Babylon's Ashes

When the Roci hit the mathematical balance point of velocity, mass, and distance that defined the halfway point, there would be some hard choices to make. Either they’d flip and start braking toward Tycho or commit to letting the chase go on indefinitely. If they let the Free Navy spook them out into the empty spaces between bases and stations, the chase turned into an ugly kind of attrition battle. Who ran out of ammunition or reaction mass first. Given how the outer system looked these days, it would make more sense to brake toward Tycho and hope that backup from the station could reach them before the Free Navy pounded them into scrap metal and blood.

Her job and Alex’s were to make sure they lived long enough to have that problem. She tracked the torpedoes. With any luck, they’d all be standard issue. They didn’t show the jittering path of point defense countermeasures yet. When they got in effective range, the Roci would start chewing them to pieces, streams of tiny tungsten rounds ripping the torpedoes to nothing. If there were only six, she’d have been confident they could do it. Ten at once was a little more complicated, but as long as they didn’t all hit at the same time, she was pretty sure they wouldn’t be overwhelmed.

Holden’s voice in her ear sounded anxious. “How long before we can start shooting back?”

“Fast-movers will be in effective PDC range in sixty-eight minutes,” she said. “Do we have any response from Ceres? Because if they could throw a few spare long-range torpedoes at these sonsofbitches, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings.”

Fred Johnson’s voice answered, calm and businesslike. “I’m working on that now.”

“Our new friends are closing,” Alex said. “We may have to get a little less comfortable.”

“Understood,” Holden said.

The Rocinante was already under a three-g burn. Bobbie felt it in her joints and eyes. The crappy juice dribbling into her veins gave her a distant, cloudy sort of headache and a taste like formaldehyde in her mouth. Below her, the rest of the crew—Holden’s and Johnson’s both—were strapped in for battle. She could hear Sandra Ip’s voice bleeding out from Alex’s headset, talking on a private channel. Naomi was talking to someone too, her voice rising from the deck below.

The anxiety and fear in her gut were as familiar as a favorite song. The logic of tactics and violence spread out on the screens, and she found she could see things in them like reading the future. If Ceres fired a barrage of missiles or long-range torpedoes, she knew the Shinsakuto would peel off to stop them. She saw how Alex would curve the Roci’s path to force a few extra seconds between the Free Navy’s incoming torpedoes. The vectors of the enemy ships whispered things in the back of her mind about recklessness and aggression. And she knew that there were other people on each of the incoming ships whose minds were making the same analysis, reaching the same conclusions. Seeing something she didn’t or missing a detail that she picked up. All it took was one critical mistake, and they’d be dead or captured. One oversight from the enemy, and they’d get away.

And along with it all—the shitty juice, the battle fear, the desperate effort of keeping her mind clear while all the blood tried to pool at the back of her skull—there was something else. A warmth. A sense of being where she belonged. Her team was counting on her, and her life depended on all of them doing their jobs with efficiency and professionalism and an unhesitating competence.

When she died, she wanted it to be like this. Not in a hospital bed like her grandmother. Not in a sad little hole on Mars with a gun in her mouth or a gut full of pills like the failures of veterans’ outreach. She wanted to win, to protect her tribe and wipe the enemy into a paste of blood and dismay. But failing that, she wanted to die trying. A snippet of something she’d once read popped in her head: Facing fearful odds protecting the bones of her fathers and the temples of her gods. Yeah. Like that.

“Shit,” Alex said. “I’ve got six more. We’re up to sixteen fast- movers.”

“I’ve got ’em,” Bobbie said.

“Why are they spacing them out like that?” Holden asked.

“The Shinsakuto’s getting ready to flip and burn,” Bobbie said. “I’m guessing Fred talked Ceres into helping.”

“I did indeed,” Fred said. “Just got confirmation.”

“If our PDCs are going to have a chance chewing these fuckers up, I’ve got to punch it,” Alex said.

“Everyone in your couches?” Holden said. There was a chorus of response. No one said no. “Do what you need to do, Alex.”

He looked over at her. Pilot’s and gunner’s stations were the only ones in the cockpit. It was designed that way because if systems started failing, they could shout to each other. They had to be able to coordinate, because from now to the end of the battle, no one else mattered. Every other life on the ship was about to become cargo.