James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

“Thank you, Captain,” the acting ruler of Earth said and signed off.

Silence filled the deck. “You notice how she didn’t say anything obscene or offensive?” Holden said.

“Did notice that.”

Holden took a deep breath. “That can’t be good.”

The meeting room was near the moon’s surface, and it was built like a classroom or a church: a podium at the front and rows of chairs before it, but the podium was empty and a dozen of the chairs had been pushed into a rough circle. Avasarala sat with Fred Johnson—the head of Tycho Station and once a spokesman of the OPA—and Martian Prime Minister Smith to her left and Bobbie Draper to her right. Both Smith and Johnson were in their shirtsleeves, and all of them looked tired. Holden, Naomi, Alex, and Amos sat together in a group across from them, a couple of chairs marking the border on either side. Holden didn’t realize until they’d all sat down that Clarissa hadn’t come. He hadn’t even considered bringing her. This was a meeting of the Rocinante ’s crew, after all, and she was …

Avasarala tapped her hand terminal. A schematic popped into place in the space in the center of the circle. Earth, Luna, the Lagrange stations were all glowing gold. The naval ships that formed the blockade that intercepted and destroyed the Free Navy’s follow-up attacks were in green. A separate model showed the inner system—Sol, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and the major Belt stations like Ceres and Pallas—with a scattering of red dots like the lesions of a rash.

“The red’s Free Navy,” Avasarala said. In person, her voice sounded raspy, like she’d been coughing. Holden couldn’t tell if she’d only been talking too much or if she’d been breathing in Lunar fines: dust too small to be stopped even by the best filters and that still made the station air stink of gunpowder. “We’ve been tracking their movements. There’s an anomaly. This one.”

She prodded her hand terminal, and the two displays merged, one expanding, the other shrinking, until they showed the same stretch of space. The red dot stood off apart from the stations and planets, floating in a vast emptiness where the orbital mechanics left it mostly alone. Naomi leaned forward, fighting to keep her eyes focused. She was too tired for this.

“What’s that doing out there?” Naomi asked, and her voice was clear enough.

“Spotting,” Fred said. “Its transponder’s off, but it appears to be a prospecting ship. The Azure Dragon out of Ceres. It’s crewed by radical OPA.”

“Meaning now maybe with the Free Navy. The rocks they’ve been throwing?” Holden said.

“Coordinated by that little fucker there,” Avasarala said. And then, with an exhausted shrug, “We think. What we know is this: As long as those pigfuckers can keep throwing rocks at us, we’re pinned. Our ships don’t dare move, and Marco Inaros can claim whatever the hell he wants in the outer planets.”

Smith leaned forward, speaking with his calm, almost apologetic tone. “If Chrisjen’s intelligence service is right and this ship is guiding the attacks, this is a critical target against the Free Navy. You know that Colonel Johnson, Secretary-General Avasarala, and I have been forming a joint task force? This will be their first field operation. Capture or destroy the Azure Dragon and reduce the ability of the enemy to launch assaults against Earth. Give some damn breathing room to the combined fleet.” It was the first time Holden had heard the term combined fleet , and he liked the way it sounded.

He wasn’t the only one.

“Shit,” Amos said. “And here I was enjoying being so absolutely thumb-up-the-ass useless.”

“You want a little ass-play, that’s your business,” Avasarala said. “Only you can do it in a crash couch. The Rocinante isn’t part of the fleet, so losing it won’t leave a hole in our defenses. And I understand you’ve got a few after-market add-ons—”

“Keel-mounted rail gun,” Alex said with a grin.

“—that scream of overcompensating for tiny, tiny penises, but might prove useful. The mission commander has requested you and your ship, and honestly none of you are worth a wet slap at this point except Miss Nagata anyway, so—”

“Wait,” Holden said. “The mission commander ? No.”

Avasarala met his gaze, and her expression was hard as granite. “No?”

Holden didn’t flinch. “The Rocinante doesn’t go under anyone’s command but ours. I understand that this is a big joint task force and we’re all in everything together. But the Roci isn’t just a ship, it’s our home. If you want to hire us, fine. We’ll take the job, and we’ll get it done. If you want to put a commander in place and expect us to follow their orders, then the answer’s no.”

“Captain Holden—” Avasarala began.

“This isn’t a negotiation. This is just how it’s going to be,” Holden said.

Three of the most powerful people in the solar system, the heads of the central factions that had struggled against each other for generations, looked at each other. Smith’s eyebrows rode high on his forehead and he looked anxiously around the room. Fred leaned forward, staring at Holden like he was disappointed in him. Only Avasarala had a glint of amusement in her eyes. Holden glanced at his crew. Naomi’s arms were crossed. Alex’s head was lifted, his chin pushed forward. Amos was smiling exactly the way he always did. A unified front.

Bobbie cleared her throat. “It’s me.”

“What now?” Holden said.

“It’s me,” Bobbie repeated. “I’m the mission commander. But if you really don’t—”

“Oh,” Holden said. “No. No, that’s different.”

Alex said, “Yeah,” and Naomi uncrossed her arms. Bobbie relaxed.

“Should have said so in the first place, Chrissy,” Amos said.

“Go fuck yourself, Burton. I was getting to it.”

“So, Bobbie,” Holden said. “How do you want to do this?”

Chapter Four: Salis

Wait wait wait!” Salis shouted into his suit radio. The base of the rail gun was ten meters across, built in a rough hexagon, and massing more than a small ship. At his words, a half dozen construction thrusters along the great beast’s side fired off, jetting ejection mass into the void. The calibration meter on Salis’ mech cycled down to zero; the hairbreadth movement of the great beast stopped. They floated together—inhumanly large weapon, softly glowing alien station, and Salis in his spiderlike safety-yellow construction mech.

“A que, coyo?” Jakulski, their tech supervisor, asked in his ear.

“Reading drift,” Salis said, playing his ranging lasers over the rail gun and the socket mount it was meant to lock into. It had been hard work, fitting the alien station with the three wide belts of ceramic, carbon-silicate lace, and steel. Now it looked like a vast blue ball with rubber bands around it, each at right angles to the other two. And where the lines crossed, rail gun turrets squatted. It had turned out it was impossible to drill into the alien station. Welding didn’t work, because the surface wouldn’t melt. Wrapping the whole damn thing up had been the only viable alternative for attaching things to it.

“Que mas que?” Jakulski asked.

“Shift one minute ten seconds relative z , minus eight seconds relative y .”

“Savvy,” Jakulski said. The construction thrusters along the length of the rail gun stuttered, impulse and counterimpulse. All around them, the gates dotted the sky with only a little over thirteen hundred bright spots, barren and empty and threateningly regular. Medina Station itself was the only other object, and it was far enough away that Salis could have covered the whole structure—drum, drive, and command—with his outstretched thumb. The slow zone, they still called it. Even though the weird limit on speed had been lifted, the name was the name, and it carried a sense of strangeness and doom with it. Most of his work was inside Medina. Heading out into the vacuum was a rare thing, and now he was here he didn’t like it much. He kept turning away from the job to look out into the black. It had been almost the end of his first week on the job before he realized he was looking for the Milky Way, and that he kept looking because it wasn’t there.