Babylon's Ashes (The Expanse, #6)

“They need and we have is all,” Roberts said.

Vandercaust made a dismissive wave of his hand. Who gives a shit what they need? But something in Roberts’ voice caught Salis’ attention. Like she’d said more than she’d said. He met her dark eyes and lifted his chin as a question. The words she was trying to say pushed her head forward like a nod.

“Can help if we want. Might as well, sí no? No reason no, since we’re not what we were anymore, us,” she said. Vandercaust scowled, but Roberts went on. “We did it. Us. Today.”

“Que done que, us?” Vandercaust said. His voice was rough, but if Roberts heard it, she didn’t stop. Her eyes glittered like she was about to cry. When she spoke, it was like water coming out a snapped pipe. Her voice gushed and pulsed and gushed again.

“Always, it’s been when we find place. Ceres o Pallas o the big Lagranges never got built. Mi tía talked about making a station for all Belters alles. Capitol city à te void. It’s this. Belters built it. Belters live in it. Belters gave it power. Y because of guns we put in, it’s ours forever. We made this place home today. Not just our home, ours. All of ours. Esá es homeland now. Because of us three.”

Tears dripped down her cheeks, slow in the sixth g. Joy lit her from inside like a fire, and it left Salis embarrassed. Seeing Roberts like this was like walking in on someone pissing—intimate and wrong. But when he looked away, the drum spread out around them. The plants, the soil, the land above him squinting down at him like a sky.

He’d been on Medina for fifteen months. Longer than he’d ever been on a station in his life. He’d come because Marco Inaros and the Free Navy needed people here. He hadn’t thought about what it meant, except he’d known in his gut he was more OPA than the OPA, and that was what Free Navy meant. Now, maybe, he caught a glimpse of what it was behind that. Not a war forever. A place.

“Homeland,” he said, speaking carefully. Like the word was made from glass, and could cut him if he said it too hard. “Because the rail guns.”

“Because something’s ours,” Roberts said. “And because now they can’t take it away.”

Salis felt something in his chest, and he let his mind poke at it. Pride, he decided. It was pride. He tried a smile and turned it to Roberts, who was grinning back. She was right. This was the place. Their place. Whatever else happened, they’d have Medina.

Vandercaust shrugged, took a long pull from his bulb, and belched. “Besse for us,” he said. “But here’s for that? They ever do take it away, we sure as shit never get it back again.”





Chapter Five: Pa

Idon’t trust anything about this,” Michio Pa said.

Josep yawned and propped himself up on one elbow, looking down at her. He was a beautiful man in a slightly ruined way. He wore his hair longer than a crew cut, shorter than his shoulders. The gray in it still only a highlight in the black. Decades had roughened his skin, and the ink there told the story of his life: the neck tattoo of the OPA’s split circle that had been covered over later to make the upraised fist of a radical collective long since collapsed. The elaborate cross on his shoulder, inscribed in a moment of faith and kept after that faith had crumbled. Phrases written along his wrists and down his side—No more water, the fire next time and To love someone is to see them as God intended them and ?lüm y chuma pas pas fóvos—spoke of the various men he had been in his life. His incarnations. That was part of why Pa felt so close to him. She was younger than him by almost a decade, but she’d been through incarnations too.

“Which ‘this’?” he asked. “There’s so many things not to trust.”

“Inaros calling in the clans,” she said, rolling over and gathering a blanket with her as she did. It wasn’t that she was uncomfortable naked, only now that their coupling was done, she was ready to go back to their more formal roles. Or something closer to them. Josep noted it and without comment went from being one of her husbands to her chief engineer. He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall.

“Is it the meeting or the man?” he asked.

“Any of it,” she said. “Something’s not right.”

“You say it, and I believe.”

“I know. This is the part where I always do this. The coyo in charge changes the plan and I start looking for them to be the next Ashford. The next Fred fucking Johnson. It’s my pattern.”

“Is. Doesn’t mean your pattern doesn’t match. What’s in your head?”

Pa leaned forward, chewing her lip. She could feel the thoughts bumping around like blind fish, searching for the words that would give them form. Josep waited.

By the terms of their ketubah, the marriage group was seven people: her and Josep, Nadia, Bertold, Laura, Evans, and Oksana. They had all kept their own surnames, and they made the Connaught’s permanent crew. The others who served under her came and went, respected that she was captain, that her orders were fair, and that she didn’t show any overt favoritism to her spouses, but there was the understanding always that the core of the ship was her family, and no threat to it would be tolerated. The idea of separating family from crew was an inner-planets thing, one example of the unconscious prejudice that made Earthers and Martians treat life aboard ships as somehow different from real life.

For them, the rules changed when the airlock closed, even if they didn’t know themselves well enough to see it. For Belters, there was no division. The Doctrine of the One Ship, she’d heard it called. That there was only one ship, and it had countless parts as a single body had countless cells. The Connaught was one part, as were all the ragtag ships under her command: Panshin, Solano, Witch of Endor, Serrio Mal, and a dozen more. And her fleet was only part of the Free Navy: a vast organism that passed information between its cells with tightbeam and radio, that consumed food and fuel, that worked its own slow destiny among the planets like a massive fish in the greater sea of the sky.

By some interpretations, even the Earther and Martian ships were part of the same one-ship, but for her, that always ran into conversations about cancers and autoimmune disorders, and the metaphor failed.

Still, there was a reason she was thinking of it now.

“We aren’t coordinated,” she said, trying out the words as she said them. “When you push off with a foot, you reach out with a hand. One movement. We aren’t like that. Inaros and military. Sanjrani and the finances. Rosenfeld and his production and design. Us. We’re not the same thing yet.”

“We’re new at this,” Josep said. The words could have been a refutation, a way to explain away her unease. From him, it was an offering. Something to react to that would help her mind come clearer.

“Maybe,” she said. “Hard to say. May be we’re supposed to be puppets and the strings all run to the Pella. Himself changes his mind, and we all jump.”

Josep shrugged, his warm eyes narrow. “He’s delivered. Ships, fuel, ammunition, drives. Freedom. He’s done what he said he’d do.” She could feel the gentle provocation in his words, and it was what she needed.

“He’s done what he says he said. His real record’s not so good. Johnson’s alive. Smith’s alive. Ganymede’s only gone neutral. We’re still throwing rocks at Earth and no surrender’s coming from them anytime soon. Go back and look at everything he promised, and it’s not what’s on the plate.”

“Politicians since immer and always, that. Still more than anyone else has done for the Belt. Inners are on their heels now. And with the Hornblower and ships like her, we’ll have stockpiles to last years. That’s our part. Keep everyone with food and air and supplies. Give us a chance to make the Belt without a boot on our necks.”

Pa sighed and scratched her knee—her nails against her skin with sound as soft and dry as sand. The air recycler clicked and hummed. The drive that pressed them both down toward the deck throbbed.

“Yeah,” she said.