Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“So I keep the peace?”

“You get them talking, and you keep them talking. And you do what you always do, you maintain absolute transparency. This is one time secrets won’t help anyone. Should be right up your alley.”

“I thought I was the galaxy’s biggest loose cannon to you guys. Is Avasarala sending the match in to meet the powder keg because she wants this to fail?”

Fred shrugged. “I care less what she wants you for than what I do. Maybe the old lady likes you. Don’t ask me to explain it.”

~

Miller was waiting for Holden outside Fred’s office.

“There are three thousand people on Medina Station right now,” Holden said. “How is it that not one of them is here to keep you from bugging me?”

“You going to take the job?” Miller said.

“I haven’t decided,” Holden said. “Which, since you are running a simulation of my brain, you already know. So you asking is really you telling me to take it. Stop me when I’m wrong.”

Holden headed off down the corridor, hoping to run into another human and make the Miller ghost go away. Miller followed, his footsteps echoing on the ceramic floor. The fact that those echoes existed only inside Holden’s mind made the whole thing even creepier.

“You’re not wrong. You should take it,” Miller said. “The man’s right. It’s important. Something like that goes from a few pissed-off locals to a meat grinder without much time in between. This one time, back on Ceres —”

“Okay, no. No folksy cop stories from the dead guy. What’s on Ilus that you want?” Holden asked. “It might help if you just came out and told me what it is you want on the other side of those rings.”

“You know what I’m looking for,” the old detective said. He actually managed to look sad.

“Yeah, whatever weird alien civilization made you. And I already know you won’t find it. Hell, you know you won’t find it.”

“Still gotta loo —” Miller vanished. A woman in a blue Medina Station security uniform walked by, looking at her hand terminal. She grunted something approximating a greeting without looking up.

Holden took the stairs up to the inner surface of Medina’s rotating habitation drum. No chance Miller would surprise him there. The drum was full of activity, with some workers spreading imported soil for the eventual farms and others raising prefab buildings that would be houses and storage. Holden waved cheerily at them as he walked past. With his increasingly frequent Miller hauntings, he had come to appreciate the value of having other humans within line of sight. They made his life a little less weird just by existing.

He avoided the elevator to the engineering transition point that would take him out of the rotating drum and into the microgravity of the stern of the former colony ship. The Rocinante was docked at the airlock there. Instead, he walked up the long curling ramp that kept him in sight of everyone in the rotating drum. The last time he’d climbed that ramp, people had been shooting and dying all around him. It wasn’t a pleasant memory, but it was better than being trapped alone in an elevator car with Miller. The universe was getting a little thick with his personal history.

Before he passed through the transition point and into the engineering decks, he floated for a moment and looked out across the inside of the habitation drum. From his elevation the plots of soil looked like checkerboard squares of dark brown against the gray of the drum’s skin. Equipment moved across them like metal insects, busy at unguessable tasks. Turning a bubble of metal into a tiny self-contained world.

We’ll forget how to do this, Holden thought. Humanity had only just started learning how to live in space, and now they’d forget. Why develop new strategies for surviving on tiny stations like Medina when there were a thousand new worlds to conquer, with air and water free for the taking? It was an astounding thought, but it also left Holden just a little melancholy.

He turned his back on the workers busy at their obsolete work, and returned to his ship.

~

“So,” Naomi said as the crew sat together in the Rocinante’s galley. “Are we going to Ilus?”

Holden had spent several minutes explaining what Fred Johnson and Chrisjen Avasarala wanted from them, and then just sort of trailed off. The truth was he didn’t know the answer to Naomi’s question.

“There are a lot of reasons to do this,” he finally said, tapping out a quick rhythm on the metal tabletop. “It is a really big deal. It’s the test case for a thousand worlds to follow. And I admit there’s some attraction to the idea that we’d get to help set the perspectives. Maybe get to help create the template for everything that follows. That’s pretty damn exciting.”

“And the money’s good,” Amos said. “Don’t forget the money’s good.”

“But,” Naomi prompted, putting her hand on his arm and smiling. Letting him know it was okay to share whatever his fears were. He smiled back and patted her hand.

“But I have one pretty compelling reason to say no,” he said. “Miller really wants me to go.”

They were silent for a long moment. Naomi was the first to speak.

“You’re going to take it.”

“Am I?”

“You are,” she said. “Because you think you’ll be able to help.”

“You think we can’t?”

“No,” Naomi said. “I think you can. And even if we’re wrong, not trying would make you cranky.”

“Other thing to consider?” Amos said. “Money’s really good.”

Chapter Five: Basia

“Jesus wept, Basia my child,” Coop said. “We’re winning. How much of a sister are you turning into if it gets rocky?”

The others all looked at him, waiting. Scotty and Pete, but also Loris and Caterine. Ibrahim and Zadie. Basia crossed his arms.

“They find out who killed their governor —” Basia began, but Coop waved a hand like shooing flies.

“Won’t. If they haven’t now, it’s just going down as one of those things that happened. Hell, I don’t remember who did it. You remember, Zadie?”

Zadie shook her head. “Ne savvy mé,” she said like the Belter that she was. That she’d been before. Coop gestured toward her like he’d proved a point.

“I don’t like how it came out either,” Pete said. “But if we hadn’t done it, they’d have been here this whole time instead of just dribs and drabs. Holden’d be here with a domed city already up, and then what would we be looking at?”