James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

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 the 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.”

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 Ölüm 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.