Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

Fayez was sitting on the small porch outside her hut. His skin had darkened in the weeks since the crash. The preliminary hydrological study had kept him and several of the others from the team out in the field for almost two weeks.

“You know what I love about this planet?” Fayez said instead of hello.

“Nothing?”

He scowled at her, feigning hurt feelings. “I love the period of rotation. Thirty hours. You can get in a full day’s work, stay up getting drunk at the saloon, and still get a full night’s sleep. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this back home.”

“There are advantages,” Elvi said, unlocking her door and stepping into the hut.

“Of course it means we’ve been here almost six weeks in the past month,” Fayez said, “but thank God we didn’t get one of those little spinning tops with sundown every six hours. Now if they can just fix the gravity.”

The unit was a single four-by-six-meter room with bed, shower, toilet, kitchen, and workstation all hunched together. As she put the satchel into the archiving unit, it struck her how much her work was about inferring things from design. As soon as she’d seen the mimic lizard’s forward-facing eyes, she’d assumed it was a predator. Anyone looking at her hut would know it had been made with the assumption that space would be at a premium. Everything was an artifact of its function. That was what made evolution so gorgeous. She looked in the mirror over her little sink. Her skin was covered in a thin layer of beige dust, like stage makeup.

“I don’t want to do this,” she said, wiping her cheeks with a damp tissue.

“Look on the bright side,” Fayez said. “They’ve only tried to kill us once so far.”

“You aren’t helping.”

“I’m not trying,” he said, then winced at the unintentional reference to the dead man.

They had cremated Governor Trying and the other casualties of the crash. Apart from one villager who’d arrived with non-responsive bone cancer, they had been the first human deaths on the world. Certainly they were the first murders.

But after that, the people from the village had been nothing but kind. Lucia Merton, the doctor who’d come to help them after the crash, had followed up with each of the survivors. A Belter from Ceres named Jordan had brought Elvi food that his wife had cooked for the injured. The holy man had invited her to the services at the village temple. Everything about the inhabitants of New Terra said that they were kind, gentle, authentic people. Except that someone had killed the governor and almost a dozen others.

The RCE encampment stood south of the village proper.

With Elvi and Fayez included, a little less than half the RCE employees on the surface had chosen to attend the village’s community meeting. The others were involved in their work or still too badly injured. If she hadn’t felt it was part of her job to educate everyone about the contamination hazards, Elvi would probably have stayed back at her hut too.

Most of the RCE personnel were field scientists. They dressed for comfort, herself included. The only ones in formal clothes were the security team. Hobart Reeve, Murtry’s second, led three armed guards in RCE uniforms that made them look like soldiers or police. They hadn’t been on the big shuttle, but had arrived on a light shuttle almost immediately. When the order had come in from RCE that no new personnel were going planetside until the UN observer arrived, Reeve had already been investigating what he always called “the incident.”

The community hall was one side of the village’s central square, set across the bare dirt and stone from the temple. Apart from the collection of religious iconography at the temple’s eaves, the two were hard to tell apart.

The chairs were made from industrial cowling and modified crash couches. If the village had been in a more temperate part of the planet, there would have been more local flora, some sort of wood analog, to use. But this was where the lithium was nearest the surface, and lithium was what would bring money to the community. So like a microorganism moving along a concentration gradient, all of humanity had come to these twenty square kilometers.

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.”