Cibola Burn, Page 60

“Why try to control it at all? Why not let people settle where they want?”

  “Because Mars,” Avasarala said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Mars has the second largest fleet in the system. Something like fifteen thousand nuclear warheads. Sixteen battlecruisers. Who the fuck knows how many other fighting vessels. The ships are newer than Earth’s. The designs are better. They’re faster. They have heat signature masking and fast water cycling and high-energy proton cannons.”

  “The proton cannons are a myth.”

  “They aren’t. So here you have the second most powerful navy that there is. What’s going to happen to it?”

  “It’s going to protect Mars.”

  “Mars is dead, Bobbie. Holden and this Havelock sonofabitch and Elvi Okoye, whoever the fuck she is? They killed it. Half the Martian government understands, and they’re shitting themselves so hard, they won’t have bones left. Who the fuck’s going to stay on Mars? A thousand new worlds where you don’t have to live in caves and wear environment suits to walk under the sky. No one’s going to be here. Do you know what would happen if half the population of Earth left for the worlds beyond the Ring?”

  “What?”

  “We’d knock down some walls and make bigger apartments. That’s how many people we have on basic. Do you know what happens to Mars if twenty percent of the population leaves?”

  “The terraforming project shuts down?”

  “The terraforming project shuts down. And upkeep on the basic infrastructure becomes harder. The tax base collapses. The economy craters. The Martian state fails. That is going to happen, and the one chance we had to keep it in check is gone. You will have a shell of a government with a planet nobody wants because nobody needs. The raw materials they have to put on the market are now abundant in a thousand new systems where the mining is simple and you don’t choke to death on vacuum if the rig fails out. And the one thing – the one thing – you have left you can sell? Your one resource?”

  “Is fifteen thousand nuclear weapons,” Bobbie said.

  “And the ships to use them. Who’s going to have those ships when Mars is a ghost town, Bobbie? Where are they going to go? Who are they going to kill? We’re all moving out our pawns for the first interstellar military conflict. And James Holden, who could have made New Terra a poster for why you might rather stay home and give us a little breathing room, instead found a bright new way to fuck things up.”

  “By succeeding?”

  “By some definition of that word.”

  “The planet blew up on him,” Bobbie said.

  “Small favors,” Avasarala replied with a snort.

  “Well,” Bobbie said. “Shit.”

  “Yes.”

  They were quiet for a long moment. Bobbie looked at her salad without seeing it. Avasarala finished her wine. She could see the former marine tracking though the lines of implication and consequence. Bobbie’s eyes went hard.

  “This dinner. We’re at a recruitment meeting, aren’t we?”

  Avasarala folded her hands.

  “Bobbie, as long as we’re all pushing out our pieces…”

  “Yes?”

  “I need to put you back on the board, soldier.”

  Acknowledgments

  As always, there were a lot of people without whom this book wouldn’t have seen the light of day. We owe particular debts of gratitude to our agent Danny Baror and to our editor Will Hinton, the amazing team at Orbit, the gang from Sakeriver, and Joseph E. Lake Jr. All of them have helped make this a better book. All the errors of fact and logic and infelicities of language are on us.