Babylon's Ashes

This was it. This was how she died. The idea was weirdly consoling. She’d end here, under billions of stars. In the unending, unshielded light of the sun, fighting for her friends. It felt bright, like a hero’s death. Not the cold fading away on a hard, gray cot in the prison infirmary she’d expected. How strange that this should feel like victory. Time seemed to slow, and she wondered if maybe she’d triggered her implants by mistake. That would be silly. Amping up her nervous system would do her exactly no good when all her speed came from the thruster’s nozzle. But no. It was only fear and the certainty that she was rushing to her death.

Naomi and Alex were shouting in her ears. Amos too. She couldn’t make sense of any of it. It occurred to her like a conclusion she was watching someone else make that Amos might feel bad when she was gone. She should have told him how grateful she was for every day he’d given her outside the hole. Her helmet alerted. She had to start braking or she’d overshoot the ship. She killed the thrusters and flipped, more from a sense of obligation than from any real hope of living. One of two boarders was spinning away sunward, arms and legs flailing and out of control. The other was above her with their back turned, facing a fast-moving body that had to be Amos. The mech flickered, drawing closer. When she started braking, it seemed to surge toward her, an illusion of relative velocity, but with enough truth to end her.

And then, inexplicably, the mech driver slumped against his harness. The mech arms waved, suddenly uncontrolled. One reached down, gouging the hull and sending the great yellow machine spinning away from the Rocinante and toward the stars. She watched, uncomprehending, until a hand grabbed her uninjured shoulder and an arm looped across her back. In the bright sunlight, the other suit’s helmet was opaque. She didn’t understand what had happened until she heard the voice over her radio.

“It’s all right,” Holden said. “I’ve got you.”

Amos woke her. His wide face and bald head seemed like a dream. But that was likely just the drugs playing with her perceptions.

The regrowth cocktail did strange things to her mind, even if the painkillers didn’t. Given the choice of feeling numb and stupid or alert and in pain, she chose pain. Wide elastic restraints held her to the bed of the medical bay. The autodoc fed her body what it needed, and only occasionally threw out errors, confused by the leakage from her after-market endocrine system. Her humerus was shattered, but growing back together. The first bullet had carved a groove ten centimeters long through the muscles of her thigh and shocked the bone, but didn’t break it.

“You okay, Peaches? I brought you some food, and I was just going to leave it for you, but you were… You looked…” He waved a hand.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I mean all shot up, but I’m fine.”

He sat on the side of her bed, and she realized they were under thrust. The smell of artificial peach cobbler was inviting and nauseating at the same time. She undid her restraints and sat up on her good elbow.

“Did we win?” she asked.

“Oh hell yeah. Two prisoners. Data core off the Azure Dragon. They tried to scrub it, but between Naomi and the Roci, we’ll put it back together. Bobbie’s straight-up pissed that she missed the action.”

“Maybe next time,” she said, and Holden came into the room.

He and Amos nodded to each other. The big man left.

“We should probably have had this talk before,” Holden said.

The Roci’s captain stood at the bedside, looking like he wasn’t sure whether to sit. She couldn’t say whether it was the trauma or the drugs, but she was surprised to notice that he didn’t look like her mental image of him. In her mind, his cheeks were higher, his jaw wider. The blue of his eyes more icy. This man looked—not older. Only different. His hair was messy. There were lines forming around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. Not there yet, but coming. His temples were touched with gray. That wasn’t what made him look different, though. The James Holden who was king of her personal mythology was sure of himself, and this man was profoundly ill at ease.

“Okay,” she said, not certain what else to say.

Holden crossed his arms. “I… um. Yeah, I didn’t really expect you to come on this ship. I’m not comfortable with it.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He waved the comment away. “It’s made me skip this part, and I shouldn’t have. That’s on me, okay? I know you and Amos trekked across a big part of North America after the rocks came down, and I know that you handled yourself just fine then. And you have experience on ships.”

Experience as a terrorist and murderer, he didn’t say.