Babylon's Ashes (Expanse 6)

“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.