Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (67 page)

“Everybody’s all right,” Alex said. “We’re all going to be fine.”

~

By the time Havelock and Doctor Merton had finished the inventory, a team of builders were already fitting batteries into fabrication units and measuring out the places where walls would be going up. Real human shelters. A new First Landing. The self-selected construction crew was a mix. Some were squatters who’d come on the dead refugee ship. Some were people Havelock had shipped out with. The divide between them still existed in his mind, but didn’t seem to be playing out on the ground. The death of the heavy shuttle and the burning of the terrorist cell seemed like things that had happened in some other epoch. He supposed it was something about the storm, the blindness, the death-slugs, and the constant awareness of mortality just outside the door, clearing its throat. It wasn’t a model of community building that he’d recommend trying to scale up, but it had worked here. Temporarily. For now.

A dark-skinned woman with long black hair detached from the group. She looked familiar, but it still took Havelock a few seconds to place her. The time downstairs had taken all the padding out of her cheeks.

“Doctor van Altricht.”

“Call me Sudyam,” she said. “Everyone else does.”

“Sudyam, then,” he said, holding out his hand terminal. “I’ve got some paperwork for you.”

“Excellent,” she said, taking it. Her gaze flickered over the contract addendum too quickly for her to really be taking it all in. At the bottom, she signed her name with a fingernail and pressed the pads of her index and middle fingers to the screen. The hand terminal chimed, and she handed it back.

“Congratulations,” Havelock said. “You are now the official field lead for the RCE research team.”

“And a worse job, I can’t imagine,” she said, smiling. “Now that I’m official, can you tell me when we’re getting replacement equipment?”

“There’s an unmanned supply pod under heavy burn to Medina,” Havelock said. “Assuming the OPA doesn’t impound it or call it salvage, it should be here in six, maybe seven months.”

“And the chance of the OPA stopping it?”

“I wouldn’t make it better than three in ten,” Havelock said. “But honestly, don’t sniff that number. You don’t know where it’s been.”

The biochemist shook her head in mild disgust. “Well, it’ll have to do,” she said.

For almost a week after the power came back on, the
Rocinante
and the
Israel
had been in a very delicate political state. The Belters on the
Israel
had been taken in as a gesture when it was pretty certain that the thing was symbolic because they were all going to be dead anyway. Now that they weren’t going to die, the question of status – were the Belters refugees, prisoners, or paying passengers? – became a much more contentious issue. Marwick had to decide whether they were going to be on his ship for the full eighteen months back to Medina, or if he was going to try to place them all downstairs. It didn’t help matters that with all the shuttles slagged, the only ways down to the surface were on board the
Rocinante
or a really long, unpleasant jump.

In the end, the break was almost even. About half of the crew of the
Barb
elected to stay with the colonists and scientists on the ground. About half of the RCE staff still in orbit, having come this far and being profoundly uninterested in just looking at the promised land from the mountaintop, elected to stay on the planet. Of the science teams that had been on the ground from the start – Vaughn, Chappel, Okoye, Cordoba, Hutton, Li, Sarkis, and a dozen others – only Cordoba elected to come back up the well and go home, and that apparently had more to do with grief over a failed romantic relationship than the fact the entire planet had been doing its best to kill them. It wasn’t something Havelock understood, but it didn’t need to be.

The ship repairs were under way when night fell, the scaffolding and the hull of the ship flickering brightly and then going dark as the welding torches did their work. The sunset was a massive canvas of gold and orange, green and rose, gray and indigo and blue. It reminded him of beaches on the North American west coast, except there were no vendors clogging the place and no advertising drones muttering about the joys of commerce. It was beautiful, in its way. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see a bonfire burning, and a bunch of the colonists sitting around it playing guitars and getting high, except that there was nothing left in the aftermath of the flooding that would burn and if there was anything on the planet that would give you a safe buzz, they’d grown it on the
Israel
.

He hauled himself up into the
Rocinante
and limped back to the bunk Naomi had assigned him. It was the first time he’d been in the
Roci
when it had an up and down, and because the ship didn’t land along the thrust vector, he walked along walls for the most part. The shredded muscles in his thigh and calf were regrowing slowly, and his knee might need another round of repairs to swap out the cartilage. Considering everything else that had happened, it was a great set of problems to have.

In his bunk, he checked his personal messages. The message he’d been dreading was there. Williams’ family was filing criminal and civil charges against him for wrongful death. His union representative was already counterfiling and RCE was being strangely cooperative. By the time the
Israel
returned to her home port, he hoped everything would be cleared up. He wished there was a way to send a message to Williams’ people and apologize. Explain that he’d tried to just disable the suit, and that he was very, very sorry that it had happened the way it did. His union rep had made him promise not to, though. There would be a chance for that when the issue was settled.

There was also a message from Captain Marwick with the subject header of I BELIEVE I OWE YOU A DRINK and a pass-through to one of the major newsfeeds. Havelock followed it.

The screen filled with the banner insets of the feed, but the central image was weird to look at. As he watched, the
Barbapiccola
, tumbling slowly on its tether, bloomed and a puff of perfectly round plastic bubbles came out. It was like watching a flower releasing seeds to the wind. A man’s voice, gentle, deep, and reassuring, came under the image, speaking Belter-accented English.

“New footage today from the stunning rescue operations on New Terra. What you’re seeing now are images captured by the Royal Charter Energy ship
Edward Israel
of the mass evacuation of the disabled freighter
Barbapiccola
. For those of you new to this story, all three ships were reduced to working under battery power at the time this occurred, and while the
Barbapiccola
was lost to an uncontrolled atmospheric entry, all hands and passengers were transferred to the
Israel
for medical evaluation and aid under the supervision of acting security director Dimitri Havelock.”

The image shifted to an image of him from his official report back to RCE. His hair stood away from his head, making him look like he was trying to be a Belter, and his voice sounded weirdly high and whiny.

“The transfer was completed in under three hours. I would specifically like to commend Captain Toulouse Marwick for his prompt and professional aid, without which we could not have managed this without considerable loss of life.”

The feed ended, and Havelock laughed. He requested a connection to Marwick, and the red-haired man appeared almost immediately.

“So I guess they aren’t firing us,” Havelock said.

“They’d be giving us a ticker-tape parade when we got home if anyone still used ticker tape,” Marwick said. “This right now is when we should all be asking for raises.”

“Hazard pay,” Havelock said, propping his head up with his arm.

“Heroes of the hour, we are,” Marwick said. “Not that they really have much clue back there what it was really like. One of those things you can explain as clearly and concretely as you want, and they still don’t get it.”

“That’s fine,” Havelock said. “They don’t need to. I’m going to have a request list from the research and survey team. Do you think there’s anything else we can give them?”

“Depends,” Marwick said. “The
Rocinante
convoying back to the Ring with us?”

“I think so,” Havelock said. “I can confirm that.”

“If we’ve got them for backup, I can strip the place down a little bit more. Not a great deal, but we could break down one of the backup generators and drop it to them. And biomass for the galleys.”

“Actually, I think we’re okay on that. Doctor Okoye was talking about a way to convert the local flora into something that could be turned into something that they could eat. It had something to do with right-handed molecules, whatever those are.”

“Well, good on her, then,” Marwick said. “Almost makes you want to stay a while, doesn’t it? See how it all plays out?”

“Oh shit no,” Havelock said. “No, you should see this place. It’s tiny, it’s filthy, and everything about it is slapped together with hot glue and prayer. Also, there are slugs that instantly kill you. If these people survive for a year, I’ll be surprised.”

“Really?”

“You know that in a month or two or eight or whatever, something’s got to happen. The hydroponics will fail out, or there’ll be another thing like that eye-eating goop only they won’t happen to have a treatment for it ready to hand, or one of the attack moons will drop out of the sky. Shit, the fucking death-slugs could grow wings. How do we know they can’t do that? We
do
know there are power plants in the ocean big enough to damn near blow the planet off course. Holden says they’re all dead now, but he could be wrong. Or turning everything off might mean there’s some kind of reactor core sinking down into the planet. We don’t know
anything
.”

Marwick looked nonplussed, but he nodded. “I suppose that’s true.”

“No, what I want is Ceres Station or Earth or Mars. You know what they have in New York? All-night diners with greasy food and crap coffee. I want to live on a world with all-night diners. And racetracks. And instant-delivery Thai food made from something I haven’t already eaten seven times in the last month.”

“You make it sound like paradise indeed,” Marwick said. “Still, I can’t help feeling uncomfortable at the idea of leaving all these poor people if they’re really going to die from staying.”

“Maybe they won’t,” Havelock said. “Wouldn’t be the first time recently I was wrong about something. And… well, they’ve got some things in the plus column too. I think they’ve got more scientists and engineers per capita than anyplace else in the universe. And we’re giving them all the supplies we can manage.”

“Still, seems thin.”

Havelock sat up a degree, his crash couch shifting and hissing on its gimbal. “They also have each other. For now, anyway. You have to figure when we started this, everyone was ready to slit everyone else’s throat, and they’re down here now putting up tents together. If nothing new comes along to kill them, there will be native-born New Terran babies as soon as biology permits. And I wouldn’t bet that the parents will all have come here on the same ship.”

“Well,” Marwick said. “It’s good to recall that wherever people start, whatever they bring with them, humanity can still pull together in heavy weather.”

Havelock shrugged. Koenen’s voice was still fresh in his memory, and Williams drifting flatlined and dead. Naomi Nagata in her cell. The Belter engineer whose locker people had been pissing in. The shuttle he’d rigged as a weapon. Jesus, he felt bad enough about Williams. He could barely imagine what it would have been like if he’d deployed the weaponized shuttle.

“Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. These people could just as easily have gone down with their teeth in each other’s throats. That happens too. It’s just the folks that go that way aren’t around to write the history books.”

“Amen,” Marwick said, chuckling. “Amen indeed.”

T
he
Rocinante
had really taken a beating.

The ship had a variety of puncture wounds in the outer hull all along her port side. Holden could see the bright spots where Basia and Naomi had replaced damaged thruster ports, but they hadn’t had the time or materials to patch all the holes. It was a testament to Alex’s skill as a pilot that he’d been able to bring them down at all without burning up. At least one PDC housing was riddled with damage, and the weapon inside was probably unsafe to use. And there was a long scar across the top of the ship where, according to Naomi, an improvised missile had hit.

Holden cheerfully noted each future repair on his itemized bill for Avasarala.

The
Rocinante
sat on a wide stretch of nothing half a kilometer from where First Landing had once stood. The frames of new construction were starting to appear. People, building on the ruins of what had come before, just like they always did. So many things had been lost, but it was the missing people that hurt the most.

Just like they always did.

Holden noted a spot of minor damage on the drive cone, then came around the stern of the ship to find a pair of Belters throwing up a temporary shelter a dozen yards away. A man in his early thirties was running cable while an older woman hammered spikes into the muddy ground. A second woman stood by with a long pole to flick away any slugs that might get too close.

“You can’t put that there,” Holden said, walking toward them and making a shooing gesture. “Ask Administrator Chiwewe where to put your tent.”

“This spot hasn’t been claimed by anyone,” the man said. “We have just as much right —”

“Yes, yes. I’m not telling you where you can and can’t build. But in a few hours this ship is going to lift off, and it will flatten your little tent.”

“Oh,” the man said, sheepish. “Right. We’ll just wait for you to go.”

“Thank you. You folks have a good afternoon.” Holden gave them a wave and a smile and headed off toward New First Landing. These people were still the same ones who had been willing to fight RCE to the death to hang on to their claim. They weren’t going to put up with being bossed around by outsiders. But the catastrophe had at least taught them to respect high-speed winds.