Babylon's Ashes

There was nothing else to say, so she sent the message. Then, like prodding at an infected wound, she pulled up a tactical report. The whole system lay before her. The Panshin still lived and a handful of others. The nakliye at Eugenia. And there, vector-mapped from the Jovian system out toward the ring, the Pella. The remnants of the Free Navy. Two other smaller dots were on intersecting paths, but when she checked their estimated course, it was clear they were all on the same mission. Marco and his loyalists would pour through the gate together. An unstoppable force. If the rail gun defenses had still been in place, it still would have been a hell of a fight. Without them, it would be a slaughter.

Then, station by station, ship by ship, she scrolled through the system. It was the equivalent of the grease-pencil grid she’d drawn in some other lifetime, on a ship that was scrap and bad memories now. All of the things that people needed. Filters. Hydroponic supplies. Recycler teeth. Centrifuges for refining ore. Centrifuges for testing water. For working with blood.

She wondered if there were any colony ships still hiding out there in the emptiness, dark and watching in horror as humanity tore itself apart. She remembered the Doctrine of the One Ship. Remembered thinking of all the vessels in the Belt as being cells of a single being. She couldn’t see it that way now. At best, they were all their own desperate bacteria floating on a vacuum sea that didn’t care if they lived and didn’t notice when they died.

And if Sanjrani was right, a worse collapse was only clearing its throat.

The door to the common corridor opened, and Josep slouched in. Nadia kissed him on her way to bed. Those were the shifts now. One to sit with Laura, one to sit with her, and one to sleep. A cycle of shared grief. Josep went to the food station, slid open a panel she hadn’t noticed, and poured himself a glass of whiskey before he came to sit in the pit across from her.

“Skol,” he said, raising his glass. The rim clinked against his teeth as he drank. For a moment, they sat there together in silence.

“Oops,” she said.

Josep raised his eyebrows. “La magic word la.”

“It was me,” she said, wiping at her eyes with the cuff of her shirt. “I did what I always do, and I drove us straight to hell with it.”

Josep’s eyes were sunk back into his head. Exhaustion showed in his skin and the angle of his shoulders. “Don’t follow your mind, me.”

“I find someone, and I put my faith in them, and I go where they lead. And then all the gold turns to shit. Johnson and Ashford and Inaros. And now Holden. I don’t know how I didn’t see it coming, but I fell into it again with him. And now…”

“Now,” Josep agreed.

“And the stupid thing,” she said, her voice rising a little, growing thin and sharp as the drone of a violin, “is that I look at all this? I look at everything I was trying to do, and none of it happened. Wanted to make the Belt for Belters, and it won’t be. I wanted to build a place where we could live and call our own, and there isn’t one. Isn’t a way to build one even. I don’t even remember now why I thought I should be on Holden’s side. To open the gates again? Get the flow of colony ships freed up? Make sure that none of the people I cared about would live?”

Josep nodded, his expression thoughtful and distant. “What would it mean if you’d dreamed it?” Josep asked.

“Dreamed what?” Michio said, shifting until her back hurt, and then shifting some more.

“This,” he said. “That you’d fought for Inaros and then for Holden. That you’d lost people precious to you and ended in a place of luxury and healing?”

“It wouldn’t mean shit.”

Josep grunted. “Could be prophecy.”

“Could be that the universe doesn’t give a shit about us or anything we do and your mystic bullshit’s just a way we try to pretend otherwise.”

“Could be that too,” he agreed with an equanimity that made her ashamed she’d said it. He took another drink of his whiskey, then put the glass on the floor and lay out full on the curving couch, his head coming to rest in her lap. His smile was warm and beautiful and filled with a humor and gentleness that made her heart ache.

“Didn’t follow Holden, us. Standing against Marco put Holden beside you, yeah. But you were never his. We didn’t fight Marco because of Holden. We fought because Marco said he was the champion the Belt needed, only turned out he wasn’t.”

“Yeah,” she said, stroking his hair.

He closed his eyes in exhaustion. “Aber, God damn but we’re still gonna need a champion.”

Chapter Forty-Nine: Naomi