Cibola Burn

by James S. A. Corey

He punctuated the words with one last massive blow that shattered a two-ton boulder into rubble. By hunching down on his six legs, Miller was able to squeeze through a small opening in the tunnel blockage. Holden lay down flat on the robot’s back, a jagged piece of the tunnel roof passing less than three centimeters from his face.

  “Clear sailing from here,” Miller said, “but the mag-lev’s dead after this. No more trains.”

  “We have any better idea what we’re looking for?”

  “Only in general terms. About the time one-celled organisms on Earth were starting to think about maybe trying photosynthesis, something turned this whole damned planet off. Took it off the grid, and killed everything high enough up the food chain to have an opinion. If I’m right, the thing that did that’s not entirely gone. Every time something reaches into this one particular place, it dies.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Holden said.

  “Don’t be,” Miller said. “It’s what we’re hoping for. Now buckle up. We’re going to try and make up some lost time.”

  The robot bolted off down the tunnel, its six legs a blur of motion. Even moving at fairly high speed, the ride on its back was very smooth.

  Holden surprised himself by falling asleep again.

  He woke to something cold and rubbery touching his cheek.

  “Stop it,” he said, waving one arm at the thing.

  “Wake up,” Miller said, the detective’s voice rumbling though the robot’s carapace.

  “Shit,” Holden said, sitting up suddenly and wiping saliva off the side of his face. “I’d forgotten I was here.”

  “Yeah, I’d say a week of no sleep and too many amphetamines broke you a little,” Miller said. “You went on quite the bender.”

  “Only without the fun.”

  “I’ve been on a few myself,” Miller said and added a strange metallic laugh. “None of them are fun. But we’re about to hit the processing station, so get awake.”

  “What should we be expecting?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see it,” Miller said.

  Holden pulled out his pistol and checked the magazine and chamber. It was ready to go. It felt a little like playing grown-up. Anything that the Miller-bot monstrosity couldn’t handle wasn’t going to be stopped by a few shots from his sidearm. But, like so many things in life, when you come to the spot where you’re supposed to do the rituals, you do them. Holden slid the pistol back into its holster but kept one hand on it.

  It took him a minute to see it, but a point of light appeared ahead in the tunnel and then grew. Not reflected light from the robot, but something glowing. Holden felt a rush of relief. He’d traveled longer and farther than he knew in the small metal tunnels of the transfer system. He was ready to go outside.

  The tunnel ended in a complex maze of new passages. A routing station, Holden guessed, where the arriving material was sent off to its various destinations. The walls were all of the same dull alloy as the tunnel. What machinery was visible in the cramped space was inset into the walls and flush with them.

  The Miller-bot paused for a moment, its tentacles waving at the tunnel choices. Holden could picture Miller standing still at the junction, tapping one finger on his chin while he decided which path to take. And then, suddenly, he actually could see Miller overlapping the robot. The headache returned with a vengeance.

  “That one was kind of your fault,” Miller said. “It’s an interactive system.”

  “Do we have any idea where we’re going?”

  Miller answered by trundling off down one of the many new tunnels. A few seconds later, they’d exited into a cavernous new space. It took Holden a few moments to realize that it was all still artificial. The room they entered felt too big to be a construct. It was like standing at the core of the world and looking up for the crust.

  All around stood vast silent machines. Some were moving, twitching. They were recognizably designs that the protomolecule favored. They had the same half-mechanism, half-organic look of everything else he’d seen them build. Here, a massive system of tubes and pistons rising from a gantry twisting into whorls like a nautilus shell. There, an appendage coming from the ceiling, half again as long as the Rocinante, and ending in a nine-fingered manipulating hand the size of Miller’s robot. Light poured into the space seemingly from everywhere at once, giving the air a gentle golden hue. The ground was vibrating. Holden could feel the soft pulses through the robot’s shell.

  “We’re in a lot of trouble, aren’t we?” Holden asked, breathless.

  “Nah,” Miller said, rotating the robot to test the air in every direction with its tentacles. “This is just initial material sorting and reclamation. Not even to the processing center.”

  “You could park a battleship in this room.”

  “It’s not for show,” Miller said, then the robot began scuttling toward a distant wall. “This is the point of this planet.”

  “Huh,” Holden said. He found he was missing all of his other words. “Huh.”

  “Yeah. So, as far I can figure it, there are minerals native to this system that are fairly rare, galactically speaking.”

  “Lithium.”

  “That’s one,” Miller agreed. “This planet is a gas station. Process the ore, refine it, send it down to the power plants, then beam the collected energy out.”

  “To where?”

  “To wherever. There are lots of worlds like this one, and they all fed the grid. Not the rings, though. I still don’t know how they powered those.”

  The robot moved with machine speed toward a distant wall, and a section of the structure slid away. It left an opening the size of a repair shuttle, and more lighted machinery beyond. Some of the giant devices were moving with articulations more biological than mechanical. They pulsed, contracted, rippled. Nothing so prosaic and common as a gear or a wheel in sight.

  “Are we moving through a fusion reactor right now?” Holden asked, Naomi’s question about radiation exposure on his mind.

  “Nope. This is just ore processing. The reactors are all in that chain of islands on the other side of the world. These guys built for flexibility and redundancy.”

  “You know,” Holden said, “one of the geologists told me this planet has been heavily modified. All of that was done just to turn it into a power station?”

  “Why not? They didn’t need it for anything else. Not a particularly good planet, rare metals aside. And be glad they did. You think you can have an underground rail system last two billion years on any planet with tectonic action?”

  Holden was quiet for a moment, riding the Miller-bot through the material refining plant as it throbbed around him. “It’s too much,” he finally said. “That level of control over your environment is too much. I can’t get my brain around it. What could kill these guys?”

  “Something worse.”

  The Miller-bot ducked under what looked like a conveyor system made of metal mesh wrapped around a pulsing musculature. It was clicking and groaning as part of the mechanism tried to move while the rest of it remained frozen. Holden had a sudden, vivid memory of a goat he’d found as a child. It’d had one broken leg wrapped in a barbed-wire fence, the other three feebly pushing at the ground to free it.

  “So there’s the thing,” the Miller-bot said, waiving its claws around at the machinery, “this right here was the point of this place. It’s why this planet exists. And right around here somewhere is a blank spot in the planetary network. A place we can’t touch.”

  “So?”

  “So, whatever’s in that blank spot, it’s not from around here. And if it’s a bullet, then whoever did this knew to shoot for the heart.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine: Havelock

  H

  avelock moved across the surface of the Rocinante, magnetic boots clicking to the exterior plating, then lifting free again. To his right, the sun – a sun, anyway – shone brighter than a welding torch. To his left, the great, clouded curve of New Terra filled his personal sky, the plane
t looming in. The upper boundary of the exosphere was invisible if he looked down, the gases too thin for an imperfect human eye to make out. The vast, sweeping curve of it before and behind the ship was hardly more then a grayness against the void. It felt too close. It was too close. He could already imagine the vicious friction tearing away his suit, the ship, the thin air burning him worse than a belt sander. The angry hot slag that had been one of the defense moons glowed high above, dull red against the pure white stars. His feet grabbed on to the plating, held, released.

  “How’s it looking out there?” Naomi asked in his ear.

  “As well as could be expected. Kind of wish that planet wasn’t quite so up in my face. I keep feeling like it’s trying to pick a fight.”

  “Yeah, I was thinking that too.”

  The point defense cannon was a single thick barrel on a hemispheric swivel joint, the metal smooth as a mirror. The hole at the end was a black dot small enough that Havelock could have blocked it with the tip of his ungloved pinky finger. The little tungsten slugs it spat out would have been small enough to hold in the palm of his hand, and the feed would have spat them out by the hundreds every second. It was a machine of inhuman power and sophistication, built to react faster than a human brain and with enough force to shoot down anything that threatened the ship.

  Without power, he could use it to hide behind.

  He lay flat against the decking, just the toes of the mag boots engaged. He took the rifle off his back, synced it to the suit’s HUD, and a handful of new stars appeared. Red for the militiamen, green for whatever the other things were they were hauling with them. The Rocinante bucked under him, the horizon of the ship shifting as the rail gun fired. A half dozen streaks of blue danced from the defense moons above, marking the path of the rail gun’s round with the instantaneous violence of lightning. He shifted a few centimeters, correcting for the movement of the ship, reacquired his targets, and opened the general frequency.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “This really isn’t something we need to be doing.”

  He saw them respond. Their bodies stiffening, their heads craning while they tried to look for him. No one came on the channel. He zoomed in on them. Their faceplates were darkened against the sun, making them anonymous. But he knew all of them.

  “Honestly, why? What’s this for? That ship down there and everyone on her is going to die. We’re doing everything we can to put that off, but you guys have done the math, right? You have the same numbers we do. You don’t gain anything from this. It’s just being mean. You don’t need to do that.”

  One of the dots flinched. At a guess, the chief engineer was shouting on whatever frequency they were all using now. Drowning him out. Havelock let his sight drift to one of the other dots. The angle made it hard to parse exactly what he was seeing. A gas storage tube of some kind, with complications of wire and circuit board on either end. Some kind of improvised missile, he guessed. They would have been pointless if the PDC he was hiding behind had been working. He wondered whether the engineers knew the Roci’s defenses were down, or if they only guessed. Or if the prospect of their own deaths and their hatred of the Belters had taken them far enough that the risk of being killed in order to deny the Barbapiccola a little more life seemed worth it to them. No matter what, it was disappointing.

  “Walters? Is this how you want to go down? Don’t listen to them for a second. Seriously, just turn off the radio. We don’t have to hurry here. Do you think you’re doing the right thing?”

  They were visibly closer now than they had been. They weren’t accelerating toward him, but they weren’t braking either. Havelock’s HUD made the calculation. They’d be at the Roci or the Barb or the tether between them in about twenty minutes.

  “You guys need to slow down now,” Havelock said. “You’re still my people, and I don’t want to hurt any of you.”

  The radio clicked to life. The chief engineer’s voice was thick with anger and contempt. “Don’t try to play that on us, you traitorous bastard. Your little friend’s PDCs are powered down. We saw that before we dropped. Do you think we’re stupid? We have orders to bring you and the Belter bitch back to the Israel and put you both in the brig.”

  “Orders?”

  “Straight from Murtry.”

  Because, Havelock figured, it was precedent. RCE would be able to assert that it had protected its claim down to the last minute. Murtry’s legacy would be that he hadn’t given up a centimeter. Not on the ground, not in space, not on the abstract legal battlefield. Nowhere.

  There was a time not that long ago when Havelock would have thought there was a kind of hard purity in that. Now it just seemed weird and kind of pathetic.

  “Okay,” he said. “You’re right. The PDCs are down, but you haven’t thought the rest of this through. I am outside the ship. I’m armored. I have an integrated HUD and a weapon that can reach any of you right now. None of you have any cover. The reason you guys are alive right now is because you’re my guys, and I don’t want any of you hurt.”

  He watched them react. It was less than he’d hoped. The Roci bucked again. The bolt of the rail gun and the attacking streaks of energy from the moons. Havelock reacquired the targets. It took a fraction of a second for the HUD’s alert to make sense to him. Four of the targets were moving. Fast. Four of the gas tanks, accelerating hard, a cloud of thin mist flowing out behind them as whatever residual vapor had been trapped in it froze into snow.

  “You’ve got incoming,” Alex snapped in his ear, and Havelock lifted his gun. One of the missiles was clearly flying off course, a vicious spiral wobble leading it down toward the planet. He took aim at one of the three remaining and blew holes on both sides of the tube. The improvised missile wobbled as whatever steering device the Israel’s engineers had put on the back struggled to use the last of the escaping ejection mass to correct the course, but the venting gases were too destabilizing. It drifted up and began to turn. He shifted to the two remaining targets. He wasn’t going to have time to get them both, but he managed to sink two rounds in the one that was heading straight toward him, trying to knock out the payload.

  The one remaining tube hit the Roci’s skin eight meters to Havelock’s right, and the world went white. Something pushed him, and something hurt, and the sound of his suit radio was still there, but it was faintly distant. His body seemed very large, like it had expanded to fill the universe or the universe had shrunk down until it fit in his skin. His hands seemed a very long way away. Someone was shouting his name.

  “I’m here,” he said, and it felt like hearing a recording of himself. The pain started ramping up. His HUD was flashing red medical warnings, and his left leg was frozen stiff and unbending. The stars spun around him, New Terra coming up from below him and then spinning up past his head. For a moment, he couldn’t find the Rocinante or the Barbapiccola. Maybe they were gone. He caught a passing glimpse of the Israel, though, far off to his right, and so small he could almost have mistaken it for a tightly packed constellation of dim stars. His HUD spooled up a fresh warning, and he felt a needle fire into his right leg. A cold shudder passed through him but his mind seemed to clear a little.

  “Havelock?” Alex said.

  “I’m here,” Havelock said. “I’m not dead. I think I’ve been knocked off the ship, though. I seem to be floating.”

  “Can you stabilize?”

  “I don’t think so. The suit may be malfunctioning. Also I seem to have taken a lot of shrapnel in my left leg and hip. I may be bleeding.”

  “Do you have containment? Havelock? Are you losing air?”

  It was a good question, but his gorge was rising. The spinning was making him sick. If he puked in the helmet, things would go from bad to worse very, very quickly. He closed his eyes and focused on his breath until he thought he could stand to look again. When he did, he kept his gaze on the unshifting images of the HUD readout.

  “I have containment. I can breathe.”

  He heard Naomi sigh.
It sounded like relief. He was flattered. The red dots of the militiamen spun past in the corner of his eye. He couldn’t tell if they were still getting closer or if they’d stopped. Something bright happened in the atmosphere. The rail gun firing again. The planet rose up from below him and disappeared over his head.

  “Hang on, coyo,” Basia said. “I’m coming out.”

  “Belay that,” Havelock said. “The guys from the Israel have more of their improvised missiles. They have guns. Stay inside.”

  “Too late,” Basia said. “Already cycled out the lock. I just need too… Shit, that’s bright.”

  Havelock twisted to the left, finding the Rocinante at last. The explosion hadn’t thrown him as far as he’d thought, but he was on the drift now. Every breath took him farther from the metal-and-ceramic bubble of air. He wondered if he stayed out here whether his body would outlast the ships. His air supply wouldn’t. The improvised missile had left a bright scar on the Roci’s outer hull, but didn’t look like it had made any holes. Tough little ship.