Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (18 page)

“Of course he is!” Carol said. “Delay is all he needs to kill us.”

Holden frowned at that. “Explain.”

“We’re not self-supporting yet,” Carol said. “We’ve got the
Barb
up in orbit. She can bring us fuel cells charged from her drive, and she dropped us with all the food and seeds she had, but we can’t really plant here yet. Soil has the wrong microorganisms in it. We desperately need food stores, soil enrichments, medical supplies.”

“All of which RCE is happy to —” Murtry started.

“But what we do have is the richest lithium vein any of us have ever seen. And with that ore, we can buy everything else we need. The
Israel
is keeping the
Barbapiccola
from sending down her shuttle to pick up the rest, and she’s threatened to stop the
Barb
if she tries to leave orbit.”

“The mineral rights on New Terra are not yours,” Murtry said. “Not until the UN says they are.”

Carol slapped the table with her palm; it was as loud as a gunshot in the small room. “See? It’s a waiting game. If he can just block us from taking our ore up to the ship long enough, then it won’t matter who gets those rights. Even if they’re awarded to us, we’ll be so behind in moving the ore to the ship that we’ll all starve to death before we ever get to market.”

“So,” Holden said. “You’re asking for the right to keep loading the ore onto the
Barbapiccola
while the rights are negotiated.”

Carol opened her mouth, closed it, and folded her arms.

“Yes,” she said.

“Okay,” Holden said with a nod. “Sounds fair to me. No matter who winds up selling that ore, they’ll need a transport to move it, and the
Barb
is as good as anything else.”

Murtry shrugged. “Fine. We’ll allow the shuttle to land and begin transporting ore again. But mining operations come with some problems for me.”

“Explain?” Holden said again.

“They’re using explosives. The same type of explosive that was used to bring down the shuttle and kill the governor. As long as these people have unrestricted access to it my people are at risk.”

“What’s your solution?” Holden asked.

“I want to control access.”

“So you’ll let us move the ore you won’t let us mine?” Carol said. “Typical corporate doublespeak.”

“I’m not saying that,” Murtry said, patting the air in a
calm down
gesture that struck Holden as intentionally patronizing. “I’m saying we hold the explosives when not in use, and your mining crews sign them out when needed. That way nothing goes missing and shows up later as a pipe bomb.”

“Carol, does that seem fair to you?” Holden asked.

“It’ll slow the process down, but it’s not a deal breaker,” she replied.

“Okay,” Holden said, standing up. “We’ll stop there for now. We’ll meet again tomorrow to go over the UN proposal on colony administration and start hammering out details. We also need to talk about environmental controls.”

“The OPA —” Carol started.

“Yes, I have the recommendations from Fred Johnson as well, and those will be discussed. I’d like to transmit a revised plan to the UN and OPA by the end of the week, and get their feedback. Acceptable?”

There were nods from both Murtry and Carol. “Great. I’ll want you two with me when I present today’s agreement at the town hall meeting tonight. Our first show of goodwill and solidarity.”

Murtry rose and walked past Carol without looking at her or shaking hands.

Goodwill and solidarity indeed.

~

“So,” Amos said when Holden exited the town hall meeting that night. “How’d it go?”

“I must have done it right,” Holden replied. “
Everyone’s
pissed.”

They walked along the dusty street together in companionable silence for a while. Amos finally said, “Weird planet. Walking in open air at night with no moon is breaking my head.”

“I hear you. My brain keeps trying to find Orion and the Big Dipper. What’s weirder is that I keep finding them.”

“That ain’t them,” Amos said.

“Oh, I know. But it’s like my eyes are forcing those patterns on stars that aren’t really lined up the right way to make them.”

There was another moment of silence, then Amos said, “That’s, like, one of them metaphors, right?”

“It is now.”

“Buy you a beer?” Amos said when they reached the doors of the commissary.

“Later, maybe. I think I’m going to take a walk. The night air is nice here. Reminds me of Montana.”

“Okay, see you when I see you. Try not to get shot or abducted or anything.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Holden walked slowly, the dirt of the planet puffing up around his ankles at every stride. The buildings glowed in the darkness, the only human habitation on the planet. The only civilization in the wilds. He put his back to it and kept on going.

He was far enough outside of town that he could no longer see its dim lights when a faint blue glow appeared beside him. The glow was both there and not there. It lit the air around it while also illuminating nothing.

“Miller,” Holden said without looking.

“Hey kid.”

“We need to talk,” Holden finished for him.

“That’s less funny the more you do it,” the detective said, his hands in his pockets. “Did you come out here to find me? I admit, I’m a little flattered, considering your other problems.”

“Other problems?”

“Yeah, that shantytown full of future corpses you’re trying to treat like grown-ups. No way that doesn’t end bloody.”

Holden turned to look at Miller, frowning. “Is that the former cop talking? Or the creepy protomolecule skin doll.”

“I don’t know. Both,” Miller said. “You want a shadow, you got to have light and something to get in its way.”

“Can I borrow the cop for a minute?”

The gray, jowly man hoisted his eyebrows just the way he had in life. “Are you asking me to use your brain to make these monkeys stop killing each other over rare dirt?”

“No,” Holden sighed. “Just advice.”

“Okay. Sure. Murtry’s a psycho who’s finally in a spot where he can do the creepy shit he’s been dreaming about doing all his life. I’d just have Amos shoot him. Carol and her gang of dirt farmers are only alive because they’re too desperate to realize how stupid they are. They’ll probably die of starvation and bacterial infections in a year. Eighteen months tops. Your pals Avasarala and Johnson have handed you the bloody knife and you think it’s because they trust you.”

“You know what I hate about you?”

“My hat?”

“That too,” Holden said. “But mostly it’s that I hate everything you say, but you’re not always wrong.”

Miller nodded and stared up at the night sky.

“The frontier always outpaces the law,” Holden said.

“True,” Miller agreed. “But this place was already a crime scene when you got here.”

“Bombing the heavy shuttle was —”

“Not that,” Miller said. “I mean all of it. All the places.”

“I seem to spend a lot of time asking people to explain themselves lately.”

Miller laughed. “You think somebody built those towers and structures and then just left? This whole planet is a murder scene. An empty apartment with warm food on the table and all the clothes still in the closets. This is some Croatoan shit.”

“The North American colonists who —”

“Except,” Miller said, ignoring him. “The people who vanished here? Not dumbass Europeans in way over their heads. The things that lived here modified planets like we remodel a kitchen. They had a defense network in orbit that could have vaporized Ceres if it wandered too close.”

“Wait, what defense network?”

Miller ignored him. “An empty apartment, a missing family, that’s creepy. But this is like finding a military base with no one on it. Fighters and tanks idling on the runway with no drivers. This is bad juju. Something
wrong
happened here. What you should do is tell everyone to leave.”

“Yeah,” Holden said, “sure, I’ll get right on that. This argument about who gets to live here really needed a third party both sides could hate.”

“No one lives here,” Miller said, “but we’re sure as shit going to play with the corpses.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Miller tipped his hat back, looking up at the stars.

“I never stopped looking for her. Julie? Even when she was dead, even when I’d seen her body, I never stopped.”

“True. Still creepy, but true.”

“This is like that too. I don’t like it, but unless something happens, we’re going to keep reaching and reaching and reaching until we find what did all this.”

“And then what?”

“And then we’ll have found it,” he said.

~

A man Holden didn’t recognize was waiting for him at the edge of town. Belter tall, stocky and thick-necked. Big meaty hands he was rubbing together nervously. Holden consciously forced himself not to drop his hand to the butt of his gun.

“Thought you got lost out there,” the man said.

“Nope, all good.” Holden held out his right hand. “Jim Holden. Have we met?”

“Basia. Basia Merton. From Ganymede.”

“Yeah, all of you are from Ganymede, right?”

“Pretty much.”

Holden waited for the man to speak. Basia stared back, wringing his hands again.

“So,” Holden finally said. “Mister Merton. How can I help you?”

“You found my son. Back… back there. You found Katoa,” Basia said.

It took Holden a moment to make the connection. “The little boy on Ganymede. You’re Prax’s friend.”

Basia nodded, his head moving too fast, like a nervous bird. “We’d left. Me and my wife and my two other kids. We got a chance to get out on the
Barbapiccola
and I thought Katoa was dead. He was sick, you know.”

“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.”

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.”