Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Fifty-One: Marco

Marco’s jaw ached. His chest hurt. The joints in his spine hovered at the edge of dislocation without ever passing through to it. The high-g burn scourged him, and he welcomed the pain. The pressure and the discomfort were the price his body paid. They were slowing on approach. The core of the Free Navy was going to reach Medina unopposed, and there was literally no one to stop it.

At a civilized thrust—an eighth, a tenth—and with some time coasting on the float to conserve mass, the journey out to the ring gate would have taken months. He didn’t have months. Everything depended on reaching Medina before the scattered forces of the consolidated fleet could reach him. Yes, it meant driving the ships he had to the edge of their ability. Yes, it would mean putting some of the reserves from Medina under conscript to fuel his return to the system, and the people of Medina would have to make do with a little less until he could stabilize the situation enough to allow resupply.

This was wartime. The days for scrimping and saving and safety were gone. Peace was a time for efficiency. War was a time for power. If it meant he drove his fighters to the ragged edge of their ability, that was how victory came. Those who held back the most reserves for tomorrow were the ones least likely to see it. If the price was long days of unrelieved discomfort and pain, he’d pay that price and glory in it. Because at the end, there was rebirth. A shedding away of all his little missteps, a purification, and the seat of his final, permanent victory. And it was coming soon.

His error—he saw it now—was in thinking too small.

He had conceived the revolution that the Free Navy represented as a balancing of the scales. The inners had taken and taken and taken from the Belt, and when they didn’t need it anymore, they’d dropped it and fled off to new, shinier toys. Marco had meant to put that right. Let the inners be the ones in need and the Belt find its independence and its strength. It was anger that had kept his view too small. Righteous anger. Appropriate anger. But blinding all the same.

Medina was the key, and always had been. But it was only now that he saw what it was the key to. He’d meant to close the gates and force the inner planets to address the consequences of generations of injustice. Looking at it now, it almost seemed like a gesture of nostalgia. A harkening back to previous generations. He’d made the classic mistake—he wasn’t too proud to admit it—of trying to fight the last war on the next battleground. The power of Medina wasn’t that it could stop the flow of money and material out to the new worlds. It was that it could control it.

The fate of the Belt wasn’t around Jupiter and Saturn, or at least not those alone. In every one of the thirteen hundred systems that the gates led to, there were planets as vulnerable as Earth. The Belt itself would spread to all the systems, float like kings above all their subject worlds. If he had it all to do again, he’d have thrown three times as many rocks on Earth, destroyed Mars while he was at it, and taken his ships and his people to the colony worlds where there were no vestigial fleets to consolidate. With only Medina and the fifteen ships at his disposal, he could exert power over all the worlds there were. It was all about placement, audacity, and will.

He needed to find a way to talk Duarte into giving him a few more ships. But the promise to keep Laconia undisturbed had earned him everything he’d needed up to now. He didn’t think another small request would be too much, especially given how much he’d sacrificed already. And if Duarte did object—

The Pella shuddered as the drive passed through some resonance frequency. Normally when that happened they weren’t under high burn. It was strange how something that was hardly more than a chime at a third of a g could sound like the coming apocalypse at two and a third. He tapped out a message for Josie down in engineering: KEEP US IN ONE PIECE.

A few seconds later, Josie wrote back something obscene, and Marco chuckled through the pressure on his throat.

They’d taken their last respite before the battle four hours earlier, dropping the deceleration to only three-quarters of a g for fifteen minutes to let people eat and visit the head. A longer break would have meant burning harder now, and they were already running at the edge of their tolerances. But the advantages of an unexpected forced march were scattered through the great military strategists of history. Earth and Mars could only look on, eyes pressed to their telescopes, and wail. Earth and Mars and Medina too.

And on Medina, Naomi and her feckless Earther fuck buddy. James Holden, following in Fred Johnson’s footsteps as condescending, patronizing hero of the poor, helpless Belt. When he died, the story of a Belt that had to be saved by self-congratulatory, faux-enlightened Earthers would bleed out with him, and good riddance. And Naomi …

He didn’t know yet what to do with Naomi. She was a conundrum. Strong where she should have been weak and weak where she should have been strong. It was like she’d been born inverted. But there was something about her. Even after all these years, there was something about her that begged to be tamed. She’d slipped away from him twice now. Whatever happened, there wouldn’t be a third time. Once he had her in hand, Filip would return on his own. That wasn’t worth worrying about.

When Filip had missed the launch from Callisto, Marco hadn’t been surprised. The boy had been acting out for weeks. It was normal. Even late, really. Marco had tested Rokku’s authority when he’d been much younger than Filip was now. Rokku had told him when to be there for launch, and Marco had intentionally come late to find the berth empty. He’d had to fend for himself on Pallas Station for seven months before Rokku’s ship came back. The captain had met him on the dock and beaten him until he was bleeding from a dozen places, but Marco had been taken back in. If Filip needed the same experience, that would be fine.

Not that Marco would beat him. Better that he laugh a little and muss the boy’s hair. Humiliation was always better than violence. To beat a man—even to beat a man to death—was at least proof that you took him seriously as a man. Though, looking back, Filip had really been starting to push as far back as when he’d shot the security coyo on Ceres. And God, Marco’s jaw ached.

He shifted his fingers, pulled up the timer. The ring gate was only minutes away now. The Pella was shedding momentum with every second, making certain that when they passed through the gate, they wouldn’t fly into a trap. Holden would be waiting. Watching the fire of their drive plumes. They weren’t close enough yet for that to be a danger. Even if Holden fired his rail gun right now, the Pella would be able to react in time to dodge it. That wouldn’t be true much longer. His compressed heart beat a little faster. His aching mouth twitched a little smile.

But discomfort was the home of the warrior, now as it had always been. He told himself that he embraced it. Welcomed it. And still, he was going to be glad when this part was done.

He typed in orders for the full force, gathering them in close enough that their drive plumes overlapped, using the vast, energetic cloud as cover to hide behind. Between that and the sensor interference of the ring, Holden would be firing as good as blind. Or at least that was the hope. The worst case was that Holden might take out two or three of his ships before they passed through the ring. But once they came close enough to target the Rocinante, crippling the ship would be nothing. Not destroying it, not unless they got unlucky. Trotting out James Holden’s famed ship as part of the new Free Navy was too good an opportunity to miss. That was what Sanjrani and Dawes—all the others—missed. Leadership required a clear sense of appearance. Of style.

Fifteen minutes. Billions of people were watching him right now. As fast as the photons could travel back, the Pella and its fourteen fighting ships would be on every newsfeed, every hand terminal, every monitor in the system. He was fifteen minutes from the hinge point in history. Fourteen.

He checked their common vector. Coming into enemy territory, it was critical that they be neither so close together that a lucky hit by Holden could damage more than one ship nor staggered to give him time to take more shots. They looked good. They would be all right.

He wished now that he’d thought to make a recording to broadcast. It was the perfect moment. Even better than his initial call to arms. He thought of all the Belters in the system—those who’d stood by the Free Navy and those who’d been too cowardly or misguided and even the traitorous fragments of the OPA who’d taken arms with Pa against their own self-interest. He had to believe they all felt a sense of pride. Before him, they’d been slaves in all but name, and now they were a force equal to and stronger than the most powerful states humanity had ever conceived. How could they not feel awe at this? How could they not feel the joy in this?

The ring was close enough to see without magnification now. As wide as Ceres Station and still tiny in the vast darkness out here where even the sun wasn’t more than a peculiarly bright star. His ships would start evasive maneuvers as they drew close. Shifting places in their formation like shells on the table of a dockside hustler. He checked their vectors again, typed out an angry command to one of the ships that was drifting behind. The ring slowly grew larger. He increased the magnification and added false light. The material that made up the ring itself still defied the best minds in the human sphere. He wasn’t really seeing it, of course. The image on his monitor was filtered through the brightness of their plumes. In truth, he was falling backward toward the ring, his face toward the faint and unimportant sun. His crash couch held him like he was resting in the palm of God.

A message appeared on his monitor from Karal: ALL SYSTEMS CHECK. BOA CAÇADA.

Marco typed back, not just to Karal, but to all of the Pella’s crew. GOOD HUNTING.

Five minutes until they passed through the gate and the battle for Medina began. The brief, decisive, ugly battle that would redefine what the Free Navy was. He willed them forward, pushing against brute physics with his mind. Smelling victory. Feeling it in his blood. Minutes slid by like hours, and also gone too fast. Two minutes. One.

Another message from Karal. WIR HAT POSSIBLE.

Beside it was deeper magnification of the ring filtered through the ship’s system. A tiny blue dot that had to be the rail gun station, and there beside it, almost too subtle to see, a fleck of lighter darkness that could have been a ship on the float. The Rocinante.

Marco felt his whole consciousness narrow into that one tiny gray dot. Naomi. That dot was Naomi. She’d run out of the solar system to get away from him, and here he was. He could see her face in his mind. The empty expression she wore when she was trying not to feel. His grin hurt. His body hurt. But the little dot forgave it all. Except—

Something was wrong with his monitor. He thought at first that the image had gotten grainy, the resolution rougher, but that wasn’t right. It was the same size, only he could see the parts that made it up. He wasn’t looking at the Rocinante. He was looking at photons streaming off a sheet of electrically excited plastic. The polymer chains glowed dark and light and dark. It was like seeing a woman’s body in painting across the room and then, without warning, only the brushstrokes that made it up. Naomi was nowhere in it.

He shouted, and could sense the pressure waves going out from his throat. The clouds of molecules that made his fingers slapped against the ones that were the control pad. He meant to type that they should fire, that they should kill while the chance was still with them, but he couldn’t make out the letters in the splash of photons that spilled off his screen. There was too much detail.

Where the air began and the crash couch ended was lost. The boundary between his body and his environment blurred. He had known since he was too young to remember learning that atoms were made from more space than material, and that at the lowest levels, the things that made atoms could bounce in and out of being. He’d never seen it before. He’d never been so aware that he was a vapor of energy. A vibration in a guitar string that didn’t exist.

Something dark and sudden moved through the cloud toward him.

On the Rocinante, the ring gate grew brighter with the braking burns of the enemy, until it looked like the negative image of an eye—black, star-specked sclera and intensely white, burning iris. The timer reached zero. The lights grew brighter. Then flickered and went out.

Holden checked the sensors. Where fifteen warships on the burn had been seconds before, there was just nothing.

“Huh,” Amos said over the ship system. “That is super creepy.”