Cibola Burn (Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  The rest of the security team brought their rifles to bear on him. Holden saw Amos drop his right hand toward his gun, then stepped in front of him and yelled, “Stop!”

  “We’re taking him in,” Murtry said, pointing at Basia. “One way or the other. We’ll let the assault on one of my people slide for now. Emotions running hot, and all.”

  “We’re all leaving anyway,” Holden said, keeping his voice low, appealing to Murtry rather than the crowd.

  “You have no authority to order anyone to leave,” Murtry replied. “I hoped we were done with that.”

  “In the meantime,” Holden continued as though Murtry hadn’t spoken, “the UN is taking custody of this man. Basia. As part of our investigation. He’ll be secure on my ship, he won’t be a threat to your people down here, and when we all get back you can present your evidence and have him arrested.”

  “ ‘Get back,’ ” Murtry said with a lazy smile. “Just going to keep him in a holding cell for the next few years? Because I accused him of something?”

  “If I have to,” Holden said. “Because I don’t believe for a second that you wouldn’t kill him.”

  Murtry shrugged. “Okay. He’s your baggage, then. Just keep him off my planet.”

  Basia looked stunned, his eyes focused on nothing in particular. The colonists began organizing a firefighting detail to put the blaze out. Murtry and his team stood and watched, not offering to help, a visible reminder of the threat they presented next to the violence of their handiwork.

  Holden headed back into town, Basia and Amos in tow. He patted his pockets looking for his hand terminal before remembering he’d dropped it on the run out to the fight. He’d never find it in the dark, so he borrowed Amos’ and called the ship.

  “Naomi,” he said once she’d picked up. “Bring the Roci down to the landing area. We’re going to need you to offload our heavier armor and some bigger firepower.”

  “This doesn’t sound good,” she said.

  “It’s not. Have you heard back from the UN or Fred yet?”

  “Nothing yet. I take it this means RCE and the Ganymede folks aren’t in a big hurry to leave?”

  “No,” Holden said with a heavy sigh. “No, they’d rather stay here and kill each other right up until the alien shit starts turning them into spare parts.”

  “And you?” she said. She meant was he coming up the well too. It was the sane thing to do.

  “Not yet,” he said. “If it escalates any more, maybe.”

  “ ‘It’ the aliens or ‘it’ the people?”

  “Right?”

  “Alex has seen a few more power spikes, and there’s more movement, but it’s pretty far south of you. If it starts looking more interesting, I’ll let you know.”

  “Thank you. Oh, and you’ll be picking up a passenger.”

  “Que?”

  “It’s complicated, but we’re putting him on the Roci because he isn’t safe down here anymore. I owe this guy, Naomi. He tried to save my life. Take good care of him.”

  “Okay.”

  “And honey?” Holden said, unable to keep the worry out of his voice. “When you get back up, keep a close eye on the Israel. I think things might be about to go all the way bad down here, and when they do, they may go bad up there too.”

  “Ha!” Naomi said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. “Let ’em try.”

  Chapter Nineteen: Havelock

  T

  he corridor stretched forty meters between the recycling tanks and the secondary machine shop with hatches inset every ten meters. Open lifts at either end led to environmental control fore and hydroponics aft. The age of the Israel showed not only in the design of the walls and the grating of the floor, but also in the green-gray finish of the ceramic. Harsh edges at the doorways marked where safety design had improved in the decades since the ship first flew out past the orbit of Mars. A white scar splashed across one wall where something drastic had happened in some previous era of the ship’s history and been patched like painting over graffiti. Havelock fought the urge to press himself into the corner nearest the doorway.

  It was hard. His species had evolved in the gravity well of Earth, had grown and developed in it. His hindbrain told him that pressure meant safety. The angry whispers of the men in the hall set his heart tripping over faster, and the wall, centimeters from his back, seemed to pull at him like a magnet. It was an error waiting to happen. Lean in, push against the wall, and it would push back, sending him out into the open air of the corridor. And the firing lines. The second law of thermodynamics as applied to gunfights.

  “Clear,” one of the engineers said, and Havelock was torn between pleasure and annoyance. Not clear, he thought. They hadn’t seen him, so they thought he wasn’t there. He held the gun at his leg, stayed still. Waited. Didn’t hug the wall.

  The first man who floated by didn’t notice him until he’d already been shot. Havelock’s paint round bloomed orange against the man’s chest. The one behind him had already launched, his body sailing between one handhold and the next, unable to change his trajectory. Havelock hit him twice, once in the leg, then in the belly. In a real fight, there would be blood in the air now. Fine red droplets spinning into orbs and already coalescing and beginning to clot. The third man was still far enough down the corridor that Havelock didn’t have a clear line of sight. Half a dozen blue paint rounds hissed past him, splattering the ceramic bulkhead. Suppressing fire. Not a bad plan, but there was no one left to exploit it.

  Havelock pulled gently at the handhold behind him to keep from drifting out, reloaded his pistol, and counted incoming rounds. The “dead” engineer floated in the corridor, a sour expression on his face. Havelock counted fifteen rounds, then there was a pause and the slick metallic sound of the pistol ejecting the paint round magazine. Havelock pulled a few centimeters forward, looking down the hall. The last man – Williams – hadn’t even taken cover while he fumbled to reload his gun. Havelock fired three times, hitting him only once. The accuracy on the pistols stank, but it was enough to make his point. The last engineer barked out an obscenity.

  “All right,” Havelock said into his hand terminal. “That’s a wrap, guys. Let’s get the cleanup crew out, and meet back in the conference room in thirty.”

  It was hard to judge the training sessions. On the one hand, they had been going for eight days now, and they were not ready for real action. The engineers weren’t soldiers. The three who’d had some training earlier in life were so out of practice that they were worse than the absolute beginners. At least the novices knew they didn’t know anything.

  And on the other hand, they were getting better faster than Havelock had expected. With another week or ten days, they’d be at least as competent as a squad of rookies. Maybe more.

  Security trainees were driven by any number of things – the need for a job, an idealistic view of helping people, sometimes just a narcissistic love of violence. The engineers weren’t like that. They were more focused, more driven, and there was a palpable sense of the team against the enemy. Murtry’s defeat of the terrorist cell downstairs left them at once excited and edgy, and Havelock didn’t see anything wrong with the bloodthirst, so long as it was channeled and controlled.

  For the next half hour, the engineers and the security team – Havelock and two others from this skeleton crew – went through the corridors, holds, and locks cleaning up the mess from the exercise. The paint polymerized quickly, peeling off the walls and grates without flaking much or leaving fragments on the float that someone could breathe in. The engineers had also manufactured sets of personal vacuuming systems that filtered everything from tiny particles of the paint casing to volatile molecules out of the air. They laughed and joked and traded friendly insults as they worked, like junior belts cleaning a dojang. Havelock hadn’t intended the cleanup as a team-building exercise, but it worked well enough that he was starting to tell himself that he had.

  The conference room where they had the or
ientation before the exercise and the postmortem afterward had been designed for the false gravity of thrust. An oblong table was bolted to the floor with crash couches around it that the engineers didn’t use. Havelock didn’t know how the decision had been made to ignore the table and rotate the consensus for up and down ninety degrees, but every meeting was like that now. The engineers and security floated against the walls or in the open air, the “floor” to their right, and Havelock took his place by the main doors.

  “All right,” he said, and the murmur of conversations stopped. “What did we learn?”

  “Not to trust motherfucking Gibbs when he tells us the corridor’s clear.” Laughter bubbled after, but it wasn’t angry or mean. Even the man being mocked was smiling.

  “Wrong answer,” Havelock said with a grin. “The right answer is don’t hurry when you’re clearing a space. We have a natural tendency to see an empty space and think it’s safe. Doors and corners are always dangerous, because you’re moving into something without being sure what’s there. By the time you see the enemy, you’re exposed to them.”

  “Sir?”

  Havelock pointed to the woman with the raised hand. “Yes.”

  “Sir, is there an algorithm for this? Because if we could get some kind of best-practice flowchart that we could study when we’re not here, I think it would help us a lot.”

  “We could classify them by the types of doors or corners,” someone else said. “And what plane we could use to approach them. Seem to me like we’d be better off shifting the axis so that whatever we’re coming to reads as down.”

  Havelock let them talk for a while. It was funny, hearing the tactics of small-unit assault analyzed in terms of engineering, but those were his crew now. They were learning to solve violence like an equation: not to eliminate it, but to understand it fully.

  “What I don’t understand,” Chief Engineer Koenen said, “is why we’re looking at the Barbapiccola at all.”

  The eyes of the assembled team turned toward Havelock, looking for an answer. Or at least a response. A surprising nervousness crawled up his throat, and he chuckled.

  “They’re the bad guys,” he said.

  “The Barbapiccola is an unarmed freighter with a standing crew of maybe a hundred people that requires a shuttle to transfer from the surface,” the chief engineer said. “The Rocinante runs with less than a skeleton crew, half of which are already off the ship. It seems to me that we have a lower-risk, higher-value option here.”

  A murmur of agreement passed through the room. Havelock shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “First thing is just what you said. The Barbapiccola’s unarmed. If things don’t go well, the worst we can expect in retaliation is a strongly worded letter. The Rocinante was a state-of-the-art Martian warship before Holden took her to the OPA. God knows what modifications they’ve made since then. She’s got a full rack of torpedoes, PDCs, and a keel-mounted rail gun. If the crew on the Rocinante see us as a threat, they can end us, and there’s really nothing we can do about it.”

  “But if we were the ones with that firepower —” Koenen began.

  “We’d be fine as long as we stayed here,” Havelock said. “But as soon as we go back through the ring gate, there’s a whole mess of lawyers, treaties, and other ships with even bigger guns. If we have to commandeer the Barbapiccola, at least we have a legal argument to make.”

  The engineers groaned and shook their heads. Legal arguments were another phrase for bullshit to them, but Havelock pressed on.

  “For one thing, the ore they’re carrying is RCE property as long as the UN charter stands. For another, if they bring any of the colonists up from the surface, we can argue they’re aiding and abetting murder.”

  “Argue?” one of the men in the back of the group said. The laughter that followed was bleak.

  “Being true makes it a strong argument,” Havelock said. “Go after the Rocinante, and we look like everything they say we are. If we stand tough, we can protect ourselves and still win the long game.”

  “Long game’s great if you’re around long enough to play it,” the man at the back said, but his tone of voice told Havelock that they’d seen the sense in what he said. For the time being, anyway.

  Ivers Thorrsen was a geosensor analyst with advanced degrees from universities on Luna and Ganymede. He made more in a month than Havelock would in a year of working security. Also, he was a Belter. Growing up in microgravity hadn’t affected him as much as Havelock had seen in other people. Thorrsen’s head was maybe a little big for his body, his spine and legs maybe a little long and thin. With enough exercise and steroids, the man could almost have passed for an Earther. Not that it mattered. Everyone on the Israel knew what everyone else was. Back when they’d left home, the differences hadn’t mattered. Not much.

  “In addition to the energy spikes, there are twenty heat upwellings that we’ve seen so far,” he said, pointing to the rendered sphere of New Terra on Havelock’s desk display. “They’ve all appeared in the last eighty hours, and so far we don’t have any idea what they are.”

  Havelock scratched his head. The cells in the brig were empty, so there was no one to overhear them. No need to be polite.

  “Were you expecting me to have a hypothesis? Because I was under the impression that we were here in order to find a bunch of stuff we didn’t know what it was. That you’ve seen something you don’t understand seems pretty much par for the course.”

  The Belter’s lips pressed thin and pale.

  “This could be important. It could be nothing. My point is that I have to find out. I’m busy with important work. I can’t spend all my time dealing with distractions.”

  “All right,” Havelock said.

  “This is the third day running that someone has sprayed urine in my locker. Three times, you understand? I’m trying to get my gear not to smell like piss instead of running the numbers.”

  Havelock sighed and canceled out his display. New Terra and its mysterious hot spots vanished. “Look, I understand why you don’t like it. I’d be cheesed off too. But you have to cut them a little slack. People are bored and they’re under pressure. It’s natural to get a little rowdy. It’ll pass.”

  Thorrsen folded his arms across his chest, his scowl deepening. “A little rowdy? That’s what you see? I am the only Belter on my team, and I am the only one getting —”

  “No. Look, just no, all right? Things are tense already. If you want me to, I’ll put a monitor on the locker and let people know they need to cool it, but let’s not make this into a Belters against the inner planets thing.”

  “I’m not making it into anything.”

  “With all respect, I think you are,” Havelock said. “And the more you try to make this into a big deal, the more it’s going to come back and bite you on the ass.”

  Thorrsen’s rage was palpable. Havelock shifted slightly, pushing himself higher in the direction that they’d temporarily chosen as up. It was an old trick he’d learned back when he’d worked with Star Helix. Humanity might have gone up out of the gravity wells, but the sense of being taller, of establishing dominance, was buried too deeply in the human animal for a little thing like null g to erase it. Thorrsen took a deep, shuddering breath, and for a moment Havelock wondered if he was going to take a swing at him. He didn’t want to lock the analyst in a cell for the night. But if it came to it, he wouldn’t mind.

  “I’ll put a monitor on your locker, and I’ll send out a general announcement that people need to put a sock in it. No one’ll piss on your stuff again, and you can get back to work. That’s what you want, right?”

  “When you write your announcement, is it going to say that they should stop pulling pranks, or that they should stop harassing Belters?”

  “I think you know the answer to that.”

  Thorrsen’s shoulders hunched, defeated. Havelock nodded. It struck him, not for the first time, that confrontations were like a dance. Certain moves required certain
responses, and most of it happened in the lower parts of the brain that language might not even be aware of. Thorrsen’s hunch was an offer of submission, and his nod accepted it, and Thorrsen probably didn’t even know it had happened.

  Certainly didn’t, in fact, because his rational mind kept on dieseling even though everything that needed talking about was already decided.

  “If you were the only Earther and it was Belters doing this, you’d feel different about it.”

  “Thank you for letting me know about the problem,” Havelock said. “I’ll see it’s addressed.”

  Thorrsen pushed off from the desk and sailed gracefully through the air, vanishing into the corridor. Havelock sighed, opened his desk display again, and paged through the ship reports. The truth was that incidents were on the rise. Most of it was little things. Complaints of petty infractions of corporate policies. Accusations of hoarding or sexual misconduct. One of the organic chemists had been making euphorics. The ship psychiatric counselor was issuing increasingly strident warnings about something he called internal stratification, which just sounded like social politics as usual to Havelock. He signed off on all the reports.