Babylon's Ashes

As she dropped the old injection nozzle into the recycler, she wondered if Marco had thought about that or if his dreams of glory had swept away any realistic plan for taking care of all the lives he’d disrupted. She had a guess about that. Marco was a creature of the grand gesture. His stories were about the single critical moment that changed everything, not all the moments that came after. Somewhere in the system right now, Karal or Wings or—thinking the name was like touching a sore—or Filip might be doing the same kind of maintenance she was doing on the Pella. She wondered how long it would take them to realize that the spoils of war wouldn’t restock their ships forever.

Probably it wouldn’t come clear until they’d used up everything. Kings were always the last to feel the famine. That wasn’t just the Belt. That was all of history. The people who’d just been going about their lives were the ones who could speak to the actual cost of war. They paid it first. Men like Marco could orchestrate vast battles, order the looting and destruction of worlds, and never run out of coffee.

When the galley was done, she took herself back to the lift, and up to the command deck. There was new analysis of the ships that had gone missing in the ring gates. No new data, just a rechewing of the old. Her fascination came from a sense of dread. She’d been through those rings, traveled the weird not-space that linked solar systems, and of all the dangers she’d faced, just quietly vanishing away hadn’t even been on her scopes. For a few hundred people—maybe more than that—something else had happened. The best minds of Earth and Mars that weren’t occupied with trying to deal with their environment and governing bodies collapsing around them were looking at this. Naomi didn’t have their resources or the depth of background expertise they did, but she had her own experience. Maybe she’d see something they hadn’t.

And so she looked. Like an amateur detective, she followed clues and hunches, and like most investigations like that, she found nothing. The new conversation on the feeds was a theory surrounding the Casa Azul’s drive signature showing that the reactor was probably misconfigured, but apart from it being a rookie mistake that transferred a lot of energy into waste heat, Naomi didn’t see anything in it. Certainly no reason that it or the other missing ships should have gone dark.

The analysis had just shifted into speculation over the plausibility of failed internal sensors in the Casa Azul increasing the pressure from the reactor bottle—which was what she assumed from the start—when her hand terminal chimed. Bobbie. She accepted the connection, and Bobbie’s face appeared on her screen. Naomi felt a twinge of alarm.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

Bobbie shook her head. It was probably meant to defuse the tension, but it reminded Naomi of a video of a bull getting ready to charge. “Do you know where Holden is? He’s not answering his comm.”

“Might be sleeping. He was up late going over footage for his broadcast thing with Monica.”

“Could you go wake him up for me?” Bobbie asked. The wall behind her was sculpted stone with recessed lighting. Naomi thought it was the governor’s palace. Fred Johnson’s distant voice, low and graveled by annoyance, confirmed that.

Naomi rose, taking the terminal with her. “On my way,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t understand why you’re part of this,” Fred Johnson said.

Across the desk from him, Jim still looked sleepy. Puffy-eyed and his hair still a little mashed from the crash couch. Bobbie, her arms crossed, sat off to one side. Before Jim could come up with an answer, she stepped in.

“He knew this Captain Pa,” Bobbie said. “Worked with her on Medina before it was Medina.”

“When she was in my chain of command,” he said. “She isn’t an unknown quantity. She was one of mine. I assigned her to that ship. I don’t need anyone telling me about who she is or what they think of her.”

Bobbie’s face darkened. “Fair enough. I got Holden here because maybe you’d listen to him.”

Jim raised a finger. “I don’t actually know what’s going on here,” he said. “So. You know. What’s going on here?”

“Michio Pa is one of Inaros’ inner circle,” Bobbie said. “Only it seems like she figured out that he’s a great big asshole, because she broke ranks. Started sending relief supplies places without the Free Navy’s say so. And now Inaros is shooting at her and she wants us to help her out.”

“Relief supplies?” Fred said, his voice hard as stone. “That’s what you’re calling them?”

“That’s what she’s calling them,” Bobbie bit back.

Jim glanced at Naomi. His expression said, This is not going well.

Naomi smiled back. I know, right?