Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“You’re not.”

“Of my bones are coral made,” the ghost said as if in agreement. “It’s all about the trade-offs.”

When the Sally Ride sent the go-ahead code, Alex took them through the Ring nice and slow, the Callisto matching speed and course. The stars vanished as the ship moved into the black nothingness of the hub. Miller flickered as they passed through the gate, started to resolidify, and vanished in a puff of blue fireflies as the deck hatch banged open and Amos pulled himself through.

“We landing?” the mechanic asked without preamble.

“No need on this trip,” Holden said, and opened a channel to Alex up in the cockpit. “Keep us here until we see the Callisto dock, then take us back out.”

“Sure could use a few days station-side, chief,” Amos said, pulling himself over to one of the ops stations and belting in. His gray coverall had a scorch mark on the sleeve, and he had a bandage covering half of his left hand. Holden pointed at it. Amos shrugged.

“We’ve got a pair of soil ships waiting at Tycho Station,” Holden said.

“No one’s had the balls to try and rip off any of the ships on this route. This many navy ships hanging around? It’d be suicide.”

“And yet Fred pays us very well to escort his ships out to Medina Station, and I like taking his money.” Holden panned the ship’s telescopes around, zooming in on the rings. “And I don’t like being in here any longer than necessary.”

Miller’s ghost was an artifact of the alien technology that had created the gates and a dead man. It had been following Holden around for the two years since they’d deactivated the Ring Station. It spent its time demanding, asking, and cajoling Holden to go through the newly opened gates to begin its investigation on the planets beyond them. The fact that Miller could only appear to Holden when he was alone – and on a ship the size of the Rocinante he was almost never alone – had kept him sane.

Alex floated down from the cockpit, his thinning black hair sticking out in every direction from his brown scalp. There were dark circles under his eyes. “We’re not landin’? Could really use a couple days station-side.”

“See?” Amos said.

Before Holden could reply, Naomi came up through the deck hatch. “Aren’t we going to dock?”

“Captain wants to rush back for those soil transports at Tycho,” Amos said, his voice somehow managing to be neutral and mocking at the same time.

“I could really use a few days —” Naomi started.

“I promise we’ll take a week on Tycho when we get back. I just don’t want to spend my vacation time, you know” – he pointed at the viewscreens around them displaying the dead sphere of the Ring Station and the glittering gates – “here.”

“Chicken,” Naomi said.

“Yep.”

The comm station flashed an incoming tightbeam alert at them. Amos, who was closest, tapped the screen.

“Rocinante here,” he said.

“Rocinante,” a familiar voice replied. “Medina Station here.”

“Fred,” Holden said with a sigh. “Problem?”

“You guys aren’t landing? I’m betting you could use a few —”

“Can I help you with something?” Holden said over the top of him.

“Yeah, you can. Call me after you’ve docked. I have business to discuss.”

“Dammit,” Holden said after he’d killed the connection. “You ever get the sense that the universe is out to get you?”

“Sometimes I get the sense that the universe is out to get you,” Amos said with a grin. “It’s fun to watch.”

“They changed the name again,” Alex said, zooming in on the spinning station that had until recently been called Behemoth. “Medina Station. Good name for it.”

“Doesn’t that mean ‘fortress’?” Naomi said with a frown. “Too martial, maybe.”

“Naw,” Alex said. “Well, sort of. It was the walled part of a city. But it sort of became the social center too. Narrow streets designed to keep invaders out also kept motorized traffic or horse-drawn carts out. So you could only get around by walkin’. So the street vendors gathered there. It turned into the place to shop and congregate and drink tea. It’s a safe place where people gather. Good name for the station.”

“You’ve put a lot of thought into this,” Holden said.

Alex shrugged. “It’s interestin’, the evolution of that ship and its names. Started out as the Nauvoo. A place of refuge, right? Big city in space. Became the Behemoth, the biggest baddest warship in the system. Now it’s Medina Station. A gathering place. Same ship, three different names, three different things.”

“Same ship,” Holden said, feeling a little surly as he instructed the Rocinante to begin the docking approach.

“Names matter, boss,” Amos said after a moment, a strange look on his big face. “Names change everything.”

~

The interior of Medina Station was a work in progress. Large sections of the central rotating drum had been covered with transplanted soil in preparation for food production, but in many places the metal and ceramic of the drum was still visible. Most of the damage the former colony ship had sustained during her battles had been cleaned up and repaired. The office and storage space in the walls of the drum was becoming the hub of efforts to explore the thousand new worlds that had opened up to humanity. If Fred Johnson, former Earth colonel and now head of the respectable wing of the OPA, was positioning Medina Station as the logical location for a fledgling League of Planets–type government, he at least had the good sense not to say it out loud.

Holden had watched too many people dying there to ever see it as anything but a graveyard. Which made it pretty much the same as any other government he could think of.

Fred had set up his new office in what had once been the colonial administration building back when Medina Station was still called the Nauvoo. They’d also been used as the offices of Radio Free Slow Zone. Now they were patched up, repainted, and decorated with atmosphere-renewing plants and video screens of the Ring space around the ship. To Holden it made for an odd juxtaposition. Sure, humans had invaded an extra-dimensional space with wormholes to points scattered across the galaxy, but they’d remembered to bring ferns.

Fred puttered around the office making coffee.

“Black, right?”