Babylon's Ashes (Expanse 6)

The timer ticked down. Holden took a long, slow breath and opened his channel to the Giambattista.

“Okay,” he said. “This is Captain Holden of the Rocinante. Please begin your passage burn now. I need you to go through the gate in”—he checked the timer—“eighteen minutes.”

“Tchuss, røvul!” the Giambattista’s captain said. “It has been, sí no?”

The connection dropped. On the screen, the Giambattista reported a hard burn starting. Holden shifted the display to show it. A single bright star in the blackness. A drive plume wider than the ice hauler that it was driving. He wanted to believe there was something off about the color of the light, as if the high-energy tuning Naomi had done with it was visible to him, but that was just his mind playing tricks. A new counter appeared on the display. The Giambattista’s expected passage through the Arcadia ring went from seventeen minutes to sixteen. The Free Navy’s arrival—unless they altered course—through the Sol gate in nineteen. Eighteen.

Holden’s gut was tight. His breath shuddered, and he drank another sip of coffee. He opened a second window, sensors trained at the Sol gate. From where they were, the Free Navy wouldn’t be visible. Not yet. The angle was off just enough to hide them.

“Do we have the rail gun ready in case they get through?”

“Yes, sir,” Bobbie answered smartly.

“Well,” Amos said. “Me and Peaches better go strap in. You know. In case.”

Clarissa touched Naomi’s shoulder one last time, then turned and launched herself, following Amos down the lift toward engineering. Holden took a long, last drink and stowed the coffee bulb. He wanted it over. He wanted this moment to last forever in case it was the last one he had with Naomi. And Alex and Amos. Bobbie. Hell, even Clarissa. With the Rocinante. You couldn’t be in a place like the Roci for as long as he had been and not be changed by it. Not have it be home.

When Naomi cleared her throat, he thought she was going to talk to him.

“Giambattista,” she said. “This is the Rocinante. I’m not showing your internal power grid above normal.”

“Perdona,” a woman’s voice came back. “Fixing that now.”

“Thank you, Giambattista,” Naomi said and dropped the connection. She smiled over at Holden. The horror of the situation was only a line at the corner of her mouth, but his heart ached to see it all the same. “Amateurs. You’d think they’d never done this before.”

He laughed, and then she laughed with him. The timers ticked down. The Giambattista’s reached zero. The brightness of the drive plume blinked out, hidden by the curve of the Arcadia ring and the profound weirdness that was distance and space here. Where that timer had been, Naomi put up a display of a mathematical model she’d built. The spike of the Giambattista’s passage already starting to decay.

The line sloped down as, beside it, the timer for Marco’s arrival turned to seconds. In the cockpit, Bobbie said something and Alex answered. He couldn’t make out the words. Naomi’s breath sounded fast and shallow. He wanted to reach over to her. To take her hand. It would have meant taking his eyes off the monitor, and so he couldn’t.

The Sol gate flickered. Holden increased the magnification until the ring filled his screen. The weird, almost biological structures of the ring itself seemed to shift and writhe. An illusion of light. The drive plumes of the Free Navy ships packed in together so tightly that it looked like one massive blaze of fire appeared on the edge of the ring, tracking in toward its center.

“You want me to take a potshot at them?” Bobbie asked. “Rail gun could probably reach them at this point.”

“No,” Naomi said before Holden could answer. “I don’t know what sending mass through the gates right now would do.”

A line appeared on the model, low on the scale. Moving toward the dying curve. The ring gate grew brighter with the braking burns of the enemy, until it looked like the negative image of an eye—black, star-specked sclera and intensely white, burning iris. The timer reached zero. The lights grew brighter.

Chapter Fifty-One: Marco

Marco’s jaw ached. His chest hurt. The joints in his spine hovered at the edge of dislocation without ever passing through to it. The high-g burn scourged him, and he welcomed the pain. The pressure and the discomfort were the price his body paid. They were slowing on approach. The core of the Free Navy was going to reach Medina unopposed, and there was literally no one to stop it.

At a civilized thrust—an eighth, a tenth—and with some time coasting on the float to conserve mass, the journey out to the ring gate would have taken months. He didn’t have months. Everything depended on reaching Medina before the scattered forces of the consolidated fleet could reach him. Yes, it meant driving the ships he had to the edge of their ability. Yes, it would mean putting some of the reserves from Medina under conscript to fuel his return to the system, and the people of Medina would have to make do with a little less until he could stabilize the situation enough to allow resupply.

This was wartime. The days for scrimping and saving and safety were gone. Peace was a time for efficiency. War was a time for power. If it meant he drove his fighters to the ragged edge of their ability, that was how victory came. Those who held back the most reserves for tomorrow were the ones least likely to see it. If the price was long days of unrelieved discomfort and pain, he’d pay that price and glory in it. Because at the end, there was rebirth. A shedding away of all his little missteps, a purification, and the seat of his final, permanent victory. And it was coming soon.

His error—he saw it now—was in thinking too small.

He had conceived the revolution that the Free Navy represented as a balancing of the scales. The inners had taken and taken and taken from the Belt, and when they didn’t need it anymore, they’d dropped it and fled off to new, shinier toys. Marco had meant to put that right. Let the inners be the ones in need and the Belt find its independence and its strength. It was anger that had kept his view too small. Righteous anger. Appropriate anger. But blinding all the same.

Medina was the key, and always had been. But it was only now that he saw what it was the key to. He’d meant to close the gates and force the inner planets to address the consequences of generations of injustice. Looking at it now, it almost seemed like a gesture of nostalgia. A harkening back to previous generations. He’d made the classic mistake—he wasn’t too proud to admit it—of trying to fight the last war on the next battleground. The power of Medina wasn’t that it could stop the flow of money and material out to the new worlds. It was that it could control it.

The fate of the Belt wasn’t around Jupiter and Saturn, or at least not those alone. In every one of the thirteen hundred systems that the gates led to, there were planets as vulnerable as Earth. The Belt itself would spread to all the systems, float like kings above all their subject worlds. If he had it all to do again, he’d have thrown three times as many rocks on Earth, destroyed Mars while he was at it, and taken his ships and his people to the colony worlds where there were no vestigial fleets to consolidate. With only Medina and the fifteen ships at his disposal, he could exert power over all the worlds there were. It was all about placement, audacity, and will.

He needed to find a way to talk Duarte into giving him a few more ships. But the promise to keep Laconia undisturbed had earned him everything he’d needed up to now. He didn’t think another small request would be too much, especially given how much he’d sacrificed already. And if Duarte did object—

The Pella shuddered as the drive passed through some resonance frequency. Normally when that happened they weren’t under high burn. It was strange how something that was hardly more than a chime at a third of a g could sound like the coming apocalypse at two and a third. He tap

ped out a message for Josie down in engineering: KEEP US IN ONE PIECE.