Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (29 page)

“I’ve done the minimum necessary at each step,” the man said through his disquieting grin.

“No,” Holden replied. “You could have left. You had the
Israel
. After the first attack on the shuttle you could have pulled your people out and waited for the investigation. A lot of people would still be alive if you had.”

“Oh no,” Murtry said, shaking his head. He stood up and uncrossed his arms. Every movement slow and deliberate and conveying threat. “No, that’s one thing we won’t do. We won’t give up a centimeter of ground. These squatters can throw themselves against us until every one of them is shattered into dust, but we’re not going anywhere. Because that…”

Murtry’s smile sharpened.

“… is also my job.”

~

The walk from the RCE security shed back to his room at the community center wasn’t a long one, but it was very dark. Miller’s faint blue glow illuminated nothing, but it was oddly comforting anyway.

“Hey, old man,” Holden said in greeting.

“We need to talk.” Miller grinned at his own joke. He made jokes now. He was almost like a real person. Somehow that was more frightening than when he’d been insane.

“I know, but I’m kind of busy with keeping these people from killing each other. Or, you know, us.”

“How’s that working for you?”

“Terrible,” Holden admitted. “I’ve just lost the only real threat I had to make.”

“Yeah, Naomi being on their ship makes the
Rocinante
a non-factor. Letting her anywhere near that ship was a dumb mistake.”

“I never told you about that.”

“Should I pretend I’m not inside your head?” Miller asked with a Belter shrug. “I’ll do it if it makes you more comfortable.”

“Hey, Miller,” Holden said. “What am I thinking now?”

“Points for creativity, kid. That’d be difficult to pull off and less fun than you might expect.”

“So stay out.”

Miller stopped walking and grabbed Holden’s upper arm. Again he was surprised at how real it felt. Miller’s hand felt like iron gripping him. Holden tried to pull away and couldn’t. And all of it was just the ghost pushing buttons in his brain.

“Wasn’t kidding. We need to talk.”

“Spit it out,” Holden replied, finally yanking his arm away when Miller let go.

“There’s a spot a way north of here I need to go look at.”

“By which you mean you need
me
to go look at.”

“Yeah,” Miller said with a Belter nod of one fist. “That.”

Against his will, Holden felt his curiosity piqued. “What is it?”

“So, turns out our coming here caused a little ruckus with the locals,” Miller said. “May have noticed. Lot of leftover stuff waking up all over the planet.”

“Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about that. Is that you? Can you control it?”

“Are you kidding? I’m a sock puppet. Protomolecule’s got its arm so far up my ass, I can taste its fingernails.” Miller laughed. “I can’t even control myself.”

“It’s just that some of it seems dangerous. That robot, for instance. And you were able to turn off the station in the slow zone.”

“Because
it
wanted me to. You can order the sun to come up if you time it right. I’m not driving this bus. Making it do what I want would be like talking someone out of a seizure.”

“Okay,” Holden said. “We have got to get off this planet.”

“Before that, though, there’s this thing. This not-thing. Look, I’ve got a pretty good map of the global network. Lots of leftover stuff coming up, checking in. Except one spot. Like a big ball of nothing.”

Holden shrugged. “Maybe it’s just a place where there are no nodes on the network.”

“Kid, this whole planet is a node on the network. There shouldn’t be anyplace that’s off-limits to me.”

“So what does it mean?”

“Maybe it’s just a spot that’s really really broken,” Miller said. “That’d be interesting but useless.”

“And the useful thing?”

“It’s a leftover bit of whatever killed this place.”

They stood in silence for a moment, the cool evening wind of Ilus ruffling Holden’s pants and not affecting the detective at all. Holden felt a chill start at the base of his spine and slowly climb his back. The hairs on his arms stood up.

“I don’t want to find that,” he finally said.

“And I do?” Miller replied with his best attempt at a friendly smile. “Free will left the conversation for me a while back. But that’s where the clues are. You should come with. It’s going to happen eventually anyway.”

“Why is that?”

“Because real monsters don’t go away when you close your eyes. Because you need to know what happened here just as bad as I do.”

Miller’s expression was still friendly, but there was a dread in it too. A fear that Holden recognized. And shared.

“Naomi first. I don’t go anywhere until we get her back.”

Miller nodded again and flew apart into a spray of blue fireflies.

Amos was waiting for him when he got back to the bar. The big man sitting alone at a table with a half-empty bottle of something that smelled like antiseptic and smoke.

“I’m guessing you didn’t kill him after I left,” Amos said as Holden sat down.

“I feel like I’m walking a tightrope so narrow I can’t even see it,” Holden replied. He shook his head when Amos offered him the bottle, so the mechanic took a long swig from it instead.

“This ends in blood,” Amos said after a moment. His voice sounded distant, dreamlike. “No way around that.”

“Well, since my job is pretty much exactly the opposite of that, I hope you’re wrong.”

“I’m not.”

Holden lacked a compelling argument, so instead he said, “What did Alex have to say?”

“We put together a list of demands for the captain of the
Israel
. Make sure Naomi gets well taken care of while she’s there.”

“What will we give up in exchange?”

“Alex isn’t blowing the
Israel
into its component atoms right this second.”

“I hope they agree we’re being generous.”

“He is, however,” Amos continued, “keeping a constant rail gun lock on the
Israel
’s reactor.”

Holden ran his fingers through his hair. “So not too generous, then.”

“Say pretty please, but carry a one-kilo slug of tungsten accelerated to a detectable percentage of
c
.”

“I believe I’ve heard that said,” Holden replied, then stood up. He suddenly felt very tired. “I’m going to bed.”

“Naomi’s in Murtry’s goddamn brig, and you can sleep?” Amos said and took another drink.

“No, but I can go to bed. Then tomorrow I’m going to figure out how to get my first officer back from the RCE maniac holding her hostage, so that I can go find the scary alien bullet fragment embedded in the planet.”

Amos nodded as if that all made sense. “Nothing in the afternoon, then.”

E
lvi slept, and she dreamed.

In her dream she was back on Earth, which was also the corridors of the
Edward Israel
. A sense of urgency pressed at her, shifting quickly toward dread. Something was on fire somewhere because she hadn’t turned in the right forms. She had to file the forms before everything burned. She was in the bursar’s office at the university and Governor Trying was there too, only he was waiting for his death certificate and it was taking too long. She couldn’t submit her forms. She looked at the onionskin papers, trying to find the submission deadline, but the words kept changing. First, the line at the bottom read,
Elvi Okoye, lead researcher and Argonaut
, and the next time she read it,
Fines to be paid directly at the temple: rabbits and hogs
. The urgency pushed at her, and when she shouted the onionskin started coming apart in her fingers. She tried to press the forms back together, but they wouldn’t go.

Someone touched her shoulder, and it was James Holden, only he looked like someone else. Younger, darker, but she knew it was him. She realized she’d been naked this whole time. She was embarrassed, but also a little pleased. His hand touched her breast, and —

“Elvi! Wake up!”

Her eyes opened, the lids heavy and slow. Her eyes struggled to focus. She didn’t know where she was, only that some dumb bastard was interrupting something she didn’t want interrupted. The dark lines before her slowly became familiar. The roof of her hut. She shifted, reaching out for someone but already uncertain who. She was alone in her bed. Her hand terminal glowed dimly. Her analysis equipment flickered as data from her work flew up and out, through the vast darkness to the Ring and Medina Station, to Earth, and answering information flew back out to her. Which was all fine and as it should be, so why the hell was she awake?

A soft knock came at the door, and Fayez’s voice. “Elvi! Wake up. You’ve got to see this.”

Elvi yawned so deeply her jaw ached with it. She pulled herself up to sitting. The dream was already fading quickly. There had been something about a fire and someone touching her whom she had badly wanted to be touched by. The details lost all coherence as she sat up and reached for her robe.

“Elvi? Are you there?”

When she spoke her words were slow, heavy, a little slurred. “If this isn’t important, I will rip your throat open and piss down your lungs.”

Fayez laughed. There were other voices behind his. Sudyam saying something too low to make out the words. Yma Chappel, the geochemistry lead too. Elvi paused, threw off the robe, and pulled on her real clothes and work boots to go with them. When she stepped out of her hut, a dozen of the people in the research teams were standing in pairs or small groups all across the night-dark plain. They were all looking up. And in the high darkness, something larger than a star glowed a sullen red. Fayez, squatting on the ground, glanced over at her.

“What is that?” Elvi asked, her voice instinctively low, as if she might startle it.

“One of the moons.”

She stepped forward, her neck back, scowling up at the night. “What’s it doing?”

“Melting.”

“Why?”

“Right?” Fayez said, standing up.

Sudyam, to their left, raised her voice. “Makes you wish we’d sent probes there, doesn’t it?”

“We’re one ship, and this is a whole damn planet,” Fayez said. “Plus which, we’ve been focusing a lot of effort on killing each other.”

“Point being?” Sudyam asked.

Fayez spread his hands wide. “We’ve been busy.”

The moon shifted colors for a moment, turning from dull red to a bright orange to yellow-white, and then back down the spectrum again, waning as suddenly as it had waxed.

“Is anyone recording this?” Elvi asked.

“Caskey and Farengier aborted the high-altitude refraction study and started sucking down data from it is as soon as they saw it was happening. Mostly, it’s visible light, heat, and about thirty percent more gamma particles than background. The sensor array on the
Israel
’s showing about the same thing.”

“Is it dangerous?” Elvi asked, knowing the answer even as she spoke the words. Maybe. Maybe it was dangerous, maybe it wasn’t. Until they knew what it was, all they could do was guess. In the starlight, Fayez’s expression was difficult to make out. The apprehension at the corners of his mouth and in the curve of his eyes might only have been her imagination. Another kind of dream. “Do the others know?”

“I guess so,” Fayez said. “Assuming they’re not too busy taking each other prisoner and setting people on fire.”

“You told Murtry?”

“I didn’t. Someone probably did.”

“And Holden? What about him? Does he know?”

“Even if he does, what’s he going to do about it? Speak to it reassuringly?”

Elvi turned toward First Landing. The few lit houses were like a handful of stars fallen to the ground. She took out her hand terminal, setting its screen to white and using it as a torch.

“Where are you going?” Fayez called from behind her.

“I’m going to talk to Captain Holden,” she said.

“Of course you are,” Fayez said with an impatient grunt. “Because what would be useful for him is a biologist’s perspective on it.”

The words stung a little, but Elvi didn’t let herself be drawn into the conversation. Fayez was a good scientist and a friend, but his habit of making fun of everything and derailing anything serious for the sake of humor also made him less useful than he should have been. One of the others should have made sure everyone knew that something was happening overhead. It shouldn’t have had to be her. And still, she quietly did hope that she would be the one to bring the news.

The dry air smelled like dust and the tiny, night-blooming flower analogs. Where there had been a few tough, ropy plants, months of foot traffic had made paths, and Elvi followed them as easily in the near-darkness as she would have in the day. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that the scattering of huts, the ruins, and even First Landing itself had become as familiar to her as anyplace else she’d lived. She knew the land, the feel of the breezes, the smells that rose and fell at different times of day. Over the past month, she had been the ears and eyes of the whole scientific community back in the solar system. Even when the terrorists had killed Reeve, and Murtry had come down, at least a part of her day had been running samples and transmitting data back home. She had spent more time not just in but
with
this environment than anyone else.

Above her, the tiny red moon reminded her that she still didn’t know much. Normally, that would have been a delight and a challenge. In the darkness of the New Terran night, it felt like a threat. Her steps took on a rhythm, her boots tapping against the wind-paved stones.

In the town, people were in the streets much like they had been out by the RCE huts. They stood in the streets and on their little cobbled-together porches, looking up at the glowing dot as it drifted toward the horizon. Elvi couldn’t say if they were curious or apprehensive or just wanting something to think about that wasn’t the conflict between RCE and the squatters. Between
us
and
them
.