Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (15 page)

Murtry and Amos smiled at each other across the table for an endless moment while Holden ran though contingencies in his mind:
What if Amos gets shot, what if Murtry gets shot, what if
I
get shot
.

“You fellas have a nice day,” Murtry said, standing slowly. His hand was not on his gun. “Keep the bottle.”

“Thanks!” Amos replied, pouring another drink.

Murtry nodded at them, then walked out of the bar.

Holden let out an exhalation that he’d been holding for what seemed like an hour. “Yeah, I think we are in way over our heads here,” he admitted.

“I’m gonna need to shoot that guy at some point,” Amos said, then tossed back another shot.

“I wish you wouldn’t. This is already looking like a train wreck, and in addition to chewing up a few hundred colonists and scientists, which is bad enough, it will also be my fault when it all falls apart.”

“Shooting him might help.”

“I hope not,” Holden said, but he was worried that Amos was right.

— it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out —

One hundred and thirteen times a second, nothing answers and it reaches out. It feels no frustration, though parts of it do. It is not designed to incorporate consciousness or will, but to use whatever it finds. The minds within it are encysted, walled off. They are used when they are of use, as is everything and it reaches out.

It is not a plan. It is not even a desire, or it is only a desire without knowledge of that longing’s object. It is a selective pressure pressed against chaos. It does not think of itself this way because it does not think, but the environment changes, a new branch of possibilities opens, and it forms the investigator and leans into the new crack. The new space. The minds within it interpret this differently. As a hand reaching up through graveyard soil. As finding a door in a room where no door had been before. As a breath of air to a drowning woman. It is not aware of these images, but awareness of them is part of it.

The investigator puts pressure on the aboriginal, and the aboriginal takes action. The environment changes again. Patterns begin to match patterns, but there can be no recognition because it is not conscious to recognize. It would be aware of the aboriginal accelerating, of it slowing, the vectors shifting zero to one to a different zero in a different location, if it were aware, but it is not aware. It reaches out.

Patterns match, and it reorients and reaches out. Cascades of implicit information bloom, and the conscious parts of it see a lotus opening forever, hear a shout that is made of other shouts that are made of other shouts in a fractal constructed of sound, pray to God for a death that does not come.

It reaches out, but the ways in which it reaches change. It improvises, as it always has, the insect twitch, the spark closing the gap it reaches out.

It touches something, and for a moment, a part of it that can feel, feels hope. It is unaware of hope. The reply does not come. It is not over. It will never be over. It reaches out, and finds new things. Old things. It flows into places that are comfortable for it to flow. There are responses, and the responses feed the impulses that caused them, and there are more responses. All automatic and empty and dead as it is. Nothing reaches back. It feels no disappointment. It does not shut down. It reaches out.

It does not experience the wariness, but the wariness is part of it. It reaches out, rushing into the new possibility space, and something deep in it, wider than it should be, watches it reach.

Doors and corners. It reaches out it reaches out it reaches out. Doors and corners.

This could get ugly, kid.

J
ames Holden came too late.

Along with everyone else in the colony, Basia watched the drive plume of the
Rocinante
light the sky of Ilus. For him, maybe, it was already too late. He’d made the bombs that destroyed the RCE shuttle and killed the UN governor. He’d been there when Coop and the others murdered the RCE security team. And maybe there was no coming back from that. Maybe he was already a dead man, or a man destined for life in prison, the same thing really. But looking up at the line of white fire in sky, he couldn’t help but feel a spark of hope. Jim Holden had saved the Ganymede children, too late for Katoa, but he’d saved the others. He’d brought down the evil corporation that had killed Basia’s little boy. Neither Mao-Kwikowski nor Protogen existed anymore because of Holden. And while Basia had never met the man in person, he’d watched him on video casts and read about him in newsfeeds. It created a strange sense of intimacy, to watch the man who’d avenged Katoa on-screen, talking and smiling.

And that man was coming to Ilus. Perhaps he could save Basia too?

So when the bright line in the sky vanished, and Basia knew Holden and his crew were in orbit, he let himself feel a swell of hope. The first he’d felt in a long time.

And when he heard the thunderclap of a descending shuttle, he ran outside just like all the other colonists, watching to see where it would land.
The UN mediator is coming!
they shouted to each other. The man who saved Earth, they meant. The man who saved Ganymede. The man who will save us.

A small shuttle dropped out of the sky and settled on the hard-packed earth to the south of First Landing, and half the town’s population ran to meet it. Basia ran too.

The shuttle sat on five squat legs, ticking with heat. The town waited in silence, too excited to talk. Then a ramp lowered to the ground, and a squat Earther with gray hair and a deeply lined face walked down it. It wasn’t Holden. One of his crew, maybe? But the man was wearing armor with the RCE logo on it, and Holden was supposed to be an impartial mediator.

The man stopped halfway down the ramp and smiled a humorless smile at them. Basia realized he was holding his breath, then realized everyone else was too.

“Hello,” the man said. “My name is Adolphus Murtry. I’m chief of security for Royal Charter Energy.”

Was it another RCE ship they’d seen braking into orbit? The man walked down the ramp, still smiling that predator’s smile, and as one the crowd backed away. Basia backed up with them.

“Because of the attack on the shuttle that claimed the lives of many RCE employees
and
UN officials, I am taking direct control of security on this world. If that sounds like martial law, that’s because it is.” Murtry whistled, and ten more people in security armor descended the ramp. They carried automatic weapons and slug-throwing sidearms. Not a non-lethal deterrent in sight.

“Please be aware,” Murtry continued, “that because of the attack on the first security team —”

“No one proved they were attacked!” someone shouted from the crowd. Coop, it was Coop. Standing at the back with his arms crossed and a smug smile on his face.

“Because of that attack,” Murtry continued, “I have given my people ‘shoot first’ authorization. They may, if they feel threatened, utilize lethal force to defuse the threat.”

Carol pushed through the crowd to confront Murtry at the bottom of the ramp, and Coop followed her.

“You’re not the government here,” Carol said, anger making the tendons in her neck stand out. Her hands were in fists, but she kept them at her sides. “You can’t just land here with a bunch of guns and tell us you have the right to shoot us. This is
our world
.”

“That’s right!” Coop yelled and turned to face the crowd, inviting them to join in.

“No,” Murtry said, his smile not changing, “it is not.”

The air was split with thunder as another ship dropped into the atmosphere and landed on the western side of town. Murtry barely glanced up at it.
More troops dropping in
, Basia thought.

Murtry began walking toward town, his people trailing out behind him, and the crowd moving in a loose cloud around them. Carol kept talking, but her words had no effect. Murtry just smiled and nodded and didn’t break stride. The ship that had landed on the other side of town blasted off on a column of white vapor and vanished from sight. The roar of its engines filled the world.

When they reached the center of town, Basia saw Jacek hanging around at the edge of the crowd. He grabbed his son by the arm, pulling him harder than he intended, and the boy gave a frightened squeak.

“Papa,” he said as Basia dragged him away, “am I in trouble?”

“Yes,” Basia shouted, then when he saw tears welling up in the boy’s eyes stopped and dropped to his knees next to him. “No. No, son. You’re not. But I need you to go home.”

“But —” Jacek started.

“No buts, boy,” Basia gave him a gentle shove toward their house. “Go home.”

“Is that man going to kill us?” Jacek asked.

“What man?” Basia asked, but it was a delaying tactic. He knew what man. Even his little boy could smell the death coming off of Murtry and his people. “No one’s going to kill us. Go home.”

Basia watched Jacek walk home, waiting until he saw the boy go inside and close the door. Basia was just starting to walk back toward the crowd when the shot rang out.

His first thought was,
Jacek was right
.
They are killing us.

Not
us
, though, once he got back to the crowd. Just Coop, lying in the dust with a red hole where his eye should be, blood pooling under his head.

And Holden, jaw clenched and eyes wide.

Too late
, Basia thought.
Too late again.

~

People with machine guns walked the streets of First Landing.

Basia and Lucia sat on their tiny front porch and watched them pass by in the fading sunlight of early evening. A man and a woman, both in body armor with the red-and-blue RCE company logo on it. Both carrying automatic weapons. Both with hard expressions on their faces.

“I did this,” Basia said.

Lucia squeezed his hand. “Drink your tea, Baz.”

Basia looked down at the cup of tea cooling on his lap. All the tea the little colony might ever have had come down on the shuttles with them. To waste such a luxury was unthinkable. He sipped at the lukewarm cup and didn’t taste it.

“They’ll kill me, next.”

“Maybe.”

“Or put me in jail forever, take me away from my family.”

“You,” Lucia said, “took yourself away when you joined with those stupid violent people who blew up the shuttle. You drove them out to the ruins when they killed the RCE people. You made every choice that took you to this place. I love you, Basia Merton. I love you till my chest aches. But you are a stupid, stupid man. And when they take you away from me, I will not forgive you for it.”

“You’re a harsh woman.”

“I’m a doctor,” Lucia said. “I’m used to giving people bad news.”

Basia drank off the rest of his tea before it could finish getting cold. “I could get some rope or chain from the dig site. Maybe hang a bench here. Then we could rock while we sit.”

“That might be nice,” Lucia said. The pair of RCE guards reached the end of the street and turned around to come back. With the sun about to dip below the horizon, their shadows were almost as long as the town itself.

“We’ve been focusing on lithium mining to get money,” Basia continued. “But we need to start thinking about our own energy needs.”

“This is true.”

“We can’t have the
Barb
bringing us power cells forever. And someday the ship will fly back to Pallas to sell the ore. So we won’t have her for a couple years.”

“Also true,” Lucia said. She swirled the last of her tea and stared up at the stars. “I miss having Jupiter in the sky.”

“It was beautiful,” Basia agreed. “I have to go meet with Cate and the others tonight, after it gets dark.”

“Baz,” Lucia started, then just stopped with sad sigh.

“They’ll want revenge for Coop. It will only make it worse.”

“What,” Lucia said, “does worse look like, I wonder?”

Basia sat quietly, thinking of the rocker he could build on their porch. Of adding a bigger water heater for hot baths. Of building a larger kitchen and dining area on the back of the house. Of all the things he wouldn’t get to do now.

The guards were at the end of the town’s long street, almost invisible in their dark armor and the fading light. Basia got up to leave.

“Can you stop them from killing anyone else?” Lucia asked, as though she were asking if he wanted more tea.

“Yes,” Basia replied. It felt like a lie.

“Then go.”

~

They met at Cate’s house. Pete and Scotty and Ibrahim. Even Zadie came, her wife Amanda staying home to look after their boy and his infected eye. That wasn’t a good sign. Of all of them, Zadie was the angriest. The one with the hottest head. Basia had worked with her on Ganymede, and more than once she’d shown up in the morning with a black eye or a busted lip from some bar fight she’d picked the night before. They were all upset, all standing on the ledge about to jump, but Zadie would be the hardest to talk off of it.

“They shot Coop,” Cate said when Scotty, the last of them to arrive, finally came in. It wasn’t a statement of fact. They’d all been there. They’d all seen it. No, it was the beginning of a justification.

“In cold blood,” Zadie said, and punctuated it with a fist to her palm. “We all saw it. Just shot him in the face in front of God and everyone.”

“So I have a plan,” Cate continued. “The RCE people are holed up in —”

“Who put you in charge?” Zadie asked.

“Murtry did.”

Zadie narrowed her eyes, but let it drop. Basia fidgeted on one end of Cate’s couch. It was a handmade frame, covered with padding stripped from the ship and badly stitched remnants of the cloth they had the fabricator crank out once a month for clothing and other needs. Cate had made a small table out of the local wood analog to sit next to it. It wasn’t quite level, and Basia’s glass of water was at a noticeable tilt. Pictures of Cate’s family, two sisters who still lived back in the Belt and their kids, hung on the walls. There was a pottery vase on the floor with sticks and branches in it that Basia thought was meant as decoration, not kindling.