Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  The comm display chirped. A request from the Serrio Mal. She accepted it. Susanna Foyle appeared on her monitor.

  “Captain Pa,” she said.

  “Captain Foyle.”

  “Rodriguez tells me we’re not taking three ships to Titan after all.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Used up a lot of ordnance on this mission that wasn’t in the specs,” Foyle said.

  “Also true,” Pa agreed.

  “Going to leave us outnumbered and outgunned.” It wasn’t an accusation. Just an observation.

  “We won’t be the only ships there,” Pa said. “We’ll have backup.”

  For the first time, Foyle’s face lowered its dignity to have an expression. “Squats and Dusters. No one we can count on.”

  “We’re all in this together,” Pa said, and Foyle coughed out a single laugh.

  “As long as you’re going first, we’ll follow. Didn’t get this far by taking the easy way. We’ve got our patches in place and our bandages on. You’re ready to burn, then so are we.”

  “Thank you.”

  Foyle nodded, dropped the connection. Pa pulled up a system-wide tactical map with all the fighting that was going on throughout the system. A cluster of updates from Vesta. A chase between Free Navy fighters and a dozen Martian warships as Marco’s forces tried to loop around toward Mars itself. The guard force left behind at Ceres tracking four Free Navy ships. The orbital defense of Earth on high alert, most of its patrol ships away from their posts and on the attack. The sum of all of humanity’s presence in the solar system, bent on violence and spectacle. And at the edge of the display, almost off it, almost forgotten, the Giambattista and the Rocinante, already decelerating toward the ring gate, and two fast-attack ships burning hard to intercept.

  Good luck, you bastard, she thought, putting her hand over the tiny gold dot marked Rocinante. Don’t make me sorry I trusted you.

  And then, over the ship-wide system, “All stations report. We’ve got another fight to get to. Don’t want to be late.”

  Chapter Forty-Two: Marco

  Son coyo, son tod!” Micah al-Dujaili shouted out from the screen. “You and all your ti-ti soldat! I am here for you, Inaros. What you did to my family.”

  Marco muted the broadcast. Somewhere nearby, someone else was watching it. Al-Dujaili’s rant still nattering in the distance as the Pella rose off Callisto, a half dozen ships arrayed behind her. “Do we have target lock?”

  Josie lifted a hand in affirmation, his eyes firmly on the monitor. They were only at a single g, but Marco felt a headache beginning at the base of his skull. It didn’t matter. It was only a little pain, after all. There’d be time to take something for it when his enemies weren’t wasting good air. Around him, the command deck of the Pella was tight and bunched. Josie with weapons. Karal at the comms. Miral muttering into his headset to someone down in engineering. They were wolves. A band of predators ready to strike. Al-Dujaili shouted something about vengeance. Something about betraying the Belt in the name of glory.

  “Let’s shut this fucker up, then,” Marco said casually. “Fire everything.”

  The warning had come to the Jovian system in time for him. Earth, Mars, the traitor Michio Pa, Holden. Naomi. All his enemies had lit their torches and hoisted their pitchforks for him and taken to the road. Marco wasn’t surprised. He’d known to watch for them, and when they came, he was ready. True, he hadn’t expected it to come from everyplace at once the way it had. The consolidated fleet had come boiling out of Ceres, up from Earth and Mars. They’d burned hard and taken some of the nearest of the Free Navy’s forces by surprise. But space and distance were Marco’s natural allies. It took time to burn across the half-billion kilometers from Mars, and the Jovian system was Belters’ land. And Belters meant Free Navy, no matter what yapping little pups like Micah al-Dujaili and Aimee Ostman wanted to pretend. By the time their Earther allies made it to al-Dujaili’s side, the man would be a corpse, and all the ships traveling with him dead at his side.

  “Firing now,” Josie said.

  The Pella rang with the mechanisms of torpedo and PDC, the vibrations traveling through the hull and making the whole ship chime like a war bell. Marco could taste the sound—ice and copper. It was beautiful.

  “Hoy, Captain,” Karal said. “Got messages coming in. Other ships que savvy if they should be firing too?”

  “Yes,” Marco said. “Tell them all to open fire.”

  “The ones kommt de Ganymede too? Not in effective range, them.”

  Marco shifted to stare at Karal. The ache in his brain grew a degree worse. He’d known Karal for decades, trusted him. In his voice now, though, Marco heard doubt. More than doubt. Insolence.

  “All. Fire. Let al-Dujaili spend his rounds plucking their torpedoes out of the black. It’ll shut his nattering mouth.”

  “Dui,” Karal said, turning back to the comms and speaking in a voice too low and urgent for Marco to bother listening.

  It was happening everywhere. Vesta. Pallas. Titan. Hygeia Station. Thisbe Yards. Europa. Large targets and small, the enemy was coming at him thinking they would wash the Free Navy aside like a wave. And there was damage, yes. Pallas blockaded. Vesta fallen. The battle forces burning toward Titan alone might make one of the largest in history, and he couldn’t say how decisive his victory there would be. It almost didn’t matter. The important thing was that he had goaded them into action. Into reaching out in anger and fear. It was a recipe for overreach. After the careful, turtle-meek response of Earth and Mars to this point, it was a relief.

  Let them come. Let them win their little victories. The Free Navy would hold what it could, scatter into the dark where that was wiser, and loop back to crush the unguarded targets left behind. It was the mistake he’d known they would make. The inner planets with all their centuries of dominion still dreamed that they could fight a war and win. Marco knew better. War was never won and never lost. Until now—until him—Earth and Mars had thought they were at peace because the violence had all poured out on the Belt and not back at them. Their fault. Their shortsightedness. They’d had their age of victory. It was over now. And this paroxysm, this grand mal seizure of a battle plan, promised a thousand more like it to come.

  The Belt would take its hits. But it would never take them passively again. That was his victory.

  “First wave’s down,” Josie said. “They got all our torpedoes. No hits. Try again?”

  “No,” Marco said. “We wait. Let them think they can handle us. Then crush them.”

  “Bien,” Josie said. Karal muttered into the comms, passing the word along. Without the weapons fire, the ship still wasn’t quiet. It only felt that way. Marco stretched his neck, craning it to try to relieve the tension there, but everything in him was straining out toward al-Dujaili. He’d killed Fred Johnson with his own hands already, and now all the OPA factions that had been stupid enough to follow an Earther would see what crop they’d sown.

  He pulled up the tactical display. The eight enemy ships led by al-Dujaili’s Torngarsuk were scattered enough to make taking two down with a single torpedo impossible, but near enough that their PDC fire could reinforce each other. For all al-Dujaili’s ranting and venom, he hadn’t lost his temper enough to abandon good sense.

  The Pella and the six other Free Navy ships from the Callisto shipyards held a looser formation but a wider surface. Outnumbered for the moment, but with ten Free Navy ships on hard burn from Ganymede, they wouldn’t be for long. Marco grinned.

  “Cut to a quarter g,” he said. “Tell the Ganymede ships to coordinate braking burns and watch close. If the enemy waits, we outnumber them. If they attack now, be ready to turn. Draw them out of their formation.”

  “Bien,” Josie said. “Aber … They’re firing.”

  “Go!” Marco shouted, willing the Pella like it was part of his body. Like he could bend its path with pure force of his intention.

  “At a quarter?” Karal yelped, and Mar
co shouted wordlessly and grabbed the pilot’s controls. Under his command, the Pella leapt forward, pushing him back. The hull creaked and groaned, but he saw Josie’s targeting solution feed in, heard the great and glorious rumble of the weapons, watched the arcs of PDC fire still too distant to pose a real threat but near enough to disrupt the enemy and then the spread of torpedoes. And the spreads from the others in his group. And far distant, but drawing close, a woven cluster thick as a rope—torpedo tracks from the Ganymede ships. All converging, all falling in to the enemy. Fire and metal and blood. It was like joy. Like music.

  He bent the Pella’s course, firing thrusters at a hundred percent or not at all, feeling the glorious torque of the turn in his blood and the aching pressure of his crash couch trying to hold him. Someone shouted, but Marco was past listening now. This was battle. This was glory and victory and power.

  A proximity warning, and the Pella’s PDCs shifted automatically, splashing an enemy torpedo that had been lost among the cloud of converging fire. Marco laughed. His other ships had taken his cue, turning toward the Torngarsuk. One of al-Dujaili’s ships misjudged, took a torpedo from the Ganymede ships in her side, and crumpled, venting air. One of Marco’s ships lost a thruster to a torpedo, and three of the remaining enemy coordinated to mow it down with PDC fire like lions descending on a crippled gazelle. Even in that moment of loss and rage, Marco felt the joy of the fight.

  It was ugly, brutal, direct. They were past clever solutions and elegant traps now. This was toe-to-toe throwing punches until someone fell to the ground. This was the urge that had put mankind on the battlefield with stones and lengths of wood, beating each other blood on blood on blood until only one side remained. And that side was Marco’s. The Free Navy, and fuck all the rest.

  The Torngarsuk died last, dancing around arcs of PDC fire while al-Dujaili shouted defiance and obscenity over the radio. And then didn’t. The Torngarsuk lost power, drifted, and detonated. Its own tiny, brief sun. Marco fell back into his crash couch, aware for the first time in he couldn’t say how long of the thrust gravity pulling at him. The tactical display showed two of the enemy ships fleeing. He hadn’t noticed when they’d left, but it hadn’t been recent—they were already far outside his effective range. Farther and faster with every breath. He smiled, noticed the taste of blood on his lips. He’d bitten his cheek. He didn’t remember that either.

  Slowly, his consciousness seemed to broaden. Not just his monitor and his couch and his body. There was an alert sounding somewhere. A smell of smoke and the bright scent of fire suppressants. His headache had bloomed without him noticing into a throbbing unpleasantness, and his hands felt like his fingers had bent backward and were only just coming back to true. He looked around the deck. Josie and Miral and Karal, all looking back at him. He lifted a fist.

  “Victory,” he said, and coughed.

  But the victory came at a price. Two of his reinforcements from Ganymede were done, the crews dead, the ships hardly more than scrap. Three of the ships from the Callisto yards would need repair. The Pella had suffered a breakdown in the air recycler that was annoying but trivial. Enough that they had to land in the shipyard again for a few days while it was repaired and tested. Johnson’s lickspittle OPA had taken worse, died in greater number, but still, this wasn’t the sort of success Marco could afford many more of.

  And add to the injury the insult of being lectured by Nico Sanjrani.

  “This has to stop,” the little economist said from the screen. “The damage to infrastructure is getting worse, and the more the curve deflects, the harder—the more nearly impossible—it’s going to be to pull it back up.”

  Marco, in the office he’d appropriated for Free Navy’s command on Callisto, leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes. The message had been sent with heavy encryption, its origin path and return hidden in layers of mathematics. All he knew for certain was that Sanjrani was far enough away that the light delay and the limitations of equipment kept him from a real-time conversation. For that, Marco was profoundly grateful.

  “I can resend the analysis,” Sanjrani whined. “But this situation is making things worse than the numbers show. Worse. Whatever it takes to stop it, you need to do that. If we don’t start building a separate exchange economy soon—and by soon I mean weeks or months ago—we may have to reimagine the whole project. We may not be able to get away from inner-planet-backed scrip at all, and then we can be as politically independent as we want, only it will still devolve back to financial constraints by the inner planets, which was what we were trying to get away from in the first place.”

  Sanjrani looked tired. Stressed. There was an ashy tone to his skin, and his eyes seemed sunken. Given that he was holed away somewhere safe from battle, it seemed more than a little histrionic. Marco stopped the message—there was another twenty minutes in the spool—and composed his reply. It wasn’t a long one.

  “Nico,” he said gently. “You give me too much credit. None of us have the power to control what atrocities Earth and Mars and their misguided allies in the Belt will commit to stop us. We can only hold to our principles and our dreams. We will absolutely prevail, in time. When the inners put down their arms and leave the Belt in peace, we will have the power to end this. Until then, our only options are to defend ourselves or let our people die. I won’t compromise on that, and I know you won’t either.”

  There. Thirty seconds to answer thirty minutes of alarmist maundering. That was what efficiency looked like. He sent the message back on its looping way, checked the newsfeeds—the battle at Titan was entering a second day with heavy casualties on both sides, and still too early to know what he’d won or lost in it—and the work reports on his ships—the Pella was ready to launch, but not with any size of escort for at least another three days—and then heaved himself up and walked through to the meeting room.

  Whatever it had been before—engineers’ workspace, security building, storage—the room was now the war council of the Free Navy. Karal, Wings, Filip, Sárta from the Pella. Captain Lister from the Coin Silver, Captain Chou from the Lína. They sat on white upholstered chairs, their uniforms lending them a formality. They stood and saluted when he entered the room. Except for Filip who nodded as a son to his parent.

  “Thank you for coming,” Marco said. “We have plans to make. This assault must not go unanswered. We have to mount a counterstrike and show the inners that we aren’t intimidated. Show our strength.”

  A murmur of agreement passed through the room, no one actually speaking loud enough to be heard. Only not to be out of line.

  Except, to his surprise, Filip.

  “Another one?” his son said. “The last grand gesture did so well, que?”

  Marco froze. The anger in Filip’s voice—more than anger, contempt—was like being slapped. All around the room, the others went silent and still.

  “Something to say, Filipito?” Marco asked, his voice low and calm and rich with threat. But Filip chose not to hear it.

  “Yeah, something. We had this conversation before, yeah? Walked away from Ceres and said we needed to plan a show of strength. Counterattack. Keep them afraid of us. We did this before, and now we’re here again.” Filip’s face was flushed, his breath fast and heaving like he’d run to get here. “Only last time it wasn’t esá coyos la, was it? It was Dawes and Rosenfeld and Sanjrani. And Pa, yeah? Inner circle. Heart of the Free Navy. Part of the plan.”

  “You’re tired, Filip,” Marco said. “You should go rest.”

  “How does this get different from last time you said it?” Filip said. “Tell me that.”

  Rage rose up in Marco’s breast, filling his head with heat and fumes. He could smell it like a chemical fire.

  “Want to know, me,” Filip said, voice trembling. “This plan we’ve got. And the last plan before it. And the one before that. Which one’s the real plan? Is there? Or are we just falling down and pretending we meant to?”

  Marco smiled. When he stepped toward hi
s son, Filip braced against a blow. Jaw tight. Hands in fists. Marco tousled his hair.

  “Boys, eh?” he said to the others. “Boys and their tantrums. Captain Chou. Can we hear your report?”

  Chou cleared his throat. “We have a few targets might serve,” he said, pulling up his hand terminal and sending a data file to the wall screen. “Depends how it fits with the larger strategy.”

  Filip went white, his jaw jutting out. Chou went on talking, gesturing at the wall screen as he listed his suggestions and plans. Marco kept his gaze on his son and let the others pretend nothing was happening but the meeting. If you act like a child, you will be treated like a child. Embarrass me and I will embarrass you.

  Filip swallowed, turned, and walked out of the room, shoulders back and head held high. Marco laughed as the door shut, just loud enough he was certain Filip would hear him.

  He turned to the wall screen. “You don’t list Tycho,” he said. “Why not?”

  Chou looked at his list, then back at Marco. “You want to take Tycho?”

  “Why not?” Marco said. “These battles we’re fighting now? They’re the inners turning us against each other. Tricking us into killing our own. Belter against Belter, and for what? We can never win Earth and Mars over. They’ll never see us as people. But Aimee Ostman? Carlos Walker? They should be on our side. Would be, if they weren’t still stuck in a past that’s gone, gone, gone. Yeah?”

  “You say it,” Chou said, nodding but dour.

  “Tycho has always been a jewel of the Belt. A source of our pride and a symbol of our success. It’s why Fred Johnson squatted on it all those years. Now another Earther who thinks he’s the savior of the poor backward Belt. Why should we let James Holden keep what was never his?” Marco grinned and let the syllables drip out of his mouth. “Tycho Station. Gather up all the ships we can, and burn there in force before the inners can regroup. We’re faster than them. Smarter. And when we reach Tycho, we will see them rise up to greet us and toss Holden out the airlock, I will guarantee that.”