Cibola Burn (Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  “Just a couple more minutes, chief,” Amos said. A moment later came a high-altitude thunderclap. The Rocinante, dropping through the atmosphere faster than sound, descending on them all like the angel of judgment.

  It seemed unreal.

  “I’m happy having you two here with me right now,” he told Lucia. It wasn’t even a lie.

  “Find a way to come back to us,” she said.

  “I don’t know what I can do.”

  “Find a way,” she repeated, making each word its own sentence. “You do that, Basia. Don’t make me grow old on this world alone.”

  Basia felt something thick blocking his throat, and he had trouble breathing around the pain in his stomach. “If you need to find someone…”

  “I did,” Lucia said. “I found someone. Now he needs to find a way to come back to me.”

  Basia didn’t trust himself to speak. Worried that if he opened his mouth it would turn into a sob. He didn’t want Murtry to see that. So instead he put his cuffed arms around Lucia and pulled her tight and squeezed until neither of them could breathe.

  “Come back,” she whispered one last time. Anything she might have said after that was drowned out by the roar of the Rocinante landing. A wall of dust blew past, stinging the bare skin on Basia’s neck. Lucia pressed her face into his chest, and Jacek clung to his back.

  “Time to go,” Amos shouted.

  Basia let go of Lucia, hugged his boy to his chest one last time, the last time maybe, and turned away from them both to board his prison.

  “Welcome aboard, Mister Merton,” a tall, pretty woman said when the inner airlock door opened. She wore a simple jumpsuit of gray and black with the name Nagata stenciled over the breast pocket. Naomi Nagata, the executive officer of the Rocinante. She had long black hair pulled into a ponytail, the same way Felcia had worn hers when she was a young girl. On Naomi it looked more like a functional choice than an aesthetic one. She didn’t appear to be armed, and Basia felt himself relax a degree.

  He handed her the key to his restraints and she unlocked them. “Basia, please,” he said as she worked. “I’m just a welder. No one has ever called me Mister Merton.”

  “Welder?” Naomi asked. It didn’t sound like she was making pleasantries. She took the restraints, rolled them into a ball, and secured them in a locker. Shipboard discipline, where any free object became a projectile during maneuvers. “Because we always have a repair list.”

  The compartment they stood in looked like a storage room laid on its side. The lockers ran parallel to the ground, rather than vertically, and there was a small hatch on either wall, with what looked like a ladder running across the floor. Naomi tapped on a panel on one wall and said, “Strapping in down here, Alex, get us off this dustball before my knees start leaking.”

  A disembodied voice with a Martian Mariner Valley twang said, “Roger that, boss. Up in thirty ticks, so get belted in.”

  Naomi pulled on a strap on the floor and a seat folded out. It was designed so a person would have to lie on the floor on their back to put their butt on the seat. A variety of restraining belts folded out with it. She pointed at another strap in the floor and said, “Better get with it. We lift in thirty seconds.”

  Basia pulled out his own seat and awkwardly lay on the ground to get into the straps. Naomi helped him buckle in.

  The Martian voice counted down from five, and the floor lurched as the ship lifted off. There was a disorienting rotation, and the floor became a wall behind him and he was actually sitting on the cushion he’d pulled out. He became very grateful for the straps holding him in place.

  Then a giant roared at the bottom of the ship, and an invisible hand crushed Basia into his chair.

  “Sorry,” Naomi said, her voice given a false vibrato by the rumbling of the ship. “Alex is an old combat pilot, he only flies at full speed.”

  As always when flying out of a gravity well, Basia was surprised by how quickly it was over. A few minutes of crushing gravity and the roar of the engines, then with almost no transition at all, he was floating in his straps in silence.

  “All done,” Naomi said as she began unbuckling. “Might be a few short maneuvering bumps as Alex gets us into the orbit he wants, but those yellow lights on the wall will flash fifteen seconds before any burn, so just grab a strap and hang on.”

  “Am I a prisoner?” Basia asked.

  “What?”

  “I’m just wondering how this works. Am I restricted to my room or is there a brig or something?”

  Naomi floated for a moment staring at him, forehead crinkling with what looked like genuine puzzlement. “Are you a bad guy?”

  “Bad guy?”

  “Are you going to try to hurt anyone on this ship? Destroy our property? Steal things?”

  “Definitely not,” Basia said.

  “Because the way I heard it, you turned on your friends in order to save our captain’s life.”

  For a moment, Basia felt something like vertigo and then pride or the promise of it. And then he remembered the concussion of the heavy shuttle rattling him and Coop’s voice. We all remember who mashed that button. He shook his head.

  Are you a bad guy?

  Naomi Nagata waited for him to speak, but he didn’t have words for the guilt and shame and anger and sorrow. In time she lifted a fist, the Belter’s physical idiom for a nod. He lifted his in reply.

  “Make yourself at home.” She pointed at the hatch to his right. “That’s aft. That way is the crew decks and the galley. The galley is open whenever. We’ve got a cabin set up for you, it’s tiny but private. If you keep going aft and hit the machine shop you’ve gone too far. For safety reasons don’t go into the machine shop or engineering.”

  “Okay, I promise.”

  “Don’t promise, just don’t go in there. The other way” – she pointed at the hatch on his left – “takes you up to the ops deck. You can come up there if you want, but don’t touch anything unless we tell you to.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m headed up there right now. You’re welcome to tag along.”

  “Okay.”

  Naomi stared at him for a second, an unreadable expression on her face. “You’re not our first, you know.”

  “First?”

  “First prisoner transport,” Naomi said. “Jim has this thing about fair trials. It means that we’ve done our share of taking people to court even when an airlock and mysteriously erased records made a lot more sense.”

  Basia couldn’t stop himself from giving the airlock door a nervous look. “Okay.”

  “And,” she continued, “you’re the first one I can remember that he specifically told me to be nice to.”

  “He did?”

  “He owes you one. I do too,” Naomi said, then gestured at the ladder and the deck hatch in a you-first motion. Basia pulled himself up to the hatch and it whined open. Naomi pulled herself along behind him. “So you can get comfortable. But the terrified mousey thing you’re doing right now will bug the shit out of me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Still doing it.”

  The deck above the storage and airlock area was a large compartment filled with gimbaled chairs and wall-mounted screens and control panels. A dark-skinned man with thinning black hair and a middle-aged beer belly was strapped into one of the chairs. He turned to face them as they floated into the room.

  “All good?” he asked Naomi. He was the source of the Mariner Valley voice.

  “Seems to be,” Naomi said, and pushed Basia into the closest chair then strapped him in. He allowed it to happen, feeling like an infant being manhandled by his mother. “Didn’t get any face time with Jim. He wanted this fellow off the ground as fast as possible.”

  “Well, can’t say I was lookin’ to stay longer.”

  “I know. Gravity wells,” Naomi said with a shudder. “I don’t know how people live like that.”

  “I was thinking more about the bugs all coming back to life. I got five more
power spikes since the last time we checked.”

  “I was trying not to think about those.”

  “Should have gotten Holden and Amos both,” Alex said. “And anyone else with sense.”

  “Just keep an eye. If anything gets close, I want them to know about it.”

  Once she’d finished belting him in, Naomi floated over to a different chair and pulled herself into it. She began calling up screens and tapping on them faster than Basia could follow, still talking to the Martian man as she worked.

  “Alex,” she said, “meet Basia Merton the welder.”

  “Welder?” Alex raised his eyebrows and grinned. “We got a pile of shit on the to-do list with Amos vacationing on the surface.”

  Basia opened his mouth to reply but Naomi said, “Basia, meet Alex Kamal, our pilot, and the solar system’s worst vacuum welder.”

  “Hello,” Basia said.

  “Hello back,” Alex said, then turned to Naomi. “Hey, while I’m thinkin’ about it? You were right about that shuttle.”

  “Yeah?” Naomi pushed off her chair and floated over to look at the screen next to Alex. He scrolled through what looked like video on fast-forward for a few seconds.

  “See there?” Alex said, pausing it. “They detach it and park it a few hundred meters from the Israel then send an engineerin’ team out. They’re inside for a couple hours, then back to the Israel. It hasn’t moved out of that orbit since.”

  “They’re doing all the shuttle runs with the other one,” Naomi said, pulling up video on a second screen and fast-forwarding through it. “I knew it.”

  “Yeah, you’re very clever. Want to keep the ’scopes recording that, or do I aim ’em at the bugs?”

  “The shuttle,” Naomi replied after a few more seconds of moving back and forth through the video.

  Basia knew he’d been invited to sit with them. And it appeared they were talking about monitoring the RCE ship, which didn’t strike him as a personal conversation. But he couldn’t help but feel a bit out of place. Like an eavesdropper on a private moment. It was the comfortable shorthand the two members of the Rocinante’s crew had. They sounded like family discussing household matters. It was unsettling to think they were the only three people on the ship. It was too large. Too empty. He didn’t want to be alone in the silence of an unfamiliar ship, but staying felt wrong too.

  Basia cleared his throat. “Should I go to my cabin?”

  “Do you want to?” Naomi asked without looking at him. “There is nothing to do in there. It’s not even one of the ones with its own video display. All the good cabins are taken by crew.”

  “You can get access to the ship’s library from there,” Alex said, pointing at the screen closest to Basia. “If you’re bored.”

  “I’m scared as shit,” Basia said without knowing ahead of time he was going to.

  Alex and Naomi both turned to look at him. The Martian’s face was kind. He said, “Yeah. I bet. But nothin’ bad is gonna to happen to you here. Until the captain says otherwise, treat this like home. If you want to be alone, we can —”

  “No.” Basia shook his head. “No, but you’re talking to each other like I’m not here, so I thought…” He shrugged.

  “Sorry. We’ve been together enough years we almost don’t need to talk anymore,” Naomi said. “I think the Israel has weaponized one of its shuttles. We’ve been monitoring the ship, and the activity around one shuttle was suspicious. I think they turned it into a bomb.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because,” Alex answered, “that’s an unarmed science ship and they flew into what they seem to see as a war zone. That shuttle could be used to attack another ship like a guided missile, or maybe as a bomb to flatten the colony.”

  “They want to attack you?” Basia asked. Why would they do that? Wasn’t the Rocinante and her crew here to solve the conflict?

  “I doubt it,” Naomi said. “More likely the Barbapiccola if she tries to break orbit and run.”

  “Yeah,” Alex said with a laugh. “The Israel takes a swing at us, it’ll be the shortest dogfight in history.”

  “First Landing. They could flatten the colony?” Basia said. “They don’t know that. You should warn them. My family is still down there.”

  “Trust me,” Naomi said, “that won’t happen. Now that we know, we’ll keep an eye on that shuttle, and if it moves, we can stop it.”

  “Should probably tell the boss, though,” Alex said.

  “Yeah.” Naomi tracked through the video a few more times, then shut it off.

  Alex unbuckled his restraint and pushed off toward the ladder. “Or… shit, XO, I can take care of it right now. I had the Roci go over the shuttle specs and calculate a rail gun shot that’ll cut her damn reactor in half.”

  Naomi stopped him with a shake of her hand. “No. Just once I’d like to find a solution that doesn’t involve blowing something up.”

  Alex shrugged. “Your call.”

  Naomi floated quietly for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision and hit the comm panel. After a few seconds Jim Holden’s voice said, “Holden here.”

  “Jim, I’ve got a problem and a solution I need to run past you.”

  “I like that we already have a solution,” Holden replied. Basia could hear the smile in his voice.

  “Two solutions,” Alex called out. “I’ve got a solution too.”

  “We’ve been watching the Israel like you asked,” Naomi said. “And Alex and I agree that the probability is high they’ve weaponized one of the two light shuttles. They’re keeping it powered down and in a matching orbit about five hundred meters from the big ship. I think it’s a last-ditch weapon to use if the Barb tries to run, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t use it on the colony, as unlikely as that seems.”

  “You haven’t met this Murtry character running RCE security,” Holden said. “Or it would seem pretty damn likely. What’s our best course of action?”

  “We get everyone off the planet, go back home, and spend a few decades doing unmanned exploration before we even think of coming back,” Naomi said.

  “Agreed,” Holden said. “And what are we actually going to do?”

  “I figure you’d want us to take care of it. Alex thinks he can gut it with a rail gun shot, but that seems like a pretty obvious escalation to me. Shooting gauss rounds past the Israel, I mean.”

  “Things are escalating just fine on their own,” Holden said. “But we’ll keep that option on the table for now. What else?”

  Naomi pulled herself closer to the comm panel and lowered her voice, as though the console were Holden himself and she was about to deliver bad news. “I take an EVA pack, fly over to the shuttle, and plant a cutout on the drive. If they run system checks, everything will come back functional, but if they try to move the shuttle I can kill it remotely. No explosions, just a dead shuttle.”

  “That seems risky,” Holden said.

  “Riskier than flinging rail gun shots through its reactor?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Riskier than leaving it out there and armed?”

  “Oh, hell no. Okay, Naomi, this is your call. One way or the other, I want that threat off the board. We have enough shit to worry about down here.”

  Naomi smiled at the comm panel. “One dead shuttle, coming up.”

  She shut off the connection with a sigh. Basia looked from one to the other of them, scowling.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” Naomi asked lightly.

  “Why would you act directly against RCE? Aren’t you supposed to be mediators? Neutral? Why take any action at all when you can stay out of it?”

  Her smile had depth and complexity. Basia had the feeling she’d heard a more profound question than the one he’d meant to ask.

  “Choosing to stand by while people kill each other is also an action,” she said. “We don’t do that here.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Havelock

  H

&nb
sp; avelock’s system filtered the newsfeeds from Sol – and it was still damned weird thinking “from Sol” – for four topics: New Terra, James Holden, contract security, and European league football. Strapped in his office crash couch, he tapped through the feed summaries. CHANGES TO COMPENSATION SCHEDULE REGULATIONS TIP THE BALANCE TOWARD EARTH-BASED CONTRACT SECURITY, STAR HELIX TO PROTEST. He deleted it. EARTHMAN’S BURDEN: FIFTY FAMOUS EARTHERS WHO SWITCHED SIDES FOR THE OPA. Holden was number forty-one. Havelock deleted it. LOS BLANCOS DEFEAT BAYERN 1–0. Havelock raised his eyebrows and put the highlights reel in his viewing queue. INCREASED VIOLENCE ON NEW TERRA. UN AND OPA REACT. MARS POSITIONING WITH OPA.