Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  She felt like she’d just lowered herself into a warm bath. The anxious gabble of the soldiers might be in the mishmash polyglot of the Belt. She might only be able to follow half of it. She knew what they were saying. Antinausea meds kept the complex spinning of the boat from turning even less pleasant, and their bitter aftertaste was like coming back to a house she’d lived in when she was young. One rich with good memories and familiar places. She liked the Rocinante as much as anyplace she’d ever been since Ganymede. They were good people, and even in a weird way they were her friends now. The soldiers all around her weren’t and would never be that. They were her command, and even if it was only for a moment, she felt like she was exactly where she belonged.

  Her suit speakers chirped. Communications were the one active thing she’d decided would be worth the risk. Now it was time to find out if that had been a good call. She accepted the connection with her chin.

  A burst of static, followed by a weird fluting sound, like wind blowing across the mouth of a bottle, static again, and then Holden’s anxious voice. “Bobbie? How’s it going in there?”

  “Five by five,” she said, checking the exterior cameras to make sure that was true. The blue glow of the alien station rose up from the bottom of her visual field and curved off to the left. A glittering star field of rockets. A glimpse of Medina Station looking smaller than a beer can. The proximity readings had a dual countdown: one for the moment they passed inside the arc of the rail gun, the other for when they’d slam into the station itself. They were both spooling down quickly. “We’ll be on the surface in … three minutes.”

  “Are the troops ready?”

  Bobbie chuckled and added the group channel in. “Hey. You assholes ready to do this?”

  The cheer that came through maxed out the speaker. She slid back to the connection to the Rocinante.

  “Good answer,” Holden said, but tightly. The fluting sound again. Distortion from the ring. She hadn’t felt anything moving through it. No discontinuity or sense of vertigo. It did manage to fuck with sensors and comms, though.

  “The mission’s on track, sir,” she said. “We’ll get control of the guns and get you in here.”

  “Alex is saying the attack ships have vectored past zero. They’re heading back in our direction now.”

  “We’ll do it quickly,” Bobbie said.

  “I know,” Holden said. “Sorry. Good hunting.”

  “Thank you,” Bobbie said, and the connection dropped, the comm indicator going to red. She went back to the exterior cameras, switched to a corrected view. The image was steady this way, the tumble of the boat only showing in three jagged blind spots that sped through it like cartoon bats. There were fewer of the decoy boats now, but not none. And they’d made it in close enough that the station was blocking all but two of the rail guns. As long as those two didn’t decide they were as interesting as the torpedoes and empty landing craft speeding toward Medina, they’d be fine. Except …

  She grabbed the image, enlarged it. There at the base of the nearest rail gun emplacement, a dozen meters from the massive sky-pointing gun, a low, gray structure. Round as a coin, and sloped so that no matter what angle debris or outgassing struck it from, it would be pressed more firmly in place. It was a design she knew inside and out. She waited for the fear to come, but all that showed up was a grim kind of determination.

  “Amos,” she shouted, sending him a copy of the image. “Take a look at this.”

  The big man looked at his hand terminal. “Huh,” he said. “Well, that complicates things.”

  She popped the group channel open.

  “New information. The intelligence we had that the rail guns weren’t guarded may have been faulty. I’m looking at an MCRN-design troop bunker right now. If there’s one, there may be others.”

  A chorus of alarm and regret. Bobbie switched the channel controls, killing all the mics but hers.

  “No whining. We knew this was a possibility. If you don’t want to participate, feel free to leave now. Otherwise, check your seals and weapons and be ready for a fight when we hit surface. Our job is to get control of those guns.”

  She enabled their mics in time to hear a ragged chorus of yes sirs and one woman’s voice calling her a bitch. If there’d been time for a lesson in discipline, Bobbie might not have ignored it, but hey. It was a high-stress environment and the OPA soldiers weren’t marines. She’d work with what she had.

  Following her own advice, she ran a weapons check. Her arm-mounted Gatling gun read a full mag, two thousand rounds of mixed armor piercing and high explosive. A single-use rocket launcher was hooked to a hard point on her back, and slaved to her suit’s targeting laser. Powered armor at full charge. She didn’t doubt that she was the single most dangerous thing on their little landing craft. That meant she’d be taking point.

  The boat informed her that they’d passed beneath the rail gun emplacement’s range. The computer started the maneuvering thrusters on their correction burns to stop the tumble and lit the main drive. The braking burn pressed her hard into the gel. Her vision started to tunnel, and she had to remind herself to tense her legs and arms, force the blood out of her muscles and into her brain. They still called it the slow zone, but the only actual speed limit there now was not getting crushed to death by the energy of stopping.

  The boat hit hard, bounced, and hit again. Before it had stopped sliding, Bobbie had pulled her straps off and hit the button that blew the door completely off the ship. They wouldn’t be using it to leave, no matter how things turned out. The landscape outside was as surreal as something in a dream. A plain of blue purer than a Terran sky, featureless and glowing. It cast shadows up across the ship, across her soldiers. Everyone’s legs and crotches bright, their faces and shoulders in darkness.

  A thick band of metal-and-ceramic almost a meter high stretched out ahead of her like a low wall, disappearing over a much-too-close horizon. The rail gun, its base hidden by the station’s curve, rose up toward an eerie starless sky. She could hear the throb of its firing as static on her radio, feel it like a change in the air pressure or a sickness just coming on.

  Bobbie had seen video feeds from the slow zone. She hadn’t been prepared for her own sheer animal rebellion at how uncanny it was. Even in the most designed architectural spaces she’d seen—Epping Cathedral on Mars, the UN building on Earth—there was a sense of nature. The station and the ring gates out beyond it weren’t like that. They were like a ship, but unthinkably huge. It was that combination of size and artificiality that brought the hair up on the back of her neck.

  There wasn’t time for it now.

  “We’ve got no cover,” she barked. “Spread out. Make it hard for the bastards to get us all. Now! Go!”

  They jetted forward in a broken line, their suit thrusters more than enough to defy the barely perceptible gravity of the eerie blue sphere. Good tactics, moving in a hard to predict ragged line like that, even if it came more from a lack of discipline than from a plan. Ahead of them, a dark line on the horizon. A second wall to match the first, converging at the rail gun. Just beyond it would be the low blister of the bunker. She could hope they hadn’t noticed her make landfall. That she could get her engineers to the base of the rail gun and cut into the control systems before the enemy knew she was there …

  “Heads up,” Amos called.

  The first enemy fire came when they were still twenty meters from the corner where the walls converged. Enemy troops in what looked like Martian light armor crouched low to use the wall as cover, aiming down at them. Bobbie’s heart sank. The enemy knew she was there, and were in position. Charging the walls, getting to the base of the rail gun. They’d be killed before they managed it.

  “Fall back,” she snapped, then squeezed off a few hundred rounds along the top of the wall. The faces peering over disappeared. Some dead, some ducking, no way to know how many of each yet. The OPA soldiers followed orders, though. No one tried to stay behind and play the hero.
The only cover she could be sure of was the curve of the station itself. Bullets flew past her. Where they struck the station, the blue showed streaks of yellow, bright as sparks that faded slowly back to blue. The rail gun was still spitting.

  Once the station’s curve had hidden the far wall, she jetted to a stop near the boat they’d landed in, and floated up until just the very top of the wall was visible above the curve of the station. She zoomed in, setting the optics to a high-contrast false color that would make any movement stand out like neon. Soon enough a shape moved. Someone emboldened to poke their head up for a quick look. She fixed on it, fired. It disappeared. Dead or ducking? No way to tell, that damned wall of metal in the way. The curve of the station protected her, but it also protected them. The other Martians. The ones, she was certain, who’d betrayed their world and armed the Free Navy. Was it so much to ask that one of them would get careless and come close?

  Amos followed her lead without being told, and the others came behind him, hauling themselves up well behind her where the enemy rounds didn’t reach and then crawling forward. The steel curve the enemy had looped around the station was wider than it was thick—eight meters across at least—plenty of room to lie on. They could move forward, push the enemy back centimeter by centimeter. Unless they were themselves pushed back. Unless the traitorous Martians had a boat of their own that could skim overhead and lay them all to waste.

  She gestured to keep their eyes forward and tried opening a connection to the Rocinante. The static seemed thicker now, ticking along in time with the rail gun fire. But then the weird fluting sound and Holden on the other side of it like she was seeing him through a veil.

  “How’s it going there, Bobbie?” he asked.

  “It’s shit,” she said. “We’re encountering well-armed resistance in a fortified position.”

  “All right. How long is it going to take you to get past them? I’m only asking because we’re looking at those fast-attack ships getting back here in a little under two hours, and it would be really great if we weren’t here when they did.”

  “That’s going to be difficult, sir,” Bobbie said. The flickers of muzzle flash told her that someone on the enemy side had tried taking a shot, but they were gone again by the time she looked. “In fact we could use a little air support.”

  “Don’t know how we do that,” Holden said.

  Naomi broke in on the line. “We’ve lost essentially all of the decoy fleet. Anything still flying would be chewed to kibble before it got to you.”

  “All right,” Bobbie said. “I’m open to suggestion at this point.”

  Amos waved at her and pointed forward, toward the shifting pillar of the rail gun. She switched to a private connection with him.

  “What about the power source?” he said. “These rail guns take a lot of energy to drive them and more to cool them off. And they’ve been going nonstop since we came through the gate. They’ve got to have a fusion reactor somewhere supplying the power. Maybe something salvaged off a ship. Maybe a couple truck-backs.”

  “Where would I find it?” Bobbie asked.

  “If it was me, I’d put it right under whichever one of those surrogate cocks they figured was least likely to get shot at. Or they could all have their own.”

  She switched back to the Rocinante.

  “What’s going on?” Holden said. “Is Amos okay?”

  “We’ve got something. I’ll report back,” Bobbie said, and dropped the connection. She waved the soldiers forward, switched to the group channel. “Hold this ground. Keep their eyes and attention here.”

  “Sa sa,” one of them said. She didn’t know which. “How long we need to keep it?”

  “Until I get back,” she said. Or for the rest of our lives, she added silently as she burned back toward the fallen boat.

  The door had been blown completely off, and the hull was dinged to shit where they’d slammed it into the station. But she didn’t need it to be pretty. She just needed it to fly, and it could still do that, at least for a little while. When she lifted away from the surface of the station, a few of the enemy took shots at her. Pointless with normal arms. The hulls might be cheap-ass crap, but they were cheap-ass crap meant to live through micrometeor strikes. The roar of the engine was just a vibration in her suit. She was leaving her people behind, and it killed her a little bit to do it. But it was the right call. There wasn’t time to hesitate.

  The station curve was so tight, she had to work to stay tucked in close to it. The rail guns knew about her now. If she poked her head up, they’d chop it off. She thumbed on the full sensor array as she sped, touring the station as quickly as she could. They’d circled the station like three belts around a basketball, a rail gun placed wherever the steel bands intersected. It wasn’t hard to find them. Each of them was radiating heat as quickly as it could, maxing out the IR sensors in a way she’d never seen. But one—the one opposite the Sol gate—looked a bit hotter. If there was a single main reactor, that was her best bet. She set the little boat’s course, overrode the proximity shutoff, and as soon as she felt it duck down in its final kamikaze burst, she undid her straps and jumped for the airlock.

  If it had been a real drive, the plume would have killed her. Instead, every temperature alarm on her armor went off at once. Her faceplate went opaque. A seal in her arm popped, sucking the skin around her elbow painfully until the secondary inflated and pressed down. For one terrifying second, she drifted above the station, blind and vulnerable. When vision returned, she could see the white bubble of the enemy bunker, and the twinkle of their muzzles as they fired. Bobbie painted the bunker with her targeting laser and launched the rocket on her back while at the same time firing her suit’s thrusters toward the surface as fast as they’d take her. She hit the surface of the station harder than she’d meant to, jarring her teeth hard enough she tasted blood. There was one bright flash as the rocket detonated, but it was quickly overwhelmed by the second flash of their landing boat slamming into the rail gun’s reactor.

  Her faceplate went opaque again, but instead of the midnight black she’d suffered in the fire of the drive plume, it glowed a mottled brown. The radiation monitor flashed a red trefoil alert at her. But what fed her raw, animal panic was the wind. A thin, fast whistle of gas rushed past her, pushed her off from the surface.

  When, seconds later, the faceplate cleared, a glowing cloud was expanding out from just beyond the horizon, a nebula slowly going dark. The surface of the station wasn’t blue, but an angry acid green.

  Oh, Bobbie thought as the station began to strobe green to white to black to green again. This might have been a really, really bad idea.

  To her left and right, the steel bands around the station were wrong. At first, she wasn’t sure how, but then she made out the gap between the steel and the surface, like a ring a size too large for the finger it was on. She switched to magnetic and IR, but they’d both burned out in the backsplash from the reactor failure. The station shifted slowly back toward blue. She had the irrational sense that it was aware of her. That she’d annoyed it, and had its attention. She used the suit’s thruster and the thin microgravity drift to pull herself back down to the surface, half expecting it to grab her and haul her inside to be punished, but it didn’t.

  Her radio was hardened enough to work. “This is Sergeant Draper,” she said. “Is the rail gun still firing?”

  “THE FUCK DID YOU DO?” a man’s voice screamed, high and frightened. She cut off all their mics.

  “That’s what I’m asking, soldier,” she said, then switched over to private. “Amos?”

  “Don’t know what you did, Babs, but it fucked things up in all the best ways. Rail gun looks powered down, the few remaining assholes are pulling back toward assholeville, and I think these metal bands that everything’s stuck to are moving a little.”

  “Yeah, I may have popped those loose.”

  “Impressive,” Amos said. “Hey, look, I got to go shoot somebody.”

&n
bsp; “No problem,” she said, and opened the channel to the Rocinante. “Okay. You guys still out there?”

  “Bad guys are getting really, really close,” Holden said. “Tell me you have good news.”

  “I have good news,” Bobbie said. “You can come through the ring. In fact, if you could get over here and get us some air support, it would be much appreciated.”

  There was a general whooping, made strange and uneasy by the interference of the ring. Was it her imagination that it was louder now?

  “You got them?” Holden said, and she could hear the grin on his face. “You took the rail guns? We control them?”

  Her suit sensors showed the wall of steel nearest her was starting to shift. Just a few centimeters, but there was definitely movement. It was broken. It was all broken. The rail guns weren’t going to defend anyone anytime soon.

  “We don’t,” she said. “But at least no one does.”

  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.”