James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

The Hornblower ’s drive plume had been detected by Free Navy arrays on Ganymede and Titan both. The thing she hated most was that the chase had led them up out of the plane of the ecliptic. The vast majority of the sun’s heliosphere extended above and below the thin disk where the planets and the asteroid belt spun in their orbits. Michio had a superstitious dislike of those reaches, the huge emptiness that, in her mind, loomed above and below human civilization.

The ring gate and the unreal space beyond it might be stranger— were stranger—but her unease about traveling outside the ecliptic had been with her since childhood. It was part of her personal mythology, and a herald of bad luck.

She set her monitor to show the boarding team’s suit cameras and play soft music. The Hornblower , as seen through twenty different perspectives while harps and finger drums tried to soothe her. A dark-skinned Earther was in the airlock, his arms spread wide. Half a dozen of the cameras were locked on him, barrels of their weapons visible. The others shifted, watching for movement on the periphery or coming from outside the ship. The man reached up and used a handhold to flip himself around, putting his arms behind him for the zip-tie restraint. It had a sense of practice that left Michio thinking that Captain Plant—if that’s who this was—had been forcibly detained before.

The boarding team moved into the ship, its eyes and attention shifting down the corridors in teams. Movement on one screen mapped to a figure seen in another. When they reached the galley, the crew of the Hornblower floated in ranks, arms out, ready to accept whatever fate the Connaught had in store for them. Even at the very small size the individual panes had taken to fit her monitor, she could see the clinging sheen of tears creeping over the captives’ faces. Grief masks formed of saline and surface tension.

“They’re going to be fine,” Evans said. “Esá? It’s our job, yeah?”

“I know,” Michio said, her gaze fixed on the screen.

The boarding team moved through the decks, locking down control. Their coordination made them feel like a single organism with twenty eyes. The group consciousness of professionalism and drills. The command deck looked ill kept. A hand terminal and a drinking bulb on the float had been sucked against an air intake. Without thrust gravity to coordinate them, the crash couches lay at a variety of angles. It reminded her of old videos she’d seen of shipwrecks back on Earth. The colony ship was drowning in the endless vacuum.

She knew that Carmondy would be calling her before he did it, and drew the music gently down. The request came through with a polite chime.

“We’ve taken control of the ship, Captain,” he said. Two of his men were watching him say it, so she saw his lips and his jaw making the words from two angles even as she heard them. “No resistance. No trouble.”

“Officer Busch?” Michio said.

“Their firewalls are already down,” Oksana said. “Toda y alles.”

Michio nodded, more to herself than to Carmondy. “The Connaught has control of the enemy ship’s systems.”

“We’re setting a perimeter and securing the prisoners. Automatic check-in set.”

“Understood,” Michio said. Then, to Evans, “Let’s pull back far enough to be outside the blast range if it turns out they’re hiding nukes in the grain silo.”

“On it,” Evans said.

The maneuvering thrusters shifted her against her restraints, not even a tenth of a g, for the burn’s scant handful of seconds. Taking the things that other people thought they deserved to keep was dangerous work. The Connaught would watch over the boarding team of course, the ship’s gentle fingers on all their pulses. And in addition, Carmondy would ping every half hour using a onetime pad protocol. If he failed to check in, Michio would turn the Hornblower into a diffuse cloud of hot gas as a warning to the next ship. And a few thousand people on Callisto, Io, and Europa would have to hope the other Free Navy conscription missions came through.

The Belt had finally shrugged off the yoke of the inner planets. They had Medina Station at the heart of the ring gates, they had the only functioning navy in the solar system, and they had the gratitude of millions of Belters. In the long term, it was the greatest statement of independence and freedom the human race had ever made. In the short term, it was her job to see the victory didn’t starve them all to death.

For the next two days, Carmondy and his men would see that the would-be colonists were sealed on secured decks, where they could ride out the transit to a stable orbit around Jupiter. Then make a complete inventory of what had been gained by the taking of the Hornblower . Once they were done, it would still be a week before the salvage drives were in place. In that time, the Connaught would stand as guard and captor, and little enough for Michio to do but scan the darkness for other refugees.

She wasn’t looking forward to it, and she was sure the others in her marriage group weren’t either. Still, there was more than that in Oksana’s voice when she spoke.

“Bossmang. We got confirmation from Ceres.”

“Good,” Michio said, but with an uptick in her inflection that meant she’d heard whatever Oksana wasn’t saying. Oksana Busch had been her wife almost as long as the group had been together. They knew each other’s moods well.

“Got something else too. Message from himself.”

“What does Dawes want?” Michio asked.

“Not Dawes. Big himself.”

“Inaros?” Michio said. “Play it.”

“Under captain-only encrypt,” Oksana said. “I can pipe it to your cabin or your terminal if—”

“Play it, Oksana.”

Marco Inaros appeared on the monitor. From the drape of his hair, he was either on Ceres or under burn. There wasn’t enough visible background behind him to say if he was on a ship or in an office. His smile was charming and reached his warm, dark eyes. Michio felt her pulse step up a little, and told herself it was dread and not an attraction. For the most part, that was truth. He was a charismatic bastard, though.

“Captain Pa,” Marco said. “I’m glad to hear you took the Hornblower cleanly. It’s another testament to your ability. We were right to have you in command of the conscription. Things have gone well enough, we’re ready to move on to the next stages of our plan.”

Michio glanced over at Evans and Oksana. He was plucking at his beard, and she was trying not to look at Michio.

“We’ll want to route the Hornblower directly to Ceres,” Marco said. “And before that, I’m calling a meeting. Strictly inner-circle. You, me, Dawes, Rosenfeld, Sanjrani. At Ceres Station.” His grin widened. “Now that we’re running the system, there are some changes we should make, eh? The Pella says you can make it there in two weeks. It’ll be good to see you in person.”

He made a sharp Free Navy salute. The one he’d come up with. The screen went blank. The mix of confusion and distress and relief that flooded Michio’s gut wasn’t easy to make sense of. Having her mission change like that, so quickly and with so little explanation, left her on the wrong foot. And going into a meeting of the inner circle still had a little of the sense of danger that it had before the Free Navy had announced itself. Years of moving in shadows left habits of thought and feeling that were hard to step out of, even if they’d won. But at least they’d be back in the plane of the ecliptic, and not high up in the black, where ominous things happened. Bad things.

Things , a small, still voice in her head said, like being called to an unexpected meeting .