Babylon's Ashes

Images flickered as Holden spoke: a terribly old Belter man with merry eyes, two women—one young and one older—clapping hands together in some game like batbat or pattycake or shin-sin, a professionally dressed woman with dark skin and a sober expression standing at a hydroponics tank so long it curved up in the distance with the body of the station. My name is James Holden, and I want to introduce you to some of the people I’ve met here on Ceres. I want you to hear their stories. Come to know them the way you do your shipmates and neighbors. I hope you’ll carry a little bit of these people with you the way I do now.

“Fuck is this?” Evans asked, laughter in his voice. “Watch the trained Belter dancing for your fun?”

“No, it’s Holden,” Oksana said. “He’s OPA.”

“En serio?”

“Johnson’s OPA,” Michio said. “He works for Earth too. And Mars.”

On the screen, Holden was handing a bulb of beer to the ancient-looking man. The Belter’s cheeks were already a little flushed, but his voice wasn’t slurred at all. Were five men for every woman on the station, back then. Five to one.

“You shipped with him, sí?” Oksana asked. “Back in the slow zone?”

“Little bit,” Michio said. “He’s also waking up next to Filip Inaros’ mother. The one Marco didn’t manage to kill? That’s him.”

“And he’s announcing to Big Himself y alles where he’s bunking?” Oksana said. “So. Brave o crazy, him?”

“Not sure I get to criticize,” Michio said, just before the fear hit her system. For a fraction of a second, she didn’t know why, and then she realized what she was seeing. In the text crawl at the bottom of the screen, and just marching off the side. Witch of Endor. She grabbed the crawl, pulled it back. Ship destroyed by Free Navy identified as Witch of Endor.

She selected the feed. Her screen flickered. Holden and the old Belter laughed about Ceres Station before it had been spun up, but she didn’t hear them. On her screen, the hyperreal image of an intelligence telescope showed a ship under high burn, streams of PDC fire seeming to bend as the ship accelerated away from the rounds. From the shape of the curve, she guessed it had been pulling almost ten gs. The picture didn’t show what she was fleeing from, and the torpedo that managed to penetrate the defenses was moving too fast to see. The ship shifted, spinning for a tenth of a second, and then blossomed into light. It is unclear, the announcer said, why the Free Navy forces appear to have attacked one of their own ships, but reports confirm drive plumes from several other known enemy locations on vectors inconsistent with an attack of consolidated fleet positions—

“Sir?” Oksana said, and Michio realized she must have said something aloud.

She considered Oksana’s eyes, respectful and hard. Evans’ soft and alarmed. Her crew and her family.

“We have Marco’s answer,” she said.

“Shift in language is shift in consciousness, yeah,” Josep said. He was dressed in his jumpsuit, as was she. But he was strapped into the crash couch. A complex schematic showed the state of the system as best she knew it. The ships loyal to the inners clustered around Earth and Mars and Ceres in red. The Free Navy loyal to Marco in blue. Her own handful of pirates and idealists in green. The independent stations and ships—Ganymede, Iapetus—were white. And a dusting of gold over it all showing where Marco had buried his treasure chests in the void.

“Mind is made from analogies,” Josep said, not needing her to contribute to the conversation. “Change in ages, change in the frame. Was in against out before. Turning into connected against unconnected now. Free Navy. Consolidated fleet. The ones who shrug off the chains against the ones who tie themselves together.”

A direct one-to-one battle against Marco wasn’t plausible. He had too many ships, and Michio’s appeals to Rosenfeld and Dawes and Sanjrani hadn’t won her any replies. Though they also hadn’t been rejected. Marco was the only one calling her traitor to the cause thus far. The others, she assumed, were only following his lead.

Didn’t help her in the short term.