“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.”