Babylon's Ashes (The Expanse, #6)

When the drive plumes had lit up the scans of Ceres, Alex felt it in his throat. Long-range battle. Torpedoes launched at extreme range in unpredictable vectors, designed to come in fast and hard, hoping to slip by the PDCs. He wondered if Mars had ever managed to build a good stealth torpedo, and if the traitors who’d supplied the Free Navy would have traded in them if they did exist. He’d spent hours in his crash couch, chasing every anomaly the Roci’s sensor arrays spat out, whether they were above threat threshold or not. When he did sleep, it was all he dreamed about.

When the data came back that the Free Navy ships were burning away, scattered as seeds, he—like every pilot in the combined fleet—looked for the strategy in it. The loops of gravity and thrust that showed where the battle would come together, what the enemy had in its mind. Every time he came up with nothing felt like a threat. The certainty that there was a pattern and he just wasn’t smart enough to see it knotted at the base of his skull until his eyes throbbed. His only comfort was that the crews of the Earth and Mars navies, who lived and breathed battle tactics, were as frustrated as he was. When the Free Navy’s trap snapped shut, they’d all die surprised together.

Only it kept not happening.

When the first ships reached the docks—two troop carriers from Earth, one from Mars—Alex had held his breath. Ceres was the port city of the Belt, and it was sitting there as unguarded and inviting as bait in a trap. Traffic control gave permission to approach. The combined fleet took berths, soldiers spilled out into the docks, the moment for resistance came and went. Reports started filtering back, many of them to Fred Johnson. The Free Navy was gone. There was no armed resistance. No soldiers, only a handful of booby traps, empty storerooms and reservoirs, and a security force stripped to its skeleton and anxious to surrender to anyone willing to take charge.

The battle for Ceres Station never came. Instead, the combined fleet and the local engineering unions put together an emergency response team that was even now jerry-rigging the environmental systems and recycling plants to keep the station from collapsing. Fred Johnson had spent all his time before the Rocinante docked trading tightbeam messages with Avasarala on Luna and whoever would answer back from Mars, where the no-confidence vote on Smith had ballooned to a full-scale constitutional crisis. After they’d docked, Fred, a security detail in tow, had vanished into a whirlwind of meetings with local OPA groups, unions, and the thin, traumatized remains of the administrative staff.

The rest of the crew went to the bar.

It had been strange at first—still was strange when he thought about it—watching the people of Ceres Station react to their new invaders. Everyone Alex met seemed built out of confusion and relief and anger and a kind of formless grief that spread out through the station hallways like a vapor. Ceres was a huge port, independent of the inner planets for years, and now maybe reconquered by them. Or maybe rescued. No one seemed to know if the combined fleet was the avenging hammer of Earth or the final proof that Fred Johnson’s OPA was a legitimate political force. Or if maybe something bigger and stranger had happened.

The smiles of the Ceres natives were tentative, and they carried shards of rage and loss in their eyes. Even here at the Blue Frog, where the crews were welcomed and served the best of what little remained, the fleet and the natives pulled apart, uncertain of each other. Segregated by choice and history. Alex found himself thinking of it as Belters at the bar and inners at the tables, but that wasn’t true. Ip and Mfume and all of Fred’s people were OPA. Even the divisions between people seemed new, and nobody was quite sure yet which unspoken rules applied.

Alex came out of the men’s room to a wall of sound. In the few minutes he’d been indisposed, someone had cranked up the karaoke and was shouting out a boozy version of Noko Dada’s version of “No Volveré” but without any of the harmony parts. He paused at the end of the bar and looked out over the tables, hoping to find a corner where he could have a quiet word with Sandra Ip away from the stage.

Holden was at a table by himself, hunched over a white mug with a ferocious scowl on his face. Alex felt a tug of anxiety. Back at his table, Bobbie and Ip were talking over each other while Mfume laughed. Ip looked over toward him, grinned, and patted the seat beside her. He held up a finger—one minute—and sloped over toward Holden.

“Hey there, partner,” Alex said. “You holding together all right?”

Holden looked up and around like he was surprised to find himself there. Then, after a moment, “Yeah, no. I’m all right.”

Alex tilted his head. “Seems like you just said three different things in a row.”

“I … ah. Yeah, I did, didn’t I? I’m fine.” He nodded at the small gold packet in Alex’s hand. “What’s that?”

Alex held it up. He’d gotten the packet from a dispenser in the men’s room. The foil had a dragon’s head embossed on it and some nonsense kanji that didn’t mean anything.

Holden’s brow furrowed. “Sobriety meds?”

Alex felt himself blushing and tried to hide it by smiling. “Well, I’m thinking I may be in a situation here pretty soon where everybody needs to be able to agree to whatever they’re agreeing to.”

“Always a gentleman,” Holden said.

“Mama raised me right. But seriously, are you doing okay? Because you’re staring at that coffee like it called you bad names.”

Holden glanced down at his cup. The song sloped down to the rough trill at the end. The applause was scattered and weak. Holden turned his coffee mug on the table, setting the black surface dancing. The porcelain scraped against the tabletop until the chords of a new tune crashed out and a woman’s voice starting on a Belter Creole cover of Cheb Khaled drowned it out. When Holden spoke, his voice barely carried over the music.

“I keep thinking about my dad calling Belters skinnies right in front of Naomi. And the way she took it.”

“Family can be rough,” Alex said. “Especially when emotions are kind of high.”

“True, but that’s not what’s …” Holden opened his hands. A gesture of frustration. “I always thought that if you gave people all the information, they’d do the right thing, you know? Not always, maybe, but usually. More often than when they chose to do the wrong thing anyway.”

“Everybody’s a little na?ve sometimes,” Alex said, feeling as the words passed his lips that maybe he wasn’t quite following Holden’s point. Maybe he should have taken the first of the sobriety pills before he’d left the men’s room.

“I meant fact,” Holden went on as if he hadn’t heard Alex at all. “I thought if you told people facts, they’d draw their conclusions, and because the facts were true, the conclusions mostly would be too. But we don’t run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people. Naomi told me that when the rocks fell, the people on Inaros’ ship cheered. They were happy about it.”

“Yeah, well.” Alex paused, rubbing a knuckle across his upper lip. “Consider they might all be a bag of assholes.”

“They weren’t killing people. In their heads? They were striking a blow for freedom or independence. Or making it right for all the Belter kids that got shitty growth hormones. All the ships that got impounded because they were behind on the registration fees. And it’s just the same back home. Father Cesar’s a good man. He’s gentle and he’s kind and he’s funny, and to him Belters are all Free Navy and radical OPA. If someone killed Pallas, he’d be worried about what the drop in refining capacity would do before he thought about how many preschools there are on the station. Or if the station manager’s son liked writing poetry. Or that blowing the station meant that Annie down in Pallas central accounting wasn’t going to get to throw her big birthday party after all.”

“Annie?” Alex asked.

“I made her up. Whoever. The thing is I wasn’t wrong. About telling people the truth? I was right about that. I was wrong about what they needed to know. And … and maybe I can fix that. I mean, I feel like I should at least try.”