Cibola Burn (Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  “I… Yeah. Sure.” She could feel the boy’s shoulder trembling. Jacek turned and walked out without meeting anybody’s gaze, but especially avoiding hers. The door closed behind him.

  “Kid was packing, boss,” Amos said.

  “I know,” Holden replied. “What did you want me to do about it?”

  “Know. That’s all.”

  “Okay, I know. But I really don’t have time to get shot right now.” He turned his attention to her. A lock of hair was dropping down over his forehead, and he looked tired. Like he was carrying the whole planet on his back. Still, he managed a little smile. “Is there anything else? Because we’re a little…”

  “Is this a bad time? Because I can —”

  “Our XO got arrested by Murtry,” Amos said, and the flatness of his eyes had gotten into his voice now. “May be a while before there’s a really good time.”

  “Oh,” Elvi said, her heart suddenly picking up its pace. The XO is Holden’s lover and Holden has a lover and Holden may not have a lover anymore and Jesus, what am I doing here all collided somewhere in her neocortex. Elvi found she was very unsure what to do with her hands. She tried putting them in her pockets, but that felt wrong so she took them out again.

  “I’d been thinking?” she said, her voice rising at the end of the word even though it wasn’t a question. “About the thing. In the desert. And now with the moon?”

  “Which moon?”

  “The one that’s melting down, Cap,” Amos said.

  “Right, that one. I’m sorry. I’ve got a lot of things going on right now. If it’s not something I can actually do something about, it’s not sinking in the way it probably ought to,” Holden said. And then, “I’m not supposed to do anything about the moon thing, am I?”

  “We can let the scientists tell us if we’re supposed to freak out,” Amos said. “It’s all right.”

  “I’ve been thinking about hibernation failure rates, and that maybe what we were seeing was analogous.”

  Holden lifted his hands. “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “It’s just that hibernation is a really very risky strategy? We only see it when conditions are so bad that the usual kinds of survival strategy would fail. Bears, for instance? They’re top predators. The food web in wintertime couldn’t sustain them. Or spadefoot toads in the deserts? In the dry periods, their eggs would just desiccate, so the adults go dormant until there’s rain, and then they come back awake and go out to the puddles and mate furiously, just this mad kind of puddle orgy and… um, anyway, and then they, they lay their eggs in the water before they can dry out again.”

  “Ok-ay,” Holden said.

  “My point is,” Elvi said, “not all of them wake up. They don’t have to. As long as enough of the organisms reactivate when the time comes, enough that the population survives, even if individuals don’t. It’s never a hundred percent. And shutting down and coming back up is a complicated, dangerous process.”

  Holden took a deep breath and ran his hands through his hair. He had thick, dark hair. It looked like he hadn’t washed it in a while. Amos lost his game, scooped up the cards, and started shuffling them with slow, deliberate movements.

  “So,” Holden said, “you think that these… things we’re seeing are artifacts or organisms or something trying to wake up?”

  “And failing. At least sometimes,” she said. “I mean, the moon melted. And that thing in the desert was clearly broken. Or anyway, that’s what it was looking like to me.”

  “Me too,” Holden said. “But just because it was moving, we kind of knew things were waking up.”

  “No, that’s not the point,” Elvi said. “There are always a small percentage of organisms that don’t wake up, or wake up wrong. These things? If that’s the model, they’re the ones waking up wrong.”

  “Following you so far,” Holden said.

  “Failure rates are usually low. So why aren’t we seeing a bunch of things waking up right?”

  Holden went over to the table and sat on its edge. He looked frightened. Vulnerable. It was strange seeing a man who’d done so much, who’d made himself known across all civilization by his words and deeds, look so fragile.

  “So you think there are more of these things – maybe a lot more – that are activating, and we’re just not seeing it?”

  “It would fit the model,” she murmured.

  “All right,” he said. And a moment later, “This isn’t making my day better.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Basia

  B

  asia sat alone on the operations deck of the Rocinante. He was belted into a crash couch next to what he’d been told was the comm station. The controls were quiet, waiting for someone to request a connection, occasionally flashing a system status message across its screen. The messages were incomprehensible mixtures of acronyms, system names, and numbers. The text was in a gentle green font that made Basia think they weren’t particularly urgent.

  Alex was in the cockpit, the hatch closed. That didn’t mean anything. The hatches closed automatically to seal each deck from the others in case of atmosphere loss. It was a safety measure, nothing more.

  It still felt like being locked out.

  The panel startled him with a burst of static followed by a voice. The volume was just loud enough that Basia could tell it was a conversation between two men without understanding any of the words. A red RECORDING status blinked in one corner of the screen. The Rocinante, monitoring and recording all of the radio transmissions around Ilus. Maybe Holden was doing that on purpose to have a record of his mission when he returned to Earth. Or maybe warships did it by default. It wasn’t something that a welder had to worry about. Or a miner. Or whatever he’d been with Coop and Cate.

  Basia was looking for a way to turn up the volume and listen in when Alex’s voice blared from the panel. “Got a call comin’ in.”

  “Okay,” Basia said, not sure if the pilot could hear him. He didn’t know if he needed to press a button to respond.

  The message on the comm panel changed, and a male voice said, “You don’t need to do anything.”

  For a moment, Basia had the irrational feeling that the person speaking had read his mind. He was about to reply when another voice, younger, male, said, “Just talk?” Jacek. The second voice was Jacek. And now Basia recognized the older voice as Amos Burton. The man who’d guarded him at the landing field. “Yeah,” Amos said. “I’ve opened a connection to the Roci.”

  “Hello?” Jacek said.

  “Hey, son,” Basia replied around the lump in his throat.

  “They made our hand terminal work again,” Jacek said. By they Basia guessed he meant Holden and Amos.

  “Oh yeah?” Basia said. “That’s real good.”

  “It only talks to the ship,” Jacek said, his young boy’s voice bright with excitement. “It doesn’t play videos or anything like it used to.”

  “Well, maybe they can make it do that too, later.”

  “They said someday we’ll be on the network, like everyplace in Sol system. Then we can do whatever.”

  “That’s true,” Basia said. Water was building up in his eyes, making it hard to see the little messages flashing by on the screen. “We’ll get a relay and a hub and then we can send data back and forth through the gates. We’ll have everything on the network then. There’s still going to be a lot of lag.”

  “Yeah,” Jacek said, then stopped. There was a long silence. “What’s the ship like?”

  “Oh, it’s pretty great,” Basia said with forced enthusiasm. “I have my own room and everything. I met Alex Kamal. He’s a pretty famous pilot.”

  “Are you in jail?” Jacek asked.

  “No, no, I get to go anywhere I want on the ship. They’re real nice. Good people.” I love you. I am so sorry. Please, please be all right.

  “Does he let you fly it?”

  “I never asked,” Basia said with a laugh. “I’d be scared to, though. It’s big and fast. Lots of guns on
it.”

  There was another long silence, then Jacek said, “You should fly it and blow up the RCE ship.”

  “I can’t do that,” Basia said, putting as much smile in his voice as he could. Making it a joke.

  “But you should.”

  “How’s your mom?”

  “Okay,” Jacek said. Basia could almost hear the shrug in his voice. “Sad. I started playing soccer more. We have enough for two teams, but we trade players a lot.”

  “Oh yeah? What do you play?”

  “Fullback right now, but I want to play striker.”

  “Hey, defense is important. That’s an important job.”

  “It’s not as fun,” Jacek said, again with the verbal shrug. There was a long silence while both of them reached for something to say. Something that could be said. Jacek gave up first. “I’m gonna go now, okay?”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Basia said, trying to keep the thickness in his throat from changing his voice. Trying to keep his tone light, fun. “Don’t run off yet. I need to ask you to do something.”

  “Got a game,” Jacek said. “Pretty soon. They’ll get mad.”

  “Your mom,” Basia said, then had to stop and blow his nose into the sleeve of his shirt.

  “Mom what?”

  “Your mom will work too much, if you don’t watch her. She gets to looking things up at night. Medical things. And she won’t get enough sleep. I need you to make sure she gets some sleep.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s serious, boy. I need you to look after her. Your sister’s gone, and that’s good, but it just leaves you to help out. You gonna help out with this?”

  “Okay,” Jacek said. Basia couldn’t tell if the boy was sad or angry. Or distracted.

  “See you, son,” Basia said.

  “See you, Pop,” Jacek replied.

  “Love you,” Basia said, but the signal had already died.

  Basia wiped his eyes with the sleeves of his shirt. He floated against his restraints, breathing deep, ragged breaths for a full minute, then pulled himself over to the crew ladder. He moved aft, deck hatches opening at his approach and slamming shut behind him as he went, the sound echoing through the empty ship.

  He changed shirts in his room, then spent a few minutes in the head cleaning his face with wet towels. They had a large shower unit – he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a real shower – but it only worked when the ship was under thrust.

  When he no longer looked like a man who’d been bawling, Basia floated back along the ladder to the cockpit. He was considering whether or not it was polite to knock before entering when he drifted too close to the hatch’s electronic eye and it snapped open with a hiss.

  Alex was belted into the pilot’s chair, the large display directly in front of him spooling out ship status reports and a rendering of Ilus, its single massive continent dotted with red and yellow marks. And one green dot that was First Landing. The pilot scowling at the screen tensely as though he could will the universe to do something. Like he could make it give his crew back.

  Basia was turning to leave when the deck hatch banged shut and Alex looked up.

  “Hey,” he said and tapped out something on the panel.

  “Hello,” Basia said.

  “How’d your call go? Everything okay?”

  “Fine. Thank you for letting me use the radio.”

  “No problem, partner,” Alex said with a laugh. “They don’t charge us by the hour.”

  An uncomfortable silence stretched out that Alex pretended not to notice by pressing buttons on his controls. “Am I allowed to be up here?” Basia finally asked.

  “I don’t mind,” Alex said. “Just, you know, don’t mess with anything.”

  Basia pulled himself into the chair behind Alex and belted in. The armrests of the chair ended with complex-looking joysticks, so Basia was careful not to bump them.

  “That’s the gunner’s seat,” Alex said, turning his entire chair around to face Basia.

  “Should I not —”

  “Naw, it’s fine. It ain’t on. Push buttons there all you want. Hey, wanna see somethin’ cool?”

  Basia nodded and put his hands on the two control sticks. They were covered with buttons. The gunner’s seat. Those sticks might control the Rocinante’s lethal weaponry. He wished Jacek could see him sitting there, holding the controls.

  Alex turned around and did something on his own panel, and the screen in front of Basia came to life with a view matching Alex’s own. Basia looked at the bright limb of his planet, trying to find the location of First Landing. Without the green dot overlay it was impossible in daylight. If they were on the night side he could have spotted them as a spark of light.

  Alex did something else, and the view shifted to a dull red blob of molten rock. “That’s the moon goin’ meltdown. It wasn’t a very big one, but still, kinda makes you wonder what could melt a hunk of rock that size.”

  “Do we know?”

  “Hell no. Some kind of alien protomolecule shit’d be my guess.”

  Before Basia could ask for more details, the radio squawked at them. “Alex here,” the pilot said.

  “Kid’s gone, wanted to check in,” Amos’ voice said.

  “How’s the captain doing?” Alex asked.

  “Not great. And once again he stopped me from doing the obvious thing.”

  “Shooting the RCE chief in the face?”

  “Awww,” Amos said. “Warms my heart how well you know me.”

  “They got her, buddy,” Alex said, his voice firm but gentle. “Don’t do anything that makes it worse.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “You just watch the captain’s back down there,” Alex continued. “I’ll take care of our XO.”

  “If they hurt her?”

  “Then it’ll be rainin’ RCE parts down on Ilus for a year.”

  “Won’t actually help,” Amos said with a sigh.

  “No,” Alex agreed. “No, it won’t. It’ll happen, though.”

  “All right. Gonna go find the captain. Amos out.”

  Alex tapped on his controls, and the view swung around away from the planet. For a moment, there was nothing, and then a tiny flicker of light, no more than a single pixel. The view zoomed in until it became a massive ship painted with the RCE colors. After a moment, it zoomed again, the rear of the ship swelling until it filled the screen, a small red crosshair glowing in the center of the view.

  “Got my eyes on you,” Alex said under his breath.

  “What’s that?” Basia asked, pointing at the crosshair.

  “That’s where the reactor sits. The Roci’s got a lock on that location. I can send a gauss round right through her heart faster than her first alarm bell can ring.”

  “Won’t that… you know…” He made an explosive motion with his hands.

  “No, it’ll just vent. Probably kill a lot of their engineering staff.”

  “Do they know you’re aiming at them?”

  “Not yet, but I’m about to fill ’em in. That’s what’ll keep my XO breathin’.”

  “Nice that you can do something to protect her,” Basia said, and meant to stop, but the words pressed out past his teeth. “My daughter is on the Barbapiccola. My wife and son are down on Ilus. I can’t do anything to help them or protect them.”

  Basia waited for the empty words of reassurance.

  “Yeah,” Alex said. “You really fucked that one up, didn’t you?”

  Alex tapped something on his screen, and the words RAIL GUN ARMED glowed red for a second over the image of the Edward Israel.

  “I need to call over to that ship in a sec,” Alex said.

  “Warn them.”

  “More like threaten them,” Alex said. “Pretty much the shittiest thing we have to offer for someone we all love, but it’s what we got left.” He reached out and fiddled with something on the bulkhead and a stream of cool air shot out of the vent. It ruffled the pilot’s thinning black hair and dried
the sweat accumulating on his scalp. He closed his eyes and sighed.

  “I don’t even have threats,” Basia said. It sounded like whining even to him. “I don’t even have that.”

  “Yeah. So I flew for the Mars navy for twenty years,” Alex said, his eyes still closed.

  “Oh?” Basia said. He wasn’t sure what the correct response was.