Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (9 page)

Elvi sat at the back with the other RCE employees, except Reeve and the security detail, who sat closer to the front with the locals. She watched them all segregate without a word. No one enforced the separation, but it was there. Michaela, an atmospheric physicist, sat beside her with a smile. Anneke and Tor, both geoengineers, sat on her other side, hand in hand. Fayez in the couch beyond her, talking with Sudyam, who had come down with the first small shuttle after the accident. The incident. The attack. Anneke leaned in and murmured something to Tor. He blushed and nodded a little too vigorously. Elvi tried to ignore the sexual byplay.

The mayor of First Landing was a thick-featured Martian woman with a broad accent and finger-cut hair named Carol Chiwewe, only they called her the coordinator, not the mayor. She called the meeting to order, and Elvi felt her heart starting to beat faster. The Belters had set the agenda, and so it started off with issues that were more important to them than to Elvi or RCE: the maintenance schedule for the water purification systems, whether to accept a credit line from an OPA-backed bank at unfavorable terms or wait until the first load of lithium came back and try for better. Everything was talked about in calm, considered terms. If there was anger or fear or murder, they had buried it so deeply that the mound didn’t show.

Reeve’s turn came, and he stepped smartly to the front of the room. His lips made a thin, forced smile.

“Thank you, madam coordinator, for inviting us to speak,” he said. “We have confirmation that the independent observer is on the way with a commission from the UN, the Martian congress, and the OPA to assist with moving the development of the colony forward. It is our hope to have the security issues addressed before they arrive.”

We hope to hang the bad guys on a rope before anyone gets here and says we can’t
, Fayez translated quietly enough for the words to reach Elvi’s ears and no farther.

“We have definitively identified the explosive used in the attack, and we are looking into which individuals had access to it.”

We don’t have a goddamn clue who did it, and since you hicks store mining explosives in an unlocked shed, we aren’t going to figure it out anytime soon.

“I don’t have to explain the gravity of this situation, but Royal Charter Energy is committed to the success of this colony for both our employees and this community. We’re all in this together, and my door is always open to anyone with questions or concerns, and I hope that we can rely on the same kindness and collaboration that you’ve extended to us since we came.”

So since we’ve got nothing, we’d really appreciate it if those of you who know who set the charges would just tell us. And also please consider not murdering us in our sleep. Thanks for that.

Sudyam coughed to hide her laughter and Fayez flashed a grin. At the front of the room, Reeve nodded and stepped down. The coordinator stood up, looking toward the back of the room. Elvi felt the sudden, powerful need to urinate.

“Doctor Okoye?” the coordinator said. “You wanted to speak?”

Elvi nodded and rose to her feet. It was about ten meters to the front of the room, and Elvi walked forward with her nerves screaming. The heat of the crowd’s bodies seemed suddenly oppressive, the smell of sweat and dust overwhelming. Her tongue felt sticky and thick in her mouth, but she smiled. At an estimate, two hundred people sat before her, their eyes on her. Her heart ticked over so fast she had to wonder whether there was enough air in the room. She remembered someone telling her once to look for a friendly face in the crowd and pretend she was only speaking to them. Four rows in on the left, Lucia Merton was sitting with her hands folded in her lap. Elvi smiled, and the woman smiled back.

“I just wanted to take a minute,” Elvi said, “to talk about how we can limit cross-contamination with the environment? Because we lost the dome? The hard perimeter dome?”

Lucia looked grave. Elvi chanced a look at the rest of the crowd and then wished she hadn’t.

“Part… um. Part of the RCE’s agreement with the UN was that we do a complete environmental study. We’re in just the second biosphere that we’ve ever seen, and there’s so much we don’t know about it that the more we can keep it pristine, the better we’ll be able to understand it. Ideally, we’d have a totally enclosed system here on the surface. Tight as a ship. Airlocks and decontamination rooms and…”

She was babbling. She grinned, hoping that someone would smile back. No one did. She swallowed.

“Every time we breathe, we’re taking in totally unknown microorganisms. And even though we’ve got different proteomes, we’re still big blobs of water and minerals. Sooner or later one of the indigenous species is going to find a way to exploit that. And it goes the other way too. Every time we defecate, we’re introducing billions of bacteria into the environment.”

“So now you’re going to tell us how we can shit?” a man’s voice said.

Elvi felt the sudden heat of a blush in her neck and cheeks. Even Lucia’s expression had gone cold and distant, the woman’s gaze fixed on nothing.

“I only meant that if we were doing this right, we’d have a protected, sterile environment and we wouldn’t be going out into the ruins or cultivating crop plants in the open air because —”

“Because you think we did it wrong,” the man sitting at Lucia’s side said. He was a big man with a dusting of gray at his temples and in the stubble of beard and a permanently angry face. “Only you don’t get to decide that.”

“I understand that we’re working with a complex situation here,” Elvi said, her voice getting rough with desperation. “But we’re all living in this massive Petri dish already, and I have a list of a few little sacrifices that we can all make that, from a scientific perspective —”

The man beside Lucia Merton flushed, and he leaned forward, his fists on his thighs. His eyes fixed on her like a predator’s.

“I’m done sacrificing things to science,” he said, and the buzz in his voice was a promise of violence. Lucia put a restraining hand on the man’s wrist, but others around the room had taken up the man’s disdain. The sounds of their bodies shifting in the seats, the murmur of voices in small conversations of their own filled the air.
Whoever killed Trying is probably in this room
, she thought. And then, immediately after that,
What the hell am I doing here?

Carol Chiwewe stood up, her expression pained. Embarrassed on Elvi’s behalf.

“Maybe we better come back to that another time, Doctor Okoye,” she said. “It’s late and people are tired, ne?”

“Yes,” Elvi muttered. “Yes, of course.”

Her skin burning with shame, she walked back toward her seat, and then past it, out into the street and alone in the deepening night toward her hut. Her shoes scraped in the gravel and dirt. The air was cool and smelled like coming rain. She wasn’t more than halfway there, moving slowly in the near-black starlight, when a voice stopped her.

“I’m sorry about my dad.”

Elvi turned. The girl was little more than a deeper darkness in the night. A slightly more solid shadow. Elvi found herself thankful that the voice wasn’t a man’s.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t think I did that very well.”

“No, it’s him,” the girl said, stepping closer. “You couldn’t have done right with him. My brother died, and now Dad’s not that kind of man anymore.”

“Oh,” Elvi said. And then, “I’m sorry.”

The girl nodded, shuffled with something, and a pale green light no brighter than a candle bloomed in her palm, casting shadows up over the girl’s face. She was pretty the way youth is always pretty, but when she got older, Elvi thought she might be beautiful the way her mother was.

“You’re Doctor Merton’s daughter,” Elvi said.

“Felcia,” the girl said.

“Good to meet you, Felcia,” Elvi said.

“I can walk you home. If you don’t have a light.”

“I don’t,” Elvi said. “I should have brought one.”

“Everyone forgets sometimes,” the girl said, setting off. Elvi trotted a little to catch up with her. For a dozen meters, they walked in silence. Elvi sensed that the girl was building up to something. A confession or a threat. Something dangerous. Elvi hoped that she was just being paranoid, and was certain that she wasn’t.

When the girl spoke at last, her voice was tight with anxiety and longing, and her words were the last thing Elvi would have guessed.

“What’s it like going to a real university?”

T
here should be fanfare
, Holden thought.

Passing through a ring into another star system, halfway across the galaxy from Earth, should be a dramatic moment. Trumpets, or loud alarms, tense faces locked on viewscreens. Instead, there was nothing. No physical sign that the
Rocinante
had been yanked fifty thousand light-years across space. Just the eerie black of the hub replaced by the unfamiliar starfield of the new solar system. Somehow, the fact that it was so mundane made it stranger. A wormhole gate should be a massive swirling vortex of light and energy, not just a big ring of something sort of like metal with different stars on the other side.

He resisted the urge to hit the general quarters alarm just to add tension to the moment.

The new sun was a faint dot of yellow-white light, not all that different from Sol when viewed from the Ring sitting just outside Uranus’ orbit. It had five rocky inner planets, one massive gas giant, and a number of dwarf planets in orbits even farther out than the Ring. The fourth inner planet, sitting smack dab in the middle of the Goldilocks Zone, was Ilus. New Terra. Bering Survey Four. RCE charter 24771912-F23. Whatever you wanted to call it.

All those names were too simple for what it really was. Mankind’s first home around an alien star. Humans kept finding ways to turn the astonishing events of the last few years mundane. A few decades from now, when all the planets had been explored and colonized, the hub and its rings would just be a freeway system. No one would think twice about them.

“Wow,” Naomi said, staring at Ilus’ star on the display with wide-eyed awe. Holden felt a rush of affection for her.

“I was just thinking that,” he said. “Glad I’m not the only one.” He opened a channel up to the cockpit.

“Yo,” Alex said.

“How fast can you get us there?”

“Pretty damn fast, if you’re willin’ to be uncomfortable.”

“Put us on a fast burn schedule and get some dirt under my feet,” Holden said with a grin.

“High burn’ll get us on the ground in ’bout seventy-three days.”

“Seventy-three days,” Holden said.

“Well, seventy-two point eight.”

“Space,” Holden said, trading his grin for a sigh, “is too damn big.”

~

Five hours into their burn, the messages started to come in. Holden had Alex bring them down to one-third g for dinner, and played the first recording on the galley screen while he helped Amos make pasta.

An older man, brown-skinned and gray-haired, stared out of the screen at him. He had the thin features and large cranium of a Belter, and just a hint of a Ceres accent.

“Captain Holden,” he said once the recording started. “Fred Johnson notified us you were coming, and I wanted to thank you for your help. My name is Kasim Andrada, and I’m captain of the independent freighter
Barbapiccola
. Let me fill you in on the situation as it stands.”

“This should be good,” Amos grunted, dumping steaming spaghetti noodles into a colander to drain them. Holden handed him the pot of red sauce he’d been stirring, then leaned against the counter to watch the rest of the broadcast.

“The colony finally got a working mining operation running about four months ago. In that time, we’ve brought up several hundred tons of raw ore from our mine. At the purity levels we’re seeing, that should translate to almost a dozen tons of lithium after refining. It’s enough to buy equipment, medicine, soil and seeds, everything this colony needs to get a real toehold.”

Naomi came into the galley, tapping away furiously at her hand terminal. “Smells good, I —” She stopped when she saw the video playing and sat down to watch.

“The
Edward Israel
,” Captain Andrada continued, “has stated that they will not allow us to leave orbit until the arbitration is complete. Royal Charter’s position being that they own this lithium until someone says they don’t. One of your first priorities will be to get the
Israel
to lift the blockade and let us take this ore to the Pallas refineries, where we already have buyers lined up and waiting.”

“Oh,” Amos said, dumping the pasta and sauce into a large bowl and putting it on the table. “Is
that
our priority?”

Holden passed the playback. “Did come across as an order, didn’t it?”

“He’s OPA,” Naomi said. “He thinks you’re here as Fred’s mouthpiece.”

“This guy is going to give me indigestion,” Holden said, killing the recording. “I’ll watch the rest of this crap after we eat.”

~

Five more broadcasts were queued up for viewing by the next day. The captain of the
Edward Israel
, an older Earthman named Marwick with flaming red hair and a British accent, demanded that Holden enforce the RCE charter by disabling the engines of the
Barbapiccola
if it tried to leave the system. Fred sent along encouragement and a reminder that Avasarala was shotgunning threats about the consequences for screwing the mission up. Three different news organizations asked for interviews, including a personal request from Monica Stuart for a live interview when he returned.

Miller watched them over his shoulder until Naomi came into their room and the detective disappeared in a blue shower of sparks.

“I think Monica likes you,” Naomi said with a grin, then flopped down onto the double-sized crash couch they used as a bed. “Alex is taking us back up to high burn in twelve minutes, and I want to die.”

“Monica would flirt with a lizard if she thought it would get her a good interview, tell Alex to give us another half hour so I can send a few responses, and hold on I’ll get my gun.”