Cibola Burn

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?”

“Yep,” Holden said, and accepted the steaming cup from him. “I don’t like coming here.”

“I understand. I appreciate you doing it anyway,” Fred said and collapsed into his chair with a sigh that seemed excessive in the one-third g of the station’s spin. But then the pressures pushing down on Fred had little to do with gravity. The five years since Holden had met him hadn’t treated the man kindly. His formerly salt-and-pepper hair had gone entirely gray, and his dark skin was lined with tiny wrinkles.

“No sign it’s waking up?” Holden said, pointing his coffee cup toward a wall screen that was displaying a blown-up image of the spherical Ring Station.

“I need to show you something,” Fred said, as though Holden hadn’t asked the question. At Holden’s nod, Fred tapped on his desk and the video screen behind him came to life. On it, Chrisjen Avasarala’s face was frozen mid-word. The undersecretary of executive administration had her eyes at half-mast and her lips in a sneer. “This is the part that concerns you.”

“— eally just an excuse to wave their cocks at each other,” Avasarala said when the video started. “So I’m thinking we send Holden.”

“Send Holden?” Holden said, but the video kept playing and Fred didn’t answer him. “Send Holden where? Where are we sending Holden?”

“He’s close when he’s out at Medina, and everybody hates him equally, so we can argue he’s impartial. He’s got ties to you, Mars, me. He’s a fucking awful choice for a diplomatic mission, so it makes him perfect. Brief him, tell him the UN will pay for his time at double the usual rates, and get him on New Terra as fast as possible before this thing gets fucked up any worse than it already is.”

The old lady leaned in toward the camera, her face swelling on the screen until Holden could see the fine detail of every wrinkle and blemish.

“If Fred is showing this to you, Holden, know that your home planet appreciates your service. Also try not to put your dick in this. It’s fucked enough already.”

Fred stopped the recording and leaned back in his chair. “So…”

“What the hell is she talking about?” Holden said. “What’s New Terra?”

“New Terra is the unimaginative name they gave to the first of the explored worlds in the gate network.”

“No, I thought that was Ilus.”

“Ilus,” Fred said with a sigh, “is the name the Belters who landed there gave it. Royal Charter Energy, the corporation with the contract to do the initial exploration, call it New Terra.”

“Can they do that? People already live there. Everyone calls it Ilus.”

“Everyone here calls it Ilus. You see the problem,” Fred said. He took a long sip of his coffee, buying himself time to think. “No one was ready for this. A shipful of Ganymede refugees commandeered a Mao-Kwik heavy freighter and blew through the Ring at high speed as soon as the first probe results came out. Before we’d had time to pick up the pieces from our initial incursion. Before the military blockade. Before Medina was ready to enforce a safe speed limit in the Ring space. They came through so fast we didn’t even have time to hail them.”

“Let me guess,” Holden said. “The Ilus Gate is on the opposite side from the Sol Gate.”

“Not quite. They were smart enough to come in at an angle to avoid slamming into the Ring Station at three hundred thousand kph.”

“So they’ve been living on Ilus for a year, and suddenly RCE shows up and tells them that, oops, it’s really their planet?”