amos, and Naomi coordinated with the Roci’s systems to bring them alongside. Bobbie chimed in now and again when she wasn’t putting her powered armor together and running through its system checks. The greater part of his attention stayed on the enemy. The Azure Dragon floated in silence. An expanding cloud of radioactive gas that had been its fusion core slowly dissipated behind it until it was hardly denser than the surrounding vacuum. No emergency beacon. No announcement of defiance or surrender. No response to his pings and queries. The silence was creepy.

“I don’t think we killed them,” Holden said. “We probably didn’t kill them, did we?”

“Doesn’t seem likely,” Naomi said, “but I suppose we’ll find out. Worst case, we did, and it still makes it easier to keep the rocks from dropping on Earth.”

Something in the tone of her voice caught him. Her eyes were on her monitor, but she didn’t seem focused. Her mind a million kilometers away.

“Are you all right?”

Naomi blinked, shook her head like she was trying to clear it, and put on a smile that was only a little bit forced. “It’s just strange being out here again. And I can’t help wondering whether I know anyone on that ship. It’s not something I thought about much before.”

“Things have changed,” Holden said.

“Yeah, you used to be the one with the high profile,” she said, and her smile became a degree less forced. “Now I’m the one all the best interrogators want to sit down with.”

Alex announced that he had positive lock on the Azure Dragon’s airlock. Override was coming. Bobbie acknowledged it, said she was prepped for boarding action. She’d be back when the enemy was cleared. It all sounded very military, very Martian. There was an excitement in their voices. Some of it was their fear dressing up in party clothes, but some of it wasn’t. For the first time that he could remember, Holden found himself imagining how it would sound in Naomi’s ears. Her friends preparing themselves to attack and possibly kill people who’d grown up the way she had. The way that no one else on the Rocinante would ever totally understand.

They’d worked on all sides of the confused mess that humanity had made of the Belt and the scattering of colonies beyond it. They’d fought pirates for the OPA. Taken contracts with Earth and Mars and private concerns with their own agendas. Thinking of Naomi now, not only as herself but also as the product of the life she’d lived—the life she was still bringing herself to reveal to him—changed how he saw everything. Even himself.

“We had to stop them,” he said.

She turned to him, confusion in her eyes. “Who? These assholes? Of course we did.” A deep clanking sound ran through the ship as the airlocks connected. An alert popped up on Holden’s screen, but he ignored it. Naomi tilted her head as if Holden was a puzzle she hadn’t quite figured out. “Did you think I felt bad for them?”

“No,” Holden said. “Or yes, but not exactly. Everyone on that ship thinks they’re doing the right thing too. When they’re throwing rocks at Earth, it’s to … to protect kids on ships that had to run with too little air or bad filters. Or people who lost their ships because the UN changed the tariff laws.”

“Or because they think it’s fun to kill people,” Naomi said. “Don’t romanticize them just because some of the justifications they use are—”

A second clank came, deeper than the first. Naomi’s eyes widened at the same moment Holden felt his gut tighten. It wasn’t a good sound.

“Alex? What was that?”

“I think we got us a little problem, folks.”

“I’m all right,” Bobbie said, and the way she said it made it clear that it was a live issue.

Naomi turned to her monitor, lips pressed thin and tight. “What’ve we got, Alex?”

“Booby trap,” Alex said. “Looks like some kind of magnetic lock from their end. Froze up the works. And Bobbie—”

“I’m stuck between their outer lock and ours,” Bobbie said. “I’m fine. I’m just going to bust my way through and—”

“No,” Naomi said as Holden’s attention flicked to the alert still flashing on his own monitor. “If it’s really bound, you could break both locks. Just sit tight, and let me see what we can do to get you unstuck.”

“Hey,” Holden said. “Anyone know why we just lost a sensor array?” Another alert popped up on his screen. Raw alarm started sounding in his head. “Or that PDC?”

The others were silent for a moment, and then for what felt like hours and was probably five or six seconds, there was only the tap of fingertips on control panels and the chirp of the Rocinante reporting back to queries. Even before he had confirmation, he was sure of the answer. The external camera swept the Roci’s skin. The Azure Dragon, hugged against her, felt like a parasite more than a prisoner. And then a flicker of sparks and a flash of safety yellow. Holden shifted the camera. Three spiderlike construction mechs squatted midway down the Roci’s side, welding torches lit and clawing at the hull.

“They’re stripping us,” Holden said.

When Alex spoke, his false politeness didn’t cover his rage. “I can put on a little burn if you want. Drop them into our drive plume and be done—”

“You’ll fold the airlocks together,” Holden said, cutting him off. “It’ll crush Bobbie to death.”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “All right. So that’s a bad idea.”

Holden took control of a PDC and tried to shift its arc far enough down to catch one of the mechs, but they were too close in. A fresh alert popped up. A hardened power conduit was throwing off errors. They were digging deeper into the hull. It wouldn’t be long before they could do some real damage. And if they managed to burrow their way between the hulls …

“What happens if Bobbie breaks the docking tube?” Holden snapped.

“Best case, we can’t use it until we get it repaired,” Naomi said. “Worst, they rigged their coupling with a secondary trap that kills Bobbie and spills out our air.”

“It’s all right,” Bobbie said. “I can take the risk. Just give me a second to position—”

“No,” Holden said. “No, wait. We can find a way out. No one dies. We’ve got time.”

But they didn’t have much. A welding torch flared again. When Amos spoke, his voice sounded wrong. Too small, too close. “You know, Cap, we’ve got another airlock. Cargo bay’s right down here by the machine shop.”

The penny dropped. Amos sounded different because he was already wearing a vac suit. He was talking through a helmet mic.

“What are you thinking, Amos?”

“Nothing real subtle. Figure we hop outside, kill a few assholes that need killing, patch stuff up when we’re done with the first part.”

Naomi caught his eye and nodded once. Years together and an uncountable list of crises weathered made a kind of telepathy between them. Naomi would stay and get Bobbie safely out of the trap. Holden would go out with Amos and keep the enemy at bay.

“All right,” Holden said, reaching for his restraints. “Prep a suit. I’m on my way down.”

“I’ll leave you one,” Amos said, “but I think we’ll get a head start without you.”

“Wait,” Holden said. “We?”

“We’re cycling out now,” Clarissa Mao said. “Wish us luck.”