Babylon's Ashes

“This is James Holden from Ceres Station. Today, we’re doing the third in this open ended series thing, and I’m really hoping you’re all looking forward to this. Especially all my friends and family back on Earth and Mars. I say this every time, but we’re doing these clips and interviews so that the folks back home can put faces and voices to the real people out in the Belt. And… yeah. So, let me introduce—”

The image cut to a tall Belter girl sitting in the galley of the Rocinante. Prax leaned forward. He’d sat exactly where she was once, during the worst part of his life. He felt a wave of nostalgia like seeing his apartment from upper university—someplace familiar that had been important to him once—that broke against the novelty of this new girl.

“Alis Caspár.”

“Great. Okay, and where do you live?”

“Ceres Station. Salutorg District.”

Prax watched the whole feed. The clap-juggling of shin-sin that seemed to delight and fascinate the Earther. The way the girl was embarrassed for him and he didn’t seem to notice. The older woman they called Tía flirting with him. It was… charming. With all the news of war and death, with all the images of ships chewing each other to shavings of metal and ceramic, the body bags of Earth, Holden’s video was nothing. Pleasant. Meaningless. Sweet, even.

The feed ended. Prax, surprised, found he’d been tearing up. He wiped his cheek with the cuff of one sleeve, and was startled when the next message opened its own feed automatically. A thin-faced woman with skin darker than Djuna’s but with the same deep hazel eyes smiled into the camera. The image shook a little and the colors weren’t as professionally toned as Holden’s had been.

“This is Fatima Crehan, sending back to James Holden and all the good people of the Belt. We’re in the refugee camp opened by the governor of Arequipa, and today I want to introduce you to a woman whose causa has been turning heads and filling bellies for, it seems like, everyone in the city.”

Prax watched, fascinated. And when it was over, another video feed, this one from Shanghai, where an old man in a yarmulke interviewed a musical band of ethnic Han boys about their music and then watched them in an alleyway with mud-colored clouds churning above them. Prax couldn’t look away.

A soft knock came at the door. Brice leaned in. “I’m sorry to interrupt, sir, but—”

“No no no, it’s fine. I’m transferring them now.” Prax grabbed Karvonides’ data reports—none of them edit-locked now—and shifted them into the open partition. “You should be able to access all of them now.”

“Thank you, sir,” Brice said. And then, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Prax said, wiping his eyes again. “Carry on.”

She closed the door. Two hours had gotten away from him somehow, and he was going to have to hurry in order to get all the samples pulled before lunch.

We could save lives. One message.

Prax shut down the dead woman’s partition, put it under administrative lock. There wasn’t time to think about anything more. He had work to do. In order to catch up, he ran the samples during his lunch hour, grabbing a few mouthfuls of rice and mushroom before the management team meeting. Afterward, it was time to go and retrieve Mei and Natalia from school, but he sent a message to one of the other parents in his parenting coop. The girls could go play with the other kids until Djuna got home. He stayed, checking in with Brice and Khana. Seeing that everyone who needed access to the datasets could get to them.

Everything felt weirdly dreamlike and light. As if he was watching someone else doing it. In his office, he rechecked the day’s sample run. How much dissolved CO2 in the water, how much nitrogen, calcium, manganese. The plants were doing well, but until the stats were all fed through, he wouldn’t know what he was looking at. That was fine.

He resisted the urge to reopen Karvonides’ partition. To find the other feeds Holden had made or inspired. It was a bad idea. Instead, he waited, worked, watched through the glass. Only Brice remained, and her workstation was down a long and curving hallway. He closed his terminal, clocked out, went to the men’s room, and waited. Washed his hands. Waited. Then casually stepped out to the main floor, swinging by one of the gang stations, opening a terminal with a guest account, accessing the datasets and protocols that Supervisor Praxidike Meng had carelessly put in the open partition without permissions set. The screen showed a pale blue logo, the flag of Ganymede. He sent copies to Samuel Jabari and Ingrid Dineyahze on Earth and Gorman Le on Luna. The only message was PLEASE CONFIRM THESE RESULTS.

Then he shut down the terminal and made his way out to the common corridors. Everything seemed brighter than it should have been. He couldn’t tell if he was tired or restless. Or both.