Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (16 page)

It was too domestic a location for the kind of meeting they were having. It all felt unreal, that he and five people he knew were discussing the murder of a dozen corporate security guards in Cate’s living room next to her vase full of sticks.

Scotty was talking, telling them to wait. Not the voice of reason, the voice of fear. Pete was on his side, arguing against escalating. Cate and Zadie shouted them down. Ibrahim said nothing, just pulled on his bottom lip and frowned at the floor.

“I think we wait for Holden,” Basia said when there was a pause in the conversation.

“Holden’s been here a day. What are we waiting for?” Cate asked, dripping angry sarcasm.

“He needs time to meet with us, get the lay of the land,” Basia said, the words sounding feeble even in his own ears. “But he’s the mediator. And he can talk directly to the OPA governing board and to the UN. His recommendations will have real weight. We need him on our side.”

“The OPA?” Zadie spat. “The UN? What exactly are they going to do for us? Send a tersely worded letter? Murtry and his thugs are right there!” Zadie stabbed her fingers at the wall, at the street beyond, at the guards with machine guns. “How many of our people do they get to kill before we defend ourselves?”

“We killed them first,” Basia said, then regretted it immediately. Everyone started shouting, mostly at him. Basia stood up. He knew he was an imposing figure, stocky and thick-necked. Bigger than anyone else in the room. He stepped forward, a physical challenge. He hoped his size would be enough. He was fairly certain Cate could beat him to death if she decided to. “Shut up!” They did. “We have a chance here,” he continued, quieting his voice with an effort. “But it’s so fragile. We killed the RCE people.”

“I wasn’t —” Zadie started, but Basia hushed her with a gesture.

“They killed Coop. Right now, they feel like they’ve made a point, so they won’t kill anyone else unless we provoke them. So, right now, we are at a balance. If no one does anything to tip it one way or another, Holden can do what they sent him here to do. He can help us resolve this without more violence.”

Cate snorted and looked away, but Basia ignored her. “I’m in this with you. I have just as much to lose as any of you. But we want this man on our side. He saw Murtry murder one of us. He’s never seen us do anything. We have the advantage of seeming like the victims right now. Let’s not change his mind on that.”

There was a long moment while Basia stood in the middle of the room, panting with emotion, and no one spoke.

“Okay,” Ibrahim said. He’d been a soldier once. The others respected him. When he finally spoke, it was with a tone of authority. Cate frowned, but said nothing.

“Okay?”

“Okay, big man,” Ibrahim said. “We play it your way for now. Go talk to this Holden. Get him on our side. He’s the one found your boy, sa sa? Use that.”

Basia felt a rush of anger and shame at the mention of Katoa, of using him as an in with Holden, but he pushed it down. Ibrahim was right. It would give Basia something to talk to Holden about, and it would make him seem sympathetic.

“I’ll talk to him tomorrow,” Basia said, swallowing the sudden nausea he felt.

“It’s on you now, big man,” Ibrahim said. It sounded like a threat.

~

Basia walked home in the pitch black of the Ilus night. He wished he’d thought to bring a light. He wished he’d never blown up a shuttle full of people and helped Coop murder the RCE guards. He wished his wife wasn’t angry with him, and that she wasn’t right. He wished that Katoa were still alive and that they all still lived in their home on Ganymede and that no one had ever come to Ilus in the first place.

He tripped on a rock and fell to his knee, skinning it. No way to fix the other things, but at least he could have thought to bring a light.

Lucia had left a light on in the house. Without it, Basia might have walked right past it without realizing. At least she wanted him to come home. She left lights on to make it happen. For the first time in a long time, Basia felt himself smile.

A shadowy figure darted through the dim light around the house to the back door. Before he had time to think, Basia was at a dead run. The figure at the door cowered, smaller than him and terrified.

Felcia.

“Papa! You scared me!”

“Oh, baby, I’m so sorry. I didn’t see it was you. Just saw someone sneaking around the house and came running.”

Felcia smiled up at him, eyes damp and lip trembling, but being brave.

“Okay, going in now.”

“Felcia,” Basia said, putting his hand against the door to hold it closed. “Why are you sneaking up to the house in the middle of the night?”

“I was out, walking.” She looked away, not able to meet his eyes.

“Please, baby, tell me it was a boy.”

“It was a boy,” she said, still not looking at him.

“Felcia.”

“I’m going up on the next shuttle, Papa,” she said, looking him in the eye finally. “I’m going up. When James Holden gets them to let the
Barbapiccola
go, I’m going with it. From Pallas I can catch transport to Ceres. Mama is calling her old mentor at CUMA to get me an interview for the pre-med program at the Hadrian on Luna.”

Basia felt like someone had punched him in the solar plexus. The pain in his stomach kept him from breathing.

“I’m going, Papa.”

“No,” he said. “You’re not.”

E
lvi’s grandfather had remarried late in life. His new husband had been a German man with a merry laugh, a snow-white beard, and a cheerful cynicism about humanity. What she remembered best about Grandpa Raynard was how quick he was with an epigram or a quip. He had one for every occasion. She’d thought they made him sound worldly and wise, in part because she was so often unsure what exactly he meant by them.

One thing he’d said was
Once is never
.
Twice is always.

When the shuttle went down, she’d known – they’d all known – that someone had put the explosives there, but her experience of the Belter colonists beginning that same night had been so different that the knowledge and the emotional impact of it had become detached. Someone among the Belters had done a terrible thing, but that person was faceless, anonymous, unreal. Doctor Merton doing everything she could to save the wounded and soothe the injured was real. Her daughter, Felcia, who was at the farthest point humanity had ever been from Earth and whose ambitions were drawing her back toward Luna, was real. Anson Kottler and his sister Kani who’d helped Elvi set up her hut. Samish Oe with his goofy half smile was real. Carol Chiwewe. Eirinn Sanchez. They had all been so kind that Elvi had shelved the death of the governor as an outlier, something so rare it would never happen again.

But the disappearance of Reeve and the security crew was twice, and the way Elvi saw the colony and the RCE scientists and her own little hut out on the edge of the plain was different now. Because the threat of violence wasn’t
never
anymore. It was
always
.

“Did you see anything else?” Murtry asked.

“No,” Elvi said. “I don’t think so.”

“Doctor Okoye, I know this has been unpleasant for you,” the chief of security said, “but I need to you try to remember if there was anything else you saw while you were out there. The person you saw coming back. Can you say if it was a man? A woman?”

That wasn’t how memory worked, of course. Just willing herself to remember something, pushing herself, was much more likely to generate a false recollection and add bad data to the set than it was to haul up some telling detail she’d failed to mention. It seemed rude to explain that to Murtry, so Elvi only shook her head.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s all right,” he said in a tone of voice that hinted strongly at his disappointment. “If anything else occurs to you, please do bring it to me.”

“I will.”

“Are you feeling okay?”

“I guess so. Why?”

“The UN mediator’s asked to talk with you too,” Murtry said. “You don’t have to if you don’t want, though. Just say the word, and I’ll tell him to go piss up a rope.”

“No, I don’t mind,” she said, but she was thinking,
James Holden wants to talk to me?
“Should I… I mean, is there anything I should particularly tell him? About the work, I mean?”

The truth was, she just wanted to get out of the security offices. The extended thirty-hour day of New Terra made it hard to feel exactly how long she’d been there, but she’d come to Reeve in darkness, she’d slept in one of the cells that night. She’d stayed there while Murtry and the security team came down and made the town safe, and now it was morning again. So two days, New Terra. Maybe three back on Earth. What exactly
day
meant wasn’t intuitive anymore.

“Captain Holden needs to understand exactly how bad our situation here is,” Murtry said. “He came out here thinking there’s two sides to this, so he’s wanting to split some kind of difference. Anything you can do to help him understand why that’s not the solution here, I would very much appreciate.”

“Oh,” she said. “Yes, of course.”

“Thank you,” Murtry said.

“One thing?”

Murtry raised his eyebrows and tilted his head toward her. He didn’t quite say,
Yes, ma’am?
but it was physically implied.

“My research is still in my hut,” she said. “I have some studies that were in progress when I came to talk to… when I came in. Is my hut off-limits, or will I be able to get back to them?”

“You’ll go back,” Murtry said. “The one thing that is not going to happen here, Doctor? We’re not giving back a goddamn centimeter of our ground. Whoever did this doesn’t get to win.”

“Thank you,” Elvi said.

Murtry’s expression hardened for a moment. His eyes became flat in a way that Elvi associated with lab animals being sacrificed. He looked dead.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

~

Walking down the street of the town, Elvi felt a pang of unease, but less so than she’d expected. The little siege she’d suffered in the security office waiting for the relief team to come had been a bleak and frightening time. But now familiar faces had joined the townsmen. Two women in RCE security riot armor walked down the street across from her, their assault rifles resting easily in their hands. Just seeing them there left Elvi feeling safer. And then Holden had also arrived. Certainly, things weren’t where they needed to be, but they were getting closer. They were getting better. That would have to be enough for now.

Another guard stood at the entrance to the general store, a rifle resting in his hands.

“Doctor Okoye,” he said nodding her inside.

“Mister Smith,” she said.

She’d been in the commissary building many times in the weeks since she’d landed on New Terra. Apart from little intimate get-togethers in the research huts and the formal town meetings in the community hall, it was the only place to go unless she found religion. She could see –
feel
– at once how the presence of James Holden had changed the nature of the space. It had been a community place before, public in the same way a municipal park might be, without any commanding human presence. Now a man sat at a table toward the back of the room, just as if he were a townsman getting a bowl of rice and a beer. Sitting there, leaning on his elbows and talking to Fayez, he commanded the space. He owned it. What had belonged to everyone was now the unquestioned domain of James Holden. Elvi’s belly went a little tighter and anxiety sped her breath.

She had seen Holden on the newsfeeds and reports. At the beginning of the war between Mars and the Belt, he had been the most important man in the solar system, and the celebrity, while it had waxed and waned over the years, had never gone away. James Holden was an icon. For some, he was the symbol of the triumph of the single ship over governments and corporations. For others, he was an agent of chaos who started wars and threatened stability in the name of ideological purity. But whatever people thought he meant, there was no question that he was important. He was the man who’d saved Earth from the protomolecule. He was the man who’d brought down Mao-Kwikowski. Who’d made the first contact with the alien artifact and opened the gates that led to a thousand different worlds.

In person, he looked different than his image on the screen. His face was still broad, but not as much so. His skin had a warmth that even years in the sunless box of a ship couldn’t erase. The dark brown hair had a dusting of gray at the temples, but his eyes were the same sapphire blue. As she watched, Holden rubbed a hand across his chin, nodding at something that Fayez was saying. It was an unconsciously masculine movement that left Elvi thinking of large animals – lions, gorillas, bears. There was no sense of threat in it, only of power, and she was profoundly aware that the man she had seen only as an image on a data feed was exhaling the same molecules that she was breathing in.

“You okay?”

Elvi started. The man who’d asked was huge, pale, and muscular. His shaved head and thick belly made him look like a gigantic baby. He put a hand on her shoulder as if to steady her.

“Fine?” she said, her inflection making it a question.

“You just looked a little weird there for a second. You sure you’re feeling all right?”

“I was supposed to meet with Captain Holden?” she said, trying to pull herself back together. “My name’s Elvi Okoye, and I’m with the RCE. I’m an exobiologist with RCE.”

“Elvi!” Fayez called, waving her over.

She nodded to the pale man and walked over to the table where Fayez and Holden were sitting. James Holden’s eyes were on her.

“This is Elvi,” Fayez said. “We’ve known each other since upper university.”

“How do you do?” Elvi said, her voice sounding false and tinny in her ears. She cleared her throat.

“Pleased to meet you,” Holden said, rising to his feet and extending a hand. Elvi shook it just as if she were meeting anyone else. She was proud of herself for that.

“Sit,” Fayez said, pushing out a chair for her. “I was just talking to the captain here about the resources problem.”