Babylon's Ashes

It was getting harder and harder to shrug off the sense of dread back on the Rocinante. The days since they’d arrived on Tycho had been one endless meeting for Holden. When he wasn’t fencing with Carlos Walker about what supplies and support the OPA could provide, he was trading long recorded messages with Michio Pa about the firing rate of the Free Navy’s rail gun artillery in the slow zone. When he wasn’t reporting to or getting reports from Avasarala, he and Naomi and Bobbie were comparing positional maps of the system with Aimee Ostman and Micah al-Dujaili. Holden never seemed to lose his temper, never seemed to rest. Every time Alex saw him, Holden smiled and was pleasant and upbeat. If he hadn’t spent years with the man, he might almost have been fooled into thinking things were going well.

But the man in the meetings, pacing the corridors of the Rocinante or the docks outside them, sitting hunched over his flickering hand terminal, wasn’t really James Holden at all. It was like Holden had become an actor and his role was James Holden. The surface was whatever it needed to be at the moment. That wasn’t the man he knew. Alex could feel the howling void of desperation and despair behind everything he said.

It showed in the others too. Naomi had become quieter, more focused. Like she was always in the middle of puzzling through an impossible problem. Even Amos seemed on edge, though what it was about was so subtle that Alex couldn’t have said for certain if that was even true. It might just have been his own fears projected against Amos’ blank slate. And if Bobbie and Clarissa seemed immune from it all, it was only because they were relatively new to the ship. They didn’t know the feel and rhythm of the Rocinante well enough yet to hear when she went slightly out of tune.

And every story of the Free Navy—another ship captured or killed, another Earth spy caught and executed on Pallas or Ganymede or Hall Station, another rock intercepted before it could hit Earth—turned the ratchet one more notch. The consolidated fleet was going to have to do something. And soon.

The little restaurant just off the main hall. Bright lights, a little redder spectrum than the sun. Syncopated harp-and-dulcimer music, which was apparently in fashion these days. Tall stools around a white ceramic bar. A plate of something not entirely unlike chicken in a vindaloo that was better than it had any right to be. Sandra had introduced the place to him the first night on Tycho, and he’d become a regular since.

His hand terminal chimed the connection request, and Alex accepted it with his thumb. Holden appeared on the screen. It might just have been the dim light on the command deck or the blue of the monitor the captain was sitting in front of, but his skin looked waxy, his eyes flat and exhausted. “Hey,” Holden said. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

“Thanks for askin’,” Alex said, maybe a little too heartily. He felt like he needed to haul the energy of the conversation up when he talked to Holden these days. As if he could inject health into the man by being so damned chipper at him. “I’m just finishing some breakfast. What’s up?”

“Um,” Holden said, and blinked. For a moment, he looked surprised. Like what he was about to say seemed a little implausible to him. “We’re looking to ship out in about thirty hours. Clarissa and Amos are in the middle of their sleep shifts, but I’m calling an all-hands meeting in four hours so we can make sure we’ve got everything in order.”

The way he said it sounded like an apology. Alex felt the words land like he was drinking something cold on an empty stomach. “I’ll be there,” he said.

“We’re good?”

“Cap,” Alex said, “this is the Roci. I made sure we were topped up and ready as soon as the docking clamps were in place. We could take off five minutes from now and be fine.”

Holden’s smile said he’d understood all Alex’s subtext. “Still, good to get everyone together and double-check.”

“No argument,” Alex agreed. “Four hours?”

“Four and change,” Holden said. “If Amos sleeps in, I’m going to let him.”

“See you on board then,” Alex said, and they dropped the connection. He took another bite of the vindaloo. It didn’t taste as good. He slid bowl and fork to the recycler, stood up, waited a few seconds just so he wouldn’t be going to find Sandra quite yet.

He went off to find Sandra.

Despite its name, the Jammy Rakshasa was an unexceptional-looking ship. Wide at the front, boxy, with a random studding of PDCs and thrusters scattered over her skin in a way that spoke of generations of use and modifications, the design growing and changing and leaving artifacts of its previous incarnations like a house altered by tenant after tenant until the original architecture was all but lost. A Belter ship. If it hadn’t been for the high security presence, both on the dock and floating around the ship itself, he’d have wondered if he was looking at the right one.