Cibola Burn (Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  “Yes,” she said.

  He squatted down beside the arch that led back toward the main rooms. The plastic was dark. It was nighttime, then. She hadn’t been paying attention.

  “What’s the rumpus?” Fayez asked. “Is there some new oh-my-god-we’re-going-to-die, or are we still coming to appreciate fully the list we’ve already got.”

  “I have to find Captain Holden.”

  Fayez put his head in his hands. “Of course you do.”

  “I have to clear the air.”

  Fayez’s neck stiffened, and his eyes were wide. “No, Elvi. No, you don’t.”

  “I do,” she said. “I know it’s inappropriate, but the fact of the matter is that I’m in love with him. It’s a distraction, and it’s affecting my work. I’ve tried ignoring it, and it’s not helping. So I’ll go to him, and we’ll talk it through. Just to resolve it and —”

  “No no no,” Fayez said. “Oh no. That’s a terrible, terrible idea. Don’t do that.”

  “You don’t understand. I don’t want to, but I have to be able to concentrate, and my feelings… my feelings about him —”

  She rose. Now that she’d said it, it was obvious what had to happen. He’d be sleeping in one of the side rooms like this. Amos would probably be there too as a guard. She could just ask to see him there, in private. And she could unburden herself. She hadn’t understood that term before, but she did now. She could unburden herself to him, and he was so kind and so gentle and so thoughtful, he wouldn’t laugh at her or turn her away. She would —

  “Elvi!” Fayez said again. “Please, please, please do not do this. You aren’t in love with James Holden. You don’t know James Holden from Adam. You have no idea how close his persona is to the real man, and you’ve never met the real man. He’s on the newsfeeds and he works here. That’s all.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Of course I do,” Fayez said. “You’re scared as hell, you’re lonely, and you’re horny. Elvi listen to me. You’ve been in one of the most stressful environments possible for the last two years. First, we were coming to an unknown planet. Then it was an unknown planet with a bunch of people on it who tried to kill you. And then it blew up. And now we’re trying to fend off tiny little things that can kill you because you brush up against them while you try to figure out how to keep things from growing in our eyes. No one stays sane in a situation like this.”

  “Fayez —”

  “No! Hear me out. You always cope by ignoring how scared you are and focusing on work, and that’s great. Really, whatever gets you through the night, I am absolutely for it. But you’re a mammal, Elvi. You’re a social animal that derives reassurance from touch, and since we’re not a cuddle-puddle culture, that means sex. For two years you’ve been avoiding workplace romances while all the rest of us have been pairing off and changing partners because we were lonely and scared and that’s one way primates reassure themselves and each other. Everyone’s been doing this but you.”

  “I don’t —”

  “So here you are, freaked out so badly you aren’t even clear that you’re freaked out, and here comes James Holden, savior of the universe, and of course it all comes out sideways. But it’s not about him, it’s about you. And if you go clear the air with him, either you’ll wind up in bed together or you’ll be back here weeping into your tissue samples.”

  Elvi felt her jaw sliding forward, her hands forming fists. Fayez rose to his knees, but not more than that. He reached out an arm to block the archway, grimaced, and pulled it back. When he spoke again, Fayez’s voice was softer, gentler.

  “Please, we have fucked up everything about coming to this deathtrap of a planet. We have hauled every tribalist, territorial, monkey-brained mistake humanity ever made through the gate and made soup with them here. This thing you’re about to do? Please let this be the one mistake we don’t make.”

  “You’re telling me,” Elvi said, her voice equal parts outrage and ice, “that I just need to get laid?”

  Fayez slumped back against the wall, defeated.

  “I’m saying you’re human, and humans take comfort from each other. I’m saying you don’t want Holden for the person he is, because you don’t know him, and you’re making up a story about him so that you feel okay about taking the thing you need because God forbid you should have a need that isn’t all twinned up with romantic love. And…”

  He lifted his hands, shook his head, and looked away. The rain pattered against the sheet plastic, tapping like fingernails on stone. Someone far down the hall shouted, and a voice even more distant called back. Elvi crossed her arms.

  “And?” she said. “Go on. I don’t see why you should stop now.”

  “And.” Fayez sighed. “And I’m right here.”

  It took a moment for her to understand what he was saying. What he was offering. Her laughter was as unstoppable as the storm had been. He pursed his lips and shrugged, his gaze fixed on the wall behind her. She couldn’t stop grinning, even though the force of it made her cheeks hurt. And then the hilarity faded a bit. She caught her breath. A flash of distant lightning brightened the window, but no thunder followed it.

  She looked down at Fayez. After a moment, he looked up.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Fayez snored when he slept. Not deeply. Not a buzzsaw. Just a soft purring at the back of his throat. Their mud-caked clothes were folded into pillows under their heads. She lay on her back, her knees bent, considering the ceiling and the softness of her own flesh. He was on his side, curled against her for warmth, his legs folded under and around hers. His breath tickled the skin of her collarbone. She wondered what she would do or say if someone walked through the archway, but it was night, and the nights here were very long. There was room in them.

  She considered his body, the color of raw honey, with more hair on his chest and legs then she’d expected. Like a caveman, only without any Neanderthal brow ridge. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, just to see how it felt. She’d always made a rule of not sleeping with her coworkers. She hadn’t so much as held someone’s hand since the Israel had started its long burn for the gate. She’d almost forgotten what sex felt like. And its aftermath.

  Fayez coughed, shifted, and she took the chance to draw herself away from him. He sprawled on the floor, face pressed against her clothes, eyes shut. She thought about James Holden, her mind touching gently at her heart, half afraid of what it would find.

  “Huh,” she said to the room, softly so as to keep Fayez from waking. “I wasn’t in love with Holden.”

  Fayez’s breath shifted and his eyes fluttered but didn’t open. She thought about trying to get her jumpsuit from him, but he looked so peaceful, she decided to wait. She had expected to feel embarrassed by her nakedness. Ashamed. She didn’t.

  She sat cross-legged by the chemical assays. In the dish, the green smear from the water sample had shifted a little, throwing off hair-thin runners, exploring its environment. She pulled up the chemical information and started going through it again from the start. When she came to the strange reading of light-activated compounds, she coughed out an impatient sigh. They were chiral, and this was a bi-chiral environment. She was seeing both conformations, and probably for completely different functions. That made sense, then.

  She stretched, her spine popping between the shoulder blades, and folded herself forward, her eyes skimming though the data. She took notes of questions to ask Lucia or send back home. She fell into the data, not noticing when Fayez woke, dressed, and left until he draped a blanket over her shoulders. She looked up. Her jumpsuit was still in a pile on the floor. Fayez put a cup of hot tea beside her and kissed the top of her head.

  “Good morning, sunshine,” he said.

  Elvi smiled, leaning back against his shins. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  “You okay?” he asked gently.

  Elvi frowned. Was she? Given the circumstances, maybe so.

  “I’m lookin
g at this organism,” she said, “and, you know, I think I’m beginning to understand it. Here, take a look at these numbers…”

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Havelock

  T

  he air recycling systems on the Edward Israel didn’t care where their power came from. Fusion reactor or battery power, it was all the same to them. Havelock’s sense that the air had changed, grown hotter and thicker and less able to sustain life, was all in his head. He was aware of being in a steel-and-ceramic tube of air, closed off from any larger, sustaining environment. He’d spent most of his adult life in that situation, and the fact had become as invisible to him as someone on Earth thinking about being held to a spinning celestial object by nothing more than mass, shielded from the fusion reaction of the sun by only distance and air. It wasn’t something you thought about until it was a problem.

  His monitor was split between Captain Marwick on the left looking harried and cross and the chief of RCE’s engineering team and Havelock’s own militia on the right.

  “I can up the efficiency of the grid enough to get us two, maybe three days,” the chief engineer said. His face was flushed, and his jaw jutted forward.

  “In theory,” Marwick said. “This is an old ship. Things based on theory don’t always play out well here.”

  “We know what kind of grid this is,” Koenen said. “It’s not guesswork. We have the numbers.”

  “It’s hard facing the fact that numbers are a kind of guesswork, isn’t it?” Marwick said.

  “Gentlemen,” Havelock said, his voice taking the same intonation Murtry’s would have had. “I understand the issue.”

  “She may be dead, but she’s still my ship,” Marwick said.

  “Dead?” the chief engineer said. “We’re going to be dead if —”

  “Stop now,” Havelock said. “Both of you. Just stop. I understand the issue, and I appreciate both of your views. We’re not going to do a goddamn thing with any ship modifications until we’ve loaded the next supply drop for the folks downstairs. Captain, can I have permission for the engineering team to do a sight-only inspection of the grid lines and couplings?”

  “Sight only?” Marwick said, eyes narrowed. “If you’ll commit to that. Fine line between seeing something and wanting to give it a little pet.”

  Havelock nodded as if that had been permission. “Chief, put together a crew. Visual inspection only. Give me a report once the drop’s gone.”

  “Sir,” the chief engineer said. The word was crisp and a little too loud. The way someone who wasn’t in the military thought people in the military sounded. The connection on the right dropped and Captain Marwick resized automatically to fill the screen.

  “That man’s an asshole.”

  “He’s scared and he’s trying to exercise control over… well, anything he can actually exercise control over.”

  “He’s an asshole, and he’s forgotten that a few paintball games aren’t enough to make him Admiral fucking Nelson.”

  “I’ll keep him in line,” Havelock said. For another ten days, and then it won’t matter.

  Marwick nodded once and dropped his connection as well. Havelock took a deep breath and let it out slowly through his nose. He flipped back to his connection request queue. Another thirty messages had come in just while he’d been talking to the captain and the chief. They were all messages from home. From Sol. Requests for interviews and comment from people he’d never met, but not all from people he hadn’t seen. Sergio Morales from Nezávislé News. Amanda Farouk from First Response. Mayon Dale from Central Information OPA. Even Nasr Maxwell from Forecast Analytics. The faces and personalities of all the newsfeeds he followed to stay in touch with how things were going back at home were coming to him now. Humanity’s attention was pointed out to New Terra. To him.

  He didn’t like it, and it didn’t help.

  He went through them one by one, replying with the same canned recording he’d made the first time: “Our hands are full right now addressing the situation on New Terra. Please refer your questions to Patricia Verpiske-Sloan with Royal Charter Energy’s public relations division.” Blah blah blah. He’d probably be dressed down at some point for doing that much. He was already a little worried that he shouldn’t have said his hands were full.

  “You all right?” Naomi asked from her cell.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I just ask because you’re sighing a lot.”

  “Am I?”

  “Five times in the last minute,” Naomi said. “Before the reactor died, it was one every two minutes. On average.”

  Havelock smiled. “You need a hobby.”

  “Oh, I really do,” Naomi said.

  He pulled up the drop shipment status page. The insertion point was still eight hours away. The longest fabrication run he could do was about six hours, then. If Murtry and the others needed anything that took longer than that, they’d have to wait. He started cycling through the list. Food. Spare water bags for the chem deck they’d salvaged. Acetylene and oxygen for the salvage and repair crew. He checked the weight. He didn’t want to skip anything that might be useful downstairs, but it wouldn’t help anyone to scatter it all across the upper atmosphere because a chute failed.

  “You’re going to be famous when we get back,” Naomi said.

  “Hmm?”

  “You’re the face of it now. Everything that’s happening here? That message you made is what all the feeds are going to be playing.”

  “That message was so information-free it was almost sterile,” Havelock said. “It’s how you say ‘no comment’ without sounding like you’re trying to hide something.”

  “They won’t care. Maybe they don’t even run your words. Just the image of you with the audio turned low while they talk over it.”

  “Well, that’s just great,” Havelock said, sifting the drop contents. The emergency lighting had batteries, and while they probably wouldn’t be enough to set off the planetary defenses, he didn’t want to risk it. He tried to remember if there was anything else that carried its own energy supply. It wasn’t an issue he was used to worrying about.

  “It was like that for us,” Naomi said. “Well, for him, really. Even before Eros.”

  “What was?”

  “Being the face of something. Looking back, I can see where it happened. And then he was that guy who’d been shot at by Mars. And then Eros.”

  “True enough,” Havelock said. “There are probably people who haven’t heard of James Holden and the Rocinante, but they’re not the kind of people who watch newsfeeds. He seems to bear up under it pretty well, though.”

  “Why Mister Havelock, I do believe that was sarcasm.”

  He switched to the packing schematic. The computer had taken all the packages and lined them up in six different configurations, depending on whether density, aerodynamics, or even weight distribution was the highest priority. He turned the imaged with his fingers, imagining each of them in turn falling through the buffeting, violent high atmosphere of New Terra.

  “I just mean that it doesn’t seem to bother him,” he said.

  “Honestly, he’s barely aware of it,” Naomi said.

  “Come on. You’re telling me he doesn’t get off on it? Just a little?”

  “He doesn’t get off on it, even a little,” Naomi said. “I’ve known men that would. But that’s not Jim.”

  “You two are a couple, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’d call him a lucky man, except he’s involved with this utter clusterfuck of a planet,” Havelock said as he chose one of the compromise packing schemes. “The only thing I’m going to be the face of is a long, slow death that everyone in the system can watch and be glad they aren’t here.”

  He switched to the fulfillment tree view. The remaining jobs that needed to be fabbed were all in queue. He had the feeling he was missing something, but it took a few seconds to remember what. He switched back to the inventory and added in a little box of oncocidals. For James
Holden.

  “How well did you know Miller?” Naomi asked. “Were you close?”

  “We were partners,” Havelock said. “He kept me out of trouble a couple times when I was in over my head. Or when I was being stupid. Ceres right before the OPA took over wasn’t a good place for an Earther.”

  “Did he ever strike you as… I don’t know. Weird?”

  “He was a cop on Ceres,” Havelock said. “We were all weird. Are you about ready for your big outing?”

  Naomi laced her fingers through the grate of the cell. Her expression was amused. “That time of the day already, is it?”

  “It is the priority of Royal Charter Energy to see that prisoners in its care are treated humanely in accordance with corporate policy and interplanetary law,” he said, the same way he did every time. It had become something like a joke between them, funny not because it was funny, but because it was familiar.