Babylon's Ashes, Page 5

  He wasn’t the only one.

  “Shit,” Amos said. “And here I was enjoying being so absolutely thumb-up-the-ass useless.”

  “You want a little ass-play, that’s your business,” Avasarala said. “Only you can do it in a crash couch. The Rocinante isn’t part of the fleet, so losing it won’t leave a hole in our defenses. And I understand you’ve got a few after-market add-ons—”

  “Keel-mounted rail gun,” Alex said with a grin.

  “—that scream of overcompensating for tiny, tiny penises, but might prove useful. The mission commander has requested you and your ship, and honestly none of you are worth a wet slap at this point except Miss Nagata anyway, so—”

  “Wait,” Holden said. “The mission commander? No.”

  Avasarala met his gaze, and her expression was hard as granite. “No?”

  Holden didn’t flinch. “The Rocinante doesn’t go under anyone’s command but ours. I understand that this is a big joint task force and we’re all in everything together. But the Roci isn’t just a ship, it’s our home. If you want to hire us, fine. We’ll take the job, and we’ll get it done. If you want to put a commander in place and expect us to follow their orders, then the answer’s no.”

  “Captain Holden—” Avasarala began.

  “This isn’t a negotiation. This is just how it’s going to be,” Holden said.

  Three of the most powerful people in the solar system, the heads of the central factions that had struggled against each other for generations, looked at each other. Smith’s eyebrows rode high on his forehead and he looked anxiously around the room. Fred leaned forward, staring at Holden like he was disappointed in him. Only Avasarala had a glint of amusement in her eyes. Holden glanced at his crew. Naomi’s arms were crossed. Alex’s head was lifted, his chin pushed forward. Amos was smiling exactly the way he always did. A unified front.

  Bobbie cleared her throat. “It’s me.”

  “What now?” Holden said.

  “It’s me,” Bobbie repeated. “I’m the mission commander. But if you really don’t—”

  “Oh,” Holden said. “No. No, that’s different.”

  Alex said, “Yeah,” and Naomi uncrossed her arms. Bobbie relaxed.

  “Should have said so in the first place, Chrissy,” Amos said.

  “Go fuck yourself, Burton. I was getting to it.”

  “So, Bobbie,” Holden said. “How do you want to do this?”

  Chapter Four: Salis

  Wait wait wait!” Salis shouted into his suit radio. The base of the rail gun was ten meters across, built in a rough hexagon, and massing more than a small ship. At his words, a half dozen construction thrusters along the great beast’s side fired off, jetting ejection mass into the void. The calibration meter on Salis’ mech cycled down to zero; the hairbreadth movement of the great beast stopped. They floated together—inhumanly large weapon, softly glowing alien station, and Salis in his spiderlike safety-yellow construction mech.

  “A que, coyo?” Jakulski, their tech supervisor, asked in his ear.

  “Reading drift,” Salis said, playing his ranging lasers over the rail gun and the socket mount it was meant to lock into. It had been hard work, fitting the alien station with the three wide belts of ceramic, carbon-silicate lace, and steel. Now it looked like a vast blue ball with rubber bands around it, each at right angles to the other two. And where the lines crossed, rail gun turrets squatted. It had turned out it was impossible to drill into the alien station. Welding didn’t work, because the surface wouldn’t melt. Wrapping the whole damn thing up had been the only viable alternative for attaching things to it.

  “Que mas que?” Jakulski asked.

  “Shift one minute ten seconds relative z, minus eight seconds relative y.”

  “Savvy,” Jakulski said. The construction thrusters along the length of the rail gun stuttered, impulse and counterimpulse. All around them, the gates dotted the sky with only a little over thirteen hundred bright spots, barren and empty and threateningly regular. Medina Station itself was the only other object, and it was far enough away that Salis could have covered the whole structure—drum, drive, and command—with his outstretched thumb. The slow zone, they still called it. Even though the weird limit on speed had been lifted, the name was the name, and it carried a sense of strangeness and doom with it. Most of his work was inside Medina. Heading out into the vacuum was a rare thing, and now he was here he didn’t like it much. He kept turning away from the job to look out into the black. It had been almost the end of his first week on the job before he realized he was looking for the Milky Way, and that he kept looking because it wasn’t there.

  “Bist bien?” Jakulski asked.

  “Moment,” Salis said, checking the ranging lasers again. He glanced up the length of the great barrel while the mech struggled again to get a fix on the thing’s skin and the socket. The few rail guns he’d seen before had been made from titanium and ceramic. These new materials Duarte was sending through the Laconia gate were bleeding-edge, though. It wasn’t only the iridescence of the carbon-silicate lace plating. The power cores that ran the guns and the frictionless ammunition feeds that supplied them were … strange.

  The designs were elegant, sure. But they were just magnetic rails powered by fusion cores same as any ship’s. And they did what they needed to do, but there was something off about the way they came together, a sense of being not manufactured so much as tested for. A kind of awkwardness and beauty that made Salis think of plants more than machines. It wasn’t only the new materials that went into them. Ever since the ring gate lifted itself off Venus, there had been bits of new one thing and another. It was the scale of it. And maybe something else.

  The ranging lasers reported back.

  “Bien,” Salis said. “Bring the bastard home.”

  Jakulski didn’t reply, but the thrusters fired. Salis kept painting socket and rail gun alike, making manual reading after manual reading. It was the sort of thing he usually left to the mech’s system, but the new materials sometimes caused the laser to throw false errors. And it was better to be certain. The station had been still as stone in the years since the gates had opened. Didn’t mean ramming a great damned machine into it wouldn’t provoke a response.

  It took the better part of a shift to bring the massive thing in, but eventually it locked into place. The turret settled, absorbed what little momentum was left in it. The socket closed around it, leaving Salis with the uncomfortable image of gigantic lips closing very slowly around a huge straw.

  “Pulling back,” Salis said.

  “Clar à test, you?”

  “Moment,” Salis said, pushing off from the station. He floated out into the emptiness to where Roberts and Vandercaust waited, strapped into their own mechs. The mech’s attitude thruster brought him to a relative stop at their side and turned him back to look at their work. On the group channel, Roberts grunted.

  “Víse ca bácter,” she said. It was true enough. With the guns strapped at the top and bottom of all three axes, the station did look a little like something seen through a microscope. A macrovirus, maybe. Or a minimalist streptococcus.

  “In place,” Salis said. “Clar à test.”

  “Three,” Jakulski said, “two, one.”

  The rail gun beneath them shifted in its socket like something waking from sleep. For a moment, it seemed to drift like a reed caught in a current of aether. Then it snapped into place, jittering from one position to the next too quickly for Salis’ eyes to see the motion between, faster than the twitch of an insect’s leg. It cycled through, taking aim on each of the gates in its field of vision. With the layout they had, at least two of the guns would be able to sight every gate, and most gates fell in the arc of three. Salis had seen pictures of old fortifications overlooking the sea back on Earth. They’d never made sense to him before—too flat to apply to his own experience—but this was the same thing. The high guns that would protect Medina Station from invading ships forever. He
felt some emotion stirring in his chest, and it could have been pride or dread.

  “Bien,” Jakulski said. He sounded almost surprised. Like he’d expected the gun to rip itself loose and spin out into the nothing sky. “Pull back for live fire.”

  “Pulling back, us,” Vandercaust said. “Don’t put a round through us, sa sa?”

  “I do, and you let me know, eh?” Jakulski laughed. Easy for him. Not like he was out here. And then, not like the guns couldn’t turn Medina to chaff too. Salis and the others pulled back fifty klicks, flipped, and decelerated for another fifty. The darkness was unnerving. Back on the other side of the gate, it was never this dark. There was always the sun and the stars.

  “Stopped and stable,” Roberts said. “Hast du dui painted friendly?”

  “Do. It shoots you, that’ll mean something’s wrong. Setting target,” Jakulski said, and Salis upped the magnification on his mech. There, in false-color readout, was the alien station. This far out, he could see three of the six guns. “Sensor arrays bist bien. Firing in three, two, one …”

  A puff of vapor spat out the tip of the gun—charged gas making a brief extension to the barrel and putting a little more speed into the round. Salis’ mech shuddered, the magnetic spill from the rails affecting his systems even this far out. He didn’t see the rounds the rail gun fired. In the time it took for the harsh feedback tick to go from his radio to his ear, the tungsten slug was already through the target gate. Or out into the weird non-space between them. In the false-color display, a ripple passed through the alien station like what he’d see in a sphere of floating water when one part of it got touched. The ripple died out before it even circled the station once.

  “La que vist?” Jakulski asked.

  “Nothing,” Salis said. “It looks fine. Tu?”

  “Station glow only thing,” Jakulski said. In all of their tests, the only reaction the station ever had to being pushed by the rail gun shots was a shower of photons.

  “Nothing else?”

  “Nope.”

  “Drift?”

  “No drift.”

  It was what they wanted to see. The rail guns were big enough, powerful enough, that even keel-mounted on a ship, firing them would have been difficult. Mounted on turrets like they were, they should have been as much thruster as weapon, driving themselves away from whatever they were shooting at fast enough that they’d be hard to catch.

  Except the station.

  Whatever the aliens did to shrug off equal and opposite reactions, it only generated enough energy to throw a little light, and it didn’t seem to bring any kind of countermeasures against them. Still, Salis wasn’t exactly looking forward to heading back and checking the sockets and bases.

  “You hear Casil talk?” Vandercaust said. “About why it don’t move when we push it?”

  “No,” said Roberts.

  “Said it does, but the ring space moves with it, so we can’t see it happening.”

  “Casil’s crazy.”

  “Sí ai.”

  “Sending us back in?” Salis asked into his radio.

  “Moment,” Jakulski said, and then, “Bien. Cleared, you. Keep tus augen wide, anything not right.”

  Not right meaning cracks in the housings, meaning leakage of the fluid tanks, meaning failures in the reactors or the ammunition feeds.

  Meaning the eyes of an ancient god looking at them. Or something worse.

  “Savvy,” Salis said, checking his thrusters. “Going in.”

  The three mech drivers shifted and launched themselves back toward the station. Medina floated to his right: the still drive cone, the turning drum. Salis looked out past it like he was searching for a familiar face, but the stars still weren’t there.

  The internal drum section of Medina Station had a straight-line sun that burned at the center of rotation from the command center all the way down to the engineering decks. The full-spectrum light from it came down on the curved farmland and the wide, bent lake that had once been meant to carry a city of Mormon faithful to the stars. Salis sat in an open-air bar with Vandercaust and Roberts, drinking beer and eating white kibble that tasted of cheese powder and mushroom. Behind and before him, the landscape curved up to lose itself in the sun’s bright line. To his left and right, the full length of the drum spinning at about the g of Luna. The gentle breeze that breathed against the back of his neck came from spinward, same as it ever did.

  When he’d been a boy, Salis had seen the Big Room caverns on Iapetus. He’d walked under the false skies on Ceres. The drum at Medina was the nearest thing he could imagine to sitting on Earth as it had been before the rocks came down: unregulated atmosphere above him and the thin crust and mantle holding him above the core of molten stone. No matter how many times he came here, it felt exotic.

  “Flyers up again,” Roberts said, squinting up into the light. Salis looked up. There, almost silhouetted by the brightness, five bodies floated in the air, arms and legs outstretched. They seemed to be flying from behind Salis, curving up ahead like the fields of soybean and maize, but the truth was they were the bodies at rest. About five months before, some adolescent idiot had figured out how to lay down a temporary track that could accelerate people anti-spinward to match the drum’s rotation and let them launch themselves up, weightless in the air. So long as no one got too near the artificial sun or failed to match the drum’s acceleration before they came back down, it was supposed to be good fun.

  Two streaks of vapor reached out from the engineering decks toward them, and Salis pointed toward them. “Security got them, yeah.”

  Vandercaust shook his shaggy gray head. “Ton muertas.”

  “Young and stupid. But it’s what the Roman said: Fihi m’fihi,” Roberts said. Her voice had more sympathy, but she was also nearer the age of the illegal flyers. “You born stone and sober, que?”

  “Born with respect,” Vandercaust said. “My shit only kills me.”

  Roberts’ shrug was a surrender. On ships—real ships—back on the right side of the gates, keeping the environment safe was always the first thing. Double-check what had already been double-checked, clean what was already cleaned. Playing fast and loose was a quick way to die, and your family and crew along with you. There was something about the big stations—Ceres, Hygeia, Ganymede, and now Medina—that gave kids license to be dumb. Reckless.

  Stability, Salis thought. Having a room as massive as the drum did something to people’s heads. He felt it too; it seemed too big to break. Didn’t matter that nothing was really that big. Anything could get broken. Earth got broken. Acting like risks weren’t risks put all of them in danger.

  Even so, there was part of him that was sorry to see the security crew lock down the flyers. Kids being kids. There should be a place for that somewhere. Martians had that. Earthers had that. It was only the Belters who’d spent too many generations dying for their first fuckup to let their kids play sometimes.

  He squinted into the brightness. The security and the flyers were heading down to the surface now, foggy trails of their suit thrusters making wide, slow spirals centered on the bright line of sun as they came down.

  “Too bad,” he said. Vandercaust grunted.

  “You hear about the gang showers in F-section?” Roberts said. “Blocked up again.”

  “Alles designed con full g,” Vandercaust said. “Same thing with the farms. Fields aren’t draining like they should. Spin the drum up the way los Mormons meant, it’d work.”

  Roberts laughed. “It would, we wouldn’t. All smashed flat, us.”

  “Better to change it,” Vandercaust said around a bite of kibble.

  “We do enough, it’ll work,” Salis said. “Ship with this much redundancy? If we can’t make it right, we don’t deserve it.”

  He drank the last of his beer and stood, lifting a hand to ask if either of his crewmates wanted another. Vandercaust did. Roberts didn’t. Salis stepped across the dirt to the bar. That was part of it, he decided. The plants and th
e false sun and the breeze that smelled of leaves and rot and fresh growth. Medina’s drum was the only place he’d ever lived where he could walk on soil. Not just dirt and dust—those were everywhere—but soil. Salis didn’t know why that was different, but it was.

  The man at the bar swapped out Salis’ bulb for a fresh, and a second besides for Vandercaust. When he got back to their table, the conversation had moved on from the flyers to the colonies. Wasn’t that big a shift. From people taking stupid risks to people taking stupid risks.

  “Aldo says there was another bunch of threats coming out of the Jerusalem gate,” Roberts said. “We send their reactor core, or they come get it.”

  “Surprise them if they do,” Vandercaust said, taking the fresh bulb from Salis. “Guns up, and it’s past time for alles la.”

  “Maybe,” Roberts said, then coughed. “Maybe we should give it to them, yeah?”

  Vandercaust scowled. “For for?”

  “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.”