Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“No, I won’t,” he said, deciding not to revisit the argument. “But there it is.”

“Amos will look after you.”

“Great,” Holden said. “I’ll land in the middle of the tensest situation in two solar systems, and instead of the smartest person I know, I’ll bring the guy most likely to get in a bar fight.”

“You might need that,” she said, her fingers tracing some of the scars he’d picked up over the last couple years. She stopped at a dark spot on his stomach. “You still taking your cancer meds?”

“Every day.” For the rest of my life, he didn’t add.

“Have their doctor look at this after you land.”

“Okay.”

“They’re using you,” she said as if they’d been talking about it all along.

“I know.”

“They know this is all going to go wrong. There’s no solution that doesn’t leave someone angry and out in the cold. That’s why they’re sending you. You’re an easy scapegoat. They hired you because you won’t hide anything, but that’s the same thing that makes you easy to blame for the inevitable failure of these talks.”

“If I thought it was inevitable I wouldn’t have taken the job,” Holden said. “And I know why they hired me for this. It’s not because I’m the most qualified. But I’m not quite the idiot they think I am. I think I’ve learned a few new tricks.”

Naomi reached up and pulled a hair out of his temple. Before he could say “ouch” she held it up in front of him. It was the gray of damp ashes.

“Old dog,” she said.

~

The flight to Ilus was grueling in more ways than just the long periods at high g. Every time the Rocinante dropped to a tolerable rate of acceleration for meals and maintenance, Holden would have dozens of messages waiting to be viewed and responded to. The captain of the Edward Israel became increasingly forceful in his demands for Holden to issue threats to the captain of the Barbapiccola. The colonists and their Belter compatriots in orbit were increasingly demanding that the Barbapiccola be released from lockdown. Both sides accused the other of escalating the conflict, though in Holden’s opinion the fact that only the colonists had so far shed blood lessened their claim in that regard.

Their argument that only the sale of their lithium ore could make them a viable colony, and that the blockade of the shipment was effectively starving them out, was, however, a compelling one. RCE continued to insist that since they had the UN charter, the mining rights and the load of lithium in orbit were theirs.

“A thousand new worlds to explore, and we’re still fighting over resources,” Holden said to no one after a particularly long and angry message from the RCE legal counsel on the Israel.

Alex, who was lounging at the ops station nearby, answered anyway. “Well, I guess lithium is like real estate. Nobody’s makin’ any more of it.”

“You did hear the part about a thousand new worlds, right?”

“Maybe some of ’em have more lithium, but maybe they don’t. And this one definitely does. People used to think gold was worth fightin’ over, and that shit gets made by every supernova, which means pretty much every planet around a G2 star will have some. Stars burn through lithium as fast as they make it. All the available ore got made at the big bang, and we’re not doin’ another one of those. Now that’s scarcity, friend.”

Holden sighed and aimed an air vent at his face. The cool breeze from the recyclers made his scalp tingle. The ship wasn’t hot. The sweat had to be coming from stress.

“We’re astonishingly shortsighted.”

“Just you and me?” Alex said, exaggerating his drawl to make a joke of it.

“A vast new frontier has opened up for us. We have the chance to create a new society, with untold riches beyond every gate. But this world has treasure, so instead of figuring out the right way to divide up the damned galaxy, we’ll fight over the first crumbs we find.”

Alex nodded, but didn’t reply.

“I feel like I need to be there right now,” Holden continued after a moment. “I’m worried by the time we land everyone will be so locked into their positions that we won’t be able to help.”

“Huh,” Alex said, then laughed. “You think we’re going there to help?”

“I think I am. I’ll be down in engineering if anyone needs me.”

“One hour to burn,” Alex replied to his back.

Holden kicked the deck hatch release and it slid open with a hiss. He climbed down the ladder past the crew decks to the machine shop, where Amos was taking apart something complex-looking on one of the benches. Holden nodded to him and kicked open the final hatch into the reactor room. Amos shot him a questioning look, but Holden just shook his head and the mechanic turned back to his work with a shrug.

When the hatch slid closed above him, the reactor room flashed with blue light. Holden slid down the ladder to the deck, then leaned back against the wall.

“Hey,” Miller said, coming around the reactor that dominated the center of the room as though he’d been standing on the other side of it waiting for Holden to arrive.

“We need to talk,” Holden replied.

“That’s my line.” The detective gave him a sad, basset-hound smile.

“We’re doing what you wanted. We’ve come through a ring into one of the other systems. You’ll get to, I assume, ride me to the planet and take your look around.”

Miller nodded, but didn’t speak. How much of what I’m about to say does he already know? How predictive is the brain model they’ve made of me? Holden decided wondering that was the path to madness.

“I need to know two things,” Holden said, “or this trip ends right now.”

“Okay,” Miller said with a palms-up, Belter version of a shrug.

“First, how are you following me around? You first showed up on this ship after Ganymede, and you’ve been everywhere I go ever since. Am I infected? Is that how you stay with me? I’ve gone through two gates without ditching you, so either you’re inside my head or you’re a galaxy-wide phenomenon. Which is it?”

“Yeah,” Miller said, then took off his hat and rubbed his short hair. “Wrong on both counts. First answer is, I live here. During the Ganymede incident, which is a stupid name for it, by the way, the protomolecule put a local node inside this ship.”