Cibola Burn

by James S. A. Corey

  “Same thing Prax’s daughter had. No immune system.”

  “Yeah. Only he wasn’t dead when we left. He was still alive in that lab where you found him. I left my son behind.”

  “Maybe,” Holden said. “There’s no way to know that.”

  “I know that. I know it. But I brought my family here. So I could keep them safe.”

  Holden nodded. He didn’t say, This is an alien world filled with dangers you couldn’t possibly anticipate, on top of which you didn’t actually own it, and you came here to be safe? It didn’t seem helpful.

  “No one can make us leave,” the man finished.

  “Well —”

  “No one can make us leave,” Basia repeated. “You should remember that.”

  Holden nodded again, and after a moment Basia turned and walked away. If that’s not a member of the resistance, he at least knows who they are, he thought. Someone to keep an eye on.

  His hand terminal chimed an incoming connection request at him.

  “Jim?” Naomi said. There was a nervous edge to her voice.

  “Here.”

  “Something’s happening down there. Massive energy spike in your location, and, uh —”

  “Uh?”

  “Movement.”

  Chapter Fifteen: Havelock

  S

  lowly, New Terra was taking on a sense of familiarity. The planet’s one big continent and long strings of islands turned under the Edward Israel every ninety-eight minutes, orbital period and the rotation of the planet conspiring to make a slightly different image every time Havelock looked. The features of the planet had started developing names for him, even though they would never be the ones that the official records showed. The largest southern island was Big Manhattan, because the outline reminded him of the North American island. The Dog’s Head islands were scattered in the middle of the planet’s one enormous ocean, and looked like a collie’s face if he squinted. What he thought of as the Worm Fields were actually a massive network of rivers on the big continent, any one of them longer than the Amazon or the Nile. In the north was Crescent City, a massive network of alien ruins that sort of looked like a cartoon moon.

  And there, in the flat beige sweep of what he thought of as the Plate, was the black dot of First Landing, like the first lesion of a rash. It was tiny, but when the ship passed over it at night, it was the only spot of light. There were more places and ecosystems down there, more discoveries to make and resources to use, than there had ever been on Earth. It seemed bizarre that they were fighting and dying over that one tiny piece of high desert. And it also seemed inevitable.

  Murtry looked out from the display, listening to Havelock’s report. Gravity changed the shape of his face, pulling down at his cheeks and eyes. It actually looked pretty good on him. Some people just belonged down a well.

  “We had one incident with Pierce and Gillett.”

  “Those are the two in marine biology?”

  “Gillett is. Pierce is actually a soil guy. It didn’t amount to anything more than a little domestic spat, but… well, tempers are fraying. All these folks came out here to work, and instead, they’re stuck here. We’re doing sensor sweeps and dropping the occasional high-atmo probe, but it’s like giving starving people a cracker when they can smell the buffet. It’s starting to come out at the seams a little.”

  “That makes sense,” Murtry said.

  “Plus which they hate null g. The autodoc’s been pumping out antinausea drugs like there’s no tomorrow. I’m surprised we aren’t just putting that shit in the water at this point.”

  Murtry’s smile was perfunctory. Havelock wanted to float the idea of a second colony. Maybe something in the temperate zone near a river and a beach. The kind of place someone might, for example, string up a hammock. It would let the expedition’s crew get working, and the problems with the squatters could work themselves out without putting anyone else in harm’s way. The words hovered at the back of Havelock’s throat, but he didn’t say them out loud. He already knew the arguments against it. You treated a tumor when it was small, before it spread. He could even hear it in his boss’s voice. Havelock cracked his knuckles.

  “The shuttle?” Murtry asked.

  Havelock looked over his shoulder, even though he knew the office was empty apart from him. When he spoke, his voice was quieter.

  “I got some pushback because it meant halving the supply schedule, but people got over it. I thought of having the hold stacked with high-density ceramics for shrapnel, and putting in a few pallets of the geology survey’s shaped charges, but I don’t have anything that’s going to make a bigger explosion than the shuttle’s reactor would. I’ve taken out all the safety overrides the way you asked, though. Physical and software. Honestly, it’s a little scary going on it anymore, just knowing that it could go off.”

  “And the controls.”

  “The standard protocols are all stripped out. You can fly it or I can. Anyone else is talking to a brick.”

  “Good man.”

  “Captain Marwick’s not happy about it.”

  “He’ll cope,” Murtry said. “Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”

  “And we have the ship’s drive,” Havelock said. “If we pointed the Israel’s ass at the Barbapiccola and fired it up, we could slag it.”

  “Right range, we could take out the Rocinante too,” Murtry said. “Except that they could say the same, and they’ve got missiles. No, we’re just getting ready for contingencies. Which brings me to the point. I’ve got the solution to one of your problems.”

  “Sir?”

  “All those bored scientists. We’ve lost a lot of the security team, and we’re in a more hostile environment than we’d expected. I need you to do some cross training.”

  “You mean hire them into security?”

  “Nothing official,” Murtry said. “But if we had a dozen people who were familiar with the riot gear and had some practice in low g, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings.”

  Havelock nodded. “A militia, then.”

  “I established that we’re in de facto control of First Landing. Holden thinks he’s some kind of fucking Solomon. I’m fine letting him go with it for now, but when the time comes, we may need to put boots on the ground here. Or on the Barbapiccola. I’m happy if we don’t, but I want the option. Can you do that?”

  “Let me look into it,” Havelock said. “I’m pretty sure it would mean bending corporate policy. The home office is pretty touchy about liability.”

  “They sent us to the ass end of nowhere and let a bunch of squatters take their best shot at us,” Murtry said. “I don’t particularly care what they think. It doesn’t need to be official. Make it a club. Just a few folks enjoying a shared hobby for low-g tactics. Fabricate them a few paint guns. Just make sure they’re ready.”

  “In case we need them.”

  “Right,” Murtry said with his dragging, full-gravity smile. “In case.”

  Technically, Havelock could have spent the time in the main security office, strapped into Murtry’s couch and using his desk. Instead, he tended to stick to his own familiar place beside the brig. He told himself it was because the system was already customized with his preferences and access codes, but he also knew it was more than that. Murtry had a way of claiming space even if he wasn’t occupying it, and Havelock wouldn’t have been comfortable. So when the second shift ended, the chief of the engineering workgroup came to him at the brig.

  Chief Engineer Matthu Koenen was a thick man with short, bottle-brush white hair and a birthmark on his neck that he’d never bothered to have removed. He floated in the air by Havelock’s couch, arms folded across his chest and legs crossed at the ankles like a dour, angry ballet dancer.

  “Thank you for coming by,” Havelock said.

  “There trouble?” Koenen snapped.

  “No,” Havelock said, his voice automatically taking on the gruff tone he used when he was on duty. “I wanted to
ask you about putting together a team. A dozen people for small-group tactics exercises.”

  The chief engineer’s brows furrowed and the lines around his mouth deepened. Havelock stared him down. He’d spent too many years as a cop on too many Belter stations to be intimidated by a scowl.

  “Small-group tactics?”

  “Null-g exercises,” Havelock said. “With the riot gear. Just to keep mind and body in condition.”

  Koenen lifted his chin, his gaze still fixed on Havelock. It was the kind of thing a Belter never did. Havelock didn’t know why the gesture so clearly belonged to someone who’d lived planetside, but it did. He found it reassuring. “You’re talking about military action? Are we expecting something?”

  Havelock shrugged against the couch restraints. The couch shifted a few millimeters on its gimbals. “I want the option,” he said, not realizing he was quoting Murtry until he’d already done it.

  “Sure, then. I can find another eleven people. When do you want us?”

  “How long will it take?”

  Koenen tapped his hand terminal with two fingertips. I can call them right now. Havelock smiled.

  “We’ll meet in the shuttle bay at oh seven hundred. I’ll go over the equipment. Then an hour drilling every day before shift for the foreseeable future.”

  “I’ll put it on the schedule.”

  They nodded to each other, and the chief engineer put out his foot, pressing it against the face of one of the cells to launch himself to the ladder. Havelock felt something uneasy shift in his mind. He was forgetting something. Something important.

  When it came to him, he grunted. “Chief!”

  The man looked over from the ladder. The plane of his body was orthogonal to the desk, and Havelock’s sense of balance shifted as his brain made one of its occasional panicked flailing attempts to determine up from down. He closed his eyes as a wave of nausea passed over him.

  “Yes?”

  “When you pick out your team,” Havelock said between clenched teeth. “No Belters.”

  For the first time, Koenen smiled. It seemed genuine. “No shit,” he said.

  As the acting head of security, he was expected to eat in the officers’ mess. It was one of those small gestures that gave the ship a sense of continuity, of rules and customs being followed. And there were some benefits for him. The lines were shorter, alcohol was available, and the wall screen was usually set to something interesting. Right now, a UN official in an uncomfortable-looking gray suit was folding his hands on a wide, glassy desk. The camera operator was framing it to be seen on hand terminals, and so the man’s face was so large on the wall that Havelock could see his pores and the streaks where the technicians on Earth had dabbed on makeup.

  “We are at the beginning of a new golden age,” he said. “The scale of this is immense. Everything we have done, from the first stone tools to the domes on Ganymede, we have done in essence with the resources of one planet. Earth. Yes, the need for minerals and rare earths took us to Mars and Luna. And the Belt. And the need for infrastructure made the Jovian system much more than we had imagined. But we are looking at an expansion that is not one or two but three orders of magnitude more than we have had in the history of our species.”

  Havelock peeled back the foil from the top of his meal. The beef and peppers had been designed for null g: hard nuggets of protein and vegetable that resisted breaking apart in the air, but turned soft and pleasant in his mouth. It wasn’t as sanitary as tubes of goo, but it was better eating. He popped the first cube into his mouth. It sponged up his saliva, clinging to his tongue. The camera on Earth flickered to a young, serious-faced woman.

  “But the designers of the protomolecule,” she said. “The species who sent it here on Phoebe in the first place?”

  “It has been billions of years since that happened,” the man in the suit said. “None of our probes have found any signs of advanced life still functioning. We have seen what appear to be ruins. We have seen what appear to be living biospheres. Honestly, there are mornings it takes my breath away.”

  Havelock sipped at the bulb of water, and the food bloomed into a rich mouthful, almost like it had been cooked in a normal kitchen instead of an industrial processor.

  “So what’s the catch?” the woman said.

  The catch is that the first thing we did once we got here was let a bunch of Belter terrorists claim squatting rights and start shooting at us, Havelock thought as he plucked another cube from the pack. On the screen the UN man unfolded his hands.

  “We are processing a bit over four thousand applications already for the rights to explore and develop these systems. We have to do this carefully if we are to get things done right. And it does not help that the OPA has used this to make what is essentially a power grab.”

  “Bloody Belters,” a voice said. Havelock turned to see Captain Marwick floating in the air behind him. The man’s close-cropped red hair and beard had more gray in them than when they’d left Earth. Havelock nodded.

  “D’ye mind if I join you, Mister Havelock?”

  “Not at all,” Havelock said, blinking back surprise.

  The captain pulled himself to the table and strapped into a crash couch. Behind him, the wall screen shifted from the UN man to the woman interviewing him, but Havelock only registered the change as shifts of lighting and background. His attention was on Marwick.

  “How’ve things been going on the surface?” the captain asked, cracking open the box containing his own dinner. He made the words seem like nothing more weighty than polite conversation. Between other people, it probably would have been.

  “You’ve seen the reports,” Havelock said.

  “Ah, reports, though. Written for posterity and the judge as often as not. Still, I was a bit surprised to see that our mutual friend Mister Murtry had taken quite such a firm hand just when the mediator arrived.”

  “Situation called for it,” Havelock said. “We’ve lost a lot of good people down there by being restrained and patient.”

  Marwick made a humming sound that could have meant anything and ate a bite of his meal. His gaze fixed somewhere over Havelock’s left shoulder.

  “And of course we’re in a position of relative power here, aren’t we?” Marwick said. “I hope our friend on the ground is keeping in mind that won’t always be the case.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “Well, I am not, strictly speaking, a part of the expeditionary force, am I? The Israel is my domain. I use my rank as captain to make the demands and requests the home office prefers me to, though in truth I’m just the lorry driver. But I’ll be driving my lorry back through that gate at some point, and Fred Johnson and his well-armed base will be waiting on the other side of it. I’d rather he not think of me first and foremost as a target.”

  Havelock chewed slowly, frowning. A dull anger tightened his jaw. “We’re the ones who followed the rules here. We came with science teams and a hard dome. We hired them to build our landing platform, and they killed us. We’re the good guys here.”

  “And the moral high ground is a lovely place,” Marwick said, as if he were agreeing. “It won’t stop a missile, though. It won’t alter the trajectory of a gauss round. What our mutual friend does planetside has consequences that go a long way out from here. And there are those among us, myself included, who’d like to go home one day.”

  Marwick took another bite of his dinner, smiled ruefully, and nodded as if Havelock had said something. He undid the crash couch straps.

  “Keeps body and soul together, these little boxes, but they don’t really satisfy, do they? Give my left nut for a real steak. Well, it was a pleasure, Mister Havelock. As always.”

  Havelock nodded, but the anger in his chest rode the ragged edge between annoyance and rage. He knew that it was at least in part because that was the reaction Murtry would have had in his place, but knowing that didn’t change the emotion. His hand terminal chimed. Chief Engineer Koenen ha
d sent a message. He tapped it open.

  we’ve got a full team. one of the boys is fabbing up a little logo for the club. just something to keep morale up.

  Havelock considered the image. It was a stylized male form, squat and featureless, holding up a fist larger than its head. It was a cartoon of the Earther body type, and of violence. Havelock looked at it for a long time before he answered back.

  looks great. make sure you get one for me.

  Chapter Sixteen: Elvi

  “W

  hat do you mean movement?” Elvi asked.