Babylon's Ashes (Expanse 6)

“But he’s trying to rebuild his caterpillar when we need a butterfly,” Naomi said.

Bobbie sighed, took a last bite of egg, and tossed the bowl into the recycler. “I could be wrong,” she said. “Maybe it’ll work.”

“We can hope.”

Bobbie’s hand terminal chirped. She considered the incoming message with a frown. The way she moved, even little motions like this, had the strength and economy of training. And more than that. A frustration.

“Oh joy,” Bobbie said dryly. “Another important meeting.”

“Price of being central.”

“I guess,” Bobbie said, hauling herself to her feet. “I’ll be back when I can. Thanks again for letting me bunk here.”

As Bobbie stepped past, Naomi put a hand on her arm. Stopped her. She didn’t know exactly what she was going to say until she said it. Only that it was tied up with the ideas of crew and family and trying not to betray who you were. “Do you want to do this junior ambassador thing?”

“I don’t know. It needs doing, I guess,” Bobbie said. “I’ve been trying to reinvent myself since Io. Maybe since Ganymede. I really liked working veterans’ outreach, but now that I’m not doing it, I don’t miss it. I figure this’ll be the same. It’s something to do. Why?”

“You don’t need to thank anyone that you’re bunking here. If you like that cabin, it’s yours.”

Bobbie blinked. Her smile was small and rueful. She took a half step away, but didn’t turn her body. The physical expression of hesitation. Naomi let the silence between them stretch. “I appreciate the thought,” Bobbie said. “But adding someone into a crew? That’s a big deal. I don’t know what Holden would think about it.”

“We’ve talked about it. He already thinks you’re crew.”

“But I’m doing this ambassador thing.”

“Yeah. He thinks our gunner is Fred’s ambassador from Mars.” Naomi knew she was stretching the truth a little there, but it was worth it. Bobbie was still for the space of a heartbeat. And then another one.

“I didn’t know that,” she said, and then with no other words, stepped back toward the lift, the airlock, Ceres Station. Naomi watched her go.

Fires on shipboard were dangerous. There were any number of ship processes that could rise up past the point of spontaneous oxidation. The trick was knowing when letting a breeze through would start combustion and when it wouldn’t. Sometimes talking to Bobbie was like putting her hand on a ceramic panel to see how hot it was. Trying to guess whether a little air would cool the big woman down or start up flames.

Alone in the galley, Naomi went through a little casual maintenance: wiping down the tables and benches, checking the status of the air filters, clearing the recycler feed. Having so many people on the ship left them running through supplies faster than she’d become accustomed to. Gor Droga’s fondness for chai drove down their supply of tea analogue. Sun-yi Steinberg preferred a citrus drink that ate into the acids and texturing proteins. Clarissa Mao ate kibble and water. Prison food.

Looking over the supply levels, Naomi had to remind herself that the Roci was carrying three times the crew it was used to. Still well within the ship’s specs and abilities. The Tachi had been designed for two full flight crews and cabins full of Martian marines. Renaming it hadn’t changed that. It had only changed her expectations. But they were still going to have to resupply again soon.

The aromatics and spices that kept everyone from eating like Clarissa were going to be hard to get. Supplies were thin on Ceres. Supplies were going to be thin all through the Belt, and now the inner planets too. Any of the complex organics that Earth used to supply could be synthesized in labs or grown in hydroponics on Ganymede and Ceres and Pallas. The touristy resorts on Titan. The problem, she thought as she replaced the injection nozzle on the coffee machine, was capacity. They could make anything, but they couldn’t make it all at once. Humanity was going to get by on the minimum until there was a way to increase production, and a lot of people living on the margin wouldn’t make it. They’d die on Earth, yes, but keeping the Belt fed wasn’t going to be trivial either.

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?”