Cibola Burn (Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  Holden crouched to enter through the small round opening, and found himself in a metallic cube two meters to a side. He sat on the floor, then slid down the wall until he was lying on his back.

  “This is a part of the old material transfer system,” Miller was saying, but Holden was already asleep.

  Interlude: The Investigator

  — it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out —

  One hundred and thirteen times a second, it reaches out, and the investigator reaches with it. Follows. Watches. It reaches for a signal it will never find. It is not frustrated, it is not angry. It reaches out because it reaches out. What it finds, it uses to reach out, and so finds more, and reaches farther. It will never be far enough. It is unaware of this fact.

  The investigator knows, and knows that it knows. An awareness in an unaware context. Consciousness within an unconscious system. So, nothing particularly new there. The investigator sighs, wishes it had a beer, knows that these are artifacts of the template. Once there was a seed crystal that had a name. It had loved and despaired. It had fought and failed and won at great sacrifice. None of that mattered. It had looked for things that were missing. For people that were missing. Everything about it is drawn along by that fact. Something is supposed to be here, and isn’t.

  And instead, there is a dead place. A place where nothing is. Where everything pulls back. The investigator reaches out, and what reaches out dies. The investigator ceases to reach out. It waits. It considers.

  Something was here once. Something built all this, and left its meal half eaten on the table. The designers and engineers that spanned a thousand worlds had lived here and died here and left behind the everyday wonders like bones in the desert. The investigator knows this. The world is a crime scene, and the one thing that stands out – the one thing that doesn’t belong – is the place that nothing goes. It’s an artifact in a world of artifacts, but it doesn’t fit. What would they put in a place they couldn’t reach? Is it a prison, a treasure chest, a question that isn’t supposed to be asked?

  A bullet. A bomb still ticking under the kitchen table after the blitz was over.

  Did He who made the lamb make thee? Or was there someone else? Whoever killed you fuckers left something behind. Something made for your death, and it’s right there.

  One hundred thirteen times a second, it reaches out, unaware of the investigator, unaware of the scars and artifacts, the echoes of the dead, the consciousness bound within it. It reaches out because it reaches out. It knows that people are dying in some more physical place, but it is not aware that it knows. It knows that it is constructed from the death of thousands, but it is not aware that it knows. The investigator knows and is aware that it knows.

  The investigator reaches out, but not at random. It looks for a path, and doesn’t find one. It looks for a path, and doesn’t find one. It looks for a path and finds one. Not there, not quite, but close. Two points define a line. One point is alive, and one point is death. Neither came from here. Bang those rocks together and see what sparks. See what burns.

  The investigator is the tool for finding what is missing, and so it exists. All the rest is artifact. The craving for beer. The hat. The memory, and the humor, and the weird half-fondness half-contempt for something named James Holden. The love for a woman who is dead. The longing for a home that will never be. Extraneous. Meaningless.

  The investigator reaches out, finds Holden. It smiles. There was a man once, and his name was Miller. And he found things, but he doesn’t anymore. He saved people if he could. He avenged them if he couldn’t. He sacrificed when he had to. He found the things that were missing. He knew who’d done it, and he did the obvious things because they were obvious. The investigator had grown through his bones, repopulated his eyes with new and unfamiliar life, taken his shape.

  It found the murder weapon. It knew what happened, at least in broad strokes. The fine work was for the prosecutors anyway, assuming it went to trial. But it wouldn’t. There were other things the tool was good for. The investigator knew how to kill when it needed to.

  More than that, it knew how to die.

  Chapter Forty-Five: Havelock

  H

  avelock still wasn’t convinced that Naomi Nagata was the best engineer in the system, but after watching her work, he had to concede there probably wasn’t a better one. If some of the people on the Israel had more degrees or specialties in which they outpaced her, Naomi could make it up in sheer, bloody-minded wildness.

  Okay, we can’t wait any longer,” she said to the muscle-bound bald man on the screen. “If he shows back up, tell him where we stand up here.”

  “Pretty sure the cap’n trusts your judgment,” Amos said. “But yeah. I’ll tell him. Anything else I should pass on?”

  “Tell him he’s got about a billion messages from Fred and Avasarala.” Alex’s voice came across the comm and also through the hatchway to the cockpit. “They’re talkin’ about building a mass driver, sending us relief supplies.”

  “Yeah?” Amos said. “How long’s that gonna take?”

  “About seven months,” Naomi said. “But at the outside, we’ll only have been dead for three of them.”

  Amos grinned. “Well, you kids don’t have too much fun without me.”

  “No danger,” Naomi said and broke the connection.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Havelock asked.

  “Nope,” Naomi replied. She pulled herself closer to the command console. “How’s it going out there, Basia?”

  The comm channel clicked and the Belter’s voice hissed into the operations deck. The sound reverberated without giving any sense of spaciousness. A whisper in a coffin. “We’re getting close out here. This is a lot of ugly.”

  “Good thing we’ve got a great welder,” she said. “Keep me in the loop.”

  The screens on the ops deck showed the operation in all its stages: what they’d managed so far, what they still hoped. And the countdown timer that marked the hours that remained before the Barbapiccola started to scrape against Ilus’ exosphere and changed from a fast-moving complex of ceramic and metal into a firework.

  Not days. Hours.

  The tether itself looked like two webs connected by a single, hair-thin strand. All along the belly of the Rocinante, a dozen ceramic-and-steel foot supports made for a broad base, the black lines meeting at a hard ceramic juncture a few hundred meters out. The Barbapiccola underneath them almost had all of the answering structures in place. Once the Belter had the foot supports installed there too, it would be time for the Martian corvette to use its battery power to tug the Belter ship into a more stable orbit, along with its cargo of lithium ore. The complexity of the situation made Havelock a little lightheaded. As he watched, the display showing the surface of the Barbapiccola stuttered, and one of the red-flagged foot supports changed to green.

  “Okay,” Naomi said over the open channel. “We’re reading solid on that one. Let’s move on.”

  “Yeah, give me one more minute here,” Basia’s compressed voice said. “There’s a seam here I don’t like. I’m just going to…” The words trailed off. The readout stuttered red and then green again. “Okay. That’s got it. Moving on.”

  “Be careful,” Alex broke in. “Keep the torch cold when you’re moving. These lines’ve got great tensile strength, but they’re crap for heat resistance.”

  “Done this before,” Basia said.

  “Partner,” Alex said. “I don’t think anyone’s done this before.”

  The tether lines were standard filament design, built for retrieving dropped Martian marines. Using them to haul a full-sized spaceship was like using a thread to pull a bowling ball: possible with enough patience and skill, and easy as hell to get wrong. Naomi had spent three long hours strapped into her crash couch before she’d decided it was plausible, and even then, Havelock half thought she’d talked herself into believing it because she knew that nothing else was.

 
; Havelock had spent the time having his connections to Murtry’s terminal refused and reflecting on the fact that he’d just spectacularly quit his job. It was odd that it weighed on him as much as it did. He was eighteen months from home and probably days at the most from death, and his mind kept turning back to the uneasy surprise with himself that came from walking out on a contract. He’d never done that before. And, since he’d gone with Naomi, he wasn’t even sure what his legal status was. Somewhere, he guessed, between former employee and accomplice to criminal conspiracy. It was a wider range than he knew what to do with. If he was really the face of what was happening on New Terra back home, they were all going to be at least as confused as he was.

  The truth was that none of the standards of corporate law or governmental authority seemed to apply out here. He could follow the feeds, read the letters, even exchange recorded video with RCE’s home office, but those were only words and pictures. The models based on experience in human space – even in the attenuated civilization of the Belt – failed here.

  Mostly what he felt, though, was relief. He was very aware of how inappropriate it was, given the context, but he couldn’t deny it. It didn’t leave him regretting his choices. Except maybe to have taken the job. All the tragedy and pain of Ilus would have been merely sad and distressing to see from a bar on Ceres Station. From where he was, the fear had stopped being an emotion and turned into an environment.

  The last foot support indicator went green.

  “Okay,” Naomi said. “That’s looking good from here. What’s it like out there, Basia?”

  “Ugly as shit, but solid.”

  “How’s your air?”

  “I’m all right,” the Belter said. “Thought I’d stay here, in case anything breaks that I’d be able to fix.”

  “No,” Naomi said. “If this fails, those lines will snap fast enough to cut you in half. Come back to the barn.”

  Basia’s percussive snort was more eloquent than words, but the small yellow dot began to move from the surface of the Barbapiccola up through the vacuum toward the Rocinante. Havelock watched, his fingers laced tightly together.

  “Alex,” Naomi said, “can you check the release?”

  “It’s good,” Alex said, his voice coming from the cockpit and the radio link both. “We start going pear-shaped, we can let go.”

  “All right,” Naomi said. And then, softly to herself, “All right.”

  “If this doesn’t work,” Alex said though the deck hatch between ops and the cockpit, “our man Basia’s going to watch his baby girl burn to death. I sort of promised him that wouldn’t happen.”

  “I know,” Naomi said. Havelock had hoped she’d say, She won’t.

  It took Basia eighteen minutes to get back to the Roci and another five to negotiate the airlock. Naomi spent most of that time on the radio to the captain and engineer of the Barbapiccola. Half the conversation was in Belter patois – ji-ral sabe sa and richtig ane-nobu – that might as well have been in code for all he could follow it. Havelock requested a connection to Murtry’s hand terminal and was refused again. He wondered whether he should write some sort of press release or letter of resignation to the company.

  “All right,” Basia said, sloping up into the ops deck. His face still had the thin, watery layer of sweat adhering to it. “I’m here.”

  The readout counting down to the Barbapiccola’s atmospheric impact was down under an hour. It was hard for Havelock to remember that the stillness of the deck was an illusion. The velocities and forces involved in anything at orbital altitudes were enough to kill a human with just the rounding error. At their speeds, the friction from air too thin to breathe would set them on fire.

  “Strap in,” Naomi said, nodding to the crash couches. Then, to the radio, “Rocinante bei here. Dangsin-eun junbiga?”

  “Ready con son immer, sa sa?”

  Naomi smiled. “Counting down,” she said. “Ten. Nine. Eight…”

  At four, the displays on the consoles began to shift color, mapping the two ships, the tether lines, the engines in psychedelic false color. Basia was muttering under his breath, and it sounded like prayer. Naomi reached one.

  The Rocinante moaned. The sound was deep as a gong, but it didn’t fade like one. Instead the overtones seemed to grow, one layering over another. On the displays, the tethers shimmered, the internal forces racing along the spider-web lines in crimson and orange and silver.

  “Come on, baby,” Naomi said, petting the console before her. “You can do this. You can do it.”

  “Getting pretty close to tolerance up here,” Alex said.

  “I see it. Keep it gentle and steady.”

  The Rocinante shrieked, a high scraping scream like metal being ripped apart. Havelock grabbed the sides of his crash couch, squeezing until his hands ached.

  “Alex?” Naomi said.

  “Just passing through a resonance window. Nothing to worry about.”

  “I’m trusting you here,” Naomi said.

  “Always can,” Alex said, and Havelock could hear the grin he couldn’t see. “I’m the pilot.”

  Basia gasped. Havelock turned, but it took a few seconds to see what the Belter was reacting to. The countdown timer – the death timer – had changed. The Barbapiccola was slated to burn in three hours and fifteen minutes. Four hours and forty-three minutes. Six hours and six minutes. It was working. As Havelock watched, the life span of everyone on the ship below him ballooned out. Havelock felt like shouting. It was working. It had no right at all to have worked, and it was working.

  The alarm Klaxon cut through the other noise. Naomi snapped back to her console.

  “What am I lookin’ at, XO?” Alex said. The sound of the grin was gone. “Why am I seeing a bogie?”

  “Checking it out,” Naomi shouted, not bothering with the radio. Havelock turned his own console to the sensor arrays. The new dot was approaching from the horizon, speeding above them in its own arc above cloud-choked Ilus.

  “Where’s the Israel?” Havelock shouted.

  “Occluded,” Naomi said. “We should be passing each other in an hour. Is that —”

  “That’s the shuttle.”

  The death timer showed seventeen hours and ten minutes.

  “The shuttle you turned into a fucking torpedo?” Basia asked. His voice was surprisingly calm.

  “Yeah,” Havelock said. “But the payload was the reactor overload, and there aren’t any reactors working, so —”

  “It’s running on battery, then. That’s still going to be a hell of a lot of kinetic energy,” Naomi said.

  “Is it going to hit us?” Havelock asked, and felt stupid as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Of course it was going to hit them.

  “Alex?” Naomi said. “Give me options here.”

  “PDCs are online, XO,” Alex said. “All I’ve got to do is put a little battery power to ’em, set ’em to automatic, and point defense can slag that thing before it comes close.”

  Twenty hours and eighteen minutes.

  “Power to the PDCs,” Naomi said. “Watch the tethers.”

  “Sorry,” Alex said. “Just trying to do a few too many things at once here. Powering up the PDCs.”

  That won’t work, Havelock thought. We’re forgetting something.

  The red dot drew closer. The Israel itself hauled up over the edge of the horizon, visual contact still blocked by the curve of the atmosphere. The shuttle sped toward them. The firing of the point defense cannons was hardly more than a brief vibration in the overwhelming strain of dragging up the Barbapiccola. If he hadn’t known to expect it, he’d have missed it entirely. The red dot blinked out, and then back in.

  “Oh,” Alex said. “Huh.”

  “Alex?” Naomi shouted. “What’s going on? Why aren’t we shooting it?”

  “Oh, we shot the hell out of it,” Alex said. “Busted that shit right on up. But this right now is when I’d normally be dodging out the debris path? That’s not really an option.
”

  “I don’t understand,” Havelock said. And then he did. The shuttle had been a great big hunk of metal when the point defense cannons hit it. Now it was almost certainly a great number of relatively small pieces of metal with pretty close to the same mass moving at very nearly the same speed. They just traded being hit with a shuttle-sized slug for being hit with a shuttle’s mass of shrapnel.

  Naomi pressed her hand to her lips. “How long before —”

  The ship shuddered. For a second, Havelock thought it was the PDCs kicking in again. Something was hissing and his crash couch had a sharp edge that he didn’t remember. The death clock had gone black. A growing mass of blood around his elbow was the first concrete sign he had that he’d been hurt, but as soon as he saw it, the pain detonated.