Cibola Burn (The Expanse) by James S. A. Corey Read Free Book Online Page A

to dock?”
    “Captain wants to rush back for those soil transports at Tycho,” Amos said, his voice somehow managing to be neutral and mocking at the same time.
    “I could really use a few days —” Naomi started.
    “I promise we’ll take a week on Tycho when we get back. I just don’t want to spend my vacation time, you know” – he pointed at the viewscreens around them displaying the dead sphere of the Ring Station and the glittering gates – “here.”
    “Chicken,” Naomi said.
    “Yep.”
    The comm station flashed an incoming tightbeam alert at them. Amos, who was closest, tapped the screen.
    “ Rocinante here,” he said.
    “ Rocinante ,” a familiar voice replied. “Medina Station here.”
    “Fred,” Holden said with a sigh. “Problem?”
    “You guys aren’t landing? I’m betting you could use a few —”
    “Can I help you with something?” Holden said over the top of him.
    “Yeah, you can. Call me after you’ve docked. I have business to discuss.”
    “Dammit,” Holden said after he’d killed the connection. “You ever get the sense that the universe is out to get you?”
    “Sometimes I get the sense that the universe is out to get you ,” Amos said with a grin. “It’s fun to watch.”
    “They changed the name again,” Alex said, zooming in on the spinning station that had until recently been called Behemoth . “Medina Station. Good name for it.”
    “Doesn’t that mean ‘fortress’?” Naomi said with a frown. “Too martial, maybe.”
    “Naw,” Alex said. “Well, sort of. It was the walled part of a city. But it sort of became the social center too. Narrow streets designed to keep invaders out also kept motorized traffic or horse-drawn carts out. So you could only get around by walkin’. So the street vendors gathered there. It turned into the place to shop and congregate and drink tea. It’s a safe place where people gather. Good name for the station.”
    “You’ve put a lot of thought into this,” Holden said.
    Alex shrugged. “It’s interestin’, the evolution of that ship and its names. Started out as the Nauvoo . A place of refuge, right? Big city in space. Became the Behemoth , the biggest baddest warship in the system. Now it’s Medina Station. A gathering place. Same ship, three different names, three different things.”
    “Same ship,” Holden said, feeling a little surly as he instructed the Rocinante to begin the docking approach.
    “Names matter, boss,” Amos said after a moment, a strange look on his big face. “Names change everything.”
    ~
    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,