James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

“Sir?” Oksana said, and Michio realized she must have said something aloud.

She considered Oksana’s eyes, respectful and hard. Evans’ soft and alarmed. Her crew and her family.

“We have Marco’s answer,” she said.

“Shift in language is shift in consciousness, yeah,” Josep said. He was dressed in his jumpsuit, as was she. But he was strapped into the crash couch. A complex schematic showed the state of the system as best she knew it. The ships loyal to the inners clustered around Earth and Mars and Ceres in red. The Free Navy loyal to Marco in blue. Her own handful of pirates and idealists in green. The independent stations and ships—Ganymede, Iapetus—were white. And a dusting of gold over it all showing where Marco had buried his treasure chests in the void.

“Mind is made from analogies,” Josep said, not needing her to contribute to the conversation. “Change in ages, change in the frame. Was in against out before. Turning into connected against unconnected now. Free Navy. Consolidated fleet. The ones who shrug off the chains against the ones who tie themselves together.”

A direct one-to-one battle against Marco wasn’t plausible. He had too many ships, and Michio’s appeals to Rosenfeld and Dawes and Sanjrani hadn’t won her any replies. Though they also hadn’t been rejected. Marco was the only one calling her traitor to the cause thus far. The others, she assumed, were only following his lead.

Didn’t help her in the short term.

She traced routes and burns for her green ships, arcs that would keep them out of range of the Free Navy’s wrath and still allow them to send supplies where the need was worst. It was like solving a complex math puzzle without any promise that an optimal solution existed. The search for the least-bad answer.

“Us, freest of the free. Disconnected from the disconnected,” Josep went on. “And because of that, coming into connection. Alienated because of our commitment to community, yeah? The yang inside the yin, the growing light from inside the dark. Had to be this way. Rule of the universe. Thermodynamics of meaning, us. Shikata ga nai. So free we have only one option. Because that’s how the mind of God is shaped. Minimums and maximums sheeting together like a curve. Like a skin made from interpretation.”

Michio moved the tactical display into her personal data and reached out, turning herself with one handhold until she faced the crash couch. Josep gazed at her with an expression of childlike joy. His pupils were so dilated, his eyes looked black.

“Got to go do something,” she said. “You going to be all right without a babysitter?”

Josep chuckled. “Been a citizen of the mind since before you were born, child-bride. I can swim in vacuum and never die.”

“All right,” she said, and set the straps on the couch to restraint with her password as the release. “I’m going to set the system to watch your vitals. May have Laura come sit with you.”

“Tell her to bring her go set. Play better when I’m stoned.”

“I’ll tell her,” Michio said. Josep took her hand in his, squeezing her fingers gently. He meant something by it—something deep and subtle and probably not comprehensible by a sober mind. All she saw was the love in it. She dimmed the lights, had the system play soft music—harp and a woman’s voice so perfect she assumed it was artificial—and left him alone. On her way up to the command deck, she sent a message to Laura and got a response. Josep probably didn’t need a minder, but better to be safe. She laughed at herself as she steadied her ankle against a foothold. Safe in the little things, reckless in the big ones.

Bertold was in Pa’s usual crash couch, music leaking from the earphones on his head and the ship’s status monitors showing green and happy on his screen. Everything was fine as long as he didn’t look out too far.

He lifted his chin to her as she pulled herself into Oksana’s customary station instead. It still felt strange, being in a ship designed by Mars. It was all built with a sensibility she couldn’t quite put her finger on: military and rigorous and straight. She couldn’t help thinking it was because the designers had grown up with a constant gravity pulling them down, but maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe it was just Martian because Mars was like that. Not inners against outers, but the rigid and brittle against the flowing and free.

“Matter? Geht gut?” Bertold asked as she retrieved the tactical schematic.

“Fine. But Josep decided to get stoned, and I’m just not doing work that goes well with intoxicated mysticism.”

She felt a stab of regret as soon as she’d said it, though she knew Bertold wouldn’t take her snapishness as more than it was. Still, if the family fell apart in the middle of everything else failing, she wouldn’t be able to do this. She needed her rock.

Good, then, that she had it.

“You mind if I …?” Bertold asked, and she mirrored her display to his. All the ships, all their vectors. The final refutation of the one-ship. Here was humanity in all its fissures and disconnections. She went back to her analysis. Here was how to get a quarter of the lost resources back and only lose two of her ships. Here was how to deliver a tenth, but not to the people most in need. Here was how to keep her ships safe and achieve nothing else.

“Looks like an amoeba giving birth to twins,” Bertold said. “Sehr feo.”

“Ugly indeed,” Michio said, running another scenario. “Stupid, wasteful, and cruel.”

Bertold sighed. When they’d first been married, Michio had been deeply infatuated with him and Nadia both. Their shared passions had mellowed since then into an intimacy that she appreciated more than sex. It was the trust that let her say what she was seeing, what she was thinking. Let her hear the hard truth spoken in her own voice. “If we’re going to do this, I’m going to have to do some things I don’t like.”

“Knew that going in, didn’t we?”

“Didn’t see the details.”

“Bad?”

In answer, she flipped a variable in the tactical readout. New options opened that hadn’t been there before: Recover sixty percent and lose nothing. Supply the five stations at greatest risk of collapse and keep Marco away from Iapetus. Open and possibly control a path to Ganymede for a few weeks at least. Bertold scowled, working out what she’d done and how she’d done it. When he saw, he grunted.

“That’s a dream,” he said.

“It’s not,” Michio said. “It’s an agreement, and two enemies willing to respect it as long as their interests align.”

“It’s putting your back to the Butcher of Anderson Station.”

“Well, yes. It is that. But I know what he is. I won’t make the mistake of trusting him. He’ll use us if he can. I’d be stupid not to repay that in kind. If Marco wasn’t putting us as his top priority, it would be different, but he’s burning hard for our ships.”

“Injured his pride, sa sa?”

“All we need is that the consolidated fleet agree not to fire on us and we don’t fire on them, and it opens up zones where Marco won’t follow. Safe havens.”

“‘Safe’ meaning huddled underneath Fred Johnson’s guns. Waiting for him to turn them on us.”

“I know,” Michio said. “And with Johnson, that time will come. When it does, we won’t be there.”

“This is a bad plan, Captain,” Bertold said. His voice was gentle, though. He already understood.

“It is. It’s the best bad plan I’ve got.”

He sighed. “Yeah.”

“Well,” she said. “We could have done things Marco’s way.”