Cibola Burn (Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  “Depends,” Marwick said. “The Rocinante convoying back to the Ring with us?”

  “I think so,” Havelock said. “I can confirm that.”

  “If we’ve got them for backup, I can strip the place down a little bit more. Not a great deal, but we could break down one of the backup generators and drop it to them. And biomass for the galleys.”

  “Actually, I think we’re okay on that. Doctor Okoye was talking about a way to convert the local flora into something that could be turned into something that they could eat. It had something to do with right-handed molecules, whatever those are.”

  “Well, good on her, then,” Marwick said. “Almost makes you want to stay a while, doesn’t it? See how it all plays out?”

  “Oh shit no,” Havelock said. “No, you should see this place. It’s tiny, it’s filthy, and everything about it is slapped together with hot glue and prayer. Also, there are slugs that instantly kill you. If these people survive for a year, I’ll be surprised.”

  “Really?”

  “You know that in a month or two or eight or whatever, something’s got to happen. The hydroponics will fail out, or there’ll be another thing like that eye-eating goop only they won’t happen to have a treatment for it ready to hand, or one of the attack moons will drop out of the sky. Shit, the fucking death-slugs could grow wings. How do we know they can’t do that? We do know there are power plants in the ocean big enough to damn near blow the planet off course. Holden says they’re all dead now, but he could be wrong. Or turning everything off might mean there’s some kind of reactor core sinking down into the planet. We don’t know anything.”

  Marwick looked nonplussed, but he nodded. “I suppose that’s true.”

  “No, what I want is Ceres Station or Earth or Mars. You know what they have in New York? All-night diners with greasy food and crap coffee. I want to live on a world with all-night diners. And racetracks. And instant-delivery Thai food made from something I haven’t already eaten seven times in the last month.”

  “You make it sound like paradise indeed,” Marwick said. “Still, I can’t help feeling uncomfortable at the idea of leaving all these poor people if they’re really going to die from staying.”

  “Maybe they won’t,” Havelock said. “Wouldn’t be the first time recently I was wrong about something. And… well, they’ve got some things in the plus column too. I think they’ve got more scientists and engineers per capita than anyplace else in the universe. And we’re giving them all the supplies we can manage.”

  “Still, seems thin.”

  Havelock sat up a degree, his crash couch shifting and hissing on its gimbal. “They also have each other. For now, anyway. You have to figure when we started this, everyone was ready to slit everyone else’s throat, and they’re down here now putting up tents together. If nothing new comes along to kill them, there will be native-born New Terran babies as soon as biology permits. And I wouldn’t bet that the parents will all have come here on the same ship.”

  “Well,” Marwick said. “It’s good to recall that wherever people start, whatever they bring with them, humanity can still pull together in heavy weather.”

  Havelock shrugged. Koenen’s voice was still fresh in his memory, and Williams drifting flatlined and dead. Naomi Nagata in her cell. The Belter engineer whose locker people had been pissing in. The shuttle he’d rigged as a weapon. Jesus, he felt bad enough about Williams. He could barely imagine what it would have been like if he’d deployed the weaponized shuttle.

  “Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. These people could just as easily have gone down with their teeth in each other’s throats. That happens too. It’s just the folks that go that way aren’t around to write the history books.”

  “Amen,” Marwick said, chuckling. “Amen indeed.”

  Chapter Fifty-Six: Holden

  T

  he Rocinante had really taken a beating.

  The ship had a variety of puncture wounds in the outer hull all along her port side. Holden could see the bright spots where Basia and Naomi had replaced damaged thruster ports, but they hadn’t had the time or materials to patch all the holes. It was a testament to Alex’s skill as a pilot that he’d been able to bring them down at all without burning up. At least one PDC housing was riddled with damage, and the weapon inside was probably unsafe to use. And there was a long scar across the top of the ship where, according to Naomi, an improvised missile had hit.

  Holden cheerfully noted each future repair on his itemized bill for Avasarala.

  The Rocinante sat on a wide stretch of nothing half a kilometer from where First Landing had once stood. The frames of new construction were starting to appear. People, building on the ruins of what had come before, just like they always did. So many things had been lost, but it was the missing people that hurt the most.

  Just like they always did.

  Holden noted a spot of minor damage on the drive cone, then came around the stern of the ship to find a pair of Belters throwing up a temporary shelter a dozen yards away. A man in his early thirties was running cable while an older woman hammered spikes into the muddy ground. A second woman stood by with a long pole to flick away any slugs that might get too close.

  “You can’t put that there,” Holden said, walking toward them and making a shooing gesture. “Ask Administrator Chiwewe where to put your tent.”

  “This spot hasn’t been claimed by anyone,” the man said. “We have just as much right —”

  “Yes, yes. I’m not telling you where you can and can’t build. But in a few hours this ship is going to lift off, and it will flatten your little tent.”

  “Oh,” the man said, sheepish. “Right. We’ll just wait for you to go.”

  “Thank you. You folks have a good afternoon.” Holden gave them a wave and a smile and headed off toward New First Landing. These people were still the same ones who had been willing to fight RCE to the death to hang on to their claim. They weren’t going to put up with being bossed around by outsiders. But the catastrophe had at least taught them to respect high-speed winds.

  When he returned to the rectangle of six partially built structures that would eventually become New First Landing’s town square, Carol was in a heated discussion with someone in an RCE engineering uniform and Naomi. Amos stood nearby, staring at nothing, a faint smile on his broad face. The medical apparatus on his leg and hand made him look like a cyborg. The bandage on his neck made him look like a pirate. Amos wore serious injury better than anyone else Holden knew. Fayez, by comparison, was still walking with a limp. Or maybe he was just making excuses to keep his arm around Elvi Okoye’s shoulder.

  Basia, Lucia, and Jacek were clumped up a respectful distance away from the argument, gripping each other like their lives depended on unbroken contact.

  “I don’t care what it says in the book,” Carol was saying. “I want all six of these structures on one generator. We only have two. I need the other for the rest of the town.”

  “These are your highest-use buildings,” the engineer replied. “The loads will be at the limit of —”

  “They build a little slack in there,” Naomi said over the top of him. “And that’s what the administrator wants, so give it to her.”

  The engineer rolled his eyes and shrugged. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Everyone getting along?” Holden asked as he approached.

  “Land of milk and honey, Cap’n,” Amos said. “Peaceful as a sleeping kitten.”

  “How’s she looking?” Naomi asked, stepping away from the group as their argument relaunched behind her.

  “Pretty beat up.”

  “We did our best.”

  “You guys were amazing,” Holden said, taking her hand. “But next time don’t let the bad guys capture you.”

  “Hey,” Naomi said with mock outrage, “I rescued myself.”

  “Been meaning to ask about that. How exactly did you persuade your jailer to come over to our side?”

  Naomi moved
a step closer and grinned down at him. “It was prison. People do all sorts of things they wouldn’t normally do in extreme circumstances like that. You sure you want to know?”

  “I don’t care even a little,” Holden said, then pulled her into a hug. She almost collapsed against him.

  “God, don’t let go,” she whispered in his ear. “My knees are killing me. Another hour of walking around in this gravity and I’m going to need ligament replacements.”

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Holden leaned around Naomi enough to catch Amos’ eye, then jerked his head toward the ship. The mechanic nodded and smiled and began hobbling around the square loading up the last of their gear.

  “Is our prisoner on board?”

  “Amos locked him in medical a couple hours ago,” Naomi said, then let her entire skeleton relax with a long groan.

  “Can you walk back to the ship?” Holden asked her.

  “Yep. Say your goodbyes.”

  Holden let her go, watching her stagger off on unsteady legs for a few moments before he turned back to shake hands with Carol Chiwewe. She and the RCE man had moved their argument to sewage systems and water treatment. After a brief goodbye and good luck to them both, he walked over to Basia and his family.

  “Doctor,” he said to Lucia, shaking her hand. “Could not have survived this without you. None of us could.” Next he shook Jacek’s hand. Finally, he shook Basia’s. “Basia. Thanks for your help with the ship. And thank you for trying to help Naomi. You’re a brave man. Farewell and fair weather.” The roiling storm clouds and gentle drizzle of rain made a joke of it, and he grinned at them.

  “What?” Basia said. “But I thought you had to take me to —”

  Holden was already walking away, but he stopped and said, “Work hard. Next time I come to this planet, I want to be able to get a decent cup of coffee.”

  “We will,” Lucia replied. Holden could hear her tears in her voice, but the rain hid them on her face.

  He wouldn’t miss the planet, but he would miss the people. Just like always.

  On the Rocinante, liftoff pressed Holden into his crash couch like the ship was welcoming him back with a hug. As soon as they hit low orbit, he floated out of his chair and down the crew ladder to the galley. Thirty-five seconds later, the coffee pot was gurgling to itself and the rich aroma of brewing filled the air. It made him feel giddy.

  Naomi floated in. “The first step is admitting that you have a problem.”

  “I do,” he replied. “But I’ve just spent a couple months down on a planet that spent the entire time trying to kill me. And I have a shitty job I have to go do, so I’m going to take a moment and make a cup of coffee first.”

  “Make me one too,” she said, then pulled herself over to the wall panel and started paging through status reports.

  “Make it three,” Amos said, dragging himself into the room. “I got a ton of shit to fix because you guys let someone use my girl for target practice.”

  “Hey, we did our best —” Naomi started, but was cut off by the comm panel squawking.

  “You guys makin’ coffee down there?” Alex said from the cockpit. “Have someone bring me up a bulb.”

  While Amos and Naomi began putting together a list of the repair work they could do during the long transit back to Medina Station, Holden prepared four large bulbs of coffee. He didn’t mind. It was very comforting doing something simple and domestic to make other people happy. Black for himself. Two whiteners, two sweeteners for Amos. One whitener for Alex. One sweetener for Naomi. He handed the finished bulbs out.

  “Can you take this up to Alex?” he asked, handing a second bulb to Naomi. Something in his voice or his face made her frown with worry.

  “Are you okay?” she said, taking the bulb but not leaving. Behind her, Amos took his coffee awkwardly in his mangled hand and headed aft with it toward his machine shop, looking at the task list on his terminal and muttering about how much work he had to do.

  “Like I said, shitty job needs doing.”

  “Can I help?”

  “I’d like to do this one alone, if that’s okay.”

  “Of course it is,” she said, then kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I’ll look you up later.”

  Holden went up to the airlock and storage deck and found a self-sealing vacuum package, a trowel, and an EVA suit for doing external repairs with a portable blowtorch. He climbed into the suit, then clumped through the ship to the cargo bay.

  To what he was pretty sure was Miller’s final resting place.

  He waited in the cargo bay airlock while the outer doors cycled open, putting the compartment into total vacuum, then went in. If something went wrong, if what was left of the protomolecule on his ship decided to defend itself, he’d be in vacuum with an airlock blocking entry into his ship. He sealed the airlock behind him, and told Alex to lock out local control on the door until he called and asked him to open it. Alex agreed without asking why.

  And then Holden began methodically tearing the cargo bay apart.

  Five hours later, and one air recharge for the suit, he found it. A small blob of flesh no larger than the tip of Holden’s finger, attached to the underside of a power conduit behind a detachable panel in the cargo bay’s bulkhead. When they’d first spotted the protomolecule monster that had hitchhiked onto the Roci from Ganymede, it had been less than half a meter from where he found the polyp. It made his skin crawl to realize how long they’d been lugging this last remnant of that monster around on his ship.

  Using the trowel, he scraped the polyp off the conduit, then put both it and the tool into the vacuum bag and activated the charge to seal it. He blowtorched the conduit for several minutes, heating the metal red to kill any residue left by the scraping. Then he dug through the supplies in the cargo area until he found a reload for the ship’s probe launcher, opened the probe up, and stuffed the bag inside the casing.

  He linked his suit radio to the Roci’s general shipwide channel. “Naomi, you around?”

  “Here,” she said after a moment. “In ops. What do you need?”

  “Can you grab manual control on probe, uh, 117A43?”

  “Sure, what do you want me to do with it?”

  “I’m going to chuck it out the cargo bay door. Can you give it about five minutes, then send it into Ilus’ sun?”

  “Okay,” she replied, not asking the question he could hear in her voice she wanted to. He killed the radio.

  The probe was a small electromagnetic and infrared sensor with a rudimentary drive system. The kind naval vessels used to see what might be hiding on the other side of a planet. It wasn’t much bigger than an old Earth fire hydrant. It had heft, though. When Holden pushed it over to the cargo bay door, it was difficult to stop it again.

  Outside, Ilus spun by, the angry brown of her cloud layer starting to show some spots of white, and even the occasional flash of blue from the ocean underneath. It’d be a while, but the planet would bounce back. Mimic lizards would return and start competing for space with human children and those annoying little bugs that bit and then fell over dead. Two alien biologies fighting for space. Or three. Or four. Nothing that Ilus hadn’t already experienced a few billion years before. New fight, same as the old fight.

  Holden put a gloved hand on the probe floating next to him, and pointed the other at the planet.

  “That’s you, man. That’s the second world you’ve saved. And once again, we have nothing to offer you in return. I kind of wish I’d been nicer to you.”

  He laughed at himself, because he could almost hear the old detective in his head saying, You could also have my Viking funeral not be all about how you feel.

  “Right. See you on the other side,” Holden didn’t really believe in another side. Nothing after death but infinite black. Or, he hadn’t, anyway. Sure, out-of-control alien technology might be involved, but maybe, just maybe, sometimes there was something else. “Goodbye, my friend.”

  H
e gave the probe a hard push, and it drifted slowly away from the ship. Holden watched it dwindle until it was just a tiny point of light reflected from Ilus’ star. Then it lit up for a few seconds with a short drive flare and streaked away from the planet. Holden waited until he couldn’t see it anymore, then shut the cargo bay doors.

  He stripped the vacuum suit off in the airlock after it cycled. Naomi was waiting for him when the inner airlock door opened.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Is it done?”

  “Yeah, I’m all done down here.”