Babylon's Ashes

Medina’s system logs were huge, larger than anything Naomi had expected. And, what was worse, not very well organized. It was an artifact of history in a way. The physical design had been intended for a generation ship cruising through the still-unknown ocean of interstellar space, but the logic systems came from Fred Johnson’s military refit, which had then been repurposed when the ship went from battleship to permanent city in space. The old security systems hadn’t all been cracked when the Free Navy took over, so there were partial records here and there, scattered by a variety of engineers trying to force their will on an already complex system.

Like cities back on Earth where era had built on era had built on the era before, the systems of Medina were shaped by long-forgotten forces. The thinking behind each decision was lost now in a tangle of database hierarchies and complex reference structures. Finding something interesting was easy. It was all interesting on some level. Finding some particular piece of information—and knowing whether it was the most recent or complete version of the data—was very, very difficult.

She used her office in the security station like it was a medieval monk’s cell, only leaving it to go back to the Rocinante to sleep, then coming back to it when she woke. Instead of copying ancient texts with pen and ink, she spelunked the datasets, poked through file systems, asked Medina to find things, and then watched to see where it didn’t search. Anything that seemed like it might be useful she copied or stripped out and then sent back. Work report logs from the days under the Free Navy’s control, sent back to Earth and Mars. Landing papers outlining the supply flow in from and back out to Laconia. Accident reports from the medical systems. Traffic control comm logs from the ships that had come and gone. Anything might be useful, so she took everything and sent it back at the speed of light to Earth and Luna and Mars and Ceres.

It kept the fear at bay. Not perfectly, but nothing short of death was going to end fear perfectly. No matter how she distracted herself, there was a timer ticking down in the back of her mind. The days and hours until Marco and his ships arrived. There were other problems, other risks—the Free Navy loyalists still on the station, the strobing do-not-approach signal that was the only thing coming out of the Laconia gate—but none of them would matter once Marco arrived. All of it pushed her to get her work done quickly, efficiently. When the next thing came—and she didn’t look what that would be straight in its eyes—she wanted to know that she’d gotten her work done.

And still, sometimes she paused. She found a personal journal tucked among the environmental reports like printed pornography tucked under a mattress. Entry after entry of a young man’s private struggles with his longings and ambitions and feelings of betrayal. Another time, she was trying to recover what she could from a half-erased partition and came up with a short video of a girl—four years old at most—leaping off a bed somewhere on the station, landing on a pile of pillows, and dissolving into laughter. Reviewing the traffic-control logs, she listened to the voices of desperate men and women from the systems on the far sides of the ring gates demand and beg and plead for the supplies they felt they deserved, wanted, and sometimes needed to survive.

It was the first time she’d really understood the scale of the destruction Marco had brought. All the lives he’d traumatized and ended, all the plans he’d shattered. Most of the time, it was too big to wrap her mind around, but little glimpses like this made it all comprehensible. Terrible and sad and enraging, but comprehensible.

And it informed some of her decisions.

“Um,” Jim said, sloping in through the door of his office. “So, sweetie? Did you mean to have the data feeds go out through all the rings? Because I’m noticing that you’ve started sending everything to everyone.”

“I meant to,” Naomi said, brushing the hair back from her eyes. It was almost the end of her second shift. Her back ached a little from sitting too long in the same position, and her eyes were dry and scratchy. “I don’t know what’s going to be useful, or who it’s going to be useful to. And since it doesn’t look like we’ll be on Medina long enough to go through everything, I thought I’d send copies out everywhere. Give other people a chance to find whatever I’m missing.”

“That’s… ah.”

“I know,” she said. “I may have been spending too much time with you. I’m starting to think like you. Only, well. The way you used to, anyhow.”

“I still think like that,” Jim said, pulling a chair over behind hers and sitting. He rested his head on her shoulder. When he spoke, she could feel the vibration in his throat against her skin. “I worry more that it’s going to do something unexpected and terrible and huge that I’ll be responsible for, but I still think that way.”