Cibola Burn

by James S. A. Corey

  “I don’t know about you folks, but I’m excited to be part of this plan,” Alex said. “Let’s get going.”

  Basia watched the clock tick away the hours and minutes to his daughter’s death.

  Naomi sat at her console rapidly typing. The symbolic language she used to program the Rocinante’s navigation systems meant nothing to him. Watching her work was like listening to someone speak in a foreign language: the awareness of information without actual meaning. But he watched her anyway, knowing that she was building a program that might add precious minutes back to the clock. Maybe hours. Not days.

  Alex was back up in his cockpit, out of sight. But periodically he called down on the ship’s comm to talk to Naomi about her work, so he was apparently following along from his own station. He would ask for clarifications or make suggestions, but his words were as empty of content to Basia as the symbols on Naomi’s screen.

  Havelock had gone belowdecks to move the emergency escape bubbles out of the cargo hold and up to the main airlock. The rail gun plan might not work, and the next step was to evacuate as many people from the Barbapiccola as the Rocinante could handle.

  It was all just delaying games. Try to save the Barb a little longer with their rail gun heroics. If not, save a few people by moving them to the Roci before she fell out of the sky or turned into a killing jar with twenty more people breathing her air and overloading her life support.

  But they all did it without question. They fought and worked and devised intricate plans to buy more time. Basia had no doubt that they’d work just as hard to keep each other alive for even a few more minutes. It wasn’t something he’d ever had to think about before. But it did seem to be a microcosm of everything in life. No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work. It made Basia proud and sad at the same time. Maybe that was how a warrior felt, standing on ground he knew he’d never leave alive. Making the choice to fight as long and hard as he could. Basia couldn’t think why I went out, but I didn’t go out easy was such an appealing and romantic notion, but it was.

  Looking at the angry brown ball of Ilus, rotating past on his screen, Basia thought, You’ll kill us, but you won’t kill us easy. He took a deep breath and worked hard not to thump himself on the chest.

  “You okay over there?” Naomi asked, not looking up from her work.

  “Fine, fine. How are you?”

  “Almost there,” she said. “The trick is that we’ll have a lot of thrust coming from one vector and not along our center of mass with the cable attached, and we only have maneuvering thrusters on three sides of the ship. So, we have to minimize rotation to port. But, we can’t use the starboard fore thruster to counteract that rotation because the cable changes where our center of mass is. It’s actually a fun problem to figure out.”

  “I have no idea what any of that means,” Basia said. “Is it working?”

  “I think it will. Alex agrees. We’ll fire in a couple of minutes on the next rotation. Then we’ll know.”

  “Great,” Basia said.

  The deck hatch clanged open and then closed again as Havelock pulled himself up into the ops deck. He’d changed out of his RCE jumpsuit and armor into loose-fitting gray sweats with the name ROCINANTE across the chest. The security officer was bigger than Holden, so if the clothes hung loose on him, they must belong to Amos. Basia thought maybe he wouldn’t wear Amos’ clothes without asking.

  “The emergency stuff is in the airlock,” Havelock said to Naomi’s back. She hadn’t looked up from her work when he came in. “I also threw a couple of EVA packs, some extra air bottles, and Basia’s welding rig in there. I can’t think of anything else we might need.”

  “Thank you, Dimitri,” Naomi said.

  “Dimitri?” Basia asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “You’ve got a problem with that? Isn’t Basia a girl’s name?” Havelock shot back.

  “It was my grandmother’s name, and she was a solar-system-wide famous physicist, so it’s a great honor to be named after her. I was the first grandchild.”

  “You two can shut up or leave the deck,” Naomi said. Then she hit the wall comm and added, “Alex, you ready up there?”

  “Think so,” Alex replied with his heavy drawl. “Just a sec, lemme tweak one thing here…”

  “Can we throw this up on the big screen?” Basia asked. “I’d like to see what happens.”

  Naomi didn’t answer, but the main screen on the deck shifted from a tactical map to a forward telescopic view. The image rotated slowly past the brown-and-gray ball of Ilus, and then past the distant gray hulk of the Barbapiccola, and then on to the starry black.

  “Missed our window,” Naomi said. “You almost ready?”

  “Yeah,” Alex replied, dragging the word out to three syllables. “Now. Good to go.”

  “Executing,” Naomi said and tapped a button on her screen, but nothing happened. The view on the big screen continued to slowly pan until Ilus came back into view. Then the Barbapiccola. Then, without warning, the Rocinante tipped violently forward and something very loud happened in the belly of the ship. A bright dot of fire and a curve of flame appeared in the planet’s atmosphere. Basia found that the far bulkhead was now traveling toward him at a slow but noticeable speed. The ship pitched again, the various maneuvering thrusters firing in staccato bursts. When the noise and movement was over, the view on the main screen was steady, locked onto the Barbapiccola.

  “Huh,” Alex said. “I’m seeing activity from the moons.”

  “Are they shooting at us?” Havelock said.

  “Nope. Looks like they’re trying to knock down the gauss round,” Alex said. “Full points for optimism.”

  “We’re not rotating anymore,” Basia said.

  “No,” Naomi replied. “Give me any three directions of thrust and I can find a way to stop us. Now we just keep it here firing and adjusting, and we should be adding some speed to our orbit.”

  Basia looked down at the timer counting away the Barbapiccola’s remaining life. It had added a little over four minutes. “How often can you fire?”

  “About every five minutes or so, if we don’t want to overheat the rails and burn the batteries out. At least, every five minutes until the batteries are dead.”

  “But —”

  “We’ve just stopped the degrading orbit, but not much more,” Naomi said.

  “Israel’s coming back around,” Alex said. “She dumped something off.”

  “Goddammit,” Naomi muttered. “Give us a fucking break, will you guys? What are they dropping?”

  “Men in suits,” Alex said.

  “It’s the militia,” Havelock said. He’d pulled himself over to a tactical display and was zooming it in and out. “Twelve of them, in vacuum armor with EVA packs. Plus an equal number of metallic objects of about human size. Not sure what those are.”

  “Any speculation on what they’re doing?” Naomi said, switching her view to match his.

  “They’re engineers. They know how crippled we are. How vulnerable. So my guess is they’re going to try to kill us.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight: Holden

  L

  ife at the naval academy had been so stressful for Holden that at the end of his first term he’d celebrated by going to a party and drinking until he passed out for twenty hours. It had been his first lesson on the difference between unconsciousness and sleep. They might seem the same, but they weren’t. After twenty hours, he’d woken feeling totally unrested, and the morning PT the next day had almost killed him.

  Riding on Miller’s material transfer network, it was difficult to get any sense of the passage of time. The first time Holden came to, his hand terminal told him ten hours had passed. He could tell he’d spent it unconscious rather than sleeping because he felt exhausted and sick. His throat hurt, his eyes burned like they’d been sandpapered, and all of his muscles ached. It almost felt like a flu, except that the antivirals he to
ok every three months made that pretty much impossible. He turned on his armor’s diagnostic system, and it gave him a series of shots. He had no idea what. He drank half the water in his canteen and closed his eyes.

  It was nine hours later when he woke again, and this time he was almost rested, the soreness in his throat gone. At some point he’d passed the threshold from unconsciousness to sleep, and his body was rewarding him for it. He stretched out on the metal floor until his joints popped, then drank the rest of his water.

  “Wakey wakey,” Miller said. He slowly appeared in the darkness, surrounded by a halo of blue light, as if someone were turning up his dimmer switch.

  “I’m awake,” Holden replied, then rattled his empty canteen at Miller. “But you stuffed me into this cattle car so fast I wasn’t able to get supplies. Gonna get pretty thirsty if there isn’t, you know, an alien drinking fountain for something.”

  “We’ll see. But that’s actually the least of our problems right now.”

  “Says the guy who doesn’t drink.”

  “There’s a damaged piece of the system ahead,” Miller continued, “and I’d hoped we’d be able to get around it. No such luck. We’re on foot from here.”

  “Your fancy alien train is broken?”

  “My fancy alien material transfer system has been sitting unused for over a billion years and half the planet just exploded. Your ship was built less than a decade ago and you can barely keep the coffee pot running.”

  “You are a sad, bitter little man,” Holden said as he climbed to his feet and pushed against the train door. It didn’t open.

  “Hold on,” Miller said and vanished.

  Holden turned the brightness up on his terminal and spent a few minutes checking over his equipment while he waited. Miller had grabbed him right after his final patrol around the settlement, which meant he had his armor, his pistol, and quite a few magazines of ammunition, all of which was pretty likely to be useless. He also had one empty canteen, no food, and a suit medical pack that was running low on almost everything, all of which would have been much handier to have fully stocked. When his body finally woke up enough to be hungry, he expected to be quite willing to trade his gun in for a sandwich. He didn’t think the alien structures would have many vending machines.

  Ten minutes passed, and his anxiety shifted to impatience. He sat down again and tried to call the Rocinante on his hand terminal, but got a failed connection message. He tried Elvi, Lucia, and Amos. All failed. Whatever the alien subway was made out of, it was blocking his signals to the hub on the Roci. It had to be that. The alternative was that the Roci wasn’t working, and that opened up too many bad scenarios. He pulled up a mindless pattern-matching game and played that for a while, until the terminal gave him a low-battery warning and he turned it off.

  After an hour passed, he started to get nervous. He wasn’t claustrophobic, and he’d spent most of his adult life in tiny cabins on space ships, but that didn’t mean he relished the idea of dying alone in a small metal box deep under the earth. He kicked the container’s door a few times and shouted to Miller, but got no reply.

  Which was, in its own way, fairly alarming.

  The container he’d been sleeping in during the long trip north was empty. The only tools he had with him were used for repairing his armor and weapons. There was nothing that could cut through the metal or bend it. He kicked the door again, this time putting enough effort into it that it hurt his shins. It didn’t move at all.

  “Huh,” he said out loud. If Miller had brought him all this way just to let him die in an abandoned train car, it was the longest prank setup in history.

  Holden was doing a mental inventory of everything he was carrying, trying to figure out if any combination of things might make an explosive powerful enough to blow the door off, and carefully ignoring the fact that any such explosion would probably liquefy any biology inside the small metal compartment, when a loud metallic groan came from outside the cart that rose in pitch to a shriek. The compartment shuddered and rocked. A long series of powerful hammering sounds assaulted him. Then another metallic scream that grew to deafening levels.

  The door to the compartment vanished, torn from the container in one massive blow. On the other side stood a nightmare.

  At first glance, it looked like a massive collection of appendages and cutting tools. It stood on six of its limbs, and waved four others in the air like a crustacean made of steel and knives. Whipping through the air around the heavier cutting arms were a dozen or more tentacles of what looked like black rubber. As he watched, two of the tentacles gripped the inside edges of the doorway and bent them out with fearsome strength.

  He pulled his pistol, but didn’t point it at the thing. It felt very small and inadequate in his hand.

  “Put that away,” the monster said in Miller’s voice. “You’ll put your eye out.”

  Holden hadn’t thought much about the fact that every time he heard Miller’s voice over the last year, it had been a protomolecule-induced hallucination. But at the sound of the detective’s voice in the air, actual vibrations moving through the atmosphere and hitting his eardrums, the strangeness of it made him feel a little lightheaded.

  “Is that you?” Holden asked in what he was pretty sure was the new universal winner for stupid questions.

  “Depends what you mean,” the Miller-bot said and backed away from the opening. It was surprisingly quiet for such a huge metallic monster. “I’m able to get into the local hardware, and this thing was in pretty good shape for having missed its three-month warranty check by a thousand million years or so.”

  Miller did something, and suddenly Holden could see the detective in his rumpled suit standing where the monster had been. He shrugged and smiled apologetically. But even as Holden saw a projection of Miller, superimposed over it he saw the robot. It was doing the same shrug, though instead of hands it used two massive serrated crab claws. It would have been comic if it hadn’t come with a splitting headache.

  “One or the other,” Holden said, squeezing his eyes shut. “I can’t see both things. It breaks my brain.”

  “Sorry. No problem,” Miller replied, and when Holden opened his eyes again only the robot was there. “Come on, we have a lot of ground to cover.”

  Holden hopped out of the material transfer container and onto a flat metal floor. Various sections of the Miller-bot’s carapace glowed with a faint light, and unlike the blue light that had always accompanied the Miller ghost, it actually illuminated the space around it.

  Pointing at one glowing limb, Holden said, “Can you make that brighter?”

  In answer, all of the glowing sections of the robot intensified until the tunnel was as bright as noon. The reason for the material transfer cart’s stoppage became apparent. A couple dozen meters ahead, the metal tunnel was blown apart and filled with rocks and debris.

  Reading his mind, Miller said, “Yeah. Not everything is handling the reboot well. Power node for the mag-lev woke up bad and blew itself up. Only it’s not exactly mag-lev. Close enough, though, you can get the picture.”

  “Can we get past it?”

  “Well, we can’t repair the track, but I can get you out. Making passages,” the Miller-bot said, waving one massive claw in the air, “is what this thing’s for. He used to dig and maintain these tunnels. Hop on.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me.”

  “No, seriously, climb on. This guy can move faster than you can on foot.”

  “Miller,” Holden said. “You are made entirely out of cutting edges and pinch points.”

  One of the black tentacles twisted around, looking over the robot’s carapace carefully. “Hold on,” Miller said, and with a hum and a few metallic clanks, the torso of the robot twisted into a new configuration, leaving a wide flat spot on its back. “There you go.”

  Holden hesitated for a moment, then climbed up one of the robot’s legs and onto its back. The Miller-bot trundled forward to the damaged section of tunne
l and the four big forward limbs went to work, tearing out the twisted metal of the tunnel walls and clearing the earth and stone that had filled the space. The machine worked with speed, precision, and a terrifying casual strength.

  “Hey Miller,” Holden said, watching the robot peel up a two-meter section of the tunnel’s metal flooring and rapidly cut it into tiny pieces. “We’re still friends, right?”

  “What? Ah, I see. When I’m a ghost, you yell at me, tell me to get lost, say you’ll find a way to kill me. Now I’m wearing the shell of an invincible wrecking machine and you want to be buddies again?”

  “Yeah, pretty much,” Holden replied.

  “Nah, we’re good.”