Babylon's Ashes

He didn’t tell her to leave Bertold and Nadia, which was good. She wouldn’t have. But she didn’t know whether to be reassured that he hadn’t tried to peel away her guards or frightened that maybe they didn’t matter.

“Bertold,” she said as they followed the other captain.

“Savvy,” he said, his hand on the butt of his gun as if it had only happened to come to rest there. Nadia was the same. They fell into a guarding formation as naturally as blinking. When Rodriguez reached the walls of the port, he landed with a clank, turning on his mag boot and killing his momentum with his knees. The music they’d heard before was gone now, and Rodriguez looked behind them, as if making sure they weren’t followed. Or else that they were.

“Making me nervous, coyo,” Michio said, walking after him. “Something you want to say?”

“Bon sí, aber not here,” Rodriguez said, the lightness gone from his voice and a grim tension in its place. “Smuggled past the smugglers, this one.”

“Not feeling better.”

“You will or you won’t. Come alles la.”

The container he took them to had a little office built out from the side. Scrapwelded together with its own airlock. Rodriguez keyed in a passcode by hand. Bertold stretched his arms, blew out his breath, like a weight lifter about to try more than his usual load.

“Love you,” Nadia said, her voice calm and conversational as if she wasn’t saying it in case they were her last words.

The airlock opened, and a man popped out. Thin frame, dark hair in curls. “Is she here?” he said, and then, “Oh. There you are.”

A shock of surprise, the uncertainty of whether this was a threat or something more interesting. “Sanjrani.”

“Nico, Nico, Nico,” Rodriguez said, pushing Sanjrani back through the airlock. “Not here. Didn’t sneak through te ass end of nothing to wave you like a flag. Get back safe in.” When Sanjrani had retreated, Rodriguez turned to Michio, motioning that she should follow. When she hesitated, he lifted his arm to his sides, cruciform. “Got no guns, me. Esá goes bad, la dué la can shoot me.”

“Can,” Bertold agreed. His sidearm was drawn, but not pointed. Not yet.

“All right, then,” Michio said, clomping forward in her boots, the magnets dragging her down against the floors, holding her, and letting her go again with every step.

In the little office, Sanjrani sat strapped onto a stool before a thin desk. Another waited across from him. She didn’t see a trap. Didn’t know what she was looking at. “Are you looking to change sides?” she asked.

Sanjrani made a deep, impatient cough. “I’m here to tell you why you’re killing everyone in the fucking Belt. You and Marco both. You two should be on my side.”

“Does he know you’re here?”

“Am I dead already? No, he doesn’t. That’s how desperate I’ve gotten. I try to talk to Rosenfeld, but he’s only talking to Marco. No one knows where Dawes got to. They won’t listen.” There was a desperation in his voice, high and thin as a bow against a string.

“All right,” she said, moving to the stool, pulling the belt across her lap. “I’ll listen.”

Sanjrani relaxed and pulled up a diagram from the desk’s display. A complex series of curves laid over x and y axes. “We made assumptions when we started this,” he said. “We made plans. Good ones, I think. But we didn’t follow them.”

“Dui,” Michio said.

“First thing we did,” he said, “was destroy the biggest source of wealth and complex organics in the system. The only supply of complex organics that work with our metabolisms. The worlds on the other side of the ring? Different genetic codes. Different chemistries. Not something we can import and eat. But that was okay. Projections were clear. We could build a new economy, put together infrastructure, make a sustainable network of microecologies in a cooperative-competitive matrix. Base the currencies on—”

“Nico,” she said.

“Right. Right. We needed to start building it all as soon as the rocks fell.”

“I know,” she said.

“You don’t,” he said. Tears sheeted across his eyes, clung to his skin. “No recycling process is perfect. Everything degrades. The colony ships? The supplies? They’re all stopgap. They’re the measure of how long we have to make a living Belt. Look here. This green curve is the projected output of the new economic models. The ones we’re not doing, yeah? And this”—he pointed to a descending red curve—“is the best case of how long the conscripted supplies will last. Equilibrium is here. Five years out.”

“All right.”

“And this line here, the base we would need between them to keep the present population of the Belt alive.”

“We stay above it.”

“We would have,” Sanjrani said, “if we’d kept to the plan. Here’s where we are now.”

He shifted the green line. Michio felt her throat tighten as she understood what she was looking at.