Babylon's Ashes

When Oksana came to her cabin that night, it hadn’t been as her officer but as her wife. She brought a bottle of whiskey with a bright-silver injection tip and two bulbs to drink it from. At first, Michio didn’t want the company, but as soon as she did, she was desperate for it. Sex, in Michio’s experience, was like music. Or language. It could express anything. Now it was rage and sorrow and need.

Afterward, strapped into the crash couch together, she listened to Oksana’s breath, deep and steady as she imagined waves must be. Michio’s heart felt fragile and more complicated than it had when she’d woken up that morning. Careful not to wake her wife, she stretched out, caught her hand terminal between her fingertips, and spooled up Marco’s denunciation. The light from the little screen filled the room, and she dropped the sound until it was nothing but a distant rhythm of hard consonants. Heard that way, there was a pattern to how Marco spoke. A throbbing in his delivery like he was imitating a heartbeat. She’d never noticed that before.

She shifted over to the cached copies of the community feeds and forums. They filled with reactions and opinions. Judgment of her and her family. Declarations of hatred. Threats of death. Nothing she hadn’t expected. These were the people she was risking everything to feed and support. And because she stood against Marco to do it, they hated her. Not all of them, but many. And deeply.

Good thing she wasn’t doing it for the popularity.

The alert went on. Attitude adjustment and burn. She shifted the hand terminal to the Connaught’s control systems. Nadia had plotted in a complex adjustment, turning on all three axes with a variable burn so that when they were done, only someone with very precise sensor arrays who’d caught them all the way through the maneuver would be able to plot where they were going with any certainty. The countdown came, the burn pressing her and Oksana gently against each other and shifting the crash couch beneath them, swinging one direction and then another and back. The deep rumble of the Epstein was like God apologetically clearing His throat.

Oksana yawned, stretched, put her hand on Michio’s shoulder.

“Hoy, Captain,” she said, voice slushy with sleep and the aftermath of coupling. Michio sighed, smiled.

“Navigator Busch,” she said, matching Oksana’s joking formality, and weaving their fingers together. “You should sleep.”

“So should you. Can you?”

“No,” Michio said. “If it gets to be a problem, I’ll hit the autodoc. Get something.”

“What’s the status?”

Michio almost asked, The status of what? But it would only have been so she didn’t have to think too much. She knew Oksana meant the Free Navy’s reaction. Were there gunships burning for them now? Had long-range torpedoes launched toward them from the ships and stations of the Belt, hoping to come quietly and fast enough to overwhelm their PDCs? Michio shifted to kiss her forehead just at the hairline. Oksana’s hair smelled of musk and the fake vanilla she favored. It was a beautiful scent.

“Everyone hates us, but no one’s shooting yet,” she said.

“They will, though.”

“They will. But we’ve carved little islands of safety. Now that they’ve accepted our tribute, we can go to Ceres or any other station Fred fucking Johnson takes without Marco following on. Unless he’s ready for a full battle with the inners.”

“In which case, it won’t really matter if we’re there or not,” Oksana said, her lips against Michio’s collarbone. “And you? Are you all right?”

The Connaught made a complex corkscrewing burn, the crash couch shifting one way, then another. The universe seeming to swirl around the stillpoint of their bodies. Michio shrugged in the darkness. “I don’t know. I know what my project is. Get the things the Belt needs and give them to the people that need them the most. But… no one’s going to thank us for it.”

“Some will,” Oksana said. Then, a moment later, “I mean, no one with power.”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing, though?”

“Doing?” Oksana asked, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.

“If no one with power loves us, let’s make our own damn power.”

Chapter Twenty-Four: Prax

The morning routine was the same. Prax got up first, padded to the kitchen still wearing his robe and slippers. He started brewing the tea and making breakfast for the family. Pancakes and bacon for the girls. Red rice and eggs for him and Djuna. He played music on the system. Usually something calm and wandering, what Djuna called his getting-a-massage music. And about the time the rice was cooked and the bacon crisped, he heard the sound of Djuna’s shower and the voices of Mei and Natalia. This particular morning, the girls were gabbling pleasantly to each other. Other mornings, they would snap and argue.