Babylon's Ashes

Josep pulled bulbs of tea for them both and then sat in companionable silence. She sipped, and the astringent bite of the tea mixed with the aftermath of sex to settle her without her even knowing she’d been unsettled. When she sighed, Josep raised his eyebrows.

“Yes,” Pa said. “You’re very smart. This is what I wanted.”

He sketched a bow, and then sobered. “Thinking about what you said? About coordinated?”

“Don’t worry,” she said, but he went on.

“You’ve been betrayed by men who were supposed to be your leaders. Johnson when we were OPA. Ashford on the Behemoth. Okulski with the union. We went independent because, yeah? Only now we’re not independent. Now we’re Free Navy, because Inaros convinced us to. Not just you. Us.”

“You’re right,” Pa said. “I’m probably just pushing back on what already happened. I should let go of it.”

“Shouldn’t let go of being educated,” he said. “Universe spent a lot of time telling you something. Now you’re second-guessing it. Maybe all those other things were getting you ready for this.”

Something in Pa’s chest slipped a little tighter. “You don’t trust him either.”

“Me? You don’t want to judge anything by me. I don’t even trust God.”

“You are absolutely the worst mystic ever,” Pa said, but she said it laughing.

“I know,” Josep said, shaking his head. “Sad failure of a prophet, me. But”—he lifted a finger—“I know you. And I know you’re the kind that likes to pretend she doesn’t know things she knows so that there won’t be friction. So if you’re thinking maybe you’re wrong so things are okay, you better check again, make sure things are okay. The universe needs a knife, then it makes a knife. And no one sharper, you.”

“And if it turns out the universe is just a bunch of chemicals and energy bashing against each other until the light runs out?”

“Then pattern-matching’s still a good way to not get bashed,” he said. “You tell me if Himself matches the pattern. You’ve seen more than I have.”

“Doubt that,” she said, but she took his hand. He held hers. After a moment, Laura came over to sit with them, and then Oksana. The talk turned to less dangerous subjects—all the ways Martian design was worse than Belter, the latest news from Witch of Endor’s capture of yet another colony ship, Carmondy’s report from the overhaul of the Hornblower. The business of running the Connaught. But the little knot sat just under her ribs, reminding her that something was wrong.

When she went back to her cabin, she went alone. She fell into the crash couch, pulled the blanket over her head, and dreamed of a huge, fragile creature swimming through the currents of the deep ocean, only the sea was made of stars, and the animal was built from ships, and one of them was hers.

Nothing as big as a revolution can survive with only one account of it. The rise of Ceres Station—or its fall, according to the inners—was the precursor to Marco Inaros and the Free Navy. Looking back, the death of a water hauler seemed a pathetically small thing to have set Earth and Mars against each other, even for just a little time, but it had been enough. With the traditional oppressors of the Belt pointing guns at each other for a change, the OPA had stepped in, taken control of the port city of the asteroid belt.

No one back then had expected it to last. Sooner or later, Mars and Earth would get their feet back under them, and then Ceres would fall. Anderson Dawes, the de facto governor of the station, would lose the power he’d grabbed and either move on to some new scheme or live on in spirit, a martyr to the cause. Every autonomous space was temporary.

Only the fall never came.

The collapse of Ganymede and the exposure of the Mao-Kwikowski protomolecule program captured the attention of the powers that be. Then Venus hatched out the great and mysterious structures that made the first gate. By the time the Behemoth accompanied the combined forces of Earth and Mars to explore the gate and consider its vast and complex implications, Anderson Dawes had woven a web of relationships. Corporations on Luna and Mars, the Lagrange stations, the Belt, the Jovian moons—none of them could allow trade to stop for the years it might take to reconquer the port. In the way of humankind since before the first contract was pressed into Sumerian clay, the temporary accommodations lasted long enough to become invisible.

And when the gates beyond the gate opened and the flood of humanity lurched out toward the new planets and suns, there were powers and money with interests in keeping Ceres as it was. And Anderson Dawes had known which palms to grease and when to compromise in order to keep the port’s traffic flowing uninterrupted.

Through long, careful management the great negotiator had outlasted his status as a rebel and become instead a politician. Dawes became respectable, and Ceres Station became first city of the Belters just in time for it not to matter.