Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (39 page)

Elvi blinked in puzzlement as Murtry left. “Is he mad at me?”

“Sweetie,” Amos said, clapping her on the back, “that just means you’re not an asshole.”

A
fter they’d lost radio contact with Murtry, Havelock had tried to sleep. He
should
have slept. There was nothing he could do. Not yet, anyway. Not until it was over. He floated in his couch, the straps keeping him centered over the gel, and willed his consciousness to fade. His mind wouldn’t rest. Were they still alive down there? What if the explosion was just the first of several? What if the planet detonated and took out the
Israel
? Should he have Marwick pull the ship into a higher orbit? Or even away from the planet entirely? And if the
Barbapiccola
tried to do the same… then what? He wasn’t supposed to let them break orbit with a full load of RCE’s lithium ore.

He closed his eyes again, but they opened as soon as he stopped consciously willing them shut. After three hours, he gave up, took off his straps, and went to the gym instead. His float-atrophied muscled complained with every set, and he put the feed of the planet below on the screen. The contours of New Terra were gone. The whole planet had become a flat and uniform gray, clouds obscuring whatever violence was happening beneath them. After the exercise round, he bathed, changed into a fresh uniform, and went to his office. His incoming message queue was filled with requests for comments from every news organization there was, and several he doubted were real. He forwarded them all to the RCE corporate headquarters on Luna. Let them answer if they wanted to. At this point, they knew as much as he did.

He checked on comms from the planet, but the signal wasn’t getting through. So he checked again. And again. The gray planet was silent.

“Any word?” the prisoner asked.

“Nothing,” Havelock replied. And then, a moment later, “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” she said. “They’ll be all right.”

“I hope so.”

“Are
you
all right?”

Havelock looked over at her. For a detained saboteur who’d been in the box for days now, she looked calm. Almost amused. He found himself smiling back at her.

“Might be a little stressed,” he said.

“Yeah. Sorry about that.”

“Not your fault,” Havelock said. “You aren’t the one calling the shots around here.”

“There’s someone calling the shots around here?” Naomi asked, and a man cleared his throat behind him. Havelock shifted his couch, the bearing hissing, to look back at the hatch. The chief engineer floated there. He wore the militia armband over his uniform sleeve.

“Hey there, chief,” he said, pulling himself into the room. “Wondering if we could have a talk. Alone, maybe.”

“You can put up the privacy shield if you want,” Naomi said. “I’ll still hear everything.”

Havelock undid his straps and pushed off. “I’ll be back,” he said over his shoulder.

“You shall always find me at home,” Naomi said.

The commissary was between rushes. The chief engineer grabbed a bulb of coffee for himself and another for Havelock. They floated together near a table bolted to the deck. Force of habit.

“So we’ve been talking,” Chief Engineer Koenen said. “About the event.”

“Yeah, it’s been pretty much the only thing on my mind too.”

“How sure are we that it’s… well…
natural
?”

“I’d have gone pretty much a hundred percent it wasn’t,” Havelock said with a grim laugh. The chief engineer’s expression seemed to close, and Havelock pressed on. “But maybe that depends on what you mean by natural. Is there something bothering you?”

“I don’t want to sound paranoid. It’s just that the timing on this seems pretty convenient. You and me and the boys catch the UN mediator red-handed. Throw the bitch in the brig. And then this big disaster comes out of nowhere, takes everyone’s attention off her.”

Havelock sipped at the coffee.

“What are you thinking, chief? That it was rigged?”

“Those squatters got here before we did. We don’t know what they found and just never told us about. And Holden worked for the OPA. He worked for Fred fucking Johnson, right? Hell, everything I heard says he’s been sleeping with that Belter girl we brought in. His loyalty isn’t to Earth. And he was the one who went on the alien whatever-the-hell-it-is that Medina Station’s floating around and came back out. I’ve been following some independent casts. The Martian marines that went there after him? There’s some pretty weird shit that’s gone on with all of them since then.”

“Weird shit like what?”

The chief engineer’s eyes brightened and he hunched forward, a posture of intimacy and complicity that was a habit of gravity. For the next half hour, he ran down half a dozen strange occurrences. One of the marines had died of an embolism during a heavy-g burn just before she’d been scheduled to talk with her cousin who ran a popular newsfeed. Another had quit the military and wasn’t talking about anything that had happened. There had been rumors of a secret report that suggested – strongly suggested – that James Holden had been killed on the station, and a doppelgänger put in his place. It stood to reason with all the other changes the protomolecule could make to a human body that recreating one wouldn’t be hard for it. Only the report had never been made public, and the people who had read it had been targets of whisper campaigns to discredit them.

Havelock drank his coffee and listened, nodding and asking the occasional question – usually for the sources of the information the chief engineer was reporting. When they were done, Havelock promised to look into the issue, then hauled himself back to his desk. On the readout, the planet was still covered in clouds.

“Everything okay?” Naomi asked.

“Fine,” he said. And then a moment later, “Just scared people trying to find a version of events where someone has control over everything.”

She chuckled. “Yeah. I’m doing the same.”

“You are? How?”

“Chewing down my fingernails and praying,” she said. “Mostly praying.”

“You’re religious?”

“No.”

“Are you and Holden secretly alien spies that blew up the planet as part of a Belter conspiracy to distract the media?”

Naomi’s laughter was deep. “Oh, was that what it was? I’m so sorry.”

Havelock chuckled too, feeling a little guilty as he did. Koenen was one of his people. Naomi Nagata was a saboteur and the enemy. And still, it was a little funny, and there wasn’t anyone else to talk with.

“It’s not that bad. Conspiracy theories come up whenever people feel like the universe is too random. Absurd. If it’s all an enemy plot, at least there’s someone calling the shots.”

“Belters.”

“This time, yeah.”

“Are they going to break in here and throw me out the airlock?”

“No, they’re not like that,” Havelock said. “They’re good guys.”

“Good guys who think I destroyed a planet.”

“No, that your alien doppelgänger boyfriend did to keep people from thinking about you. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. No one’s really thinking you’re in league with the protomolecule. They’re just scared.”

Naomi went quiet. Her fingertips pressed against the cage and she hummed quietly to herself. It wasn’t a melody Havelock knew. He checked his incoming queue again. Another half dozen requests for comment. A note from one of the security team that the Belters on the
Israel
had started sitting together in the commissary and exercising together in the gym. It seemed suspicious to the man making the report. It sounded like circling the wagons to Havelock. He’d have to think about what to do about that. If anything. The radio signal to the planet still didn’t go through. The analysis of the IR sensors that could see through the cloud cover was that First Landing was being destroyed by the storm. He turned his attention to the sensor array data as it streamed back to Earth. Maybe someone there could make something of it. The first-report newsfeeds were already speculating that it had been a fusion core overloading. Having just heard about how Jim Holden was a shapeshifting alien left him a little skeptical about everything.

When, six hours later, his hand terminal lit up with an incoming request from Murtry, Havelock felt a huge weight lifting from his shoulders. He accepted the connection, and a low-res Murtry fuzzed to life on the screen. The feed jumped and hopped, but the audio quality was all right apart from a little static.

“Good to see you, Havelock. How’re things holding together up there?”

“No complaints, sir. Mostly we were waiting to hear from you. That looks like a hell of a rainstorm you’ve got going down there.”

“Loss of life was minimal,” Murtry said. “A few of the squatters didn’t bother getting to shelter in time, and the floodwaters pulled some local bugs out from the ground that’ll kill you if you touch them. They lost another one to that. Our people are fine. The camp’s a loss.”

“Ours or theirs?”

“Ours
and
theirs. Everyone down here’s going to be starting over from scratch.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Why?”

Havelock blinked. His smile felt nervous. “Because we just lost everything.”

“We didn’t lose as much as they did,” Murtry said. “That makes this a win. We’re going to need to pack the shuttle with relief supplies and get it down here. Food. Clean water. Medical supplies. Warm clothes. No shelters, though. Or if they are, make ’em those cheap laminate ones that won’t hold up for more than a week.”

“Are you sure? I can get some emergency prefabs worked up —”

“No. Nothing like permanent shelter comes down here until our people are the only ones using it. And we’ll be hauling up some of the squatters. Can you start setting something up for an extra hundred or so people? It doesn’t need to be comfortable, but it has to be something we can control.”

“We’re bringing the squatters on the
Israel
, sir?”

“We’re getting them off the planet and putting them under our thumbs,” Murtry said with a smile. “His Holiness, Pope Holden, thinks he bullied me into it. That man is about as smart as a dead cat.”

Havelock was suddenly acutely aware that Naomi’s privacy shield was down and every word of his conversation was carrying to her. He tried to think of a way to trigger it that wouldn’t let Murtry know that he’d forgotten protocol up to now.

“There a problem, Havelock?”

“Just thinking where we can put them, sir,” Havelock said. “We’ll come up with something.”

“Good man. This thing was a lucky break. Play this right, and we’ll get all the squatters off the planet. Even if we can’t, they’re going to have hell’s own time claiming they’ve got a viable settlement.” Murtry’s smile was thin. “This last sixty hours, we’ve probably made more progress toward straightening this mess out than all the time since we came out here.”

Naomi rapped against the cage with her knuckles, the grate clacking softly enough that the hand terminal’s mike didn’t pick it up. Her eyebrows were raised in query, but she didn’t speak. Havelock made the smallest possible nod.

“What about the mediation team?” he asked. “Holden and his people?”

“Holden and Burton are fine. Burton almost got his ass caught out in the worst of it, but it didn’t quite happen,” Murtry said with a shrug and a smile. “Can’t have everything.”

Havelock winced, thinking how callous Murtry’s words would sound to someone who didn’t know him. “Well, let them know we’ll put together relief supplies and get them down there as soon as we can get through the cloud cover.”

“No permanent structures.”

“No, sir. I understand.”

“I’m going to want to get some of our science team up when the shuttle goes back too. The ones that’re going a little too native. I’ll work up an evac list.”

“Do you want me to get the… ah… other shuttle ready to return to normal duty?” Havelock said, hoping that Murtry wouldn’t tell him to keep the weapon live. There was silence on the connection. “Sir?”

“We’ll have to, won’t we?” Murtry said. “Yeah, all right. But be ready to put it back in play as soon as the evacuation’s done. I don’t like giving up our advantages for nothing.”

“No, sir,” Havelock said. “I’ll see to it.”

“Good man.”

The connection died. Havelock started pulling up the duty roster and inventory lists. It was almost a minute before he risked glancing over at Naomi. She looked like she’d eaten something unpleasant.

“That’s who you work for?”

“He’s the chief of security,” Havelock said.

“That man is a snake.”

“He just came off badly,” Havelock said. “He didn’t know you could hear him.”

“If he had, he might have hissed a little different,” she said. Then a moment later, “Do you have any selective apoptosis catalysts on board?”

“Oncocidals? Sure, anti-cancer meds are standard.”

“Would you send some down in the shuttle?”

“I think antibiotics and clean water are more likely to —”

“Holden needs them. He caught a lot of rems on Eros. It’s not a big thing when we have a med bay, but he pops a new tumor every month or two. Unless Alex decides to take the
Roci
down into that soup, they may be down there for a while.”

He should probably have said no. She was his prisoner, and doing her favors wasn’t really part of the job. But she hadn’t made it clear to Murtry that she was listening. She could have embarrassed him and hadn’t.

“Sure,” he said. “I don’t see why not.”

“About that dead cat thing…”

“Yeah?”

“A lot of people have underestimated Jim over the last few years,” Naomi said. “A lot of them aren’t with us anymore.”

“A threat?”

“A heads-up not to make the same mistake your boss is making. I like you.”

~

Putting the relief supplies together was easy. Everyone on board had been waiting for a chance to do something. Food, fresh water, polyfiber blankets, and medical supplies – including a box of oncocidals with Holden’s name on the top – filled the shuttle’s hold until there was hardly room to close the door. Havelock found himself watching the sensors, waiting for the clouds to thin enough for the one tiny light of First Landing to show through. It was a shock to remember that those lights weren’t going to shine again. That they were gone. Havelock hadn’t been there. He’d never been to the surface of New Terra at all, and still the idea of the one human settlement being wiped away bothered him.