Babylon's Ashes (Expanse 6)

“They’re angry and they’re frightened. They need someone to blame. I’m the obvious choice.”

“Who are they putting up?”

“Olivia Liu and Chahaya Nelson were both mentioned. It’s going to be Emily Richards, though.”

Avasarala chewed a bite of egg, but didn’t taste it. Richards wasn’t bad. She was serious, at least. Liu and Nelson were too entrenched in what Mars had been. They wouldn’t be ready for what it was becoming. Richards women made good policy. Always had.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This must be hard for you.”

“Politicians are gamblers,” Smith said. “We do our best to bend the odds, but the universe does what it does.”

Bullshit, she thought. Politicians are the frontal lobes of the body politic. The universe does what it does. They’d be better off without him. Only not yet.

“You have a day,” she said. “Get me the data before it’s too late.”

“Chrisjen—”

“What are they going to do? Fire you? Fuck them—give me the data so I can get the problems fixed. If they give you too much shit, I’ll offer you asylum.”

He laughed and leaned back in his chair. His eyes shifted to the dead wall screen, then back to her. She wondered if the wine by the sofa had been his first bottle.

“Promise?” he asked as if it was a joke. She smiled.

The Strategy and Response Committee. Admirals Pycior and Souther. Parris Kanter from Human Development back at The Hague. Michael Harrow from Aquaculture. Barry Li and Simon Gutierrez from Transportation and Tariffs. Not the dream team she’d have chosen, but the best of who she had left. Sitting around the dark glass table, they all looked as tired as she felt. Good. They should be.

“Mars,” Avasarala said. “Smith is out on his ass. Emily Richards is taking over. I’m reaching out to her now. I don’t know whether she’ll be more open, but I wouldn’t assume it. What do you have?”

Li spoke first. Exhaustion made his lisp worse, but the sharpness of his intelligence made his eyes seem brighter. “We’re maintaining relief routes in Africa and Europe. Our next area of focus is East Asia.”

“There weren’t any strikes there,” Avasarala said.

“But they took the worst of the ash fall,” Li said. “I have my people working out routes and probable needs. Information from the ground is sketchy.”

“The Belt?” she said.

“The Belt’s the Belt,” Pycior said. “There’s a wide variety of response. Ganymede is still maintaining neutrality, but it’s firmly in the Free Navy’s sphere of control. If we could offer protection, it would likely declare for us. The OPA is divided. Tycho Station, Kelso Station, and Rhea are the only ones who’ve condemned the Free Navy. The Trojan stations and Iapetus aren’t declaring anything. Most of the rest of the Belt … It’s for the Free Navy. As long as they keep promising food, material, and protection, it’s going to be hard for moderate Belters to organize, even assuming they want to.”

Souther cleared his throat. He spoke in a high voice that reminded her of singing. “We’ve taken apart the Azure Dragon’s comm logs. They indicate that there’s a high-level Free Navy meeting on Ceres right now. Inaros and his four captains.”

“What are they meeting about?” Avasarala snapped.

“No one seemed to know,” Souther said. “But we don’t have evidence of a second shepherd vessel. We’ve identified seven more major rock strikes that are presently en route to Earth. We’re tracking them, and we’re ready to take them out.”

Meaning they were unpinned. Avasarala leaned forward, pressing her fingers to her lips. Her mind danced across the solar system. Medina Station. Rhea, declaring against the Free Navy. The food and supplies of Ganymede. The starvation and death on Earth. The Martian Navy divided between the mysterious Duarte and his black market Free Navy and Smith. Now Richards. The lost colonies. Fred Johnson’s OPA and all the factions he couldn’t influence or command. The colony ships being preyed upon by the Free Navy pirates, and the stations and asteroids gaining the benefit of the piracy. And the missing ships. And the stolen protomolecule sample.

A dozen possibilities shifted in her mind—redeploy forces to Tycho Station and embolden Ganymede, or blockade Pallas and try to cut off the Free Navy’s resupply capabilities, or set up a protected zone for the colony ships out there and running dark. There were a thousand different paths, and she couldn’t be sure where any of them would lead. If she guessed wrong, it could mean the collapse of all that was left.

But Marco Inaros and his captains were together in one place, and her ships weren’t pinned.

“Fortune favors the bold, yes?” she said. “Fuck it. Let’s take back Ceres.”

Chapter Eleven: Pa

Seven decades before Michio Pa was born, Earth and Mars rewrote the tariff regulations on raw ore from the Belt. The stated reason was that it would encourage the establishment and expansion of refineries in the Belt and around Jupiter and Saturn. It might even have worked. In the short term, it meant that a wave of Belter prospectors and asteroid miners who’d been living at the edge of survival slipped over into the abyss. Ships were impounded or run illegally or lost from not having the scrip to pay for maintenance and repair. Back then, Earth and Mars had walked in each other’s footsteps, and the only option that seemed to have any promise of justice was for the Belt to build a military of its own.

It was never official. The Outer Planets Alliance survived since then by being diffuse and deniable. But the beginnings were there. Choose a faction, find a place in the chain of command, build the thin but resilient structure that would have muscle one day. That would eventually become an answer to the inner planets projecting their power out to where the sun was hardly more than the brightest star.

When Michio Pa turned twenty-two, Fred Johnson—the Butcher of Anderson Station—had seemed like her brightest hope. He was an Earther fighting for the Belt. Fighting against his own natural self-interest. It gave a sense of authenticity to someone young enough and still easily swayed. She’d taken a position on Tycho Station, made her contacts first and then her commitment. Trained in the quasi-military that Johnson was hauling up. Put in her years.