Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“Okay,” Havelock said. “These are the bad guys. We don’t know how many there are. We don’t know how they’re armed. So we’re going to try to scare them off. Everyone get your gun at the ready. Look threatening, and don’t fire. If they figure out our guns aren’t real, we may be in for a bad time.”

“Sir?” one of the men said. “You remember we’re covered with target paint, right?”

Before Havelock could answer, the thrusters started, pushing compressed gas out behind them like a fog and smoke. All their suits rose together into the night. Or else fell. The acceleration pushed the blood into Havelock’s legs, and the suit squeezed, pressing it back. It wasn’t even a full g. It was hardly a third, but it felt like something much, much faster. Much more dangerous. Now that he knew to look for it, the welding flicker was obvious. It didn’t stop. The main burn cut out, and the suits rotated, starting the braking burn. The perfect synchrony meant the Israel was still coordinating them.

This time, the intruder saw them. The welding torch died. Havelock looked down between his feet, his paint gun centered between his toes, waiting for the bullets to start streaming out and praying that they wouldn’t.

They didn’t.

“It’s working!” one of the men shouted. “Motherfucker’s running away!”

And there it was. A red EVA suit on the skin of the shuttle. It struggled with something, looked up toward Havelock and his militia descending upon him, and turned back. Whoever it was, there was only one of them. The braking thrust stuttered. They were almost at the shuttle now. Fifty meters. Forty. Thirty. Havelock opened a standard general-response channel.

“Attention unidentified welder. You will stand down.”

The red suit stood, the EVA suit firing off. The person lifted at a ninety-degree angle, not going directly away from them, but diving down toward the planetary surface and whatever lower orbit would mean a safe rendezvous. Havelock felt the relief flooding him. They weren’t shooting. His HUD promised him that the shuttle’s basic functions were unchanged. It hadn’t been set to detonate. And the militia boys weren’t in charge of their own burns, so they wouldn’t be taking off after the intruder.

He had underestimated them.

The first dark thread rose out toward the intruder and missed, but once the whole team had seen the grapnel fire, the idea was out there. A half dozen grapnels fired, their propellant flaring blue and orange as they flew like tiny missiles toward the fleeing welder. Then one made contact. The enemy and the man who’d fired the grapnel both jerked, and the engineer’s suit started an emergency burn, trying to compensate. With the enemy encumbered and slowed, two more grapnels connected. Soon five of his people had lines attached to the saboteur, their collected thrusters holding the red suit’s EVA pack in check. Havelock took control of his suit back from the Israel and dropped down toward the planet and the prisoner.

The red suit was twisting now, trying to bring its welding torch to bear on the lines. Havelock raised his gun, and the enemy paused. He was close enough now that he could see the face behind the helmet. A Belter woman, dark-skinned, with wavy dark hair clinging to her sweaty forehead. Her expression was pure chagrin.

He opened the general channel again.

“Hi,” he said. “Don’t panic. My name’s Havelock. I’m acting security chief for the Edward Israel, and you have to come with me now.”

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 things it finds are not the signal that would let it end, but they are tools, and it explores then without knowing it is exploring them. Like water finding its mindless way through a bed of pebbles, it reaches out. What it can move, it moves, what it can open, it opens. What it can close, it closes. A vast network, ancient and dead, begins to appear, and it reaches into it. The parts of it that can think, struggle to make sense of it. Parts of it dream of a mummified body, its dry heart pumping dust through petrified veins.

Not everything responds, but it reaches out, presses, moves. And some things move back. Old artifacts awaken or don’t. None of them are what it seeks. None ever will be. It experiments without awareness of experimenting, and a landscape begins to form. It is not a physical landscape, but a logical one – this connects to this connects to this. It builds a model and adds it to the model it already has, and does not know it has done so. It reaches out. One hundred thirteen times a second, it reaches out.

Something that worked once, stops working. It reaches out and what answered before answers less now. Something burns or fails or tries to rise up and breaks. Part of the map goes dark, dies, and it reaches out to the silent dead. Part of it feels frustration, but it is not aware of that part, and it reaches out. Part of it wants to scream, wants to die, wants to vomit though a mouth it imagines has been transformed into something else for years now. It does not experience these things, though parts of it do. It reaches out.

And it pulls back.

It is unaware of pulling back, but one time out of every seventeen million attempts, it touches something and will not touch it again. It is not aware of pulling back, because it is not aware of anything, but the failures accrue. A blank place forms, an emptiness. A void. Avoid. Jesus, an old woman thinks, now with the puns.

The map is not physical, but it has a shape. It is a model of part of the universe. It becomes more detailed, more concrete. Some things come alive and then die. Some do not answer ever. Some become tools, and it uses the tools to reach out, except not there.

The emptiness gains definition too. With every failed connection, with every pulling back its liminal borders become better defined. It struggles to make sense of the shape of the nothing that defies it. The structures of the minds that never died within it struggle with it. It is a cyst. It is a negative space. A taboo. It is a question that must not be asked. It is not aware that it thinks these things. It is not aware that the space exists, that when it reaches into that place, it dies.

It does not need to be aware of the problem. It has a tool for this. A thing that finds what is missing. A tool for asking questions that shouldn’t be asked. For going too far. The investigator considers the cyst, the shadow, the space where nothing is.

That right there? The investigator thinks. Yeah, where I come from, we’d call that a clue.

Chapter Twenty-Three: Holden

“Come on,” Holden said to the empty desert and the man who wasn’t there. “You show up every time I don’t want you around. But I get something I want to talk to you about, and nothing.”