Babylon's Ashes (Expanse 6)

“Every faction of the OPA Fred could bully or beg or cajole into coming together is waiting for us at Tycho,” Holden said. “And we’re going to have to tell them Marco won.”

“He didn’t win,” Naomi said.

“We’ll have to tell them we were ambushed and Fred died, but Marco totally didn’t win.”

Naomi smiled. Laughed. It was strange how it made the darkness better. Not less dark. Just better, even though it still was what it was. “Well, all right, when you put it that way. Look, worst-case scenario is we don’t get them on our side. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be great to have more of the Belt on our side. But if we don’t have them to work with, we don’t. We can still win.”

“Only the war,” he said. “Not the part that matters.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Avasarala

Gorman Le blinked, rubbed his entirely-too-green eyes, and waited for her to respond.

“And you don’t know where it came from?” Avasarala said.

“We

ll, Ganymede,” he said. “The transmission records are clear. It definitely came from Ganymede.”

“But we don’t know who on Ganymede.”

“No,” he said, nodding to mean yes, she was right. Fucking confusing way to express himself.

The meeting room was a smaller one in Nectaris facility. The lights were cold, the walls a brushed ceramic that hadn’t been fashionable in thirty years. It was on a physically separate environmental system, so the air didn’t have the recently rebreathed smell that most of Luna suffered these days. If the gunpowder stink of lunar fines was there, she’d gotten so used to it that she couldn’t tell.

Gorman Le sat hunched forward like a schoolboy, a glass of water forgotten in his hand. He was wearing the same suit he’d had on yesterday and the day before. She was starting to think he kept it in a closet and threw it on whenever he had to talk with her. Weariness radiated from him like he was a medic on the last hour of a four-day shift, but there was something else in him. Something she hadn’t seen recently. Excitement, maybe. Hope.

That was bad. Lately, hope was a poison.

“So the report schema or whatever the hell you call it could be real,” she said. “Or it could be the Free Navy trying to fuck with us. Or it could be … what?”

“Nutritional yeast with advanced radioplasts. We’ve been looking at how the protomolecule was able to grow based on some kinds of ionizing radiation?” The rise of inflection at the end made it a question, as if he were asking her permission instead of debriefing her. “Nonionizing too, but that’s really easy. Light’s nonionizing radiation, and plants have been harvesting that since forever. But—”

Avasarala raised her hand, palm out. Le’s mouth kept moving for a few seconds, part of him still speaking while the rest was reined in. “I care deeply about all the fine details,” she said, “only actually, I don’t. Sum it up.”

“If the numbers are right, we could feed maybe half a million more people on this base right now. The first runs we did looked really good. But if it’s something that doesn’t scale and the farms crash, we could lose days cleaning it back out.”

“And then people starve.”

Gorman nodded some more. Maybe he didn’t mean anything by it. “Resetting would definitely mean missing some production goals.”

She leaned forward, plucked the glass from his hand, and looked into his eyes. “Then people starve. We’re grown-ups here. You should be able to say it.”

“Then people starve.”

She nodded and leaned back. The terrible thing was that her back felt better. She’d been at one-tenth of a g for so long, she was getting used to it. When she went back down the well, she’d have to reacclimatize. When. Not if. Gorman was looking at her, his jaw set, his nostrils flared like a panicky horse. She had to restrain herself from patting his head. She wanted some fucking pistachios.

“What’s your doctorate in?” she asked.

“Um. Structural biochemistry?”

“Do you know what mine’s in?”

He shook his head for a change.

“Not structural biochemistry,” she said gently. “I don’t know anything about whether this magic yeast recipe is bullshit or not. So if you can’t tell, I’m less than fucking useless. So what are we here for?”

“I don’t know what to do.” He looked young. He looked lost.