Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  “Maybe. But he’s new at this part.”

  She sat across from him, folded her arms. The clouds in her eyes weren’t gone. He wouldn’t have expected them to be. But they weren’t thick with thunderbolts either. “Maybe,” she said. Grudgingly. “But I’m not staying. Not after that.”

  “You should reconsider,” Dawes said. “If the plan came from Fred Johnson, it will be solid. And better that you be part of it than not.”

  She grunted, but there was a hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth. That one found home. Dawes leaned into it a little, pressing his advantage.

  “There has to be a grown-up in that room,” he said. “Holden’s a puppy. We both know that. We need you there to keep him from fucking everything up.”

  “Holden’s the most experienced man in the system,” Dawes said. “He’s been on Medina. He’s been past it to the colonies. He walked off Eros Station before it woke up. He fought pirates for us. He went on diplomatic missions for us. His ship has berthed at Tycho Station more than anyplace else since the day he stole it from Mars. Holden has years working with the OPA.”

  “There’s OPA,” Liang Goodfortune said, turning left down the corridor so that Dawes had to trot to keep up with them, “and there’s OPA.”

  Tycho Station didn’t have the same breadth and depth as Ceres. Everyone here had a job or access to one. The brothels were all licensed, the drugs all from a dispensary, the gambling all taxed. But the station was also a home to people who’d lived their lives in quiet rebellion against the inner planets, and that meant a kind of demimonde had existed there too. Workers for an Earth corporation whose first loyalty was to the Belt. And so there were clubs where the music had lyrics shouted in Belter cant, where the drinks and food called back nothing to a farmland under the bare sun, where the games were shastash and Golgo instead of poker and billiards. Liang Goodfortune fit in there like they’d never left.

  “So it was Johnson’s OPA,” Dawes said. “He was a good ally.”

  “He was useful for an Earther,” Liang Goodfortune said. “That’s not saying much. And Holden’s just the same. Another Earther for us to rally around? You know better than that, Anderson. Holden’s worked for Johnson and Earth.”

  “On behalf of the Belt,” Dawes said. “UN Navy kicked him to the curb before any of this began. His career was with a water hauler because he couldn’t stomach being part of imperial Earth. Coyo can’t change where he was born, where he grew up, but he’s lived on float. His lover’s one of ours.”

  “Savvy you he’s loyal to the Belt because he’s sleeping with Naomi Nagata? Or you think maybe she’s disloyal à the Belt because she’s with a squat? That knife cuts from the grip.”

  “Holden has been making a one-man propaganda campaign on behalf of the Belt,” Dawes said, raising his voice over the ambient musical shout of the nightclub.

  “His amateur anthropology feed? It’s insulting y patronizing y shit,” Liang Goodfortune said.

  “It’s well meant. And it’s more than other people in his position have done. Holden’s a man of action.”

  They came into the larger room, lights swirling around the bar, music thudding hard enough to press his lungs. Dawes had to lean in until his lips were almost brushing Goodfortune’s ear. “I think if there’s anyone in the system better prepared to stand against Inaros, you can’t find them and neither can I. Either you make cause with him, or you go hat in hand to the Free Navy and say you’re ready to take their table scraps. But do it soon, because I will wager everything I have that even if he has to go to war by himself, James Holden will destroy Marco Inaros before this is done.”

  “He can’t do it alone,” Dawes said, spreading his hands wide.

  The Desiderata of Bhagavathi had been Carlos Walker’s ship for thirty years, and it bore the stamp of his peculiar aesthetic sense in every detail. The anti-spalling covers on the walls were gray, but textured to catch the light in smooth curves that rose and fell like the hills of a vast desert or the not-quite-identifiable skin of nude bodies. The crash couches on the command deck weren’t simple, utilitarian gray but a sculpted bronze that had nothing to do with the actual metal and ceramic that made them up. Music played on the speakers so softly it might almost have been Dawes’ imagination: harp and flute and a dry, hissing drum. It felt less like a pirate ship than a temple. Maybe there was room for both.

  “That isn’t an argument that I should do it with him,” Carlos Walker said, handing over a drinking bulb. The whiskey that flooded Dawes’ mouth when he sipped was rich and deep and complicated. Carlos Walker smiled, watching him appreciate it. “I came out of respect for Johnson. I am staying out of respect. That respect doesn’t extend to dying on Holden’s errands. You say yourself that Medina is too well defended.”

  “I say it’s well defended,” Dawes said.

  “The rail guns will kill any ship that comes through the ring.”

  “Perhaps,” Dawes said. “But keep in mind, this is Fred Johnson’s plan. And that Fred had access to Michio Pa and all that she knows about the station defense.”

  Carlos Walker hesitated, though with him it expressed itself only as a slightly longer silence. He shook his head. “There’s risk in leaving Marco Inaros and his Free Navy to play themselves out. There’s danger in taking them on. But only one requires that I drive my ship into rail gun fire. I can’t agree to it.”

  “Not every battle is won on the battleground,” Dawes said. “I respect your caution, but Holden hasn’t asked you to be vanguard. Hasn’t even asked you to go through the ring gate. Don’t assume he’s going to demand heroism and sacrifice. I know his reputation, but no one survives the things he’s survived without having a deep capacity for thoughtfulness and foresight. And more than that, strategy. Holden comes across feckless sometimes, truth, but he’s a thinker. What he’s doing? It’s all from the head.”

  “You think he’s not angry?” Dawes said. “Holden is here as much for vengeance as you are. This is a man who acts from the gut, from the heart, before his head gets in the way.”

  They were alone in the chapel, except for the images of Fred Johnson. It felt wrong to bring talk of violence and revenge into even as milquetoast a holy place as this, but grief came in all kinds of clothing. And this had begun as a moment to show respect for the dead. Micah al-Dujaili hunched forward, his arms resting on the back of the pew in front of him. His eyes were bloodshot.

  “Carl talked to me,” he said. “Said he couldn’t stand by while the Belt starved. And Inaros killed him for it.”

  “Tried to kill Holden’s wife too,” Dawes said. He knew that wasn’t quite true, but this was a moment for broad strokes. “Not because she was a threat. Not because she was of any sort of strategic value. Just because she’d embarrassed him, and he could.”

  “Inaros isn’t who we thought he was. Everyone, they still call him a hero. They look at Earth and they look at Mars, and they cheer. They still cheer.”

  “Some still do,” Dawes said. It was true. All through the system, Inaros had as many that loved him as had turned away. More, maybe. “It’s not him, though. It’s the idea of him. The man who stood up for the Belt. Only that man hasn’t risen up yet. They only think he has.”

  “Will this Holden hurt him?”

  “Every time Holden takes a breath, Marco Inaros suffers,” Dawes said. And that was probably as close to truth as anything he’d said in the last two days.

  Micah nodded slowly, then stood, wavering drunkenly, and threw his arms around Dawes. The embrace went on longer than Dawes felt comfortable with. Just as he began to wonder if the other man was starting to black out, Micah stepped back, gave a sharp OPA salute, and walked out of the chapel, wiping his eye against the inside of his wrist. Dawes sat back down.

  It was midshift, and almost midnight for him. The three Fred Johnsons still graced the front wall. The child, the adult, and the man who, all unknowingly, was at the end of his struggles. Fred Johnson as he had been. The way Dawe
s remembered him best was tied up and spitting angry the first time they’d met, and the flicker of disappointment in the man’s eye when he realized Dawes wasn’t going to kill him.

  They’d fought a hell of a fight together, against each other and side by side. And then against each other again. The clash of empires, only he wasn’t sure what the empires were any longer. Everything they’d done had brought them here, one dead, the other living a life he barely recognized or understood.

  Humanity hadn’t changed, but it had. The venality and the nobility, the cruelty and the grace. They were all still there. It was just the particulars he felt shifting away from under him. Everything he’d fought for seemed to belong to a different man in a different time. Well. It was in the nature of torches to be passed. Nothing to be sad about in that. Except that he was sad.

  “Well, there you have it,” he said to the empty air. “The kingmaker’s last hurrah. I hope to hell you knew what you were doing. I hope James Holden is what you thought he could be.”

  It was almost an hour later that the door opened and a young man came in. Tight dark curls, wide-set warm eyes, a thin apologetic mustache. Dawes nodded to him, and the man nodded back. For a moment, they were both silent.

  “Perdón,” the man said. “Not rushing, me. It’s only I’m supposed to take this one down now. It’s … it’s on the schedule.”

  Dawes nodded and waved him forward. The man moved hesitantly at first, then reached a point of commitment where the work was just the work. The corporal came down first, then the head of the OPA. The young boy with the book and the grin stayed until last.

  There had been a moment when that child had waved into a camera, decades ago, not knowing the gesture was also his last. The boy and the Butcher were both gone now. The man took the picture down, rolled it together with the others, and slid them all into a sleeve of cheap green plastic.

  He stopped on his way out. “You all right, you? Need something?”

  “Fine,” Dawes said. “I’m just going to stay here a little longer. If that’s all right.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Amos

  Sex was one of those things where the way it was supposed to work and the way it worked for him didn’t always match up real well. He knew all the stuff about love and affection, and that just seemed like making shit up. He understood making shit up. He also understood how people talked about it, and he could talk about it that way, just to fit in.

  In practice, he recognized there was power in being with another living body, and he respected it. The pressure built up over the weeks or months on the burn kind of like hunger or thirst, only slower and it wouldn’t kill you if you ignored it. He didn’t fight against it. For one thing, that was stupid. For another it didn’t help. He just noticed it, kept an eye on it. Acknowledged it was there the same way he would anything powerful and dangerous that was sharing his workspace.

  When they got into port someplace big enough to have a licensed brothel, he’d go there. Not because it was safe so much as it was an environment where he knew what all the dangers looked like. Could recognize them and not be surprised. Then he’d take care of what needed to be taken care of, and afterward, it wouldn’t bother him for a while.

  Maybe that was different from everyone else, but it worked for him.

  The thing was, he’d usually be able to sleep afterward. Really sleep. Deep and dreamless and hard to pull up out of until he was done. And right now, he was mostly just looking at the ceiling. The last girl—the one called Maddie—was curled up next to him, the sheets draped around her legs, her arm under one pillow, snoring a little. One of the good things about getting a room for the whole night is they’d give you a quiet one away from the front. Maddie was someone he’d used and been used by before when the Roci’d been on Tycho, and he liked her as much as he liked anyone that wasn’t in his tribe. That she felt safe sleeping next to him warmed something in his stomach that usually stayed cold.

  She had a little gap between her front teeth and skin as pale as anyone he’d ever met. She could blush on command, which was a pretty good trick, and she’d been in the life since she was a kid. Before she’d come to Tycho for the legal trade. His own childhood in the illegal trade meant they had context that made the talk before and after more comfortable for him, and she knew he wouldn’t pull any of that “you’re better than this” soul-saving bullshit. He also wouldn’t start calling her a bitch and being abusive out of shame the way some johns did. He liked shooting the shit with her afterward, and usually the way she snored just a little didn’t keep him from drifting off.

  Only that wasn’t what was keeping him awake. He knew what was keeping him awake.

  He got out of bed quietly so as not to wake her up. He’d paid her and rented the room for the whole night, and the house wasn’t about to give him a refund for leaving early, so she might as well get the rest herself. He gathered up his clothes and slipped out into the hallway to get dressed. A john on his way out passed by as he was pulling on his jumpsuit, made brief and awkward eye contact, nodded curtly. Amos smiled his amiable smile and made room for the guy to go past before he zipped himself in and headed out toward the docks.

  The Roci had spent more time in Tycho than any other port, usually getting put back together after the last whatever went wrong. It wasn’t home—nowhere outside the Roci was home—but it was familiar enough that he could feel the differences. It was in the way people talked to each other in the hallways. The kinds of images that played on the newsfeeds. He’d seen what it was like for a place to change in ways that didn’t change back. Earth was like that. Now Tycho. Kind of like a big, slow wave coming out from where the rocks had hit Earth and spreading through everyplace humans were.

  There were people on Tycho who recognized him too. Not like they knew Holden. Holden, he couldn’t walk through a room anymore without people staring at him and pointing and making a fuss. Amos had the sense that was going to be a problem eventually, but it wasn’t one he knew how to fix. He wasn’t even sure what it implied at this point.

  Back at the ship, he headed down to the machine shop and his workstation. The Roci told him that Holden was in the galley with Babs, Naomi was catching some bunk time, and Peaches was at work replacing the hatch seals they’d been talking about. He made a note on his work schedule to double-check them when she was done, even though he knew they’d be fine. Peaches turned out to be a pretty good worker. Smart, focused, seemed to really enjoy fixing things, and never bitched about the stresses of shipboard life. Perspective, he figured. Shittiest ship there was still had to be better than the best cell in the pit, if only because you got to pick that you were in it.

  He shrugged into his couch, pulled up the technical reports, and spooled through the way he had before. Not that he expected to find anything different. Just to see if there was any reaction when he got to the weird bit. He got to it and looked at the data for a while. The torpedoes Bobbie had fired off. Their trajectories. The error logs. And he had the same reaction. It was bugging him.

  He shut the workstation down.

  “Hey,” Peaches said, coming up from engineering with an ARL polymer tank slung over one shoulder.

  “Hey,” he said. “How’s it going?”

  She was still too skinny. The smallest standard jumpsuit still left her swimming in it. They’d had to adjust the code to convince the Roci that anyone flying on her could be so slight. Working made her look healthier, though.

  She thumbed open a storage locker, slid the tank into place, and dropped into her couch. “I got the seals replaced, but I don’t like the inner airlock door in the cargo bay. It’s not throwing errors, but the power’s dirty.”

  “Dirty dirty? Or inside the error bars but it pisses you off dirty?”

  “Second one,” Peaches said, and then grinned. But her grin faded fast. “You all right?”

  He smiled. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because you’re not all right,” she said.

  Amos leaned b
ack, shifted to crack his neck. Part of him wanted to talk to her about the torpedoes, but he couldn’t picture Holden doing it. And this was kind of a Holden thing, so he only shrugged. “Need to talk to the captain about something.”

  “Then we’re back to the ‘throw ships at them until they run out of ammunition’ plan,” Bobbie said. Her voice was clear and sharp. Someone who didn’t know her might have thought she was pissed, but Amos was pretty sure that was her having a good time. He hesitated in the corridor outside the galley. Truth was, even if they decided to go after Medina like they were stomping snakes to death, they’d be in port for a couple more days. There’d be time to ask the question later that didn’t mean putting his elbow in the planning. But he also wanted to get some decent sleep, so he went forward anyway.

  They were sitting across the table from each other, leaning in like two kids dissecting the same frog. The display between them glowed blue and gold. Holden looked tired, but Amos had seen him looking worse one time and another. Holden was the kind of guy who smoked himself down to the filter if he thought it was the right thing to do.

  “We should talk to Pa again,” Holden said, looking up at Amos and nodding. “If we go for the station, we risk losing a lot of people.”

  Amos ambled to the food dispensers. They were topped up fresh, so he had a lot of choices. There was a part of him that liked it better when it was just a few.

  “It’s called war for a reason, sir,” Bobbie said. Even though she didn’t hit it, the sir had a sting. A reminder that it wasn’t just them anymore. “We know the fire rate. We know the retrain rate. We can do the math. If we can get even a small team onto the surface—”

  “Of the alien station that we totally don’t understand but strapped a bunch of artillery to anyway,” Holden said. Bobbie wouldn’t be interrupted.