Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“And we heard the supply drop was shot down,” Holden said. “So, we’ve got a few hundred people down here, a bunch more up there, and we’re all about to die because the planet’s defenses won’t let us help each other.”

“The Roci’s got the juice to land, if you need us,” Alex said. Basia wanted to scream at him, We can’t land, my daughter’s still up here!

“They shot the shuttle down,” Holden said. “Do not risk my ship.”

“If we can’t get supplies down to you, me and Naomi’ll be inheriting it pretty soon.”

“And until that happens, do what I tell you to do,” Holden said. The words were harsh, but there was affection in them.

“Roger that,” Alex said. He didn’t sound offended.

“You know,” Holden continued, “we’ve got what seems like an engineering problem. And the best engineer in this solar system is locked up on that other ship. Why don’t you call them and point that out?”

“I’ll do that,” Alex replied.

“I’ll see if there’s anything we can do from this end.”

“Miller,” Alex said. Basia had no idea what that meant.

“Yeah,” Holden said.

“You take care of yourself down there.”

“Affirmative. You take care of my ship. Holden out.”

~

“Look,” Alex said, not quite yelling, “I’ve run the damn numbers. You’re going down. It might take two weeks if you’re lucky, but that ship is gonna be scrapin’ atmosphere and catching on fire.”

“Heard you the first time,” the face on the other end said. A man named Havelock. Alex had called him after the conversation with Holden. He’d stopped off on his way up from the engine room to don a fresh uniform and comb his thinning black hair. He looked very official. It didn’t seem to impress Havelock very much.

“So stop dickin’ me around and turn Nagata loose to help us figure this shit out,” Alex said.

“And that’s where you lose me,” Havelock replied with a tight smile. He was a compact, pale-skinned man with a military-style haircut. He radiated the self-assured physical competence carried by soldiers and professional security people. To Basia, a Belter who’d lived under the thumbs of two different inner planet governments, it said, I know how to beat people up. Don’t make me show you.

“I don’t see how —” Alex started.

“Yes,” Havelock interrupted him. “We’re all going to crash if we can’t get the reactors back online. I agree. What I don’t get is how me releasing my prisoner fixes that.”

“Because,” Alex said, visibly gulping as he bit the word off, “XO Nagata is the best engineer there is. If someone is going to figure this problem out and save all of our asses, it’s probably going to be her. So stop keeping the potential solution to our problem locked in your jail.” He smiled at the camera and turned off the microphone before adding, “you pig-headed idiot.”

“I think maybe you’re underestimating my engineering team,” Havelock replied, still with his smug smile. “But I hear what you’re saying. Let me see what I can do.”

“Gee, that would be great,” Alex said. He somehow managed to make it sound sincere. He turned off the comm station. “You smug sack of flaming pig shit.”

“What do we do now?” Basia asked.

“The hardest thing of all. We wait.”

~

Basia floated in a crash couch on the ops deck. His mind drifted from a fitful half sleep to groggy wakefulness and back again. A few workstations away, Alex was fiddling with the controls and muttering to himself.

As he drifted, sometimes Basia was on the Rocinante, his mind worrying over the missing rumble of the fusion reactor like a tongue searching the gap left by a lost tooth. And then, without transition, he’d be drifting down the icy corridors of his lost home on Ganymede. Sometimes they were the peaceful tunnels and domes that had been his family’s home for so many years. Other times, they were filled with rubble and corpses, the way they’d been when Basia had fled.

The long flight on the Barbapiccola afterward had been hellish. The endless days trapped in a cabin barely large enough for one person, but housing two full families. The growing sense of despair as port after port after port turned them away. No one needing a ship full of refugees flooding their docks in the middle of what looked like the solar system’s first all-out war.

Basia had drifted through that like a ghost as well. He’d thought he was saving his family when he put them on the ship. But he’d left a dying son behind and trapped the rest of them on a leaky old cargo ship with nowhere to go.

That moment when the captain of the Barbapiccola had called them all together and told them about the rings and the worlds on the other side had felt like a revelation. When he’d asked if any of them wanted to try and take one of the new worlds, make a home there, not one voice had been raised in dissent. Even just the word, home, made it impossible to argue. So they’d flown through the gate, past the confused and disorganized ships around it and in the hub, and come out the other side into the Ilus system. They’d found a world with oxygen and water, a muddy brown-and-blue ball from orbit, but so beautiful once they’d landed that people lay on the ground and wept.

The months that followed were brutal. The painful medication and exercise to get their bodies used to the heavy gravity. The slow building of the dwellings. The desperate attempts to grow some, any, food in the scraps of soil they’d brought down from the Barb. The discovery of the rich lithium veins and the realization that they might have something to sell and become self-sustaining, followed by the backbreaking labor to pull the ore from the ground with primitive tools. All worth it, though.

A home.

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 its reach broadens. If the signal came, the acknowledgment, it could stop, and it does not stop. It reaches out, and in reaching finds new ways to reach. It improvises, it explores. It is unaware of doing so. The systems it activates broaden it. Then it reaches out in ways it could not before. Because it is not aware, it has no memory, feels no joy. The parts of it that are aware dream and suffer as they always have. It is not aware of them.

It reaches out and finds more power. Something fails. Many things fail. Something that was once a woman cries out in silent horror and fear. Something that was once a man prays and names it Armageddon. It reaches out. It narrows only slightly as it reaches out. And at its center, the empty place gains definition. Patterns begin to match, simplifying into lower-energy structures. The investigator thinks of these as solutions. A model of the world is built within it, and of the satellites that surround it. The places it cannot go begin to relate, gaining definition. The abstract architecture of connection and the abstract model of geography correlate.