James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

Naomi found him in their cabin after his exercise. Her hair was tied back, away from her face, and her eyes were calm and serious.

“Was looking for you,” she said.

He waved a little gamely. “Present.”

“You doing all right?”

“I don’t know. Yes?” He held out his hands, a gesture of helplessness. “I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time with this. Not like it’s the first war I’ve started.”

Her laugh was rueful and warm. She launched across the room, caught onto the handholds where she could look over his shoulder at the monitor. The two enemy ships on approach. The Giambattista and the Roci . A red field where the braking burn would start. A white line where the Roci thought the attack would come. The first attack. Violence reduced to spare and well-presented graphic design.

“You didn’t start this one,” Naomi said. “Marco did that.”

“Maybe,” Holden said. “Or maybe Duarte did. Or the protomolecule. Or Earth and Mars over the last couple of centuries of not giving a shit about the Belt. I don’t know anymore. I feel like I understand what I have to do in the next … I don’t know. Five minutes? Maybe ten? Then after that, things get muddy.”

“Next is enough,” Naomi said. “As long as you always see the next step, you can walk the whole way.”

She put a hand on his shoulder, her palm warm against his skin. He laced his fingers with hers and braced as she pulled herself down beside him. A simple maneuver they’d done a million times before. The long practice of trivial intimacy.

“I keep wondering if this was inevitable,” he said. “There are so many things we could have done differently. Maybe we could have kept this from happening.”

“We you-and-me, or we humanity?”

“I was thinking humanity. But you-and-me too. If you’d killed Marco when you were kids together. If I’d kept my temper and not gotten kicked out of the Navy. If … I don’t know. If any of the things that got us here hadn’t happened, would none of this be happening?”

“Don’t see how it could.”

On the screen, the two enemy ships ticked closer to them while they shifted—not as quickly—toward the red warning of the hard burn. “I keep thinking it would have, though,” Holden said. “If it wasn’t me or you or Amos or Alex, if it wasn’t the Roci , it would be someone or something else. The Belt didn’t get screwed because of you or me. Whatever it was that made the protomolecule didn’t throw it at us because of anything that we’d done.”

“Seeing as we were single cells at the time.”

“Right? The details would be different, but the … the shape of it all would be the same.”

“That’s the problem with things you can’t do twice,” Naomi said. “You can’t ever know how it would have gone if it had been the other way.”

“No. But you can say that if we don’t do something different, it’ll happen again. And again. And again, over and over until something changes the game.”

“Like the protomolecule?”

“It didn’t change anything,” Holden said. “Here we are, still doing all the same things we did before. We’ve got a bigger battleground. Some of the sides have shifted around. But it’s all the crap we’ve been doing since that first guy sharpened a rock.”

Naomi pulled herself closer, tucked her head against his shoulder. Probably people had been doing that since the dawn of time too, just not in freefall.

“You’ve changed,” she said. “The man I met on the Canterbury wouldn’t have said that it was everyone’s business. That whatever anyone did counted.”

“Well. I’ve had really a lot of people shooting at me since then.”

“And you’ve grown up some. It’s all right. I have too. We’re both still doing it. That’s not something you stop. Not until you’re dead.”

“Mm,” Holden said. Then, “So I’m guessing this kind of thing doesn’t bother you?”

“Nature of history? No, it doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

He felt Naomi’s shrug against his body, familiar as if he’d done it himself. “I know what I need to deal with next. I’ve got two attack ships crawling up my ass, ready to kill me and all the people I love most in life. And if they manage it, my evil ex-boyfriend may very well grind all human civilization in the system into a new dark age.”

“Yeah. That guy’s an asshole.”

“Yup.”

They watched it coming, knew it would come. It didn’t make it any less frightening when it came.

Alex put the Roci just ahead of the Giambattista ’s nose, offset enough not to melt her with their exhaust, but close enough to maybe stop the enemy torpedoes before they hit. The two incoming plumes were like stars—fixed and steady. Holden remembered being a boy in Montana, learning to catch a baseball. The way that the ball seemed to float almost motionless when it was coming straight for him. This was the same.

“Status?” Holden said.

“Sixty-three seconds to effective range,” Naomi said. “ Roci ’s watching them.”

Holden breathed out. The captain of the Giambattista insisted that her ship wouldn’t suffer more than three and a half gs, so that’s what they were at. The enemy was slowing at a little over eight, but still going so fast that they would only spend a fraction of a second in range.

“Forty,” Naomi said, and coughed. A painful sound that made Holden aware of the weight on his own throat. Maybe they should have gone on the juice after all. Behind them, the ring gate would have been visible to the naked eye by now. Even a very low-power scope would be showing the weird, almost organic, moving-but-stationary nonmaterial of its frame. Signal was leaking through the bare thousand kilometers of its diameter, distorted like ocean waves seen from beneath—radio, light, all the electromagnetic spectrum, only warped and made strange. And beyond that, the rail guns waiting to kill them all.

“Starting to think this may not have been a great plan,” he said.

“Five seconds. Four …”

Holden braced. Not that it was going to help, just that he couldn’t keep from doing it. On the external cameras, the enemy drive plumes grew larger, thicker, brighter, and then in a blink, faster than the frame refresh, they were gone and the Rocinante bucked hard around him, slamming him into his crash couch like he’d fallen off a ladder. The ship rang like a struck gong, deafening. For a confused second, he thought they’d been thrown around by the enemy’s wake. That they were going to capsize.

The Roci steadied. An alarm was sounding, brash and demanding.

“What have we got?” Holden shouted.

“I don’t know,” Clarissa shouted. “I haven’t been looking at this any longer than you. Just … All right. Looks like we ate a couple PDC rounds or … No, hold on. That doesn’t make sense.”

The alarm shut off. The silence seemed more ominous. Maybe the shaking hadn’t been the Roci ’s maneuvering thrusters getting them out of the way. They’d been hit. They might be spewing out their spare air into vacuum.

“‘Doesn’t make sense’ is not good, Clarissa,” he said, trying to make his panic sound cheerful. “Something that made me feel like we weren’t dying would be really nice.”

“Well, we got a little beat up,” Clarissa said. “I thought it was PDCs, but … No. We took out a torpedo close enough that we caught some debris.”

“They launched four torpedoes at us and two at the Giambattista ,” Naomi said from behind him. “We got them all, but there was a little damage to both ships. I’m waiting to get a solid report from Amos.”