Cibola Burn (Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  The first militiaman flew through the doorway too fast, pumped on adrenaline and unaccustomed to having a gun in his hand. The second came just behind him, feet first. Havelock felt his gut go tight. They both had pistols in their hands and armbands around their biceps. Naomi, behind him, took a breath.

  “Gentlemen,” Havelock said with a nod. “How can I help you?”

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the first one demanded, trying to bring his gun to bear and steady himself against the wall at the same time.

  “Moving the prisoner,” Havelock said, his voice pitched just between contempt and incredulity. “What else would I be doing?”

  “Chief didn’t say anything about that,” the second one said.

  “Chief Engineer Koenen isn’t head of security on this ship. I am. You guys are helping me. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it, but keep in mind that this is what I do, all right? What the hell are you two doing here?”

  They exchanged a glance. “Chief told us to come guard the prisoner.”

  Naomi smiled and looked demure and non-threatening. She faked it pretty well.

  “Good plan,” Havelock said. “This is where they’ll be coming. You two set up here in case they get through. Once I’ve got this one safely stowed where they won’t find her, I’ll come reinforce you.”

  “Yes, sir,” the second man said, making a sharp salute with the same hand that had the gun in it. Havelock flinched. These guys were so not ready for live rounds. Havelock pulled the shotgun to ready and racked it.

  “Miss Nagata,” he said. “If you’d be so kind.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said meekly and pushed off for the door.

  He followed, catching himself on the doorframe and turning back.

  “If anyone comes through, identify them before you start shooting, all right? I don’t want anyone to get hurt by mistake.”

  “We will, sir,” the first one said. The second one nodded. Havelock would have wagered half his salary that they’d been planning to open up on anyone that came through the door. Naomi waited for him just down the corridor. He put the shotgun’s safety on and let it trail from his shoulder. All the corridors in the Israel were narrow, but more so here. The nearer you got to the outside, the tighter the space became. The cloth and padding along the walls ate the sounds of the ship. Numeric codes printed on the material listed what conduits and technical systems were buried in the bulkhead underneath them, the model of panel, and their replacement dates. The idea behind the foam and cloth was to make everyone safer in case of a collision or unexpected burn. Right now, it made him think of a padded cell.

  Havelock nodded back over his shoulder. “If something happens, don’t go back there without me.”

  “Hadn’t planned on it.”

  They moved down the corridor, Havelock taking lead and gesturing her forward. She didn’t move with the tactical instinct of someone trained to do it, but she was smart and quiet and caught on quickly. She also had a Belter’s grace in zero g. If he’d had a few weeks with a squad of people like her, he’d have given them live rounds. At the wall before the intersection with the maintenance corridor, he gestured to the thin ceramic lip of the bulkhead.

  “Stay here,” he whispered. “And stay small.”

  Naomi lifted her fist. Havelock moved forward. At the intersection, two more of the team were braced in what they probably thought was a cover position. One of them was solid. The other had his hand too far forward. If he tried to push off, he’d get a backspin that would turn him away from the fight. They’d been over this.

  “Gentlemen,” Havelock said as he slid forward through the air. “Walters and… Honneker, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Honneker said.

  “What’s our situation?”

  “Chief called for radio silence. Don’t want to warn the enemy what we’re up to. We’ve got Boyd and Mfume at the decompression hatch. Chief’s got Salvatore and Kemp. They’re going forward to flush the bad guys out.”

  “Who do we have outside?”

  “Outside?” He shook his head, uncomprehending.

  “Did we put anybody in suits and send them out the other airlocks?”

  “Hey,” Honneker said, “that’s a good idea. We should do that.”

  “So didn’t do it already,” Havelock said.

  “No, sir. Didn’t think of it.”

  “All right,” Havelock said, and the dry rattle of gunfire echoed from down the corridor. The two engineers turned, pulling themselves to look. Honneker pulled a little too hard, launching himself into the corridor where anyone coming the other direction could have shot him while he flailed. The radio clicked to life in Havelock’s ear. The chief engineer sounded like a kid at a birthday party.

  “We have contact! We have contact! The enemy’s taken cover in the lavatory by secondary supply. We have him pinned down!”

  A flurry of shots rang out, coming through the radio a fraction of a second before the sound could move through the ship’s air. Koenen started shouting at someone to pull back, then realized his radio was still live and cut it. Havelock braced his ankle in a handhold, stretched out to Honneker, and pulled him back in gently.

  “What do we do?” Walters said as Honneker steadied himself on a handhold. “Should we go forward? We could grab some suits and go around like you said?”

  Havelock took out the fully charged Taser, shaking his head. It was ready to fire. The second one, with the low charge, took half a second to go to ready status. The two men were looking at him for guidance.

  “You should both look down the corridor,” Havelock said, pointing at the intersection with his chin. When they turned, he shot them both in the back. Their bodies arched, shuddered, and went still. Havelock took their pistols, disabled their suit radios, and handcuffed them first to each other, and then to one of the handholds.

  “Clear,” he said over his shoulder, his voice calm but strong enough to carry. Naomi moved forward, shifting from one side of the corridor to the other so that she was never more than a fraction of a second from something solid she could use to change direction. Good instincts.

  “That’s four down,” she said. “Are you really good at this, or are they really bad?”

  “Teaching may not be my strong suit,” Havelock said. “And we do have the element of surprise on our side.”

  “I guess,” Naomi said, her voice making her skepticism clear. “How are you doing?”

  Havelock started to say I’m fine by reflex, and then paused. He had just attacked and disabled two of his crewmen who’d been working at the direct and explicit order of his superior officer. He’d betrayed the trust of men he’d been traveling with for years on behalf of a Belter saboteur. And they were all of them days from dying. And, maybe oddly, it was that last fact that made all the rest all right. He was a dead man. They were all dead men. So there was a sense in which what he did now didn’t matter. He was free to follow his conscience wherever it led.

  It was the security man’s nightmare scenario. In the face of death, why wouldn’t there be riots? Why wouldn’t there be killing and theft and rape? If there were no consequences – or if all the consequences were the same – then anything became possible. It was his job to expect the worst of humanity, including himself. And now here he was, helping a lawfully bound prisoner escape because he liked the death she offered him better than Murtry’s plastic-and-ceramic sepulcher standing on an empty planet. He didn’t give a good goddamn about New Terra or Ilus or whatever the unpleasant ball of mud under them got called. He cared about the people. The ones on the Israel and the ones on the Barbapiccola and the ones on the surface. All of them. Staking a claim that the corporation could use to protect its assets after they all died just wasn’t good enough.

  “I’m weirdly at peace with this,” he said.

  “Probably a good sign,” she said, and a fresh round of shooting started. Havelock gestured for her to stay and pushed forward.

  All the major
corridors on the Israel had decompression hatches: thick circles of metal with hard polymer seals. Most of the time they were bumps in the walls, larger than the ship designs a generation or two later, but easy enough to ignore. If something holed the ship, the hatch would close with the speed and amorality of a guillotine. If someone got caught in it, one loss was better than venting the air. Havelock had seen training videos about misfires, and he’d been nervous around them ever since. One man was pressed to the wall, eyeing the corridor ahead anxiously. Havelock cleared his throat, and the man spun, pistol at the ready.

  “Mfume,” Havelock said, his palms up. “Where’s Boyd?”

  “He went forward,” Mfume said, gesturing with the gun, but not lowering it. “The chief’s getting shot at. And he told me to stay here. And I stayed, but —”

  “It’s all right,” Havelock said, moving closer slowly, not making eye contact. He kept looking down the corridor, trying to shift the man’s attention there. The raised pistol made his chest itch. “You did the right thing.”

  The radio crackled back to life, and the chief engineer spoke. He sounded winded. “We’ve locked the little bastard down. He winged Salvatore, but it’s not bad. I need everyone up here. We’re going to rush him.”

  “That’s probably not a good idea,” Havelock said on the open channel.

  “It’s all right,” the chief engineer said. “We can take him.”

  “Not without casualties that you don’t have to take,” Havelock said. “Is he in armor?”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I got one hit on him,” another voice said, its tone high and tight, like a kid on his first hunt who thinks he shot a deer.

  “Everyone check in,” the chief said.

  “Jones and I are in the brig, chief. Everything’s quiet.”

  “Prisoner giving you any shit?” the chief asked.

  “I moved her,” Havelock said. “She’s fine. I need you to pull back now. We have to do this by the numbers.”

  Another half dozen gunshots peppered the air. Mfume twitched with each of them. Havelock gently pushed the barrel of the man’s gun away until it pointed at the wall. Mfume didn’t seem to notice he’d done it.

  “No can do,” Koenen said. “If we let up, this Belter sonofabitch is going to get loose. We’ve got to finish this thing. Honneker! Walters! Get your nuts in your palms and head forward, boys. This piece of shit is going down.”

  The silence on the radio was eerie.

  “Walters?” the chief engineer said.

  Havelock took Mfume’s wrist and twisted, bracing one leg against the wall for leverage. Mfume cried out, but he loosened his grip on the gun enough for Havelock to bat it away. The black metal spun down the corridor, and Mfume yelled and tried to push him away. Havelock shifted his grip, pulling out and down, peeling Mfume away from his bracing wall. The engineer screamed again, and Havelock fired the Taser into his back. Mfume bounced against the far wall, limp as a puppet, and Havelock pulled the shotgun off his back and shifted to jam one knee against the lip of the decompression hatch and the other foot behind him against a handhold.

  “Nagata,” he shouted. “We’re about to have company.”

  Down the corridor, the chief engineer boiled around the corner and slammed into the wall, firing his pistol wildly.

  “Cease fire!” Havelock called. “You’ve got one of your own floating outside cover. Cease fire!”

  “Fuck you!” Koenen shouted, and Havelock pulled the shotgun’s trigger. The bag round took the chief in the side and sent him spinning. Havelock landed the second shot in the man’s back just as three more engineers caromed around the corner in a clump. Havelock shot each of them once, then shifted himself to the other side of the hatch and pushed off, stowing the shotgun and pulling the Tasers. The low-charge one was already dead, and he dropped it. One of the men was bleeding; a droplet of blood the size of a fingernail floated in the air. All four men were gasping in pain. Two of them had dropped their weapons, and the other two – the bleeding man and Koenen – seemed unaware Havelock was there at all. Havelock Tased the first of the floating men, then grabbed the one who was bleeding, Salvatore.

  “You. Kemp.”

  “You shot me.”

  “With a bag round. The other guy shot Salvatore with a bullet. You need to get him to the medical bay.”

  “You’re a traitor,” the chief engineer shouted, and Havelock Tased him before turning back to Kemp.

  “I’m taking your gun away, and I’m giving you Salvatore. You’re helping him get to the medical bay now. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” Kemp said, then looked over Havelock’s shoulder and nodded. “Ma’am.”

  “Everything under control?” Naomi asked.

  “Wouldn’t go that far,” Havelock said, putting Kemp’s hand on Salvatore’s arm and giving them both a little shove back up the corridor. “I’m fairly sure the two from the brig are on their way down here.”

  “We should leave, then.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  The short stretch of corridor between the corner and the airlock had a sealed door to secondary storage, a low access panel to the power conduits in the walls, and the entrance to the maintenance airlock’s locker room. The space was narrow and cramped. Bullet holes pocked the cloth. One of them had penetrated the wall and hit a hydraulic tube. The safety hydraulic fluid was polymerizing in the air, a hundred tiny greenish dots slowly turning white. The original leak was probably already sealed with a hunk of the stuff. The washroom was the standard utility size, so small that squatting on the vacuum seat meant pressing back to one wall and knees to the other. It wouldn’t have been much for cover in the first place, and the narrow door stood open. A dozen bullet holes scarred the walls and the doorway.

  “Okay,” Havelock said, and a gun popped out, firing blind down the hallway. He pushed Naomi behind him, shouting, “Stop! Stop! I’ve got Nagata right here!”

  “Stay the hell back!” a man’s voice shouted from the washroom. It sounded almost familiar, but Havelock couldn’t place it. “I swear to God I’ll shoot.”

  “I noticed,” Havelock shouted back.

  “It’s okay, Basia,” Naomi called. “It’s me.”

  The voice went silent. Havelock moved forward slowly, ready for the gun to reappear. It didn’t. The man floating in the washroom wore military body armor of a Martian design that was maybe half a decade out of date. His hair was dark with flecks of gray at the temples, and he had a welding torch in one hand. The gun was in the other. His eyes were wide and his skin was ashy. A streak across the side of the armor showed where one of the militia’s bullets had skipped off his ribs. Havelock put up his left hand, palm out, but kept the Taser tight in his right.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s all right. We’re all on the same side here.”

  “Who the hell are you?” the man demanded. “You’re the security guy. The one that locked her up.”

  “Used to be,” Havelock said.

  Naomi put her hands on Havelock’s shoulders, pulling herself over him to see the other man.

  “We’re leaving,” she said. “Want to come with?”

  Chapter Forty-Three: Basia

  “W

  e’re leaving,” Naomi said. “Want to come with?”

  Basia felt a powerful flush of embarrassment. Things had started out so well.

  He’d cut into the Israel’s airlock control panel with the efficiency of long practice. The composite plating had been an old layering system he’d seen often working on Ganymede, and the familiarity had given him a sense of confidence. He’d floated through the short corridor to a storage and locker room without seeing a soul, clutching his pistol in one hand. He’d hoped the weapon would turn out to be unnecessary. On the other side of the locker room was the starboard passageway that would lead to the brig. He was about sixty meters from his goal, and not even an alarm had gone off.

  His first sign that things were going wrong was a massive
barrage of gunfire that seemed to come from everywhere at once. He’d been hiding in the tiny lavatory closet ever since.

  “I came to rescue you,” Basia said, recognizing how silly the words sounded even as he said them.

  “Thanks for that,” Naomi replied with a smile.

  “Yeah, so, we should probably keep —” the Earther in the body armor started to say, then was cut off by a new fusillade of shots. Bullets bounced off the corridor walls, tearing strips of foam off to join the floating blobs of solidified hydraulic fluid. The Earther shoved Naomi into the lavatory with Basia, mashing them both against the back wall. More shots hit, including one that skipped off the Earthman’s shoulder plating, leaving a long dented streak.

  “I’m Basia,” he said.