Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (10 page)

Naomi pushed herself up with a groan. “I’ll get some coffee while you find your bullets.”

“Don’t leave,” Holden said, reaching for her arm. “I don’t want to record these broadcasts with Miller standing behind me.”

“He’s only in your head,” she said, but she sat back down anyway. “He won’t show up on the recording.”

“Do you think that makes it
less
uncomfortable? Really?”

Naomi crawled across the bed and curled up next to him, putting her head on his chest. He tugged on a lock of her hair and she let out a long contented sigh.

“I like long flights when we aren’t doing these bone-crushing mad dashes,” she said. “Nothing to do but read, listen to music, stay in bed all day. You being famous sucks.”

“It’s also the reason we’re sort of rich now.”

“We could sell the ship, go get jobs at Pur’N’Kleen again. Do the Saturn ice run…”

Holden stayed silent and played with her hair. It wasn’t a serious suggestion. They both knew there was no going back to the people they used to be. Him the XO and her the chief engineer on an ice hauler that no one in the universe cared about unless it was late for a delivery. Anonymous people living anonymous lives. Would anyone even need Pur’N’Kleen anymore, with a thousand new worlds full of water and air?

“You going to be okay without me down there?” Naomi said.

The Belter colonists from Ganymede had spent months on the
Barbapiccola
prepping for landing on Ilus. Loading up on bone and muscle growth hormones, working out under a full g until their bodies would be able to handle the slightly heavier-than-Earth gravity of the planet. Naomi didn’t have the time or inclination to radically alter her physiology for this one job. Holden had argued that she would have then been able to come to Earth with him after. She replied that she was never going to Earth, no matter what. They’d left it at that, but it was still a sore spot for him.

“No, I won’t,” he said, deciding not to revisit the argument. “But there it is.”

“Amos will look after you.”

“Great,” Holden said. “I’ll land in the middle of the tensest situation in
two
solar systems, and instead of the smartest person I know, I’ll bring the guy most likely to get in a bar fight.”

“You might need that,” she said, her fingers tracing some of the scars he’d picked up over the last couple years. She stopped at a dark spot on his stomach. “You still taking your cancer meds?”

“Every day.”
For the rest of my life
, he didn’t add.

“Have their doctor look at this after you land.”

“Okay.”

“They’re using you,” she said as if they’d been talking about it all along.

“I know.”

“They know this is all going to go wrong. There’s no solution that doesn’t leave someone angry and out in the cold. That’s why they’re sending you. You’re an easy scapegoat. They hired you because you won’t hide anything, but that’s the same thing that makes you easy to blame for the inevitable failure of these talks.”

“If I thought it was inevitable I wouldn’t have taken the job,” Holden said. “And I know why they hired me for this. It’s not because I’m the most qualified. But I’m not quite the idiot they think I am. I think I’ve learned a few new tricks.”

Naomi reached up and pulled a hair out of his temple. Before he could say “ouch” she held it up in front of him. It was the gray of damp ashes.

“Old dog,” she said.

~

The flight to Ilus was grueling in more ways than just the long periods at high g. Every time the
Rocinante
dropped to a tolerable rate of acceleration for meals and maintenance, Holden would have dozens of messages waiting to be viewed and responded to. The captain of the
Edward Israel
became increasingly forceful in his demands for Holden to issue threats to the captain of the
Barbapiccola
. The colonists and their Belter compatriots in orbit were increasingly demanding that the
Barbapiccola
be released from lockdown. Both sides accused the other of escalating the conflict, though in Holden’s opinion the fact that only the colonists had so far shed blood lessened their claim in that regard.

Their argument that only the sale of their lithium ore could make them a viable colony, and that the blockade of the shipment was effectively starving them out, was, however, a compelling one. RCE continued to insist that since they had the UN charter, the mining rights and the load of lithium in orbit were theirs.

“A thousand new worlds to explore, and we’re still fighting over resources,” Holden said to no one after a particularly long and angry message from the RCE legal counsel on the
Israel
.

Alex, who was lounging at the ops station nearby, answered anyway. “Well, I guess lithium is like real estate. Nobody’s makin’ any more of it.”

“You did hear the part about a thousand new worlds, right?”

“Maybe some of ’em have more lithium, but maybe they don’t. And this one definitely does. People used to think gold was worth fightin’ over, and that shit gets made by every supernova, which means pretty much every planet around a G2 star will have some. Stars burn through lithium as fast as they make it. All the
available
ore got made at the big bang, and we’re not doin’ another one of those. Now
that’s
scarcity, friend.”

Holden sighed and aimed an air vent at his face. The cool breeze from the recyclers made his scalp tingle. The ship wasn’t hot. The sweat had to be coming from stress.

“We’re astonishingly shortsighted.”

“Just you and me?” Alex said, exaggerating his drawl to make a joke of it.

“A vast new frontier has opened up for us. We have the chance to create a new society, with untold riches beyond every gate. But
this
world has treasure, so instead of figuring out the right way to divide up the damned galaxy, we’ll fight over the first crumbs we find.”

Alex nodded, but didn’t reply.

“I feel like I need to be there right now,” Holden continued after a moment. “I’m worried by the time we land everyone will be so locked into their positions that we won’t be able to help.”

“Huh,” Alex said, then laughed. “You think we’re going there to help?”

“I think I am. I’ll be down in engineering if anyone needs me.”

“One hour to burn,” Alex replied to his back.

Holden kicked the deck hatch release and it slid open with a hiss. He climbed down the ladder past the crew decks to the machine shop, where Amos was taking apart something complex-looking on one of the benches. Holden nodded to him and kicked open the final hatch into the reactor room. Amos shot him a questioning look, but Holden just shook his head and the mechanic turned back to his work with a shrug.

When the hatch slid closed above him, the reactor room flashed with blue light. Holden slid down the ladder to the deck, then leaned back against the wall.

“Hey,” Miller said, coming around the reactor that dominated the center of the room as though he’d been standing on the other side of it waiting for Holden to arrive.

“We need to talk,” Holden replied.

“That’s my line.” The detective gave him a sad, basset-hound smile.

“We’re doing what you wanted. We’ve come through a ring into one of the other systems. You’ll get to, I assume, ride me to the planet and take your look around.”

Miller nodded, but didn’t speak.
How much of what I’m about to say does he already know? How predictive is the brain model they’ve made of me?
Holden decided wondering that was the path to madness.

“I need to know two things,” Holden said, “or this trip ends right now.”

“Okay,” Miller said with a palms-up, Belter version of a shrug.

“First, how are you following me around? You first showed up on this ship after Ganymede, and you’ve been everywhere I go ever since. Am I infected? Is that how you stay with me? I’ve gone through two gates without ditching you, so either you’re inside my head or you’re a galaxy-wide phenomenon. Which is it?”

“Yeah,” Miller said, then took off his hat and rubbed his short hair. “Wrong on both counts. First answer is, I live here. During the Ganymede incident, which is a stupid name for it, by the way, the protomolecule put a local node inside this ship.”

“Wait. There’s protomolecule stuff in the
Roci
?” Holden said, fighting down the surge of panic. If Miller wanted to hurt him and had the means to do so, it would already have happened.

“Yeah,” Miller said with a shrug, like it wasn’t a big deal. “You had a visitor, remember?”

“You mean I had a half-human monster,” Holden said, “that almost killed Amos and me. And that we vaporized in our drive trail.”

“Yeah, that’d be him. To be fair, he wasn’t exactly running a coherent program, that one. But he had enough of the old instructions left that he placed some material on the ship. Not much, and not what you’d call live culture. Just enough to keep a connection between the Ring Station’s processing power and your ship.”

“You infected the
Roci
?” Holden said, fear and rage briefly warring in his gut.

“Don’t know I’d use that verb, but all right. If you want. It’s what lets me follow you around,” Miller said, then frowned. “What was the other thing?”

“I don’t know if I’m done with
this
thing,” Holden said.

“You’re safe. We need you.”

“And when you don’t?”

“Then no one’s safe,” Miller said, his eerie blue eyes flashing. “So stop obsessing. Second thing?”

Holden sat down on the deck. He hadn’t wanted to ask how Miller was in his head, because he was terrified the answer would be that he was infected. The fact that he wasn’t, but his ship was, was both a relief and a new source of fear.

“What will we find down on Ilus? What are you looking for?”

“Same thing as always. Who done it,” Miller said. “After all, something killed off the civilization that built all this.”

“And how will we know when we’ve found it?”

“Oh,” Miller said, his grin vanishing. He leaned toward Holden, the smell of acetate and copper filling the air or else only his senses. “We’ll know.”

T
he sandstorms tended to start in the late afternoon and last until a little after sundown. They began as a softening of the western horizon. Then the little plant analogs in the plain behind her hut would fold their photosynthetic surfaces into tight puckers like tiny green mouths that had tasted lemon, and twenty minutes later the town and the ruins and the sky would all disappear in a wave of dry sand.

Elvi sat at her desk, Felcia at the foot of the bed, and Fayez with his back against the headboard.

Felcia had become a regular visitor, more often than not to talk with Elvi or Fayez or Sudyam. Elvi liked having her around. It made the division between the township and the RCE teams seem… not less real, but less terrible. Permeable.

Today, though, felt different. Felcia seemed more tightly wound than usual. Maybe it was the fact that the UN mediator’s ship was getting close. Maybe it was the weather.

“So, our solar system only has one tree of life,” Elvi said, moving her hands in the air as if to conjure it up. “It started once, and everything we’ve ever found shares that ancestry. But we don’t know why.”

“Why we all share?” Felcia asked.

“Why it didn’t happen twice,” Elvi said. “Only one kind of Schrödinger crystal. One codon map. Why? If all the materials were there for amino acids to form and connect and interact, why wasn’t there one schema that started in one tide pool, and then another someplace else, and another and another? Why did life arise just the one time?”

“So what’s the answer?” Felcia asked.

Elvi’s let her hands wilt a little. A particularly strong gust drove a wave of hard grit against the side of the hut. “Which answer?”

“Why it only happened once?”

“Oh. I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

“Same reason there’s only one tool-using hominid left. The ones that still exist killed all the competition,” Fayez said.

“That’s speculation,” Elvi said. “Nothing in the fossil record indicates that there was more than the one beginning of life on Earth. We don’t get to just make things up because they sound good.”

“Elvi is very comfortable with mysteries,” Fayez said to Felcia with a wink. “It’s why she has a hard time relating with those of us who feel anxious with our ignorance.”

“Well, you can’t know everything,” Elvi said, making it a joke to hide a tinge of discomfort.

“God knows I can’t. Especially not on this planet,” Fayez said. “There was no point sending a geologist here.”

“I’m sure you’re doing fine,” Elvi said.

“Me? Yes, I’m wonderful. It’s the planet’s fault. It’s got no geology. It’s all manufactured.”

“How do you mean?” Felcia asked.

Fayez spread his hands as if he were presenting her with the whole world. “Geology is about studying natural patterns. Nothing here’s natural. The whole planet was machined. The lithium ore you people are mining? No natural processes exist that would make it as pure as what you’re pulling out of the ground. It can’t happen. So apparently, whatever built the gates also had something around here somewhere that concentrated lithium in this one spot.”

“That’s amazing, though,” Elvi said.

“If you’re into industrial remediation. Which I’m not. And the southern plains? You know how much they vary? They don’t. The underlying plate is
literally
as flat as a pane of glass. Somewhere about fifty klicks south of here, there’s some kind of tectonic Zamboni machine about which I am qualified to say absolutely nothing. Those tunnel complexes? Yeah, they’re some kind of old planetary
transport
system. And yet here I am —”

“I need a letter of recommendation,” Felcia blurted, then looked down at her hands, blushing. Elvi and Fayez exchanged a glance. The wind howled and muttered.

“For what?” Elvi asked gently.

“I’m going to apply for university,” the girl said. She spoke quickly, like the words were all under pressure, and then more slowly until at last she trailed away. “Mother thinks I’ll probably get in. I’ve been talking with the Hadrian Institute on Luna, and Mother arranged that I can get back to Pallas when the
Barbapiccola
takes the ore, and then take passage on my own from there, only the application needs a letter of recommendation, and I can’t ask anyone in the town because we haven’t told Daddy, and…”