Babylon's Ashes

Chapter Nine: Holden

The sound reached all the way to the galley: a deep thud, then a pause, then another thud. Each time it came, Holden felt himself flinch a little. Naomi and Alex sat with him, trying to ignore it, but whatever they started a conversation about—the state of the ship, the success of their mission, the question of whether to give in to fate and convert a section of the crew quarters into a brig—it died out under the slow, unending beat.

“Maybe I should talk to her,” Holden said. “I think I should.”

“Don’t know why you think that,” Alex said.

Naomi shrugged, abstaining. Holden took one last bite of his fake lamb, wiped his mouth with the napkin, and dropped everything into the recycler. Part of him hoped that one of them would stop him. They didn’t.

The Rocinante’s gym showed its age. No two resistance bands were quite the same color, the green-gray mats had white lines where the fabric had worn thin, and the smell of old sweat softened the air. Bobbie had strung a heavy bag on a tight line between the ceiling and the deck. Her exercise outfit was tight and gray and soaked with sweat. Her hair was tied back, and her eyes were locked on the bag as she shifted on the balls of her feet. As Holden stepped into the room, she turned to the left, putting her weight into a roundhouse kick. This close, the thud sounded like something heavy being dropped. The system reported a little under ninety-five kilograms per square centimeter. Bobbie danced back, her focus locked on the bag. She shifted to the right, and kicked with her other leg. The thud was a little softer, but the reading went up by three kilos. She danced back, reset. Her shins were red and raw-looking.

“Hey,” she said, not looking at him. Thud. Reset.

“Hey,” Holden said. “How’re you doing?”

“Fine.” Thud. Reset.

“Anything you want to talk about?”

Thud. Reset. “Nope.”

“Okay. Well. If you ah”—Thud. Reset.—“change your mind.”

“I’ll track you down.” Thud. Reset. Thud.

“Great,” Holden said, and stepped back out of the room. Bobbie hadn’t looked at him once.

In the galley, Naomi had a bulb of coffee waiting for him. He sat across from her while Alex dropped the last of his food into the recycler. Holden drank. The Roci’s processors were calibrated once a week, and they’d stocked up before leaving Luna, so it was almost certainly his imagination that made the coffee more bitter than usual. He put a pinch of salt in it anyway, swirling the bulb to stir it.

“You knew that wasn’t going to work,” he said.

“I expected it wasn’t,” Naomi said. “I didn’t know.”

“Just suspected.”

“Strongly suspected,” she said. It was almost an apology. “I could have been surprised.”

“You got to give Bobbie her room, Cap,” Alex said. “She’ll come out the other side of it.”

“I just… I wish I understood what’s bothering her so much.”

Alex blinked. “She’s been spoiling to take the fight to some bad guys ever since Io. Now she got one, and she was stuck in a box while the rest of us did the shooting.”

“But we won.”

“We did,” Naomi said. “And she watched us do it while we tried to figure out how to get her out of a trap. By the time she was free, it was over.”

Holden sipped at the coffee. It was a little better. That didn’t help. “Okay, so what I meant was I wish I understood what was bothering her in hopes that then there’d be something I could do about it.”

“We know,” Naomi said. “The difficulty isn’t lost on us.”

Amos’ voice came over the ship’s comm. “Anybody there? I’ve been paging ops for the last ten minutes.”

Alex thumbed the system on. “On my way up now.”

“Okay. I think I tracked down the last leak. Let me know what it looks like from your end.”

“Will do,” Alex said, nodded to the two of them, and headed up toward ops and the ongoing repair effort. The Azure Dragon’s crew hadn’t had all that long, but they hadn’t been trying for clean either. It was easier to cut through a lot of hull quickly when you didn’t care what broke while you did it. Knowing that the ship wasn’t right yet was like an itch he couldn’t quite reach. Part of that came from knowing how strapped the shipyards on Luna were going to be. The days of sloping into Tycho and having Fred Johnson’s teams patch the ship up were probably gone, and Luna had Earth’s navy to take precedence over Holden and his crew.

It wasn’t just that, though. It was also the same thing he’d felt driving him to talk to Bobbie. And to Clarissa Mao before that. He wanted things to be all right, and he had the growing feeling that they weren’t. That they weren’t going to be.

“What about you?” Naomi said, looking at him from under a spill of dark, gently curled hair. “Want to talk?”

He chuckled. “I do, but I don’t know what to say. Here we are, the conquering heroes with prisoners and a salvaged data core, and it doesn’t feel like enough.”

“It isn’t.”

“Always so comforting.”