Babylon's Ashes (Expanse 6)

“Or now Marco and Rosenfeld and Dawes are distracted, Duarte moves his ‘advisors’ in place so when he wants to, he can point the rail guns at Medina, tell us all what we should make him for breakfast,” Roberts said.

Jakulski lifted a hand, caught the server’s eye, and pointed to his spent bulb. One more wouldn’t do any damage that wasn’t already done. And all of it was going on God-damn Shului’s tab anyway. Best make it count. Vandercaust, across from him, noticed and raised his own bulb as well. The server nodded with her hand and went back to what she’d been doing. A bird with wings as wide as Jakulski’s outstretched fingers skinned past them, a fluttering and a flash of blue. It rode the breeze like it was still on a planet that curved down at the horizon instead of up. There was something wonderful about air wide enough to fly in.

“Say you?” he asked, looking at Vandercaust.

“Not saying nothing, sa sa?” the oldest tech said, scratching idly at the split-circle tattoo on his wrist. “Drinking.”

Jakulski narrowed his eyes. Curiosity shifted sluggishly in his brain. He was too tired. He should go back and sleep. But the server was on her way with two fresh bulbs, and he’d made the trip so he could be with the team. “Best guess, then. Duarte pushing pawns to get control of Medina? Marco using Laconia against Pa? What are we looking at?”

“Best guess is I don’t fucking know,” Vandercaust said in an amiable voice, and gestured in a controlled way that made it clear he was very drunk indeed. “It’s a war. Wars aren’t like that.”

“Aren’t like what?” Roberts said.

“Aren’t like stories about wars,” Vandercaust answered solemnly. “Stories about wars come after. Like Qin Shi Huang unified China or when you look and say this led to this led to this, and then it was over. How did anything begin? War start when Marco hit Earth? When Earth hit Anderson Station? And it ends when Earth and Mars are dead? When Belters have a home? When everyone agrees it’s done?”

Roberts rolled her eyes, but Salis leaned forward, fingers laced across his knee. Jakulski took his new bulb from the server and drank. It was cold and rich, but something made him a little sorry he’d stayed to drink it. Martians on Medina, and Pa running her own crew, and Fred Johnson taking Ceres back. It all felt like someone building the solar system’s biggest mousetrap. And Jakulski thought maybe he was living inside the cheese.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Holden

It hadn’t really been that long since Fred had crewed up the Rocinante for its burn down to Luna, but it had also been a lifetime. Now, with the Tycho-based crew gone, the ship seemed bigger. Emptier. It was like the end of a really long party when all the guests have gone home, and Holden couldn’t quite decide if it left him feeling lonely or relieved. When they headed out this time, they’d only have one pilot. One engineer. Still two mechanics, assuming that was Clarissa’s official title. After flying with the Roci for so many years with just his little family, it was strange to feel the loss of that redundancy, but some deep training was still there in the back of his mind saying that everyone had to be replaceable. As if keeping Chava Lombaugh on the ship would have really made it bearable losing Alex to a badly placed PDC round or a stroke during a high-g burn or any of the other thousand things that could go wrong in space. As if Sandra Ip could ever have taken Naomi’s place.

On one hand, it was unthinkable. On the other, it was reasonable. Alex was Alex, and no one else would ever be. If something did go wrong, though, they’d want a pilot. And the chances of things going wrong seemed pretty high.

The Minsky had started its life burning out of Luna with colonists funded by Royal Charter Energy. The same company that had landed on Ilus and Longdune and New Egypt. If things had gone the way they’d intended, they’d have passed through the ring gates on their way to landfall in a system called San Esteban. Instead, they’d been taken over by the Serrio Mal, looted, and were in a braking burn toward Ceres with what was left of the crew and supplies after Michio Pa and her people were done with it. Food and water, hydroponics and medical supplies, construction mechs and scientific equipment and the people to use them. And burning at its side, a Free Navy gunship as escort. Probably one of Pa’s. Probably not a trap.

Probably not going to get reduced to radioactive gas by Fred. But only probably.

Alone on the command deck, he had the Roci’s inventory schematic pulled up on the screen and the latest edited piece from Monica spooling on his hand terminal. The inventory chirped and updated. It took him a second to find the new data.

“Alex?”

“Right here, Hoss,” Alex replied, his voice coming through the comm and down from the

cockpit both.

“Confirm that you’re seeing the juice on your couch topped up?”

A moment passed. “I am showing full-on shitty synthetic juice guaranteed to give a migraine and diarrhea if you use it for more than eight hours.”

“Seriously?”

“We had better than this on the Canterbury,” Alex said.

Holden felt a twitch of concern. “Why did we get third-rate juice?”

Naomi answered as if she were beside him instead of strapped into the loading mech on the dock. “Because the alternative was loading the injectors with morphine so you don’t care so much about being crushed. There’s a war on, you know.”

“So there is,” he said as the inventory chimed another update.

Amos said, “Should show we’re at eighty percent on PDC rounds.”

“Showing eighty-one point seven,” Holden said.

“Really? I’m pretty sure that ain’t right.”

“Track it down,” Holden said. “I’ll let you know if the ship changes her mind in the meantime.”

“We’re on it,” Amos agreed.