Babylon's Ashes

The ring was close enough to see without magnification now. As wide as Ceres Station and still tiny in the vast darkness out here where even the sun wasn’t more than a peculiarly bright star. His ships would start evasive maneuvers as they drew close. Shifting places in their formation like shells on the table of a dockside hustler. He checked their vectors again, typed out an angry command to one of the ships that was drifting behind. The ring slowly grew larger. He increased the magnification and added false light. The material that made up the ring itself still defied the best minds in the human sphere. He wasn’t really seeing it, of course. The image on his monitor was filtered through the brightness of their plumes. In truth, he was falling backward toward the ring, his face toward the faint and unimportant sun. His crash couch held him like he was resting in the palm of God.

A message appeared on his monitor from Karal: ALL SYSTEMS CHECK. BOA CAÇADA.

Marco typed back, not just to Karal, but to all of the Pella’s crew. GOOD HUNTING.

Five minutes until they passed through the gate and the battle for Medina began. The brief, decisive, ugly battle that would redefine what the Free Navy was. He willed them forward, pushing against brute physics with his mind. Smelling victory. Feeling it in his blood. Minutes slid by like hours, and also gone too fast. Two minutes. One.

Another message from Karal. WIR HAT POSSIBLE.

Beside it was deeper magnification of the ring filtered through the ship’s system. A tiny blue dot that had to be the rail gun station, and there beside it, almost too subtle to see, a fleck of lighter darkness that could have been a ship on the float. The Rocinante.

Marco felt his whole consciousness narrow into that one tiny gray dot. Naomi. That dot was Naomi. She’d run out of the solar system to get away from him, and here he was. He could see her face in his mind. The empty expression she wore when she was trying not to feel. His grin hurt. His body hurt. But the little dot forgave it all. Except—

Something was wrong with his monitor. He thought at first that the image had gotten grainy, the resolution rougher, but that wasn’t right. It was the same size, only he could see the parts that made it up. He wasn’t looking at the Rocinante. He was looking at photons streaming off a sheet of electrically excited plastic. The polymer chains glowed dark and light and dark. It was like seeing a woman’s body in painting across the room and then, without warning, only the brushstrokes that made it up. Naomi was nowhere in it.

He shouted, and could sense the pressure waves going out from his throat. The clouds of molecules that made his fingers slapped against the ones that were the control pad. He meant to type that they should fire, that they should kill while the chance was still with them, but he couldn’t make out the letters in the splash of photons that spilled off his screen. There was too much detail.

Where the air began and the crash couch ended was lost. The boundary between his body and his environment blurred. He had known since he was too young to remember learning that atoms were made from more space than material, and that at the lowest levels, the things that made atoms could bounce in and out of being. He’d never seen it before. He’d never been so aware that he was a vapor of energy. A vibration in a guitar string that didn’t exist.

Something dark and sudden moved through the cloud toward him.

On the Rocinante, the ring gate grew brighter with the braking burns of the enemy, until it looked like the negative image of an eye—black, star-specked sclera and intensely white, burning iris. The timer reached zero. The lights grew brighter. Then flickered and went out.

Holden checked the sensors. Where fifteen warships on the burn had been seconds before, there was just nothing.

“Huh,” Amos said over the ship system. “That is super creepy.”

Chapter Fifty-Two: Pa

“Here we are. Back again,” Michio said as she stepped onto the docks of Ceres Station.

“Hup,” Josep, walking beside her, agreed.

When she’d left, she had been rebelling against a rebellion. Now she had come, whether anyone admitted it or not, to beg the powers of Earth and Mars for her freedom. She felt like the docks themselves should have changed too. Grown older and more worn the way her soul had. But the echoing music built from the clanking of mechs and power tools, the gabble of voices, was what it had been before. The smells of carbon lubricants and ozone was still as sharp.