Babylon's Ashes

“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.”