Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

To what he was pretty sure was Miller’s final resting place.

He waited in the cargo bay airlock while the outer doors cycled open, putting the compartment into total vacuum, then went in. If something went wrong, if what was left of the protomolecule on his ship decided to defend itself, he’d be in vacuum with an airlock blocking entry into his ship. He sealed the airlock behind him, and told Alex to lock out local control on the door until he called and asked him to open it. Alex agreed without asking why.

And then Holden began methodically tearing the cargo bay apart.

Five hours later, and one air recharge for the suit, he found it. A small blob of flesh no larger than the tip of Holden’s finger, attached to the underside of a power conduit behind a detachable panel in the cargo bay’s bulkhead. When they’d first spotted the protomolecule monster that had hitchhiked onto the Roci from Ganymede, it had been less than half a meter from where he found the polyp. It made his skin crawl to realize how long they’d been lugging this last remnant of that monster around on his ship.

Using the trowel, he scraped the polyp off the conduit, then put both it and the tool into the vacuum bag and activated the charge to seal it. He blowtorched the conduit for several minutes, heating the metal red to kill any residue left by the scraping. Then he dug through the supplies in the cargo area until he found a reload for the ship’s probe launcher, opened the probe up, and stuffed the bag inside the casing.

He linked his suit radio to the Roci’s general shipwide channel. “Naomi, you around?”

“Here,” she said after a moment. “In ops. What do you need?”

“Can you grab manual control on probe, uh, 117A43?”

“Sure, what do you want me to do with it?”

“I’m going to chuck it out the cargo bay door. Can you give it about five minutes, then send it into Ilus’ sun?”

“Okay,” she replied, not asking the question he could hear in her voice she wanted to. He killed the radio.

The probe was a small electromagnetic and infrared sensor with a rudimentary drive system. The kind naval vessels used to see what might be hiding on the other side of a planet. It wasn’t much bigger than an old Earth fire hydrant. It had heft, though. When Holden pushed it over to the cargo bay door, it was difficult to stop it again.

Outside, Ilus spun by, the angry brown of her cloud layer starting to show some spots of white, and even the occasional flash of blue from the ocean underneath. It’d be a while, but the planet would bounce back. Mimic lizards would return and start competing for space with human children and those annoying little bugs that bit and then fell over dead. Two alien biologies fighting for space. Or three. Or four. Nothing that Ilus hadn’t already experienced a few billion years before. New fight, same as the old fight.

Holden put a gloved hand on the probe floating next to him, and pointed the other at the planet.

“That’s you, man. That’s the second world you’ve saved. And once again, we have nothing to offer you in return. I kind of wish I’d been nicer to you.”

He laughed at himself, because he could almost hear the old detective in his head saying, You could also have my Viking funeral not be all about how you feel.

“Right. See you on the other side,” Holden didn’t really believe in another side. Nothing after death but infinite black. Or, he hadn’t, anyway. Sure, out-of-control alien technology might be involved, but maybe, just maybe, sometimes there was something else. “Goodbye, my friend.”

He gave the probe a hard push, and it drifted slowly away from the ship. Holden watched it dwindle until it was just a tiny point of light reflected from Ilus’ star. Then it lit up for a few seconds with a short drive flare and streaked away from the planet. Holden waited until he couldn’t see it anymore, then shut the cargo bay doors.

He stripped the vacuum suit off in the airlock after it cycled. Naomi was waiting for him when the inner airlock door opened.

“Hey,” he said.

“Is it done?”

“Yeah, I’m all done down here.”

“Then come to my room, sailor,” she said. “There’s something there I want to show you.”

~

Holden floated half a meter above his bed, his body soaked with sweat. Naomi drifted next to him, long and lean, hair wild from their lovemaking. He touched his own scalp, feeling the weird sweaty points his own hair had become.

“I must look a fright,” he said.

“Hedgehogs are cute. You’re fine.” Naomi tapped one long toe against the bulkhead and drifted a few centimeters closer to the atmospheric controls. She aimed the airflow vent at them both, and Holden’s skin tingled as the cool air dried him.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to take enough showers to wash Ilus off of me,” he added after a moment.

“I was in a brig for a couple of weeks. Trade you.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Not your fault. Just bad luck. Did you know that the security guy Havelock was Miller’s partner on Ceres?”

Holden touched the bed so he could rotate his body and look at her. “You’re shitting me.”

“Nope. Before we met him, of course.”

“Wish I’d known.”

“You think you do, but it would have been weird.”

“Probably right,” Holden said, then sighed and stretched until his joints popped. “I’m never doing that again.”

“Which that?”

“Leaving you. When I thought I was going to die down on Ilus and you were going to die in orbit and we wouldn’t even be able to hold each other when it happened, it was the worst thing I could possibly think of.”

“Yeah,” she agreed with a nod. “I understand.”

“I promise it won’t happen again.”

“Okay. Why’d you let Basia go?”

Holden frowned. The truth was, he wasn’t really sure why he had. And it was something he’d been trying hard not to think about too much.

“Because… I like him. And I like Lucia. And breaking up their family wouldn’t solve anything. I bought his story about blowing the landing pad early to try and save people. Plus, he’s not going to be setting any more bombs. And the one thing Murtry told me that made me really think is that we’re beyond the borders of civilization right now. Black-and-white legal arguments don’t make a lot of sense here. Someday, maybe.”

“The frontier doesn’t have laws, it has cops?” Naomi said, but she smiled when she said it.