Babylon's Ashes (Expanse 6)

“Oh hell yeah. Two prisoners. Data core off the Azure Dragon. They tried to scrub it, but between Naomi and the Roci, we’ll put it back together. Bobbie’s straight-up pissed that she missed the action.”

“Maybe next time,” she said, and Holden came into the room.

He and Amos nodded to each other. The big man left.

“We should probably have had this talk before,” Holden said.

The Roci’s captain stood at the bedside, looking like he wasn’t sure whether to sit. She couldn’t say whether it was the trauma or the drugs, but she was surprised to notice that he didn’t look like her mental image of him. In her mind, his cheeks were higher, his jaw wider. The blue of his eyes more icy. This man looked—not older. Only different. His hair was messy. There were lines forming around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. Not there yet, but coming. His temples were touched with gray. That wasn’t what made him look different, though. The James Holden who was king of her personal mythology was sure of himself, and this man was profoundly ill at ease.

“Okay,” she said, not certain what else to say.

Holden crossed his arms. “I … um. Yeah, I didn’t really expect you to come on this ship. I’m not comfortable with it.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He waved the comment away. “It’s made me skip this part, and I shouldn’t have. That’s on me, okay? I know you and Amos trekked across a big part of North America after the rocks came down, and I know that you handled yourself just fine then. And you have experience on ships.”

Experience as a terrorist and murderer, he didn’t say.

“The thing is,” he went on, “you aren’t trained for this kind of action. Going out on the float with a gun in your hand is different from being on the ground. Or being a technician inside a ship. You’ve got those implants, but using them out there, you’d have wound up crashing out and choking to death on your own vomit, right?”

“Probably,” she said.

“So going out again like that’s not something you should do. Amos took you because … because he wants you to know you belong here.”

“But I don’t,” she said. ?

??That’s what you’re saying.”

“Not everyplace Amos goes, no,” Holden said. He met her gaze for the first time. He looked almost sad. She couldn’t understand why. “But as long as you’re on my ship, you’re crew. And it’s my job to protect you. I screwed that up. You don’t go into battle in a vac suit anymore. At least not until I think you’re trained. That’s an order. Understood?”

“Understood,” she said. And then, trying the word out to see how it felt in her mouth, “Understood, sir.”

He had been her sworn enemy. He had been the symbol of her failure. He’d even become a symbol, somehow, of the life she could have had if she’d made different choices. He was only a man in his early middle age that she barely knew, though they had some friends in common. He tried a smile, and she returned it. It was so little. It was something.

She finished her cobbler after he left, then closed her eyes to rest them and didn’t know she’d fallen asleep until the dream came.

She was digging through slick, black mud-sticky shit, trying to get down to where someone was buried. She had to hurry, because they were running out of air. In the dream, she could feel the wet cold against her fingers, the disgust welling up at the back of her throat. And the fear. And the heartbreaking loss that came from knowing she wouldn’t make it in time.

Chapter Eight: Dawes

The first session of Marco’s impromptu summit began when Michio Pa arrived, looking pleasant and implacable in equal measures. Her ship had docked halfway through a day cycle, so Marco only kept them for a few hours. The following three days were more punishing, the meetings lasting over thirteen hours each day without even so much as a break for meals. They’d eaten at the meeting tables while Marco laid out his vision for a grand, system-spanning network of Belter civilization.

Free spin stations, automated factories and farms, power stations hunkered close to the sun and beaming energy to the human habitations, the large-scale stripping of biological resources from the corpse of the Earth. It was a grand and beautiful vision with a scope and depth that dwarfed even the Martian terraforming project. And Marco Inaros presented it all with a ruthlessness and intensity that made the objections the rest of them brought up seem small and petty.

Sanjrani wanted to know how the labor force needed to create Marco’s massive snowflake-complex void cities would be trained. Marco waved the problem away. Belters were already trained to live and build in space. That knowledge was their birthright. Bred into their brittle bones. Pa brought up the problem of keeping food and medical supplies flowing to all the stations and ships already feeling the pinch from the loss of supply lines from Earth. Marco agreed that there would be lean times, but assured Pa that her fears were greater than the actual problem. No objection any of them raised swayed his commitment. His eyes were bright, his voice rich as a viol, his energy was boundless. After the meetings were done, Dawes went back to his quarters, weary to the bone. Marco went to the bars and pubs and union halls and spoke directly to the citizens of Ceres. If he slept, Dawes didn’t know when.

On the fifth day, they took a break, and it felt like collapsing at the end of a long run.

Rosenfeld’s interpretation did little to help.

“Coyo is manic. He’ll come back down.”

“And then what?” Dawes asked.

The pebble-skinned man shrugged. His smile had very little to do with pleasure. “Then we’ll see where we are. Inaros is a great man. For our purposes, he’s the great man. It isn’t a role that’s fit for a wholly sane person.”

They sat in the gardens of the governor’s palace. The smell of plants and soil mixed with the textured protein and grilled peppers that Rosenfeld preferred for breakfast. Dawes leaned back from the table and sipped from his bulb of hot, milky tea. He’d known Rosenfeld Guoliang for almost three decades, and he trusted him as much as he trusted anyone. But not completely.