James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

Holden glanced down at his cup. The song sloped down to the rough trill at the end. The applause was scattered and weak. Holden turned his coffee mug on the table, setting the black surface dancing. The porcelain scraped against the tabletop until the chords of a new tune crashed out and a woman’s voice starting on a Belter Creole cover of Cheb Khaled drowned it out. When Holden spoke, his voice barely carried over the music.

“I keep thinking about my dad calling Belters skinnies right in front of Naomi. And the way she took it.”

“Family can be rough,” Alex said. “Especially when emotions are kind of high.”

“True, but that’s not what’s …” Holden opened his hands. A gesture of frustration. “I always thought that if you gave people all the information, they’d do the right thing, you know? Not always, maybe, but usually. More often than when they chose to do the wrong thing anyway.”

“Everybody’s a little naïve sometimes,” Alex said, feeling as the words passed his lips that maybe he wasn’t quite following Holden’s point. Maybe he should have taken the first of the sobriety pills before he’d left the men’s room.

“I meant fact,” Holden went on as if he hadn’t heard Alex at all. “I thought if you told people facts , they’d draw their conclusions, and because the facts were true, the conclusions mostly would be too. But we don’t run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people. Naomi told me that when the rocks fell, the people on Inaros’ ship cheered. They were happy about it.”

“Yeah, well.” Alex paused, rubbing a knuckle across his upper lip. “Consider they might all be a bag of assholes.”

“They weren’t killing people. In their heads? They were striking a blow for freedom or independence. Or making it right for all the Belter kids that got shitty growth hormones. All the ships that got impounded because they were behind on the registration fees. And it’s just the same back home. Father Cesar’s a good man. He’s gentle and he’s kind and he’s funny, and to him Belters are all Free Navy and radical OPA. If someone killed Pallas, he’d be worried about what the drop in refining capacity would do before he thought about how many preschools there are on the station. Or if the station manager’s son liked writing poetry. Or that blowing the station meant that Annie down in Pallas central accounting wasn’t going to get to throw her big birthday party after all.”

“Annie?” Alex asked.

“I made her up. Whoever. The thing is I wasn’t wrong . About telling people the truth? I was right about that. I was wrong about what they needed to know. And … and maybe I can fix that. I mean, I feel like I should at least try.”

“Okay,” Alex said. He was pretty sure he’d lost the thread of whatever they were talking about a while back, but Holden seemed at least less brooding. “So that means you’re about to do something?”

Holden nodded slowly, then drank off all that was left of his coffee at once, put the mug on the table, and clapped Alex’s shoulder. “Yeah. I am. Thank you.”

“Glad I could help,” he said. And then, to Holden’s retreating back. “Least I think I am.”

Back at the table, Sandra Ip had switched to club soda. Bobbie and Arnold were comparing stories about free climbing at different gravities, and Naomi and Clarissa Mao were at the edge of the stage, getting ready to take a turn singing. Ip caught a glimpse of the foil package in Alex’s hand, and her smile was a promise that things were going to go very, very well for him. Still, she must have read something in his expression or the way he held himself when he sat down.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

Alex shrugged. “I’ll tell you when I find out.”

Chapter Seventeen: Holden

The girl was something like a hundred ninety-two centimeters, and she would have towered over him if she weren’t sitting down. Her hair was cut close to her scalp in what Holden figured was fashionable for adolescent Belter girls these days. There were probably hundreds of microfeeds about it, which he didn’t follow. Or maybe she was a rebel and the hairstyle was all her own. Either way, it made the slightly enlarged head less pronounced. She sat at the edge of the bench, looking around at the Rocinante ’s galley like she was regretting that she’d come. The older woman she called Tía stood against the wall, scowling. A chaperone who wasn’t impressed with anything she saw.

“I’ll just be a second here,” Holden said. The software package Monica Stuart had sent him assumed a level of proficiency he didn’t have, and he’d managed somehow to turn off some of its intelligence defaults. The girl nodded tightly and plucked at her sari. Holden hoped his smile was reassuring. Or failing that, amusing. “Really. I’ve just about … Wait, wait, wait. Okay. There.”

Her image appeared in his hand terminal with tiny overlays for color correction, sound correction, and something labeled DS/3 that he didn’t know what it was. Still, she looked good.

“All right,” Holden said. “So, I figure anyone who watches this is going to know who I am. Could you maybe just say your name?”

“Alis Caspár,” she said, her voice flat. She could have been a political prisoner the way she spoke. So, it wasn’t going too well yet.

“Great,” he lied. “Okay, and where do you live?”

“Ceres Station,” she said, and then an awkward pause. “Salutorg District.”

“And, um, what do you do?”

She nodded, settling into herself. “Ever since Ceres broke away from Earth control, my family has been running a financial coordination service. Converting scrip from different corporations and governments into compatible. Mi family bist peace-loving people. The pressure that the inner planets put on the Belters is not the fault of—”

“Let me break in for just a second,” Holden said. Alis went silent, looked down. Somehow Monica made doing this seem really easy. Holden was starting to see how that might actually be the product of years of experience and practice and not something he could jump into without guidance. Except he didn’t have time for that, so he forged ahead. “When we met … we met like four hours ago … you were with some of your friends. In the corridor?”

Alis blinked, confused, and looked at Tía. The little incredulous glance was the first time the girl had looked like herself since she’d come on board.

“It was really amazing,” Holden said. “I mean, I was walking by and I saw you all there. And I was really impressed. Could you tell me about that?”

“Shin-sin?” Alis said.

“Is that what you call it? The thing with the glass balls?”

“Not glass,” Alis said. “Resin.”

“Okay, yes,” Holden said, pouring enthusiasm out toward her like dropping water onto a sponge. It all seemed to just soak in and vanish. But then Alis chuckled. It didn’t matter that it was more at him than with him. “Could you do it again? Here?”

She laughed, covering her mouth with one hand. For a long second, he thought she might call the whole thing to a halt. But then she plucked a little bag from her hip and took out four brightly colored clear spheres a little larger and softer than the marbles Holden had played with as a boy. Carefully, she set them between her fingers, resting between the second knuckles. She started singing, a high, choppy chant, and then stopped, laughed, and shook her head.

“Can’t do this,” she said. “I can’t.”

“Please, just try. It’s really great.”

“It’s dumb,” she said. “It’s kid thing.”

“I’m … really immature.”