James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

He resisted the urge to reopen Karvonides’ partition. To find the other feeds Holden had made or inspired. It was a bad idea. Instead, he waited, worked, watched through the glass. Only Brice remained, and her workstation was down a long and curving hallway. He closed his terminal, clocked out, went to the men’s room, and waited. Washed his hands. Waited. Then casually stepped out to the main floor, swinging by one of the gang stations, opening a terminal with a guest account, accessing the datasets and protocols that Supervisor Praxidike Meng had carelessly put in the open partition without permissions set. The screen showed a pale blue logo, the flag of Ganymede. He sent copies to Samuel Jabari and Ingrid Dineyahze on Earth and Gorman Le on Luna. The only message was PLEASE CONFIRM THESE RESULTS.

Then he shut down the terminal and made his way out to the common corridors. Everything seemed brighter than it should have been. He couldn’t tell if he was tired or restless. Or both.

He stopped at a noodle stand between the tube station and home. No-Roof for him and Djuna. Fried tofu for the girls. And—a luxury—rice wine. And a round ceramic container with green tea ice cream for dessert. When he got home, Natalia was whining about having to drill her times tables and Mei had shut herself in her room to trade messages with her friends from school and watch entertainment feeds of boys three or four years older than her. Other nights, he would have insisted that they all come to the table for dinner, but he didn’t want to disturb anything.

He served the noodles into recyclable ceramic bowls with a pattern of sparrows and twigs on them, brought one to Natalia at her desk, another to Mei sprawled out on her bed. She was so big these days. Soon, she’d be bigger than his shoulder. His little girl, who no one had expected to live, and look at her now. When he kissed the crown of her head, she looked up at him quizzically. He nodded her toward her screen of soulful-looking young men.

He and Djuna sat at the table together, almost like they were dating again. He looked at her: the curve of her cheek, the little scar on her left knuckle, the gentle fold of her collarbone. Like he was saving it for some coming day when she wouldn’t be there. Or else when he wouldn’t.

The rice wine bit at his mouth. Maybe it always felt like that—chill and warming at the same time—and he just didn’t usually notice. Djuna told him about her day, the office politics and palace intrigues of biofilms, and he took in her words like they were music. Just before he cleared their dishes and broke out the ice cream, she reached across the table and took his hand.

“Are you all right?” she said. “You’re acting strange.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Bad day at work?”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I think maybe it was very good.”

Chapter Twenty-Five: Fred

James Holden has just declared piracy legal,” Avasarala said from Luna, then paused. Her eyebrows were high on her forehead, and she nodded a little. Like she was encouraging a not very bright child to understand her. “He took in a pirated ship. From a pirate . And then thanked her for his cut of the fucking booty and waved as she burned away. And you, the Butcher of Anderson Station, grand Whatever-the-Fuck of the OPA? You sat there with your cock in your hand and let him do it. I mean, I understand Holden is Holden, but I let you put your hands on Ceres because I thought you at least were a fucking grown-up.”

She leaned back from her camera, shaking her head, and cracked a pistachio.

“I thought better of you, Johnson,” she said. “I really did. My life has become a single, ongoing revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough.”

At this point, he was pretty clear she was talking for the comfort of hearing her own voice. He checked the feed data. Ten more minutes. She might get to something important in the course of it, so he let it play as he walked through the bedroom. Her sharp consonants and scratching vowels made a kind of background music while he dug his evening medications out of his bedside table. Five pills and a glass of water. The pills were chalky and bitter on his tongue, and even after they were washed down his throat, he suffered their aftertaste.

Working twenty-hour days was a younger man’s gig. He could still rise to the occasion, but there had been a time his determination against the universe would have felt like a fair fight. Anger alone would have carried him forward, and maybe the scourge of fatigue would have made him feel he was expiating his sins. Now he was surviving on coffee and blood pressure meds and trying to keep the system from falling any further apart. It seemed less romantic.

“It looks like Richards has almost whipped what’s left of the Martian parliament into order,” Avasarala said, “so hopefully we can get something from her. Just an assurance she won’t come piss all over our strategy so it smells more like her would be enough. Souther’s pushing for Rhea or Pallas, depending on whether we want to shore up the allies we already have, half-assed as they may be, or deny Inaros a manufacturing base. Admiral Stacey’s pushing back against any of it for fear of stretching our ships out too thin.”

Both strategies were mistakes. He’d need to make the case for that. She pressed her fingers to her forehead. A short, percussive sigh. For a moment, she seemed smaller. Vulnerable. It was a strange look for her.

“We’ve had two more rocks. One of them had the stealth coating on it, but we caught it. This time. I’ve got the deep arrays sifting through all their data looking for more. But it costs so little to push something into an intersecting orbit, Inaros could have done hundreds of these. Spaced them out over months. Years. A century from now, we could see something loop in from out of the ecliptic with a note on it that says, ‘Fuck you very much from the Free Navy.’ My grandchildren’s grandchildren will be cleaning this same shit up.”

“Hopefully. If we win,” Fred said to the screen. Not that the recording could hear him. He moved to the bathroom, and the display shifted to follow him.

The best thing about the governor’s quarters was the shower. Wide as a rainstorm, and the whole floor a grated drain that worked even at a third of a g. Fred stripped and washed the sweat and grime of the day off his skin while Avasarala went over the latest intelligence about the state of affairs on the colony planets (no hard data, but things were probably bad), the reports on the ships that had gone missing passing through the gates (several theories and hope that the flight records from Medina would help if they ever became available), and the situation on Earth (the expected second wave of deaths from collapsed food, sanitation, and medical infrastructure was starting to appear).

After he dried off, Fred pulled on a fresh shirt, clean trousers. Thick, soft socks. The small pleasures of life. Avasarala kept delivering her report, diving into unneeded details and side comments as if she were lonely and didn’t want to face the emptiness and quiet of her own rooms on Luna. But even she couldn’t last forever.

“I’ll expect to hear from you,” she said. “And I’m fucking serious about this. Don’t let Holden. Make. Any. More. Laws.”

Fred sat on the edge of the bed, closed his eyes, and let his head sink into his hands. He’d been awake for over thirty hours now, and was looking down the barrel of another shift. Negotiating with the unions, adjusting decades-old contracts to fit the new situation. Moving Belters out of their holes, shutting down great swaths of the station to conserve the supplies they had. Part of his mind kept treating it like an emergency. A wound that had to be stanched until help could arrive. Three, four times a shift, he’d remember that there wasn’t help. That the choices he made today might stay in place for years. Forever.