Babylon's Ashes (The Expanse, #6)

“So how long is this window or wake or whatever it is that we’re shooting for?” Amos asked.

Time was almost out. The question now was just how fast Inaros wanted to be going when they came through the gate. If he cut the braking thrust and came through fast, it would throw off the timing. If the Giambattista went through the Arcadia gate too late, it would be the one to quickly, quietly vanish away. If it went through too early, Naomi’s curve would already have decayed down to nothing and the Free Navy would pass into the slow zone in safety.

They’d gone back to the Rocinante. Alex and Bobbie in the cockpit, ready for battle if battle came. Holden and Naomi were strapped into the couches in the command deck. Amos, on float, had come up for the company as much as anything else. They weren’t at battle stations yet. If it came to that, this was probably the last time he’d see Amos in the flesh. Holden tried not to think about it.

“It’ll be maybe five minutes,” Naomi said. “Part of that’s going to depend on the mass and energy of the ships they bring through. If we’re lucky, maybe as much as … ten?”

“That ain’t much,” Amos said with an amiable smile. He put a hand on the ladder up to the cockpit to keep himself from drifting. “You good up there?”

“Good as gold,” Alex said.

“If this trick of Naomi’s doesn’t go, you think we can take ’em?” Amos said.

“All of them, probably not,” Bobbie called down. “Some of them, for sure.”

Clarissa rose up from the lift, a pale smile on her lips. She’d spent enough time on the float now to be natural with it. She moved from grip to grip along the wall like she’d been born a Belter. When she got to Holden, she held out a bulb from the galley.

“You said you hadn’t been able to sleep,” she said. “I thought you’d want some coffee.”

Holden took it; her smile widened a degree. The bulb was warm against his palm. Probably it wasn’t poisoned. She wasn’t really likely to do that anymore. He steeled himself a little before he took a sip.

Medina Station was in the hands of the OPA fighters from the Giambattista, not that it would do much good. Its PDCs and torpedoes had, for the most part, been spent defending against Holden. What was left was a rounding error on what they’d have needed to hold back Inaros. The Roci was waiting almost behind the blue station at the center of the slow zone. If he’d trained the ship’s cameras on it, he could have seen the ruins of the rail guns as clearly as if he’d been standing over them.

“Anything coming out of Laconia?” he asked.

“We don’t have a repeater on the far side of that gate, but just peeping through the keyhole? Nothing,” Naomi said. “No signal. No sign of approaching drives.”

The Roci chirped out an alert. Holden pulled it up.

“Got something, Cap?” Amos asked.

“Incoming ships have changed their burn a little. They’ll be coming in fast.”

“And early,” Naomi said. Her voice was like someone talking through pain. The Roci’s countdown timer adjusted itself, estimating that the enemy would come through the ring gate in twenty minutes. Holden washed the lump in his throat with Clarissa’s coffee.

Clarissa pushed over to Naomi’s couch, her sharp face bent by a frown. Naomi looked up at her and wiped her eyes. A droplet of a tear floated in the air, drifted toward the recycler intake.

“I’ll be all right,” Naomi said. “It’s just that my son’s on one of those ships.”

Clarissa’s eyes sheened over too and she put a hand on Naomi’s arm. “I know,” Clarissa said. “If you need me, you can find me.”

“It’s okay, Peaches,” Amos said. “Me and the captain had a talk about it. We’re good.” He gave Holden a cheerful thumbs-up.

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, r?vul!” 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.