Cibola Burn (Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  So Basia and his team worked the metal rails, pulling them out of the fabricator gleaming and new in the harsh white lights. They loaded them on handcarts and dragged them into the mining pit. Then unloaded them by hand and welded them into the growing railway system. It was the kind of physical labor people had mostly stopped doing in their mechanized age. And the process of welding inside an atmosphere was totally unlike welding in vacuum, so he had a new skill set to develop. The combination of mental challenge and physical toil left him exhausted. His world narrowed to the next task, the ache in his hands, and the distant promise of sleep. There was no time to dwell on other things.

  Like being a murderer. Like the corporate security forces sniffing around for him and Coop and the others. Like the guilt he felt every time Lucia lied to them and said she didn’t know anything that would help.

  Later, when he sat in the crew hut with his muscles twitching and cramping with fatigue, trying to sleep with the daylight streaming in through the windows, then he could revisit the death of the shuttle over and over again. Think about what he could have done to disable the explosives faster than he did. How he could have tackled Coop, taken the radio away from him. If his mood was especially bad, he would think about how if he’d just listened to his wife, none of it would have happened in the first place. On those days he felt such shame that he hated her a little for it. Then hated himself for blaming her. The pillow he pressed to his eyes kept the sunlight out, but not the images of the shuttle exploding over and over again, screaming like a dying beast as it went down.

  But during the night, while he worked, he had some measure of peace.

  So when Coop appeared at the work site, sauntering into the pit like he didn’t have a care in the world, Basia almost hit him in the face.

  “Hey, mate,” Coop said. Basia dropped his hammer, shoulders slumping.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “So we got a thing,” Coop continued, throwing one companionable arm around Basia’s shoulders. “Need mi primero on it.”

  That couldn’t be good. “What thing?”

  Coop guided him away from the work site, smiling and nodding at the few other night-shift crew they passed. Just two chums out for a walk and a conversation. When they were out of earshot of everyone, he said, “Seen that RCE girl going up to the ruins. Sent Jacek to check on it.”

  “Sent Jacek,” Basia echoed. Coop nodded.

  “Good kid. Reliable.”

  Basia stopped, pulling his arm away. “Don’t —” Involve my son in this. Before he could get the words out, Coop waved it off and kept talking.

  “Está important.” Coop stepped close, voice lowering. “She went up to the ruins, then went straight to the RCE goons. Jacek says they’re planning to wait for us up there. Catch the resistance red-handed.”

  “Then we don’t go back,” Basia said. It seemed so simple. No reason to panic.

  “You crazy, primo? Toda alles been up there. Trace evidence up the ass. They wait long enough, they get bored and bring a real crime scene team down, we all done. All of us, y veh unless you stopped shedding skin when you were there.”

  “Then what?”

  “We go up first. A flare on that blasting powder, boom. No more evidence.”

  “When?”

  Coop laughed. “What you think? Next week some time? Now, coyo. Got to go now. Mediator’s landing in hours-not-days. Don’t want this to be what he sees when he steps off the ship, do you? You a team lead, you can take one of the carts. We got to get that shit and get gone.” Coop snapped his fingers impatiently. “Jetzt.”

  Coop spoke about insanity like blowing up their stash of mining explosives with such an air of self-assurance and certainty, Basia found it hard to argue. Sure, blowing up the alien ruins was crazy. But Coop was right. If they found the explosives and traced them back to Basia, they’d know. He didn’t want to, but he had to. So he would.

  “Okay,” he said and walked toward the cart charging station. Only one was left, and because the universe was a cruel and mocking place, it was the same one he’d been driving the night of the bombing. It still had the dents and scorch marks it had picked up that night. The scorch marks everyone in the colony was careful not to ask about.

  Coop waited impatiently for him to unlock it and back it out of the stall, then hopped in and started tapping out a fast drumbeat on the plastic dashboard. “Let’s go let’s go let’s go.”

  Basia went.

  Halfway to the alien ruins, they came across four more of Coop’s inner circle. Pete and Scotty and Cate and Ibrahim. No Zadie. Her little boy had come down with a nasty eye infection, and she wasn’t around much lately. Cate had a duffel bag she threw into the back of the cart with a metallic thump, then the four of them climbed in after it.

  “That the stuff?” Coop asked, and Cate nodded and slapped the side of the cart to let Basia know he could drive. Basia didn’t ask what the stuff was. Too late to start questioning.

  The ruins looked as dark and deserted as they ever did, but Coop made Basia drive the long way round to come at the site from the side opposite the town. “Just to be safe,” he said.

  When Cate pulled open the duffel, Basia wasn’t surprised to see it filled with guns. The Barbapiccola hadn’t been a warship. They hadn’t left Ganymede with a great store of weapons, but what there was had come down to the surface when First Landing was begun. This looked like most of them. Cate pulled out a shotgun and started loading fat plastic shells into it. She was a tall, rawboned woman with a wide jaw and a permanent frown line between her eyes. She looked natural holding a gun. Like a soldier. When Basia picked one up, a short-barreled automatic pistol of some kind, he felt like a child playing dress-up.

  “You’ll need this, killer,” Ibrahim said and tossed him a narrow metallic object. It took Basia several seconds to realize it was the magazine for his pistol. It only took two tries to slide it in the correct way. Blow the explosives. Clear the site. Destroy the evidence. That had never really been the plan, and somewhere in his gut, he’d known.

  While the rest of the group finished readying their weapons, Basia stood a few meters from the cart, staring up at the night sky. One of the points of light was the drive tail of the Rocinante, the ship Jim Holden was flying in on. The mediator. The one who was supposed to keep the colonists and RCE people from killing each other. He wondered how far out Holden was. He wondered if the man knew he was already too late. Too late for the second time. Holden had been too late on Ganymede too.

  Basia’s son Katoa hadn’t been the only one who was sick. Whose immune system had faltered and failed under the thousand different stressors of life outside a gravity well. There had been a group of them who’d come to Doctor Strickland. The man who was supposed to know the answers. Katoa, Tobias, Annamarie, Mei. Mei, who had lived. Who James Holden had rescued from the labs on Io.

  Holden had been there when they found Katoa too. Basia had never met the man. Had only ever seen him on news broadcasts. But Mei’s father had been a friend. He’d sent a message telling Basia what had happened, and that he’d been with Holden when they found the boy’s body.

  Why one and not the other? Praxidike’s Mei, but not his Katoa. Why did some people die and others live? Where was the justice in it? The stars he looked up at didn’t have any answers for him.

  Holden had been too late to stop what was happening on Ilus right now before anyone had ever set foot on it. Before the rings opened. Before Venus bloomed. If Katoa were still alive, Basia wouldn’t have come here, and if he had, he wouldn’t have stayed.

  It was a strange thought. Surreal. Basia tried to picture the man he’d be in that other timeline, and couldn’t. He looked down at the ugly black gun in his hand. I wouldn’t be doing this.

  “Game’s on,” someone said. Basia turned around. It was Coop. “Get back in it, coyo.”

  “Dui,” Basia said, and took a deep breath. The night air was cold and crisp and tasted vaguely of dirt from that afternoon’s du
st storm. “Dui.”

  “Follow on,” Coop said, then headed off to the ruins at a slow trot. Cate and Ibrahim and Pete and Scotty followed, clutching their guns in what they probably thought was a military style. Basia carried his pistol by the barrel, worried about getting his fingers anywhere near the trigger.

  They entered the massive alien structure through one of the many openings in its side. Windows? Doors? No aliens left to say. Inside, the light coming off their flashlights and work lamps reflected off the smooth, strangely angled walls. The material looked like stone, was smooth as glass, and turned from black to a rosy pink where the light hit it. Basia trailed his fingers along it.

  Coop waved for them to stop, and then ducked down and crab-walked over to a windowlike opening in one wall. He peeked over and dropped back down, motioning for the group to join him. Basia hunkered down with the rest.

  “See?” Coop whispered, pointing at the next room beyond the window. “Knew they’d set up there.”

  Cate popped up for a second to look, then crouched down again with a nod. “I see five. Reeve, the boss, and four of his goons. Sidearms and stun guns. They’re all looking the wrong way.”

  “Too easy, boss,” Scotty whispered with a grin, and clicked off the safety on his rifle. Cate slid open the breech on her shotgun just far enough to make sure there was a shell loaded. Coop held up his big automatic pistol in one hand and yanked back the slide. Then on his other hand he raised three fingers and started silently counting down.

  Basia looked at each of them in turn. They looked flushed and excited. All except Pete, who stared back at Basia, his skin looking a sickly green in the pale light, and his head shaking back and forth in a silent negation. Basia could practically hear the man thinking, I don’t want to do this.

  Something shifted in Basia’s mind, and the world seemed to snap into focus with an almost physical sensation. He’d been following Coop in a daze since the moment the man showed up at the work site. And now they were about to shoot a bunch of RCE security people.

  “Wait,” he said. Coop answered by standing up, pointing his pistol into the next room, and firing.

  Basia’s mind stuttered. Time skipped.

  Coop, yelling obscenities and firing his pistol over and over into the next room. Basia is lying on his back on the floor looking up as shell casings tumble out of Coop’s gun and bounce across the ground next to him. They appear to be moving so slow that Basia can read the manufacturer’s stamp. TruFire 7.5mm they say.

  Skip.

  He is standing next to Cate. He has no memory of getting up. She is firing her shotgun, and the sound of it going off in the tight space is deafening. He wonders if he will suffer permanent hearing loss. In the next room, three men and two women in RCE security uniforms are scrambling to take cover, or draw weapons, or return fire. They have looks of panic on their faces. They shout to each other as they move. He doesn’t recognize any of the words. One of them fires a pistol, and a bullet slams into the wall near Cate. A piece of the bullet or a piece of the wall punches a small hole in her cheek. She continues to fire as if the injury is beneath notice.

  Skip.

  An RCE security woman clutches at her chest as blood fountains out of it. Her face is pale and terrified. He is just a meter away from her, standing next to Scotty. Scotty shoots her again, this time in the neck. She falls backward in slow motion, hands reaching up to the wound but going limp and lifeless halfway there, and she just looks like she’s shrugging.

  Skip.

  He stands by himself in a corridor. He doesn’t know where it is or how he got there. He hears gunfire behind him, and screams. An RCE security man is a few meters ahead of him, holding a stun gun. The man has dark skin and bright green eyes, wide with fear. Basia suddenly remembers that the man’s name is Zeb, though he can’t remember why he knows that. Zeb throws the stun gun at him and reaches for the pistol he still has in a holster on his hip. The stun gun bounces off Basia’s head, opening up a three-centimeter gash that begins bleeding heavily, but he doesn’t feel it. He sees Zeb pulling his pistol, and without thinking about it he points his own gun at him. He’s surprised to see that he’s holding it correctly, by the handle, with his finger on the trigger. He doesn’t remember doing that. He pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. He’s about to pull it a second time when there is a loud bang from behind him, and Zeb begins to fall, blood gushing from his forehead. He waits for the blackout.

  There was no skipping. No respite. No escape.

  “Good job,” Coop said behind him. “That one almost got away.”

  Basia turned slowly, still in a dream. A fugue. A dissociative state. The impulse to lift his hand one more time, to let the violence carry him just one step farther and shoot Coop almost lifted his arm. Almost, but not quite. Zeb bled out on the floor. The sounds of gunfire stopped.

  Behind him, the rest of his group whooped and hollered in happy and excited voices. Basia looked at his gun, remembering how they work in action videos. You put the magazine with the bullets in it in the gun, and then you have to put a bullet in the chamber. He remembered Cate pulling back the breech on her shotgun. Coop pulling back the slide on his automatic. Basia’s gun wouldn’t have fired no matter how many times he pulled the trigger.

  Zeb stopped bleeding. That was almost me, Basia thought, but the thought had no emotional content yet. No weight. It was like a puff of acrid smoke passing through his mind, and then gone again.

  “Help us drag these bodies out back, primo,” Coop said, patting him on the back. “Zadie’s washing the place down with corrosives and digestive enzymes, kill the evidence, but they ain’t gonna eat the big chunks, eh?”

  Basia helped. It took them several hours to bury the corpses of the five women and men in the hard-packed dirt behind the alien ruins. Coop assured them that the next dust storm would remove all signs that anyone had dug there. The RCE people would just disappear without a trace.

  Scotty and Pete dragged the rest of their explosives out of the ruins and loaded them on the cart. Then they walked back to town with Cate and Ibrahim. Cate carried her duffel of guns over one shoulder. Basia’s pistol was in it again, never having been fired.

  “We had to do this,” Coop said once they’d left. Basia didn’t know if he was telling Basia that or himself. Basia nodded anyway.

  “You set this up. You knew you were going to kill them, and you made me part of it.”

  Coop gave him a Belter shrug and a cruel smile. “You knew that coming out, coyo. You maybe pretended not to, but you knew.”

  “Never again,” Basia said. “And if anyone in my family is hurt because of this, I will kill you myself.”

  He drove back to the mine, then walked to his house. The sun was just coming up when he finally stumbled into his tiny bathroom. The man in the mirror didn’t look like a killer, but his hands were covered with blood. He started trying to wash them off.

  Chapter Ten: Havelock

  A

  bout five hours before – when Havelock had been halfway through his ten-hour shift – a man dressed in an orange-and-purple suit so ugly it approached violence sat down on a couch in a video studio on Mars. Havelock floated against his restraints, considering him. Strapping in was second nature now, even though it felt a little silly. The orbital space around New Terra was essentially empty, and the chance of a sudden acceleration was almost nil. It was just a habit. On the little monitor set into the cabin wall, the young man shook the feed host’s hand and smiled at the camera.

  It’s been a while since you came by, Mister Curvelo,” the host said. “Thank you so much for coming back.”

  “Good to be here, Monica,” the man said, nodding like he’d been caught at something. “Good to be back.”

  “So I got a chance to play the new game, and I have to say it seems like a real departure from your previous work.”

  “Yeah,” the man said shortly. His jaw was tight.

  “There’s been a certain amount of controversy,�
� the host said. Her smile was a little sharper. “You want to talk about that?”

  It was physically impossible for Havelock to sink back into his couch, but psychologically it was a snap.

  “Monica, look,” the man in the ugly suit said, “what we’re exploring here are the consequences of violence. Everybody’s looking at that first section, and they don’t think about how everything comes after.”

  Havelock’s hand terminal chimed. He muted the newsfeed and took the connection.

  “Havelock,” Murtry said, “I have a call I need you to take.”

  His voice was so calm and controlled, Havelock felt his breath go shallow. It was the sound of trouble, and his mind clutched at the first fear that came. The Rocinante and Jim Holden, the UN mediator, was about ten hours from the end of its deceleration burn. Almost here. If something had gone wrong with it…

  “Something happened downstairs,” Murtry said. “I’ve got Cassie on the horn, and I need you to keep her from melting down while I talk to the captain.”