Babylon's Ashes

Rindai glanced at him, lifting her chin in greeting. “For for Shului not come?” she asked, but before he had to come up with an answer, the lock cycled, and the Martians came in. Jakulski’s first thought, quick as a reflex, was that they looked pretty unimpressive for great saviors.

The captain of the Proteus was a dark-skinned man with wide-set eyes and broad, expressive lips. His uniform was Martian, except for its insignia. Not taller than Jakulski, probably, and comfortable moving in zero g. The six behind him were in civilian jumpsuits, but the broadness of their shoulders and the cut of their hair said they were as military as the captain no matter what they were wearing. Samuels nodded, but didn’t salute. The Proteus coyo caught his ankle in a floor hold and pulled himself to a stop as gracefully as a Belter.

“Permission to come aboard, Captain?” he said.

“Glad to have you here, Captain Montemayor,” Samuels said. “Esá es my department heads. Amash. Rindai. Jakulski. They’re to help you with constructing and arming the security base.”

Security base? Jakulski sucked in a long breath. Not something Shului had mentioned. He wondered if not wanting Rindai to see his infected eye had been bullshit and he’d just wanted someone else to pick up the project. Just as likely Shului hadn’t even known…

“Not at all, sir,” the Proteus man—Montemayor, she’d called him—said. “We’re here to help you. Admiral Duarte specifically told me to assure you that we have the utmost faith in your ability to address any instability that might come from Sol system. We just want to assist and support our allies in Medina as best we can.”

“Appreciate that,” Samuels said, and it could just have been Jakulski’s imagination, but she did seem to relax a little. Like maybe she’d been expecting this to be less pleasant and was relieved that the Martian coyo had started by showing his belly. Jakulski looked over the other six, wondering which of them he’d be working with and what exactly they’d be working on.

“Come you, have a drink,” Samuels said, clapping Montemayor on the arm just as if they were friends. “We’ll get you an escort to your quarters.”

“It’s Callisto all over again,” Roberts said.

“You weren’t even born when Callisto had trouble,” Salis replied. “Que Callisto all over again?”

Jakulski leaned back, pressed to the ground by the spin of the drum. Somewhere five levels below their feet, a quarter of a klick aft, and maybe ten degrees spinward, his cabin waited and with it, his comfortable clothes. After the Martians had all been greeted and drunk to and made welcome and all, he’d hurried to the café, thinking maybe he’d be able to catch the technical team before they went home. He hadn’t taken the time to stop and change clothes. So now the uniform, even undone at the throat, sanded his neck.

The technical team had all been there, and still were. Planted in their chairs like they’d taken root.

“Don’t have to have been there to know what a proxy war is,” Roberts said. “My family’s Callistan, three generations. I know what it looked like, even if I wasn’t there. Earth sends private security. Mars sends advisors. Everybody just there to help out this union or that trade group, but what it came down to was Earth and Mars spending Belter lives so they never had to risk their own.”

He’d expected the place to be empty. It was long after his shift, well into when he should have been spinning down for sleep. But the light of the straight-line sun was bright and high, and even after generations in the black, some atavistic part of his brain still told him that meant midday. Drum time was permanent noon, first and last and always. And with the overlapping shifts that kept Medina alive and working no matter what the clock pretended, there were people coming in for an early breakfast or a late lunch, grabbing a quick drink on the way back to their cabin. Or like him and the technical team—burning the midnight oil. All at the same time. It was the drift of humanity left to live on whatever schedule they chose instead of being chained to the twenty-four hours of Earth and Mars. Belter time.

“Maybe if they’d come on their own, yeah,” Salis said. “Could see it then. But that’s not the way I heard it.”

“The way you heard it?” Roberts laughed. “Didn’t know you had your cameras in the bedrooms of power. Inside scoop, you?”

Salis made a rude gesture, but he was smiling while he did it. Jakulski took a drink of his beer, surprised to find the bulb so close to empty already.

“Friends in comms, me,” Salis said. “What I heard was Marco asked Duarte to come. Not Laconia coming to pull our puppet strings. It’s them dancing to a Free Navy song.”