James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

Those last were the hardest. New colonies still trying to force their way into local ecosystems so exotic that their bodies could hardly recognize them as life at all, isolated, exhausted, sometimes at the edge of their resources. And what they wanted was to send back help. He listened to their voices, saw the distress in their eyes. He couldn’t help but love them a little bit.

Under the best conditions, disasters and plagues did that. It wasn’t universally true. There would always be hoarders and price gouging, people who closed their doors to refugees and left them freezing and starving. But the impulse to help was there too. To carry a burden together, even if it meant having less for yourself. Humanity had come as far as it had in a haze of war, sickness, violence, and genocide. History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage. The one didn’t come without the other, and Holden had to take comfort in that. The sense that however terrible humanity’s failings were, there was still a little more in them worth admiring.

He did what he could to answer the most pressing messages, offer what hope he could. The voice, however briefly, of Medina Station. Coordinating supplies for all the colonies was more than he could manage. It would be full-time work for a staff of dozens at least, and he was only one man with a radio. Still, just seeing the need, dipping his toes into the oceanic task of being the physical hub of a thousand different solar systems, gave him a covert sense of hope for the future.

He’d been right. There was a niche here.

Providing the plan worked. Providing they didn’t all die. Providing that any of a million things he hadn’t even thought of yet didn’t swing through and destroy everything he was still looking for and planning. There was always the forgotten arm. The thing you didn’t see coming. Hopefully, the thing Marco Inaros wouldn’t see coming either.

“So how long is this window or wake or whatever it is that we’re shooting for?” Amos asked.

Time was almost out. The question now was just how fast Inaros wanted to be going when they came through the gate. If he cut the braking thrust and came through fast, it would throw off the timing. If the Giambattista went through the Arcadia gate too late, it would be the one to quickly, quietly vanish away. If it went through too early, Naomi’s curve would already have decayed down to nothing and the Free Navy would pass into the slow zone in safety.

They’d gone back to the Rocinante . Alex and Bobbie in the cockpit, ready for battle if battle came. Holden and Naomi were strapped into the couches in the command deck. Amos, on float, had come up for the company as much as anything else. They weren’t at battle stations yet. If it came to that, this was probably the last time he’d see Amos in the flesh. Holden tried not to think about it.

“It’ll be maybe five minutes,” Naomi said. “Part of that’s going to depend on the mass and energy of the ships they bring through. If we’re lucky, maybe as much as … ten?”

“That ain’t much,” Amos said with an amiable smile. He put a hand on the ladder up to the cockpit to keep himself from drifting. “You good up there?”

“Good as gold,” Alex said.

“If this trick of Naomi’s doesn’t go, you think we can take ’em?” Amos said.

“All of them, probably not,” Bobbie called down. “Some of them, for sure.”

Clarissa rose up from the lift, a pale smile on her lips. She’d spent enough time on the float now to be natural with it. She moved from grip to grip along the wall like she’d been born a Belter. When she got to Holden, she held out a bulb from the galley.

“You said you hadn’t been able to sleep,” she said. “I thought you’d want some coffee.”

Holden took it; her smile widened a degree. The bulb was warm against his palm. Probably it wasn’t poisoned. She wasn’t really likely to do that anymore. He steeled himself a little before he took a sip.

Medina Station was in the hands of the OPA fighters from the Giambattista , not that it would do much good. Its PDCs and torpedoes had, for the most part, been spent defending against Holden. What was left was a rounding error on what they’d have needed to hold back Inaros. The Roci was waiting almost behind the blue station at the center of the slow zone. If he’d trained the ship’s cameras on it, he could have seen the ruins of the rail guns as clearly as if he’d been standing over them.

“Anything coming out of Laconia?” he asked.

“We don’t have a repeater on the far side of that gate, but just peeping through the keyhole? Nothing,” Naomi said. “No signal. No sign of approaching drives.”

The Roci chirped out an alert. Holden pulled it up.

“Got something, Cap?” Amos asked.

“Incoming ships have changed their burn a little. They’ll be coming in fast.”

“And early,” Naomi said. Her voice was like someone talking through pain. The Roci ’s countdown timer adjusted itself, estimating that the enemy would come through the ring gate in twenty minutes. Holden washed the lump in his throat with Clarissa’s coffee.

Clarissa pushed over to Naomi’s couch, her sharp face bent by a frown. Naomi looked up at her and wiped her eyes. A droplet of a tear floated in the air, drifted toward the recycler intake.

“I’ll be all right,” Naomi said. “It’s just that my son’s on one of those ships.”

Clarissa’s eyes sheened over too and she put a hand on Naomi’s arm. “I know,” Clarissa said. “If you need me, you can find me.”

“It’s okay, Peaches,” Amos said. “Me and the captain had a talk about it. We’re good.” He gave Holden a cheerful thumbs-up.

The timer ticked down. Holden took a long, slow breath and opened his channel to the Giambattista .

“Okay,” he said. “This is Captain Holden of the Rocinante . Please begin your passage burn now. I need you to go through the gate in”—he checked the timer—“eighteen minutes.”

“Tchuss, røvul!” the Giambattista ’s captain said. “It has been, sí no?”

The connection dropped. On the screen, the Giambattista reported a hard burn starting. Holden shifted the display to show it. A single bright star in the blackness. A drive plume wider than the ice hauler that it was driving. He wanted to believe there was something off about the color of the light, as if the high-energy tuning Naomi had done with it was visible to him, but that was just his mind playing tricks. A new counter appeared on the display. The Giambattista ’s expected passage through the Arcadia ring went from seventeen minutes to sixteen. The Free Navy’s arrival—unless they altered course—through the Sol gate in nineteen. Eighteen.

Holden’s gut was tight. His breath shuddered, and he drank another sip of coffee. He opened a second window, sensors trained at the Sol gate. From where they were, the Free Navy wouldn’t be visible. Not yet. The angle was off just enough to hide them.

“Do we have the rail gun ready in case they get through?”

“Yes, sir,” Bobbie answered smartly.

“Well,” Amos said. “Me and Peaches better go strap in. You know. In case.”

Clarissa touched Naomi’s shoulder one last time, then turned and launched herself, following Amos down the lift toward engineering. Holden took a long, last drink and stowed the coffee bulb. He wanted it over. He wanted this moment to last forever in case it was the last one he had with Naomi. And Alex and Amos. Bobbie. Hell, even Clarissa. With the Rocinante . You couldn’t be in a place like the Roci for as long as he had been and not be changed by it. Not have it be home.