Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Thirty-Four: Dawes

There was no viewing of the body. Fred Johnson—the Butcher of Anderson Station—had requested that his body be recycled into the system of Tycho Station. Water that had been his blood was likely already coming through the taps and faucets throughout the station. His chalk bones would reenter the food cycle in the hydroponics pools. The more complex lipids and proteins would take longer to become humus for the mushroom farms. Fred Johnson, like all the dead before him, fell to his component parts, scattered, and entered the world again, changed and unrecognized.

Instead, there were printed images of him on the chapel wall. A portrait of the man as a colonel in the service of Earth. A picture of him as an older man, still strong in his features but with a weariness creeping in at his eyes. Another of a ridiculously young boy—not more than ten years old—holding a book in one hand and waving with the other, his face split by a massive and childlike grin. They were the right ears, the right spacing of the eyes, but Dawes still had to work to believe that happy child had grown into the complex man he’d known and called friend and betrayed.

The memorial was in a small chapel so aggressively nondenominational that it was hard to tell the difference between it and a waiting room. Instead of religious icons, there were sober, abstract shapes. A circle in gold, a square in forest green. Intentionally empty symbols meant as placeholders for where something with significance might have been. The Tycho Manufacturing logo in the hallway outside held more meaning.

The pews were bamboo textured to look like some sort of wood—ash or oak or pine. Dawes had only ever seen pictures of live trees. He wouldn’t have known one from another, but it gave the little room some sense of gravitas. Still he didn’t sit. He walked past the pictures of Fred Johnson, looking into the eyes that didn’t look back. The thing in his chest, the one making it hard to breathe, felt thick and complicated.

“I had a speech ready,” he said. His voice echoed a little, the emptiness giving it depth. “Well practiced. You’d have liked it. All about the nature of politics and the finest of humanity being our ability to change to match our environment. We are how the universe consciously remakes itself. The inevitability of failure and the glory of standing back up after it.” He coughed out a chuckle. It sounded like a sob. “What I really meant was I’m sorry. Not just sorry I backed the wrong horse. Am sorry about that. But I’m sorry I compromised you while I did it.”

He paused as if Fred might answer, then shook his head.

“I think the speech would have worked. You and I have so much history behind us. Seems strange. I was a mentor to you once. Well. Feet of clay. You know how it is. Still, I really think you’d have seen the value in having me back. But this Holden prick?” Dawes shook his head. “You picked a shit time to die, my friend.”

The doors opened behind him. A young woman in an oil-stained Tycho Station jumpsuit and a deep-green hijab stepped in, nodded to him, and took a place in the pew, her head bowed. Dawes stepped back from the pictures of the dead man. There was more he wanted to say. Apparently there always would be.

He took a seat across the aisle from the woman, folded his hands in his lap, lowered his head. There was a profound mundanity in shared grief. A set of rules as strong as any human etiquette, and they didn’t allow for him to keep up his one-sided conversation. Not aloud, anyway.

The Free Navy could have been—ought to have been—a glorious moment for the Belt. Inaros had conjured up a full military for them out of nothing. Dawes had told himself at the time that Inaros’ failings as a political animal weren’t a problem. Were an opportunity, even. As a member of the Free Navy’s inner circle, Dawes could exert his influence. Be kingmaker. The cost was high, yes, but the rewards were nothing short of visionary. An independent Belt, cut free of the inner planets. The threat of the gate network under their control. Yes, Inaros was a peacock who made his way through life on charisma and violence. Yes, Rosenfeld had always had a whiff of brimstone about him. But Sanjrani was smart, and Pa was capable and dedicated. And if he’d said no, it would all have gone ahead without him anyway.

It was what he’d told himself. How he’d justified it all. The best would have been that someone besides Inaros had acquired the ships. The second best was that Inaros’ circle of advisors and handlers include him. So what was third?

After the abandonment of Ceres, Dawes had gone on playing the role of elder statesman for a while, even as Pa’s rebellion made it impossible to pretend things were on track. When Aimee Ostman had found him, told him that Fred Johnson was putting together a meeting on Tycho, it had looked like an opportunity to broker peace. If not between Earth and the Free Navy, at least with the remains of the OPA. It had been the perfect way to leverage his relationship with Fred into a place at the table.

Another woman came in, sitting beside the one in the hijab. They exchanged soft words. Two men came in together, sat in the back. Change of shift was coming. Mourners would be stopping in on their way to work, or on their way back from it. Dawes felt a twinge of resentment that they should interrupt his time alone in the chapel. It was irrational and he knew it.

And anyway, Fred Johnson had made his wishes clear, even if he hadn’t meant to. And Dawes still owed the colonel something.

“Is fucking bullshit is what it is,” Aimee Ostman said. “James pinché Holden can fuck himself.”

Dawes sipped his espresso and nodded. Holden’s first move had been to humiliate her. For reasons Dawes understood. But still, for her to begin by losing face was hard.

“Forgive him for it,” Dawes said. “I have. You should too.”

“For for?”

Aimee Ostman scowled and scratched her chin. Her quarters in the station were wide and luxurious. One wall was taken entirely by a screen tied to an exterior camera, the resolution so fine it was indistinguishable from a window into space. The divan was spotless cream, the air scented with volatile molecules that mimicked sandalwood and vanilla. Dawes gestured at it all with his demitasse.

“Look at this,” he said. “Room for an ambassador. For a president.”

“And?”

“And he gave it to you,” Dawes said and took another sip. “Thought it was doing you honor. Best suite in the station.”

“He spat in your face,” Aimee Ostman said, pointing index and middle finger at him together like the barrel of a gun. “Kicked you out.”

Dawes laughed, shrugged. Invited her to laugh and shrug with him. It bit at his soul, but it was the thing to do. “I showed up unannounced. It was rude of me. Holden was in the right. How would you have been if I’d brought him to the back room at the Apex without telling you first?”

She scowled, her eyes tracking low and to the left. “Should have been more polite about it.”

“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 Dawes 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.”