Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (25 page)

Certainly it wasn’t just that she was generating excuses to see him again.

She went down the list of things to do, then paused. At the end, she wrote,
Letter of recommendation for Felcia Merton
. She sat for a long moment, looking at the words, trying to decide how she felt about them. She erased the line, waited, and then entered it in again.

~

Walking into the town was like entering another world, and a harder one. The dirt streets weren’t empty, but the people who walked them stayed closer to the walls than they had before. The smiles and nods, the eye contact and simple greetings were all gone. The townspeople walked quickly, with their heads down. Elvi had the urge to stand in their way, block them with her body until they acknowledged that she was there.

The building where it had happened stood near the edge of town. The fire had melted what it hadn’t burned. The bones of the structure still stood, charred and tilted in the afternoon sun. She paused before them. They reminded her of something, but she couldn’t quite remember what. Something dead. Something about fire.

Oh. Of course. The artifact, burning in the desert.

Two of the RCE security force walked down the street in front of her, striding in the middle of the road. She couldn’t make out their words, but the tone of the conversation was bright, loose, and celebratory. One of them laughed. Elvi turned, walking toward them. As they passed, one of them lifted a hand in greeting and Elvi returned it automatically. Across the street, one of the Belter women – Eirinn her name was – stepped out from a door, saw the security forces, and hesitated before she came out into the light. Elvi watched the woman walk, her head a little too high, her shoulders pulled a little too far back. Nothing proved fear like the effort of rejecting it. First Landing had belonged to that woman once.

Elvi stepped into the commissary, hoping to find Holden at his traditional table. The room was dim, and it took her eyes a moment to adjust. The other one, Amos Burton, was there instead, eating a bowl of brown noodles that smelled of fake peanuts and curry. In the back, Lucia Merton sat in a booth with someone. Elvi looked away before the doctor met her gaze.

Amos looked up at her as she came close.

“I was wondering if Captain Holden… I wanted to talk with him. About the artifacts? In the desert?”

“Something happen with it?”

“I had some theories about it that I thought might be… useful.”

Oh good God
, she thought. I’m stuttering like a schoolgirl. Thankfully, Amos didn’t notice, or if he did he pretended not to.

“Captain’s off getting ready to transfer the prisoner,” Amos said. “Should be back around sundown.”

“All right,” Elvi said. “That’s fine. If you’d tell him I was looking for him? I’ll likely be in my hut by the time he’s back. He can find me there.”

“I’ll let ’im know.”

“Thank you.”

She turned away, fists pushed into her pockets. She felt humiliated without being entirely certain why she should. She was just going to offer some perspective on the artifacts and the local ecosystem. There was nothing about it that was at all inappropriate or —

“Elvi!”

She felt her belly drop. She turned toward the back, toward the booth where Lucia Merton sat. Fayez had swiveled around in the chair and was waving at her. She looked at the door to the street, wishing there was some graceful way to get through it.

“Elvi! Come sit. Have a drink with us.”

“Of course,” she said, and walked toward the back of the commissary, regretting every step as she took it.

Doctor Merton looked pale except for the bags under her eyes. Elvi wondered if the woman was ill, or if it was just distress and grief.

“Lucia,” Elvi said.

“Elvi.”

“Sit, sit, sit,” Fayez said. “You’re standing there, I feel short. I hate feeling short.”

Elvi smoothed the fabric of her pants and slid in next to Fayez. His smile was beery and amused. Lucia’s glance at her was almost an apology.
You could have sat next to me
, she seemed to say.

“We were just talking about Felcia,” Fayez said, then turned to Lucia. “Elvi is the smartest person on the team. Seriously, do you know that she’s the one who wrote the first real paper on cytoplasmic computation? That’s her. Right there.”

“Felcia’s told me about you,” Lucia said. “Thank you for being a friend to my daughter.”

Your family tried to kill me
, Elvi thought.
You shared your bed every night with a man who wanted me dead.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “She’s a very talented girl.”

“She is,” Lucia said. “And God knows I tried to talk her out of being a doctor.”

“You were hoping she’d stay?” Elvi asked, and her voice was more brittle than she’d intended.

“Not that, no,” Lucia said, laughing. “That she’s leaving this planet is the only good thing that’s happened since we came. It’s only that I’m afraid she’s doing it because it’s what I do. Better that she find her own way.”

“It’s a long way to Luna,” Fayez said. “I mean, I had five major courses of study before I fell in love with geohydraulics. I was going to be a brewer. Can you imagine that?”

Elvi and Lucia said
Yes
at precisely the same time. Elvi smiled despite herself. Lucia stood.

“I should go get Jacek,” she said.

“Is he all right?” Elvi asked. It was a reflex. A habit of etiquette. She wished she could take the question back even as the words left her mouth. The doctor’s smile was wistful.

“As well as can be expected,” she said. “His father is leaving today.”

Taken prisoner on the
Rocinante, Elvi thought, but said nothing.

“Your money’s no good here,” Fayez said. “It’s on me.”

“Thank you, Doctor Sarkis.”

“Fayez. Call me Fayez. Everyone else does.”

Lucia nodded and walked away. Fayez shook his head and stretched, his arm reaching behind Elvi’s shoulders. She shifted to the opposite side of the table.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked.

“What am
I
doing? You think that’s the question?”

“You know that her husband —”

“I don’t know a damned thing, Elvi. Neither do you. I’m rich in interpretation and poor in datasets, just the same as you.”

“You think… you think it’s not…”

“I think that building was filled with terrorists, and that Murtry killed them and saved us. That’s what I
think
, though. I also think that the more the locals know and love me, the less likely it is that I’ll be scalped in the next uprising. And… and what is civilization if it isn’t people talking to each other over a goddamned beer?” Fayez said, then lolled his head back over his shoulder. “Am I
right
?”

“Fuckin’ A,” Amos called back. “That sure is whatever you were talking about.”

“That’s right,” Fayez said.

“You’re drunk.”

“I’ve been doing this for a while,” Fayez said. “I’ve probably had drinks with a third of the people in this shithole. What I want to know is where the rest of you are while I’m making peace.”

For a moment, she could see his fear too. It was in the angle of his jaw and the way his half-closed eyes cut to the left, avoiding hers. Fayez who could laugh at anything, however tragic, was scared out of his wits. And why wouldn’t he be? They were billions of klicks from home, on a planet they didn’t understand, and in the middle of a war that had now killed people on both sides. And how odd and obvious that it would be a victory for their side – the nameless, faceless killers identified and killed or imprisoned – that would call up the panic.

Fayez was waiting. Waiting for the next escalation. The other shoe to drop. He was reaching out for whatever control he could find or hope for or pretend into being. Elvi understood, because she felt just the same, only she hadn’t known it until she saw it in someone else.

He scowled down at the table, then, slowly, his gaze floated up to meet hers. “What
are
you doing here?”

“Sitting with you, apparently,” she said.

Waiting for the other shoe.

B
asia stood at the edge of the landing area, steel shackles damp with his sweat and chafing his wrists and forearms. Murtry had insisted on restraints until Basia was off-planet, though he had given the key to Amos, and the big man had assured Basia he’d be uncuffed once the
Rocinante
lifted off. It was one last visible demonstration to the citizens of Ilus that Murtry could and would exert his will upon them. Jim Holden was still trying to play the peacemaker, and he’d agreed to the restraints in exchange for Basia being released into his custody without any further threats or considerations. Basia understood why everyone was doing what they were doing.

It didn’t make it less humiliating.

Lucia and Jacek stood with him, waiting for the
Rocinante
to land. Jacek stood in front of him, back pressed to his father’s stomach and Basia’s cuffed hands on his shoulders. His wife’s hand, gripping his own, rested on his son’s shoulder. All three of them touching. He tried to draw strength from it. Tried to lock the sensation of having his wife and his son close to hand into his memory. He had the terrible sense that it was the last time he’d ever feel her touch. He felt both relief and sadness that Felcia was already gone. Bad enough that his son, too young to really understand what it all meant, had to see him in chains. He could not have stood his bright, beautiful girl seeing him that way.

The other townspeople – men and women he had lived with sharing air and water and sorrow and rage – avoided the spectacle of his departure as if his guilt were an illness they might catch. He’d become a stranger to them. He might almost have preferred to have them condemn him.

All I wanted was my freedom. All I wanted was my family with me, and not to lose another child to them.
He was amazed and sick at heart that that had been too much to ask of the universe.

Amos, his nominal guard, stood a respectful distance away, arms crossed and staring up at the sky. Giving the family the space to say goodbye. Holden stood with Murtry and Carol, the triumvirate of power on Ilus. They weren’t looking at each other. They were there to take the sting off of Murtry exerting his control by pretending they were part of the decision. His life was a pawn in their political games. Nothing more.

“Just a couple more minutes, chief,” Amos said. A moment later came a high-altitude thunderclap. The
Rocinante
, dropping through the atmosphere faster than sound, descending on them all like the angel of judgment.

It seemed unreal.

“I’m happy having you two here with me right now,” he told Lucia. It wasn’t even a lie.

“Find a way to come back to us,” she said.

“I don’t know what I can do.”

“Find a way,” she repeated, making each word its own sentence. “You do that, Basia. Don’t make me grow old on this world alone.”

Basia felt something thick blocking his throat, and he had trouble breathing around the pain in his stomach. “If you need to find someone…”

“I did,” Lucia said. “I found someone. Now he needs to find a way to come back to me.”

Basia didn’t trust himself to speak. Worried that if he opened his mouth it would turn into a sob. He didn’t want Murtry to see that. So instead he put his cuffed arms around Lucia and pulled her tight and squeezed until neither of them could breathe.

“Come back,” she whispered one last time. Anything she might have said after that was drowned out by the roar of the
Rocinante
landing. A wall of dust blew past, stinging the bare skin on Basia’s neck. Lucia pressed her face into his chest, and Jacek clung to his back.

“Time to go,” Amos shouted.

Basia let go of Lucia, hugged his boy to his chest one last time,
the
last time maybe, and turned away from them both to board his prison.

“Welcome aboard, Mister Merton,” a tall, pretty woman said when the inner airlock door opened. She wore a simple jumpsuit of gray and black with the name Nagata stenciled over the breast pocket. Naomi Nagata, the executive officer of the
Rocinante
. She had long black hair pulled into a ponytail, the same way Felcia had worn hers when she was a young girl. On Naomi it looked more like a functional choice than an aesthetic one. She didn’t appear to be armed, and Basia felt himself relax a degree.

He handed her the key to his restraints and she unlocked them. “Basia, please,” he said as she worked. “I’m just a welder. No one has ever called me Mister Merton.”

“Welder?” Naomi asked. It didn’t sound like she was making pleasantries. She took the restraints, rolled them into a ball, and secured them in a locker. Shipboard discipline, where any free object became a projectile during maneuvers. “Because we always have a repair list.”

The compartment they stood in looked like a storage room laid on its side. The lockers ran parallel to the ground, rather than vertically, and there was a small hatch on either wall, with what looked like a ladder running across the floor. Naomi tapped on a panel on one wall and said, “Strapping in down here, Alex, get us off this dustball before my knees start leaking.”

A disembodied voice with a Martian Mariner Valley twang said, “Roger that, boss. Up in thirty ticks, so get belted in.”

Naomi pulled on a strap on the floor and a seat folded out. It was designed so a person would have to lie on the floor on their back to put their butt on the seat. A variety of restraining belts folded out with it. She pointed at another strap in the floor and said, “Better get with it. We lift in thirty seconds.”

Basia pulled out his own seat and awkwardly lay on the ground to get into the straps. Naomi helped him buckle in.

The Martian voice counted down from five, and the floor lurched as the ship lifted off. There was a disorienting rotation, and the floor became a wall behind him and he was actually sitting on the cushion he’d pulled out. He became very grateful for the straps holding him in place.