James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

Despite herself, Michio laughed too. “Did you know your accent gets thicker when you flirt?”

“Yeah,” Evans said. “I’m just a complex tissue of affectation and vice. Took your mind off him, though. You were starting to lose your temper.”

“Not done losing it yet,” she said, and turned the mic back to live. “Sir. Sir! Can we at least agree that I’m the pirate who’s offering to lock you in your cabin for the trip to Callisto instead of throwing you into space? Would that be all right?”

There was a moment of stunned silence on the radio, then a roar of incoherent rage that resolved into phrases like drink your fucking Belter blood and kill you if you try . Michio lifted three fingers. Across the command deck, Oksana Busch waved her own hand in acknowledgment and tapped the weapons controls.

The Connaught wasn’t a Belter ship. Not originally. She’d been built by the Martian Congressional Republic Navy, and she’d come equipped with a wide variety of military and technical expert systems. They’d been on it for the better part of a year now, training in secret at first. And then when the day came, leading her into the fray. Now Michio watched her own monitor as the Connaught identified and targeted six places on the floating cargo ship where a stream of PDC fire or a well-placed missile would peel open the hull. The targeting lasers came on, painting the Hornblower . Michio waited. Evans’ smile was a little less certain than it had been. Slaughtering civilians wasn’t his first choice. In fairness, it wasn’t what Michio would have picked either, but the Hornblower wasn’t going to make its journey through the gates and out to whatever alien planet they’d thought to colonize. The negotiation now was only what the terms of that failure would be.

“Want to fire, bossmang?” Busch asked.

“Not yet,” Michio said. “Watch that drive. If they try to burn out of here? Then.”

“They try to burn on that busted cone, we can save the ammunition,” Busch said, derision in her voice.

“There’s people counting on that cargo.”

“Savvy me,” Busch said. Then, a moment later, “They’re still cold.”

The radio clicked, spat. On the other ship, someone was shouting, but not at her. Then there was another voice, then several, each trying to cut above the others. The report of a gun rang out, the sound of the attack pressed thin and nonthreatening by the radio.

A new voice came.

“ Connaught ? You there?”

“Still here,” Michio said. “To whom am I speaking, please?”

“Name’s Sergio Plant,” the voice said. “Acting captain of the Hornblower . I’m offering up our surrender. Just no one gets hurt, okay?”

Evans grinned their triumph and relief.

“Besse to hear from you, Captain Plant,” Michio said. “I accept your terms. Please prepare for boarding.”

She killed the connection.

History, Michio believed, was a long series of surprises that seemed inevitable in retrospect. And what was true of nations and planets and vast corporate-state complexes also applied to the smaller fates of men and women. As above, so below. As the OPA and Earth and the Martian Congressional Republic, so with Oksana Busch and Evans Garner-Choi and Michio Pa. For that matter, so with all the other souls who lived and worked on the Connaught and her sister ships. It was only because she sat where she did, commanded as she did, and carried the weight of keeping the men and women of her crew safe and well and on the right side of history that the smaller personal histories of the Connaught ’s crew seemed to have more significance.

For her, the first surprise in the many that had brought her here was becoming part of the military arm of the Belt at all. As a young woman, she’d expected to be a systems engineer or an administrator on one of the big stations. If she’d loved mathematics more than she did, it might have happened. She’d put herself through upper university because she thought she was supposed to, and failed because it had been a horrible fit. When the counselors sent her the message that she was being disenrolled, it had been a shock. Looking back, it was obvious. The clarifying lens of history.

She’d fit better with the OPA, or at least the arm of it she’d joined. Within the first month, it became clear that the Outer Planets Alliance was less the unified bureaucracy of the revolution than a kind of franchise title adopted by the people of the Belt who thought that something like it should exist. The Voltaire Collective considered itself OPA, but so did Fred Johnson’s group based on Tycho Station. Anderson Dawes acted as governor of Ceres under the split circle, and Zig Ochoa opposed him under the same symbol.

For years, Michio had styled herself as a woman with a military career, but with an awareness in the back of her mind that her chain of command was a fragile thing. There was a time it had made her reflexively protective of authority—her authority over her subordinates and the authority of her superiors over her. It was what put her in the XO’s chair of the Behemoth . What put her in the slow zone when humanity first passed through the gate and into the hub of the thirteen-hundred-world empire to which they were heir. It was what had gotten her lover, Sam Rosenberg, killed. After that, her faith in command structures had become a little less absolute.

Once again obvious in retrospect.

As to the second surprise, she couldn’t have said exactly what it was. Falling into a collective marriage or her recruitment by Marco Inaros or taking possession of her new ship and its revolutionary mission with the Free Navy. Lives had more turning points than seams of ore, and not every change was obvious, even looking back.

“Boarding team’s ready,” Carmondy said, his voice flattened by the suit mic. “You want us to breach?”

As the leader of the assault team, Carmondy was technically in a different branch of command than Michio, but he’d deferred to her as soon as he and his soldiers had come aboard. He’d lived on Mars for a few years, wasn’t part of the plural marriage that formed the core of the Connaught ’s crew, and was professional enough to accept his status as an outsider. She liked him for that, if little else.

“Let’s let them be nice,” Michio said. “If they start shooting at us, do what needs doing.”

“Savvy,” Carmondy said, and then switched channels.

Both ships were on the float now, so she couldn’t lean back in her crash couch. If she’d been able to, she would have.

When the news had come out that the Free Navy was taking control of the system and that the ring gate was closed to through traffic, the fleet of colony ships on the burn for the new worlds beyond faced a choice. Stand down and give their supplies over for redistribution to the stations and ships most in need, and they would be allowed to keep their ships. Run, and they wouldn’t.

The Hornblower —like who knew how many others—had done the calculation and decided the risk was worth the reward. They’d killed their transponders, spun their ship, and burned like hell, but briefly. Then spun again, burned again, spun again, burned. Hotaru, they called it. The strategy of going bright only for a moment, and then going dark in hopes that the vastness of space would conceal them until the political situation changed. The ships had enough food and supplies to last the would-be colonists for years. The volume of the system was so massive that if they avoided detection at the front, finding them later could be the work of lifetimes.