Cibola Burn (Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  Inside, the fear was so pronounced it was almost an odor. Half of the colonists were in almost frantic activity, building slug-sweeping implements and clearing the structure. The other half sat on the floor, many wrapped tight in blankets, empty expressions on their faces. The human mind could only take so much threat. Everyone had a different limit, and he couldn’t really blame the people who had been broken by the last thirty hours. It was actually sort of amazing that it hadn’t happened to all of them.

  He was, however, unsurprised to see Basia’s wife and son busily at work with the chemical sciences team.

  “Doctor Merton,” he greeted her with an apologetic smile.

  “Captain,” she replied. Her returning smile was thin, and very tired. As the colony’s only doctor, she’d had a very long day.

  “I’ve heard about the death,” he started, but she cut him off with a sharp nod and a gesture toward the chemical analysis deck.

  “We’re analyzing the toxin right now,” she said. “It’s unlikely we’ll be able to make a counter-agent with the tools available, but we’re going to try.”

  “I appreciate the effort,” Holden said. “But I’m hoping to make it unnecessary.”

  “Are we being forced to leave?” she said, a look of sad resignation replacing her wan smile. “After all this…”

  “Maybe not forever,” Holden said, putting his hands on her shoulders. She felt very thin.

  She nodded slowly, looking around them at the dirty, frightened people filling the room. “I can’t argue. There’s nothing left to fight over.”

  Oh, Holden thought, some people can always find a reason to fight, speaking of which. “I need to find Murtry.”

  Lucia gestured at an opening behind her, and Holden left with one last squeeze of her shoulders and what he hoped was an encouraging smile.

  In the next room, Murtry was down on his haunches looking at something on the floor. Wei stood behind him, nose wrinkled in disgust and her rifle in her hands.

  “Wei,” Amos said with a nod.

  “Amos,” the security officer replied with a grin.

  Holden wondered what was going on there. They couldn’t have a thing, could they? When would they have found time to have a thing? But they definitely acted like they were sharing a private joke.

  “Captain Holden,” Murtry said, standing up, not giving him more time to think about possible Amos-and-Wei dalliances. On the floor behind the RCE security chief was a clear plastic bowl inverted over one of the slugs. The creature was nuzzling its prison with its pointed eyeless face.

  “Made a friend,” Holden said, pointing at the slug.

  “They say it’s a good idea to know your enemy,” Murtry replied.

  “They say a lot of stuff.”

  “Yes. Yes, they do. How did the recon go?”

  “About how you’d expect,” Holden said. “Initial reports are correct. There isn’t a single standing structure. Not even the remains of one. All the colony supplies are lost. We can make potables out of ground water until the chem lab runs out of supplies. But what’s raining out of the sky is radioactive, and probably has things living in it.”

  “All right,” Murtry said, scratching his ear with one thick fingernail. “Can we agree that at present, the insurgent colony might not be viable?”

  “You don’t have to sound happy about it.”

  “I’m going to have some relief flown down as soon as comms clears up. RCE is happy to share these needed supplies with the refugees.”

  “Very magnanimous,” Holden said. “But RCE is going to do me a bigger favor.”

  “Oh,” Murtry said, his face shifting into a smile. “We are?”

  “Yeah. Go ahead and bring the supply shuttle down. Evacuation is going to take some time, and we’ll want plenty of medicine, food, and shelter to keep these people healthy until everyone is off-world.”

  “Off-world? Sounds like you’re doing us a favor there, Captain.”

  “I’m not done,” Holden said, and took a step forward, deliberately moving into Murtry’s space. The security man stiffened, but didn’t step back. “When the shuttle leaves, it’s going to take some of the colonists with it. The sick and vulnerable first. And as soon as your people can de-weaponize the second shuttle, it’ll start making runs too. I’m giving the same orders to the Barbapiccola and the Rocinante. We’re leaving this planet, and if I can’t stick everyone on the Roci and the Barb, the Edward Israel will be taking the rest.”

  Murtry’s smile cooled. “Is that right?”

  “It is.”

  “I fail to see why the ship that brought the squatters here can’t also take them away,” Murtry said.

  “One, it no longer has the room,” Holden started.

  “Then they should dump the ore they illegally stole from this world,” Murtry said.

  “And two,” Holden continued as if he hadn’t interrupted, “she’s down to the last of her supplies. I won’t stick hundreds of people on that ship that may not make it back to Medina. I doubt it’s RCE policy to ignore a humanitarian crisis. And even if it is, it’s sure as hell going to make for terrible press.”

  Murtry took an answering step toward Holden, crossing his arms and shifting his smile into an equally meaningless frown.

  Plan B is that I have Amos kill you right now and just take what I want when the shuttle lands, Holden thought, but worked to keep it off his face.

  Almost as if he could sense the thought, Amos shuffled forward and put one hand on the butt of his pistol. Wei shifted to his right, still gripping her rifle.

  We are so close, Holden thought, to all of this going completely off the rails. But he couldn’t back down. Not with a couple hundred people living or dying on the outcome of the confrontation. Wei cleared her throat. Amos grinned back at her. Murtry cocked his head to one side, his frown deepening.

  Here we go, Holden thought, and suppressed the urge to swallow a mouth suddenly full of saliva.

  “Of course,” Murtry said. “We’d be happy to assist.”

  “Uh,” Holden replied

  “You’re right. We can’t leave them here,” Murtry continued. “And there isn’t room for them anywhere else. I’ll let the Israel know they’re taking on passengers as soon as we get comms up.”

  “That would be great,” Holden said. “Thank you.”

  “Doctor Okoye,” Murtry said. Holden turned to find the diminutive scientist had come in, her usual tentative smile on her face.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” she said. “But we’ve gotten the radio back up. We’re on with the Israel right now. You said to tell you as soon as we got through.”

  “Thank you,” Murtry said and started to follow her out of the room. He paused, as though something had suddenly occurred to him, and turned to Holden. “You know, we’re only in this situation because these people came down and built a shantytown. We’d brought much better structures with us on the heavy shuttle. Much of this could have been avoided.”

  Holden started to reply, but Elvi said, “Oh, no. I’m unhappy about the loss of the dome and the permanent structures too. But we clocked gusts of three hundred and seventy kilometers an hour out there. Nothing we set up would have withstood that.”

  “Thank you, Doctor Okoye,” Murtry said with a tight smile, “for correcting me. Let’s go call the ship, shall we?”

  Elvi blinked in puzzlement as Murtry left. “Is he mad at me?”

  “Sweetie,” Amos said, clapping her on the back, “that just means you’re not an asshole.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Havelock

  A

  fter they’d lost radio contact with Murtry, Havelock had tried to sleep. He should have slept. There was nothing he could do. Not yet, anyway. Not until it was over. He floated in his couch, the straps keeping him centered over the gel, and willed his consciousness to fade. His mind wouldn’t rest. Were they still alive down there? What if the explosion was just the first of several? What if the planet detonated and took out the Israe
l? Should he have Marwick pull the ship into a higher orbit? Or even away from the planet entirely? And if the Barbapiccola tried to do the same… then what? He wasn’t supposed to let them break orbit with a full load of RCE’s lithium ore.

  He closed his eyes again, but they opened as soon as he stopped consciously willing them shut. After three hours, he gave up, took off his straps, and went to the gym instead. His float-atrophied muscled complained with every set, and he put the feed of the planet below on the screen. The contours of New Terra were gone. The whole planet had become a flat and uniform gray, clouds obscuring whatever violence was happening beneath them. After the exercise round, he bathed, changed into a fresh uniform, and went to his office. His incoming message queue was filled with requests for comments from every news organization there was, and several he doubted were real. He forwarded them all to the RCE corporate headquarters on Luna. Let them answer if they wanted to. At this point, they knew as much as he did.

  He checked on comms from the planet, but the signal wasn’t getting through. So he checked again. And again. The gray planet was silent.

  “Any word?” the prisoner asked.

  “Nothing,” Havelock replied. And then, a moment later, “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too,” she said. “They’ll be all right.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Are you all right?”

  Havelock looked over at her. For a detained saboteur who’d been in the box for days now, she looked calm. Almost amused. He found himself smiling back at her.

  “Might be a little stressed,” he said.

  “Yeah. Sorry about that.”

  “Not your fault,” Havelock said. “You aren’t the one calling the shots around here.”

  “There’s someone calling the shots around here?” Naomi asked, and a man cleared his throat behind him. Havelock shifted his couch, the bearing hissing, to look back at the hatch. The chief engineer floated there. He wore the militia armband over his uniform sleeve.

  “Hey there, chief,” he said, pulling himself into the room. “Wondering if we could have a talk. Alone, maybe.”

  “You can put up the privacy shield if you want,” Naomi said. “I’ll still hear everything.”

  Havelock undid his straps and pushed off. “I’ll be back,” he said over his shoulder.

  “You shall always find me at home,” Naomi said.

  The commissary was between rushes. The chief engineer grabbed a bulb of coffee for himself and another for Havelock. They floated together near a table bolted to the deck. Force of habit.

  “So we’ve been talking,” Chief Engineer Koenen said. “About the event.”

  “Yeah, it’s been pretty much the only thing on my mind too.”

  “How sure are we that it’s… well… natural?”

  “I’d have gone pretty much a hundred percent it wasn’t,” Havelock said with a grim laugh. The chief engineer’s expression seemed to close, and Havelock pressed on. “But maybe that depends on what you mean by natural. Is there something bothering you?”

  “I don’t want to sound paranoid. It’s just that the timing on this seems pretty convenient. You and me and the boys catch the UN mediator red-handed. Throw the bitch in the brig. And then this big disaster comes out of nowhere, takes everyone’s attention off her.”

  Havelock sipped at the coffee.

  “What are you thinking, chief? That it was rigged?”

  “Those squatters got here before we did. We don’t know what they found and just never told us about. And Holden worked for the OPA. He worked for Fred fucking Johnson, right? Hell, everything I heard says he’s been sleeping with that Belter girl we brought in. His loyalty isn’t to Earth. And he was the one who went on the alien whatever-the-hell-it-is that Medina Station’s floating around and came back out. I’ve been following some independent casts. The Martian marines that went there after him? There’s some pretty weird shit that’s gone on with all of them since then.”

  “Weird shit like what?”

  The chief engineer’s eyes brightened and he hunched forward, a posture of intimacy and complicity that was a habit of gravity. For the next half hour, he ran down half a dozen strange occurrences. One of the marines had died of an embolism during a heavy-g burn just before she’d been scheduled to talk with her cousin who ran a popular newsfeed. Another had quit the military and wasn’t talking about anything that had happened. There had been rumors of a secret report that suggested – strongly suggested – that James Holden had been killed on the station, and a doppelgänger put in his place. It stood to reason with all the other changes the protomolecule could make to a human body that recreating one wouldn’t be hard for it. Only the report had never been made public, and the people who had read it had been targets of whisper campaigns to discredit them.

  Havelock drank his coffee and listened, nodding and asking the occasional question – usually for the sources of the information the chief engineer was reporting. When they were done, Havelock promised to look into the issue, then hauled himself back to his desk. On the readout, the planet was still covered in clouds.

  “Everything okay?” Naomi asked.

  “Fine,” he said. And then a moment later, “Just scared people trying to find a version of events where someone has control over everything.”

  She chuckled. “Yeah. I’m doing the same.”

  “You are? How?”

  “Chewing down my fingernails and praying,” she said. “Mostly praying.”

  “You’re religious?”

  “No.”

  “Are you and Holden secretly alien spies that blew up the planet as part of a Belter conspiracy to distract the media?”

  Naomi’s laughter was deep. “Oh, was that what it was? I’m so sorry.”

  Havelock chuckled too, feeling a little guilty as he did. Koenen was one of his people. Naomi Nagata was a saboteur and the enemy. And still, it was a little funny, and there wasn’t anyone else to talk with.

  “It’s not that bad. Conspiracy theories come up whenever people feel like the universe is too random. Absurd. If it’s all an enemy plot, at least there’s someone calling the shots.”

  “Belters.”

  “This time, yeah.”

  “Are they going to break in here and throw me out the airlock?”

  “No, they’re not like that,” Havelock said. “They’re good guys.”

  “Good guys who think I destroyed a planet.”

  “No, that your alien doppelgänger boyfriend did to keep people from thinking about you. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. No one’s really thinking you’re in league with the protomolecule. They’re just scared.”

  Naomi went quiet. Her fingertips pressed against the cage and she hummed quietly to herself. It wasn’t a melody Havelock knew. He checked his incoming queue again. Another half dozen requests for comment. A note from one of the security team that the Belters on the Israel had started sitting together in the commissary and exercising together in the gym. It seemed suspicious to the man making the report. It sounded like circling the wagons to Havelock. He’d have to think about what to do about that. If anything. The radio signal to the planet still didn’t go through. The analysis of the IR sensors that could see through the cloud cover was that First Landing was being destroyed by the storm. He turned his attention to the sensor array data as it streamed back to Earth. Maybe someone there could make something of it. The first-report newsfeeds were already speculating that it had been a fusion core overloading. Having just heard about how Jim Holden was a shapeshifting alien left him a little skeptical about everything.

  When, six hours later, his hand terminal lit up with an incoming request from Murtry, Havelock felt a huge weight lifting from his shoulders. He accepted the connection, and a low-res Murtry fuzzed to life on the screen. The feed jumped and hopped, but the audio quality was all right apart from a little static.

  “Good to see you, Havelock. How’re things holding together up there?”

  “No c
omplaints, sir. Mostly we were waiting to hear from you. That looks like a hell of a rainstorm you’ve got going down there.”

  “Loss of life was minimal,” Murtry said. “A few of the squatters didn’t bother getting to shelter in time, and the floodwaters pulled some local bugs out from the ground that’ll kill you if you touch them. They lost another one to that. Our people are fine. The camp’s a loss.”

  “Ours or theirs?”

  “Ours and theirs. Everyone down here’s going to be starting over from scratch.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”