Cibola Burn

  “Is it bad?”

  “Yeah. Take the call. Be the calm one. You can do that?”

  “Sure, boss,” Havelock said. “Cool as November, smooth as China silk.”

  “Good man.”

  The picture froze for a fraction of a second, and then Cassie was looking out at him. For a year and a half, they’d been on the ship together, part of the same team, familiar if not intimate. He’d been aware vaguely when she’d struck up a romance with Aragão and then when they’d broken it off. He thought of her as a friend because he didn’t think about her much at all.

  In the image, her skin had an ashy color, and her eyes were lined with red.

  “Cassie,” Havelock said, his voice falling into the comforting register he’d trained for in the hostage negotiation workshop he’d taken after the Ceres riots. “Hear things are a little rough down there.”

  Cassie’s laugh shifted the camera, shaking her on the screen like an earthquake. She looked away, and then back.

  “They’re gone,” she said. In the pause afterward, her gaze shifted like she was looking for something. More words to say, maybe. “They’re gone.”

  “Okay,” he said. A thousand different questions pressed forward, wanting to be asked. What happened? Who’s missing? What happened? But Murtry hadn’t asked him to find out, and Cassie didn’t need an interrogator. “Murtry’s talking to the captain.”

  “I know,” Cassie said. “We had a lead. We found a hideout. Reeve took them out. I stayed back with the witness.”

  “Is the witness there?”

  “She’s sleeping now,” Cassie said. “I’m a security systems consultant, Havelock. I’m supposed to be figuring out optimal shift schedules and building the surveillance network. I don’t shoot people. That’s not my fucking pay grade.”

  Havelock smiled, and Cassie smiled with him, a tear leaking out the side of her eye. For a moment they were both laughing, the horror and the fear transforming into something like exasperation. Something a little bit safer.

  “I’m scared as hell,” Cassie said. “If they come for me too, I won’t be able to stop them. I’ve got the office locked down, but they could cut through the walls. They could blow the place up. I don’t know why we thought it was a good idea to be down here at all. After they blew the heavy shuttle, we should have hauled our butts back up the well and stayed there. We should have dropped rocks on them from fucking orbit.”

  “The thing now is keeping you and the witness safe.”

  “And how are you going to do that?” Cassie asked. Her voice was a challenge, but one that wanted to be answered. You can’t and Tell me that you can all at the same time.

  “We’re working on that,” Havelock said.

  “I don’t even have food in here,” Cassie said. “It’s all at the commissary. I’d kill for a sandwich. I really would. I’d kill for it.”

  Havelock tried to remember what they’d said in the workshop about talking with people who’d been traumatized. There was a list. Four things. The mnemonic was BEST. He couldn’t remember what any of the letters stood for.

  “So,” he said. “I bet you’re pretty freaked out right now.”

  “I’m not holding it together.”

  “Yeah, it feels like that, but actually, you’re doing good just by not making it worse. That’s how people usually get it wrong when things go to hell. Overreact, escalate. All goes pear-shaped. You’re holed up and talking to us. Means you’ve got good instincts for this.”

  “You’re making that shit up,” Cassie said. “I’m just this side of going catatonic.”

  “Stay on this side, and that makes it a win. Seriously, though, you’re doing the right thing. Stay cool, and we’ll get on top of this. I know it feels like it’s all going to hell, but you’re going to be all right.”

  “If I’m not —”

  “You will be.”

  “But if I’m not. If, right?”

  “Okay,” Havelock said. “If.”

  “Do me a favor. There’s a guy back on Europa. Hihiri Tipene. He’s a food engineer.”

  “Okay.”

  “Tell him I said I was sorry.”

  She thinks she’s going to die, Havelock thought, and she may be right. The bright, coppery taste of fear flooded his mouth. The locals were killing RCE security, and she was the last one standing. He didn’t know anything about the state of play down there. For all he knew, there might be three tons of industrial explosive about to turn Cassie into a memory. Any moment, she could die, and he could watch her die and not be able to do anything about it.

  “You’re going to tell him yourself,” he said gently. “And after this, it won’t even be scary.”

  “I don’t know. You’ve never met Hihiri. Promise me?”

  “Sure,” Havelock said. “I’ve got your back on this one.”

  Cassie nodded. Another tear streaked down her cheek. He didn’t feel like he was doing a great job of keeping her from meltdown.

  A tiny inset window appeared on the feed. Murtry’s security override.

  “Hey there, Cass,” Murtry said. “I’ve talked to Captain Marwick, and we’re dropping a team to you. It’s going to take us a couple hours, though. Your job is to keep that civilian safe.”

  Cassie’s voice trembled when she spoke, but it didn’t break. “There are forty of our people on the planet and two hundred of them. I’m one person. I can’t protect everyone.”

  “You don’t have to,” Murtry said. “I’ve sent the lockdown notice. I’m coordinating the science teams. That’s on me. Your job is Doctor Okoye. You just keep her breathing until we’re down there, okay?”

  “Yessir.”

  “All right,” Murtry said. “Two hours. You can do this, Cass.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Havelock, we’re doing a briefing in the security office right now. If you could pop by?”

  “On my way,” Havelock said. He undid his straps, pulled himself out of his couch, and launched for the hallway. The Edward Israel had corridors that were built as elongated octagons, like something his grandfather would have traveled in. The straps and toeholds along the walls had no directionality. He moved quickly down the hall, his brain flipping from telling him that he was climbing up a massive steel-and-ceramic well to falling headlong down it to – oddly – crawling upside down, as if he were on the ceiling of a drainage pipe. Belters, he’d been told, had a natural sense of themselves divorced from set ideas of up and down, but he’d only heard that from Belters, and always in the context of how they were better than him. Maybe it was true, maybe it was exaggeration. Either way, by the time he pulled himself into the security office, he felt a little woozy, and missed the false gravity of thrust.

  Ten people clung to the walls, all oriented the same way. Men and women with radically different facial structures and skin tones, and all with the same expression. It was almost eerie. Murtry had broken out the riot gear, and the blue-gray body armor with the high neck-protecting collars made them all seem like huge, human-shaped insects. Even Murtry was wearing it, so apparently he was going on the drop too.

  “— I have left,” Murtry was saying from his place at the front of the room. “And you’re all I have left. The cavalry’s not going to come in and save our butts. We are the cavalry, and that means I have already lost everyone I’m going to lose. We are the security team for this whole planet, right here in this room. And we can do it, but not if we’re making sacrifices. While we’re down there, if you feel threatened, you do whatever it takes to protect yourself and your team.”

  “Sir?”

  “Okmi?”

  “Does that mean we have authorization for lethal response?”

  “That means you have authorization for preemptive lethal response,” Murtry said, then waited a moment for the words to sink in. Havelock sighed. It was ugly, but there wasn’t a choice. If the heavy shuttle had been just a crime, they could have dealt with it like police. But the locals hadn’t stopped there, and n
ow more RCE people were missing or dead. So now it was more like a war.

  Well. At least they’d tried the peaceful way first. Not that the Belters would give them any credit for it.

  “We’re dropping in twenty minutes,” Murtry said. “It’s a long, fast drop, and some of it’ll be choppy. I’m bringing us down just east of the Belter camp. Smith and Wei are squad leads. Our first priority is reaching and reinforcing the office down there.”

  “What about the Barbapiccola?” someone asked.

  “Screw the Barbapiccola! What about the Rocinante?”

  Murtry lifted his hand, palm out.

  “Don’t any of you spend your time worrying about what’s happening up in orbit or back at home. That’s on me, and I’ll take care of it. Me and Havelock.” Murtry flashed a quick smile at him, and Havelock nodded, almost a little bow. “You have your orders, and you have my trust. Let’s get downstairs and get this clusterfuck under control.”

  The security force broke, bodies moving through the air in a fast, efficient stream toward the hangar and the light shuttles. Havelock felt a thin stab of regret, watching the others head down without him. He remembered something from his childhood, a flash of memory here and gone, about a lame child and the Pied Piper.

  Murtry floated through the air toward him, moving against the flow.

  “Havelock, good to see you. I’m going to need a minute.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Murtry nodded toward his private office. It was a tiny room, smaller even than a sleeping cabin, with a crash couch on old-style gimbals that arced up and over it. Murtry closed the door behind them.

  “So I’m putting you in charge of the ship.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. I’m leaving you in a crap position,” Murtry said. “We’ve got a full crew on the Israel that are mostly eggheads with their petticoats in a bunch because we’re not letting them do science, and the captain’s been fighting hard to keep them up here. Now there’s trouble, they won’t be pushing so hard to go down, but the pressure’s got to go someplace. I’m leaving you a skeleton crew to deal with it.”

  “We’ll get it done, sir.”

  “Good man. The biggest threat we’ve got on the board is the Rocinante. Used to be Martian military before it went OPA. Israel is huge, but we’re a science ship. If the Rocinante knocks us down, we’re going down.”

  “Why would they shoot us down?”

  Murtry shrugged. “I think less about why and more about if. So… there’s something I need, and it’s going to play hell with your shuttle schedules, but I want you to do it anyway.”

  “Of course.”

  “We’re taking one of the light shuttles for the drop,” Murtry said slowly, as if he were thinking it through while he spoke, even though that clearly wasn’t the case. “The one that’s left? I want you to weaponize it. Take off anything that’d keep its reactor from overloading, and set it with a hardened remote ignition. Lock out all the standard nav controls and put in something that just you and me have access to.”

  “Captain Marwick too?”

  Murtry’s smile was an enigma. “Sure, if you want.”

  “Give me half a day, I’ll get it done,” Havelock said.

  “Good.”

  “Sir? Who are you thinking we’d be using this against? The Belter camp?”

  “We’re just buying options, Havelock. I hope not to use it at all,” Murtry said. “But if I decide I’m going to, I’ll want it fast.”

  “You’ll have it.”

  “I feel better knowing that,” Murtry said, and put his hand on the desk to push off.

  “Sir?”

  Murtry lifted his eyebrows. Havelock felt a sudden flush of embarrassment, and almost didn’t go on. And then he did.

  “I know it’s a small thing, sir, but when I was on the call, Cassie said she was hungry. I told her we’d bring her a sandwich.”

  Murtry’s expression was empty as stone.

  “I was wondering if you could take her a sandwich, sir.”

  “Might could manage,” Murtry said, and Havelock couldn’t tell if the man was amused or annoyed. Maybe both.

  Havelock floated at his desk. The cells of the brig were all empty. His skeleton crew – the four most junior security staff and a technician they’d borrowed from the ship’s maintenance crew – were quietly modifying the one remaining light shuttle. Making the bomb. On his monitors, the shuttle drop and the Rocinante’s final deceleration burn, and the internal monitors of the station with Cassie and Doctor Okoye, each had their own window. Havelock watched them all, waiting for the next thing to go wrong. Every minute seemed to stretch. The air recycler hummed and clicked. He chewed his thumbnail.

  When the incoming message chime sounded, he started and had to put his hands to the console to keep from drifting off. He shifted to his message queue. The new one came from the RCE corporate offices on Luna, and the subject was listed as POSSIBLE STRATEGIES FOR DEESCALATING CONFLICT ON NEW TERRA: CALL FOR INPUT. The timestamp was five hours ago.

  Somewhere out near the ring gates, the radio signals had passed each other, waves of electromagnetism passing through the void with human meanings coded into them. The distance it had taken a year and a half to travel in person, the message had managed in five hours.

  Five hours, and still too goddamn slow.

  Chapter Eleven: Holden

  T

  he Rocinante did the last of its deceleration burn on a tail of white fire and dropped into a high orbit around Ilus. Below, the planet looked enough like Earth that the fact that it didn’t look like Earth was unsettling. Holden had looked down on alien worlds before. The rust red and white of Mars, the swirls and eddies of Saturn and Jupiter. They were totally unlike Earth’s blue and brown and white. But Ilus had open sea and sky with puffs of cloud, all the markers that Holden’s brain connected with his home world.

  Except that there was only one large continent, and thousands of islands strung across its one giant ocean like brown beads on a necklace. The mix of alien and familiar made his head hurt.

  “Rocinante,” the Edward Israel broadcast at them. “Why are you target locking us?”

  “Uh…” Holden slapped at the comm panel until he opened a channel to them. “No, that’s just standard range finding, Israel. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Roger that,” a not quite convinced voice replied from the other ship.

  “Alex,” Holden said, switching to the internal channel. “Please stop poking the bear.”

  “Roger that, Cap,” Alex said, exaggerating his drawl and stifling a laugh. “Just lettin’ the locals know there’s a new sheriff in town.”

  “Stop it. Give us an hour for the final check and get us dirtside.”

  “Okey dokey,” Alex said. “Long time since I landed one of these.”

  “Is it going to be a problem?”

  “Nope.”

  Holden climbed out of the ops chair and floated to the crew ladder. A few minutes later he was on the airlock deck with Amos. The mechanic had laid out two suits of their Martian-made light combat armor, a number of rifles and shotguns, and stacks of ammunition and explosives.

  “What,” Holden said, “is all this?”

  “You said to gear up for the drop.”

  “I meant, like, underwear and toothbrushes.”

  “Captain,” Amos said, almost hiding his impatience. “They’re killing each other down there. Half a dozen RCE security vanished into thin air, and a heavy lift shuttle got blown up.”

  “Yes, and our job is not to escalate that. Put all this shit away. Sidearms only. Bring clothes and sundries for us, any spare medical supplies for the colony. But that’s it.”

  “Later,” Amos said, “when you’re wishing we had this stuff, I am going to be merciless in my mockery. And then we’ll die.”

  Holden started a snarky reply, then stopped himself. Had anything ever gone the way he planned? “Okay, one rifle each, but dis
assembled and in a duffel. Nothing visible. And light torso armor only. Something we can hide under our clothes.”

  “Captain,” Amos said with mock surprise. “Have you actually learned from your past? Is this a new thing you do now?”

  “Why do I put up with your shit?”

  “Because,” Amos said, starting to strip an assault rifle down to its component parts, “I’m the only one on the ship that can keep the coffee maker running.”