Babylon's Ashes (Expanse 6)

Evans looked at his own fingers like he was surprised to see them there, then slowly lowered them to his sides. She watched the realization bloom in his eyes: If he’d started firing, the enemy fleet would have started firing. Maybe not the Rocinante, but everyone else. His instincts had come within a finger-tap of killing them all. He moaned the way he did when he was sick or drunk, unstrapped, and pushed off. His crash couch spun gently on its gimbals as he abandoned his post. She didn’t stop him.

On her screen, Holden was bending in toward the camera. Not much, just the little unconscious curve of someone protecting their gut. She forced her own spine to relax. Long seconds passed as she waited for another attack. Heartbeat after heartbeat, nothing came.

“Well,” she said.

“Yeah,” Holden replied.

Another moment passed. Michio heard another voice behind Holden. Naomi Nagata. The words themselves weren’t clear, but the tone of the woman’s voice could have stripped paint. So he hadn’t left her someplace safe. Fair enough. Safety might not exist now anywhere. The first hints of adrenaline crash haunted the edges o

f Michio’s consciousness: a faint nausea, a deepening weariness, sorrow. She ignored those too.

“Was saying,” Michio said, her voice calmer than she’d expected. “We have the Minsky and what she’s carrying. Ready to pass control over to you. Then we’re backing away before anyone else starts shooting at us.”

“That wasn’t Fred,” Holden said. “I don’t know who fired those torpedoes, but we’re going to find out.”

Michio’s lips felt heavy, solid, like she’d been carved from stone. It didn’t matter who’d pulled the trigger on the attack from Ceres. Look far enough back, and Marco Inaros would be behind it.

“I appreciate that,” she said. “You let us know when you’re ready for the remote command protocols.”

Marco’s response didn’t take an hour. He shook his head sorrowfully, looked into the camera with wide, dark eyes. The raw charisma of his presence was banked by being on a screen, but it wasn’t extinguished. Proof that the traitor Michio Pa was working with Earth. Undermining the efforts of the Free Navy to protect and rebuild the Belt. Brazenly giving aid and comfort to the enemy. His voice vibrated with indignation on behalf of his people and disgust for her collaboration with the enemy. It didn’t matter that the “enemy” included millions of Belters he’d left behind. She wondered whether that would matter to the people who watched him.

He included images of the Rocinante defending the Connaught. The final proof, if anyone needed it, that she was in bed with the people who most wanted the Free Navy and the Belt to fail.

She watched it on the command deck, a dozen responses competing in her head. She even went as far as recording one, but the words got away from her, tugged along by her anger until the woman looking back at her from the screen seemed almost as crazed as the one Marco described.

They burned away from Ceres, but not hard. The point of the exercise was to put themselves in range of the inners and not be killed. To show the other ships still loyal to her and the handful of independent ships that saw more hope in her path than Marco’s that zones of protection were possible. Fleeing her new little zone of safety as quickly as she could was what she wanted down to her marrow, but it wasn’t what she’d come here for. Wasn’t what she’d risked her ship and her family and her life to get. And so a third of a g, and then the float, reorienting, then another burn. The farther she got from Fred Johnson’s guns, the more she tried to make the Connaught hard for Marco to track.

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?”