James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

“I … well …” Jim took a deep breath, blew out. “Shit.”

“How much of the debris from the wave of decoys can we police up?”

“Anything that hasn’t drifted out past the rings,” Holden said. “You’re thinking put it all just inside the Sol ring and hope the Free Navy runs into it?”

“The gate’s not that big,” Naomi said.

“Three-quarters of a million square klicks,” Holden said. “And fifteen ships coming through it. Even if we turned all our scrap metal into sand, the Free Navy’s more likely to miss them and not even know they were there.”

“I know,” Naomi said. “But maybe one will get a lucky hit. And then there’ll be one less. If we aren’t playing the long shots, we’re giving up. Long shots are all we’ve got left. And even if we lose—”

“I’m not looking at—”

“ Even if we lose ,” Naomi said, “how we lose matters. You didn’t set yourself to be a symbol of anything. I know that. It’s just something that happened. But after it happened, you used it. All those video essays you put out, trying to show everyone that the people on Ceres were just people?”

“Those weren’t about me,” Jim said, but the guilt in his voice said he didn’t believe it.

“They were you using the famous Captain James Holden to make people look at what you needed them to see. Don’t be ashamed of that. It was the right thing to do. But everyone out there who saw them? Who made their own versions of them and added to the project of trying to remind each other that war isn’t all ships and torpedoes and battle lines? If we’re going to …” Her throat was tight now. The words stuck there. “If we’re going to die, we should make it mean at least as much as your video pieces did.”

“I don’t know that those mattered,” Jim said. “Did they do anything?”

“You don’t get to know that,” Naomi said. “They did or they didn’t. You didn’t put them out so that someone would send you a message about how important and influential you are. You tried to change some minds. Inspire some actions. Even if it didn’t work, it was a good thing to try. And maybe it did. Maybe those saved someone, and if they did, that’s more important than making sure you get to know about it.”

Jim sank down into himself. The mask of himself that he’d worn since Tycho slipped a little. She saw the despair under it.

“I shouldn’t have come here,” he said.

“You took this on because it was the risky job,” she said. “You did it because it needed doing, and you don’t ask people to take things on you wouldn’t do yourself. Just like when you ran onto the Agatha King . You don’t change, Jim. And I knew that coming in. We all did. We thought we’d make it, but we knew we might be wrong. We were wrong. Now we have to do this next part well too.”

“Getting killed. This next part is getting killed.”

“I know,” she said.

They were silent, the two of them. Bobbie’s voice, as far away as the stars, turned briefly to laughter.

“The videos were just stupid little art projects,” Jim said. “Dying’s not an art project.”

“Maybe it should be.”

He hung his head. She put her hand on it, feeling the individual strands of hair against her fingertips. The tears in her eyes didn’t sting. They flowed gently, like a brook. There was no way to tell him all of it. The guilt she felt for bringing them all into Marco’s orbit. The certainty in her heart that if she’d just seen what Marco Inaros was in time, none of them would have been in this position. If she said it, Jim would feel like he had to comfort her, to be strong for her. He’d close back up into himself. Or no. Not himself. Into James Holden. She liked Jim better. One long breath. Another. Another. The quiet intimacy of a perfect moment.

“Hey,” Bobbie said, stepping into the room. “Do either of you—um. Sorry.”

“No,” Jim said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “What’s up?”

Bobbie lifted her hand terminal. “Do either of you know if we sent the incident reports on the missing ships to Luna? Avasarala said her science monkeys are really champing at the bit for those.”

Naomi took a long, shuddering breath and then smiled. Perfect moment over. Back to work. “I’ll get right on it.”

“Okay,” Bobbie said, stepping backward out of the room. “Sorry if I … you know.”

“Have you eaten yet?” Jim said, standing up. “I don’t think I’ve had anything since breakfast.”

“I was going to after I was done here.”

“Could you two bring me a bowl of something?” Naomi said, turning to her monitor again.

The BATCH COMPLETE message had given up on her and dropped back to her file-system prompt. She spooled through the traffic logs as Jim and Bobbie called back to the Roci . Their voices—Jim, Amos, Alex, Bobbie—mixed together. A little conversation about food and beer, who wanted to be together and who wanted to be apart. She had to force herself to concentrate. The log structure was a mess, one manager doing things one way, the next picking another.

It took the better part of an hour to be sure she’d gotten the data from all the times ships had gone missing. Some of them, she’d already seen back on Luna, but there were more that she hadn’t. Almost two dozen ships had vanished, including, it seemed, one of the stolen Martian ships heading for Laconia. Ships from the colonies. One of the transport ships delivering for the Free Navy too. All sides had lost something.

Which was interesting.

She prepped the data package for Luna. This one, she encrypted. But as it sent, she reviewed her own copy again. The missing ships tended to be larger, but weren’t always. They seemed to vanish most in high-traffic times …

Alex brought her a bowl of noodles and mushrooms and a bottle of Medina-brewed beer. She was pretty sure eating it that she’d remembered to thank him. Not positive, though. There was a correlation if she plotted the high-traffic times to the incidents … No. This was wrong. She was looking at it the wrong way. They didn’t just need to look at when things had happened. They needed to look at all the times Medina had seen similar conditions—high traffic, large-mass ships, mistuned reactors—and nothing had gone wrong. She scooped up the full flight data partition and started streaming it down toward Luna too, but she couldn’t let it go.

Her back ached. Her eyes hurt. She didn’t really notice. Here was a dataset built of high-traffic periods with and without mysterious disappearances. Here was one mapping the energy output and mass of the missing ships and trying to fit that curve against ships that had sailed through safely. The full encrypted dataset sent to Luna announced it was complete, which seemed awfully fast until she checked how long she’d been sitting there.

Five variables—preceding mass, preceding energy, mass of the ship, energy of the ship, and time. No single-point solution, but a range. A moving system of curves, rising with preceding mass and energy, falling with time, and, where the mass and energy curve of the other ships intersected it, disappearances. It was as if traffic passing through the gates created a wake, and when something large enough and energetic enough struck that wake, it vanished.

Her hands were trembling as she pulled her terminal out of her pocket. She didn’t know if it was emotion or exhaustion or if the noodles and mushrooms had been so long ago she just needed to eat. Jim picked up the connection almost as soon as she requested it.

“Hey,” he said. “Are you all right? You didn’t come back to the ship last night.”

“No,” she said, meaning no she hadn’t gone back to the ship, not no she wasn’t all right. She waved the imprecision of the word away. “I think I have something interesting here. I need someone to look at it for me in case I’m just hallucinating from exhaustion.”