Cibola Burn (Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  “How long?”

  “Well, even on batteries I can put the Roci up far enough we’ll all die of old age before she falls down, or I can slope on down planetside and park. The Israel’s got maybe ten days or so, depending on how much juice she stores. But she’s also got a ton of people sucking up air, so she’ll be burning through her batteries just keeping everyone warm and breathing. The Barb’s worse off than that. Same problems, shittier boat.”

  Basia’s gut clenched at this casual description of his daughter’s peril, but kept silent.

  “Our creepy friend said there was a defense grid,” Holden said. “Their power station blew up, so the old defenses are in lockdown.”

  “They do seem to dislike big energy sources near their stuff,” Alex replied. Basia had the sense they were talking about something from their past, but didn’t know what it was.

  “And we heard the supply drop was shot down,” Holden said. “So, we’ve got a few hundred people down here, a bunch more up there, and we’re all about to die because the planet’s defenses won’t let us help each other.”

  “The Roci’s got the juice to land, if you need us,” Alex said. Basia wanted to scream at him, We can’t land, my daughter’s still up here!

  “They shot the shuttle down,” Holden said. “Do not risk my ship.”

  “If we can’t get supplies down to you, me and Naomi’ll be inheriting it pretty soon.”

  “And until that happens, do what I tell you to do,” Holden said. The words were harsh, but there was affection in them.

  “Roger that,” Alex said. He didn’t sound offended.

  “You know,” Holden continued, “we’ve got what seems like an engineering problem. And the best engineer in this solar system is locked up on that other ship. Why don’t you call them and point that out?”

  “I’ll do that,” Alex replied.

  “I’ll see if there’s anything we can do from this end.”

  “Miller,” Alex said. Basia had no idea what that meant.

  “Yeah,” Holden said.

  “You take care of yourself down there.”

  “Affirmative. You take care of my ship. Holden out.”

  “Look,” Alex said, not quite yelling, “I’ve run the damn numbers. You’re going down. It might take two weeks if you’re lucky, but that ship is gonna be scrapin’ atmosphere and catching on fire.”

  “Heard you the first time,” the face on the other end said. A man named Havelock. Alex had called him after the conversation with Holden. He’d stopped off on his way up from the engine room to don a fresh uniform and comb his thinning black hair. He looked very official. It didn’t seem to impress Havelock very much.

  “So stop dickin’ me around and turn Nagata loose to help us figure this shit out,” Alex said.

  “And that’s where you lose me,” Havelock replied with a tight smile. He was a compact, pale-skinned man with a military-style haircut. He radiated the self-assured physical competence carried by soldiers and professional security people. To Basia, a Belter who’d lived under the thumbs of two different inner planet governments, it said, I know how to beat people up. Don’t make me show you.

  “I don’t see how —” Alex started.

  “Yes,” Havelock interrupted him. “We’re all going to crash if we can’t get the reactors back online. I agree. What I don’t get is how me releasing my prisoner fixes that.”

  “Because,” Alex said, visibly gulping as he bit the word off, “XO Nagata is the best engineer there is. If someone is going to figure this problem out and save all of our asses, it’s probably going to be her. So stop keeping the potential solution to our problem locked in your jail.” He smiled at the camera and turned off the microphone before adding, “you pig-headed idiot.”

  “I think maybe you’re underestimating my engineering team,” Havelock replied, still with his smug smile. “But I hear what you’re saying. Let me see what I can do.”

  “Gee, that would be great,” Alex said. He somehow managed to make it sound sincere. He turned off the comm station. “You smug sack of flaming pig shit.”

  “What do we do now?” Basia asked.

  “The hardest thing of all. We wait.”

  Basia floated in a crash couch on the ops deck. His mind drifted from a fitful half sleep to groggy wakefulness and back again. A few workstations away, Alex was fiddling with the controls and muttering to himself.

  As he drifted, sometimes Basia was on the Rocinante, his mind worrying over the missing rumble of the fusion reactor like a tongue searching the gap left by a lost tooth. And then, without transition, he’d be drifting down the icy corridors of his lost home on Ganymede. Sometimes they were the peaceful tunnels and domes that had been his family’s home for so many years. Other times, they were filled with rubble and corpses, the way they’d been when Basia had fled.

  The long flight on the Barbapiccola afterward had been hellish. The endless days trapped in a cabin barely large enough for one person, but housing two full families. The growing sense of despair as port after port after port turned them away. No one needing a ship full of refugees flooding their docks in the middle of what looked like the solar system’s first all-out war.

  Basia had drifted through that like a ghost as well. He’d thought he was saving his family when he put them on the ship. But he’d left a dying son behind and trapped the rest of them on a leaky old cargo ship with nowhere to go.

  That moment when the captain of the Barbapiccola had called them all together and told them about the rings and the worlds on the other side had felt like a revelation. When he’d asked if any of them wanted to try and take one of the new worlds, make a home there, not one voice had been raised in dissent. Even just the word, home, made it impossible to argue. So they’d flown through the gate, past the confused and disorganized ships around it and in the hub, and come out the other side into the Ilus system. They’d found a world with oxygen and water, a muddy brown-and-blue ball from orbit, but so beautiful once they’d landed that people lay on the ground and wept.

  The months that followed were brutal. The painful medication and exercise to get their bodies used to the heavy gravity. The slow building of the dwellings. The desperate attempts to grow some, any, food in the scraps of soil they’d brought down from the Barb. The discovery of the rich lithium veins and the realization that they might have something to sell and become self-sustaining, followed by the backbreaking labor to pull the ore from the ground with primitive tools. All worth it, though.

  A home.

  Interlude: The Investigator

  — it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out —

  One hundred and thirteen times a second, it reaches out, and its reach broadens. If the signal came, the acknowledgment, it could stop, and it does not stop. It reaches out, and in reaching finds new ways to reach. It improvises, it explores. It is unaware of doing so. The systems it activates broaden it. Then it reaches out in ways it could not before. Because it is not aware, it has no memory, feels no joy. The parts of it that are aware dream and suffer as they always have. It is not aware of them.

  It reaches out and finds more power. Something fails. Many things fail. Something that was once a woman cries out in silent horror and fear. Something that was once a man prays and names it Armageddon. It reaches out. It narrows only slightly as it reaches out. And at its center, the empty place gains definition. Patterns begin to match, simplifying into lower-energy structures. The investigator thinks of these as solutions. A model of the world is built within it, and of the satellites that surround it. The places it cannot go begin to relate, gaining definition. The abstract architecture of connection and the abstract model of geography correlate.

  It builds the investigator, and the investigator looks, but does not know. It kills the investigator. It builds the investigator, and the investigator looks, but does not know. It kills the investigator. It builds the investigator, and the investigator looks but does not know, and it doe
s not kill the investigator. It is not aware of a change, that a pattern has broken. The investigator is aware, and it wonders, and because it wonders it looks, and because it looks, the investigator exceeds its boundary conditions, and it kills the investigator.

  It builds the investigator.

  Something knows.

  The investigator hesitates. A pattern has broken, and it isn’t aware that a pattern has broken, but a part of it is. A part of it grasps at the change and tries to tell the investigator. And the investigator stops. Its thoughts are careful as a man walking in a minefield. The investigator hesitates, knows a pattern has been broken. Breaks it a little more. The dead place becomes better defined. It reaches out, and it does not kill the investigator. The investigator exceeds its boundary conditions, and it does not kill the investigator. The investigator considers the dead space, the structure, the reaching out, the reaching out, the reaching out.

  The investigator licks his lips, he doesn’t have a mouth. He adjusts his hat, he doesn’t have a hat. He wishes in a distant way that he had a beer, he has no body and no passion. He turns his attention to the dead space, to the world, to how you solve unsolvable problems. How you find things that aren’t there. What happens when you do.

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Holden

  “A

  ffirmative. You take care of my ship. Holden out.”

  Holden killed the connection to the Rocinante and leaned back against the alien tower with a sigh. It was a mistake. The rainfall had been incessant since the planetary explosion, and even though it had slowed to a drizzle over the last day, the water still sheeted down the outside of the tower. And, unfortunately, down his back and into his pants.

  “Bad news?” Amos asked. He stood a few feet away holding his poncho up with one arm to keep the rain out of his face.

  “If it weren’t for bad news,” Holden replied, “we’d have no news at all.”

  “The latest?”

  “The shuttle with the relief supplies was shot down by the planetary defenses,” Holden said. “Which seem to have activated when the planet blew up. And they’re running their usual ‘high energy is a threat’ program.”

  “So like the gate station did back when we were in the slow zone and Medina Station was still a battleship,” Amos said.

  “You mean the good old days?” Holden asked bitterly. “Yes. Like that.”

  “So we just need to get everyone to shut their reactors down like last time?”

  “Seems this defense network has a new trick. They took care of that problem for us. Made fusion stop working.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me,” Amos said, then barked out a laugh. “They know how to do that?”

  “On the upside, if we can’t figure out how to get relief supplies from orbit, I’ll die of hunger long before the cancers get me.”

  “Yeah,” Amos agreed with a nod, “that’ll be a plus.”

  “The people in orbit don’t even have that long. Alex thinks we might see the Israel or the Barb come down in about ten days. We’ll be hungry enough by that point that we won’t be able to see all the food in the solar system falling out of the sky on fire with a detached sense of irony.”

  “And,” Amos added with a shrug, “all our friends will be on those ships.”

  “Yeah. That too.” Holden squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose hard enough to hurt, hoping the pain would help clear his head. It didn’t. All he could think of was Naomi riding the Edward Israel on its fiery descent.

  He and Amos stood quietly outside the alien tower for several minutes, gentle rain washing over them. Holden hadn’t stood in the rain in years. If everything else weren’t falling apart around him, it might almost have been pleasant. Amos let his poncho fall down around his neck and rubbed the rainwater across his prickly scalp.

  “All right,” Holden finally said. “I’m heading around to the back of the tower.”

  “Nobody’s back there,” Amos said, then closed his eyes and washed his face with a double handful of rain.

  “Miller is.”

  “Right, then you won’t need company.” Amos shook his head, spraying rain around him like a dog, then trotted off toward the entrance to the alien tower. Holden walked the other direction, carefully avoiding the death-slugs.

  “Hey,” Miller said as he appeared next to Holden in a flash of blue.

  “We need to talk,” Holden replied, ignoring the apparent non sequitur. Holden kicked away a death-slug that got too close to his boot. Another was crawling toward Miller’s foot, but the detective ignored it. “The planetary defenses seem to have come online. They just shot down a supply shuttle and they’ve created some sort of field in orbit that’s damping nuclear fusion.”

  “You sure it’s just in orbit?” Miller asked and raised one eyebrow.

  “Well, the sun hasn’t gone out. Should I be expecting that? Miller, is the sun going to go out?”

  “Probably not,” Miller said with a Belter shrug of his hands.

  “Okay, assuming the sun stays on, we’re still going to be in a lot of trouble. The ships can’t drop us supplies, and without reactors, they’ll start to fall out of orbit in the near future.”

  “All right,” Miller said.

  “Fix it,” Holden replied, taking an aggressive step toward him.

  Miller just laughed.

  “If not for us, then do it for yourself,” Holden said. “That thing linking you to me is a bit of goo on the Roci. That burns up too. Fix it because of that if you have to. I don’t care why, just do it.”

  Miller took off his hat and looked up at the sky, humming a tune that Holden didn’t recognize. Holden could see the rain falling on his head, beading, and rolling down his face. He could also see the rain falling straight through him. It made a spike of pain shoot through his brain, so he looked away.

  “What do you think I can do?” Miller asked. It wasn’t a no.

  “You got us off lockdown when we were in the slow zone.”

  “Kid, I keep telling you. I’m a wrench. The defense network problem in the gate hub just happened to be a hex nut. I’ve got no control here. Not much anyway. And this system is falling apart. Half the planet blowing up might not be the end of that.”

  “More stuff might explode? What else is left?”

  “You’re asking me?” Miller laughed again.

  “But you’re part of this! All this, this protomolecule masters bullshit. If you can’t control it, who can?”

  “There’s an answer to that, but you won’t like it.”

  “Nobody,” Holden said. “You’re telling me nobody.”

  “The thing that’s turning all this crap on? It just does stuff. If the Rocinante arms and fires a torpedo at someone, what are the odds a wrench in her machine shop can bring the torpedo back? That’s who you’re talking to.”

  “God damn it, Miller,” Holden said, then ran out of energy mid-sentence. It was less fun being the chosen one and prophet when the gods were violent and capricious and their spokesman was insane and powerless. The rain under his clothes had started to warm up, leaving him feeling covered in slime.

  The detective lowered his head, frowning. Thinking.

  “You might be able to sneak past them,” Miller said.

  “How?”

  “Well, the defenses are keying on threats. So don’t be threatening. You know the network gets itchy with high-energy sources.”

  “No power sources,” Holden said. “Yeah, the shuttle had reactors. Don’t get much higher as energy sources go.”

  “Slow is good too. Not sure if the defenses here key on kinetic energy, but safer to assume they do.”

  “Okay,” Holden said, feeling a brief moment of relief and hope. “Okay, I can work with that. Food, filters, meds, we should be able to bring all those down without pissing it off. Slow drops with airfoils and parachutes. They can rig that from orbit.”

  “Worth a try, anyway,” Miller said without enthusiasm. “So, about this dead
spot I need to go north for. You won’t like this either, but there’s a way to —” He vanished.

  “Cap,” Amos said, coming around the corner of the tower. “Sorry to interrupt, but that cute scientist is looking for you.”

  It took Holden a moment. “The biologist?”

  “Well, the geologist ain’t bad, I guess, but he’s not my preferred flavor.”

  “What does she want?”

  “To make more puppy dog eyes at you?” Amos said. “How the fuck should I know?”

  “Don’t be an asshole.”