Babylon's Ashes

“We’ve had two more rocks. One of them had the stealth coating on it, but we caught it. This time. I’ve got the deep arrays sifting through all their data looking for more. But it costs so little to push something into an intersecting orbit, Inaros could have done hundreds of these. Spaced them out over months. Years. A century from now, we could see something loop in from out of the ecliptic with a note on it that says, ‘Fuck you very much from the Free Navy.’ My grandchildren’s grandchildren will be cleaning this same shit up.”

“Hopefully. If we win,” Fred said to the screen. Not that the recording could hear him. He moved to the bathroom, and the display shifted to follow him.

The best thing about the governor’s quarters was the shower. Wide as a rainstorm, and the whole floor a grated drain that worked even at a third of a g. Fred stripped and washed the sweat and grime of the day off his skin while Avasarala went over the latest intelligence about the state of affairs on the colony planets (no hard data, but things were probably bad), the reports on the ships that had gone missing passing through the gates (several theories and hope that the flight records from Medina would help if they ever became available), and the situation on Earth (the expected second wave of deaths from collapsed food, sanitation, and medical infrastructure was starting to appear).

After he dried off, Fred pulled on a fresh shirt, clean trousers. Thick, soft socks. The small pleasures of life. Avasarala kept delivering her report, diving into unneeded details and side comments as if she were lonely and didn’t want to face the emptiness and quiet of her own rooms on Luna. But even she couldn’t last forever.

“I’ll expect to hear from you,” she said. “And I’m fucking serious about this. Don’t let Holden. Make. Any. More. Laws.”

Fred sat on the edge of the bed, closed his eyes, and let his head sink into his hands. He’d been awake for over thirty hours now, and was looking down the barrel of another shift. Negotiating with the unions, adjusting decades-old contracts to fit the new situation. Moving Belters out of their holes, shutting down great swaths of the station to conserve the supplies they had. Part of his mind kept treating it like an emergency. A wound that had to be stanched until help could arrive. Three, four times a shift, he’d remember that there wasn’t help. That the choices he made today might stay in place for years. Forever.

The temptation to lie back, put his head to the pillow, and let his gritty, tired eyes close was as powerful as hunger and sex had been four decades back. The weight of the idea as much as exhaustion pulled him down. It was stupid for anyone, much less a man his age, to be pushing that hard, and the governor’s bed was soft and inviting, the sheets clean and crisp. But if he did, his eyes would open the moment his head touched the pillow. Restlessness would twist him, knotting the sheets around his legs until he gave up, two or three wasted hours later. One more shift, and he’d be spent enough to let the pills work. He’d fall into the blackness behind his eyes, consciousness blinking blissfully out. But not yet.

His first lover—Diane Redstone, her name was—had a phrase for moments like this. Nice woods, she’d say, and then get up out of their bed and go to work. He hadn’t understood where the saying came from until years after they parted for the last time. Now that he did, he couldn’t help harboring an irrational dislike of Robert Frost.

He pulled up his hand terminal, considered himself through its tiny eyes, and pressed Record.

“Message received. I’ll do what I can to keep our mutual acquaintance in line. But I’d also point out that he’s a resource we’d be foolish to squander. Neither of us is in a position to do some things that Holden and his people can. Speaking of which, I’m including a salvage manifest for the Minsky. It’s a big ship, and well supplied. It’s within my power as acting governor of Ceres to claim emergency powers and seize property for the common good. That’s not Holden’s law, that’s just law. I’ll be sending it and a third of its cargo back down to Earth, and the August Marchant and Bethany Thomas as escort. There’s enough in there to keep a midsized city alive. Just a drop in the bucket, I know, but that’s how buckets get filled.”

He tried to think of anything else he should say, and couldn’t decide if there was too much or not enough. Either way, it could wait. He reviewed the message, encrypted and queued it, and then levered himself up off the bed. There’d be time to sleep later.