Babylon's Ashes

Holden shifted his monitor to the exterior cameras and shifted the view until he could see the Giambattista, the alien station, and—far enough away that it hardly seemed like more than a shaving of metal, invisible without the Roci enhancing it—Medina Station. He folded a hand over his mouth, turned on identification markers for all the landing skiffs and jerry-rigged boats, watched the display vanish under the cloud of pale green text, turned them off again and stared into the blackness. His eyes felt gritty. It was like all the anxiety and tension that he’d built up during the burn out to the ring had collapsed. Turned into something else.

“You all right?” Naomi asked.

“I was thinking about Fred,” he said. “This? It’s what he did. Lead armies. Take stations. This is what his life was like.”

“This is what he retired from,” Naomi said. “When he decided to start trying to get people to talk things out instead of shooting people, this is what he left behind.”

“Well, let’s see how that works,” he said. He set up the camera, considered himself on his screen, and ran his fingers through his hair until he looked a little better. Still worn-out. Still tired. But better. He set the system to broadcast.

“Medina Station. This is James Holden of the Rocinante. We’re here to take administration of the station and the slow zone and the gates back from the Free Navy. If you really want, we can spend a while shooting your PDCs and torpedo arrays until they don’t work and then land all these boats. We’ve got a lot of people with guns. I figure you do too. We could all kill a bunch more of each other, but I’d really prefer that we do this without losing anyone else. Surrender, lay down arms, and I promise humane treatment for the Free Navy’s command structure and any other prisoners.”

He tried to think of something else. Something more. A sweeping speech about how they were all one species after all, and that they could shrug off the weight of history if they chose to. They could all come together and make something new, and all it would really take was doing it. But all the words he could think of sounded false and unconvincing in his mind, so he cut the feed instead and waited to see what happened.

Naomi slipped out of her crash couch, floated to the lift and down. She came back a few minutes later with a bulb of tea. Slipped back into her couch. Waited. If it went on much longer, Holden knew he’d have to launch the attack. The boats weren’t built for much more than scooting from one ship to another. They’d start running out of air and fuel before long. But maybe a few minutes more…

The response came. Clear, unencrypted radio signal, as open as his demand for surrender had been. The woman in the Free Navy uniform was on the float in a very familiar room. The religious images on the wall behind her were like symbols from a recurring dream about violence and blood and loss.

Only maybe this time would be different.

“Captain Holden. I am Captain Christina Huang Samuels of the Free Navy. I will accept the terms of your surrender on the condition that you guarantee the safety and humane treatment of my people. We reserve the right to record and broadcast your boarding action to assure that all of humanity will bear witness to your behavior. I do this out of necessity and loyalty to my people. The Free Navy is the military arm of the people of the Belt, and I will not sacrifice the lives of my people or the unaffiliated civilians of Medina Station when there is no profit to be had from it. But I myself will stand now and forever against the tyranny of the inner planets and their exploitation and slow genocide of my people.”

She saluted the camera and the message ended. Holden sighed, started up his broadcast again.

“Sounds good,” he said. “We’ll be right over.” He killed the broadcast.

“Seriously?” Alex called from above. “‘Sounds good, we’ll be right over’?”

“I may kind of suck at this job,” Holden called back.

The voice over the ship’s comm was Clarissa’s: “I thought it was sweet.”

The fall of Medina Station took twenty hours from the first OPA ships docking to the last Free Navy operative being locked in a cell. Medina’s brig wasn’t anywhere near big enough, so it was reserved for the higher officials—the command staff, the department heads, the security officers and agents. The others—mostly technicians and maintenance—were confined to their quarters with the doors locked by the station system. Which meant, in the end, by Holden. He couldn’t help feeling like he’d just sent a thousand people to their rooms to really think about what they’d done.