Babylon's Ashes (Expanse 6)

“It was never her job to,” Avasarala said, her fingers smoothing her granddaughter’s hair the way they had her daughter’s once when they’d all been younger. Some other time before the world had shattered under them all. “Love was always your grandfather’s work. I loved”—her breath caught—“I loved him very much.”

“He was a good man,” Kiki said.

“Yes,” she said, running her fingertips through the girl’s hair. Tracing the paler line of her scalp.

Minutes passed. Kiki shifted a little, but only a little. Grandmother and granddaughter were quiet. The tears in Avasarala’s eyes weren’t thick. Didn’t fall. When she blinked them away, none rose to take their place. She considered the curve of Kiki’s ear the way she once had Ashanti’s, when her daughter had been a little girl. And Charnapal, when he’d been a child. Before he’d died.

“I do the best I can,” Avasarala said.

“I know.”

“It isn’t enough.”

“I know.”

A weird peace seemed to flow over her. Into her. For a moment, it was as if Arjun were there. As if he’d spoken some perfect bloom of a poem to her instead of only her least favorite granddaughter bearing witness to her failures. Everyone had their beauty and their way of expressing it. It was only hard for her to love Kiki because they were so much like each other. Exactly alike, if she were being honest. That made loving her too much dangerous sometimes. She knew what being herself had cost her, and so seeing herself in Kiki made her so very afraid for the girl. Avasarala heaved a great sigh, plucked at the girl’s shoulder.

“Go tell your mother I had something fall through, and we should eat together. Tell Said too.”

“He was the one that let me in,” Kiki said, sitting up.

“He’s a fucking busybody and he should stop putting his fingers in my shit,” Avasarala said. “But this one time, I’m glad he did.”

“So you won’t punish him?”

“Fucking right, I’ll punish him,” she said. Then, almost to her surprise, she kissed Kiki’s smooth, unlined forehead. “It’s just this time I won’t mean it. Go now. I have something I need to do.”

She’d expected her makeup to be ruined, but it really wasn’t. A touch of eyeliner and a stray lock of hair tucked down was all she needed to look like herself again. She pulled Holden’s message back up, let it play while she composed herself in the eye of her terminal’s camera.

When the prompt to reply came, she squared her shoulders, imagined herself looking into Holden’s eyes, and started the recording.

“I’m sorry to hear about Fred. He was a good man. Not perfect, but who is? I’ll miss him. What we do next is simpler. You get your sorry ass to Tycho Station and make this work.”

Chapter Thirty: Filip

The Pella limped along at a third of a g. After so long on the float, Filip felt even that in his knees and spine. Or maybe it was only that he was still bruised by the god-awfu

l forces of the battle now behind them.

The battle they’d lost.

He stood in the galley, a bowl of Martian-designed rice noodles and mushrooms in his hand, and looked for a place to sit, but the benches were all filled. The Koto had taken it worse than the Pella—a rail gun round holing the reactor and cracking the hull from stem to stern. Most of the ships Filip had lived on would have died in that same second, but the Martian Navy had built with battle in mind. In a slice of a second so thin you could see through it, the Koto had registered the hit and dropped core, leaving the crew trapped and helpless, with only the battery backups to keep them alive.

The Shinsakuto had been driven away from them, hounded and harassed by fighting ships and torpedoes from the consolidated fleet and Ceres. If the Rocinante had finished its job on the Pella, the crew of the Koto would still be out there on the float. Or maybe they’d be dead by now, the air recyclers finally failing and leaving them all to gasp and choke and claw each other in their death panic. Instead, they were all on the Pella, hot-bunking with the usual crew, taking up space on the galley and pointedly not making eye contact with Filip as he looked for his place among them.

His own crew was there too. Men and women he’d been shipping with since before it all began. Aaman. Miral. Wings. Karal. Josie. They were looking away as much as the others. Only about half of them were wearing their Free Navy uniforms. Koto and Pella both had dropped back to the simple functional clothes that any crew might wear, and some of the ones still in uniform had rolled up their sleeves or left their collars open. Filip felt his own uniform, crisp and fresh and done to the neck, and for the first time he felt a little foolish in it. Like a kid dressed in his father’s clothes as a costume.

The murmur of conversation was a wall that excluded him. He hesitated. He could just take the bowl back to his quarters. It wasn’t really that they were keeping him apart. It was only that they were so crowded now, and stung from having lost a fight. He took a step toward the corridor, intending to go. Meaning to. And then stopping and looking back in case there was some slot, some corner of bench, that he’d overlooked. Some place for him.

He caught Miral’s eye. The older man nodded, and—Filip thought with a sigh—shifted to open a little room beside him. Filip didn’t run there like a little boy, but he went quickly, worried that the gap might close again before he reached it.

Karal was sitting across from Miral, and all of them sandwiched by unfamiliar bodies. A woman with dark skin and a scar across her upper lip. A thin man with a tattoo on his neck. An older woman—white, close-cropped hair and a crooked, unfriendly smile. Karal was the only one of them to acknowledge Filip, and that only with a grunt and a nod.

When the older woman spoke, it seemed like she was picking up the thread of a conversation that had been going on before Filip had taken his seat, but with a studied casualness of someone with an agenda. “Con mis coyo on the Shinsakuto, the Ceres fleet’s there forever. Earth away from Earth.”

“Forever’s a long time,” Miral said, considering the table like he was reading it. “Can think we know what a year, two years, three years down looks like, aber that’s only shit and guessing.”

“Can’t see the future,” the woman said. “Can see what’s there now, though, que no?”