Cibola Burn (Expanse) Read online

  If there had been a reply, it could end. If there had been anyone to answer, it would have come to rest like a marble at the bottom of a hill, but nothing answers. The scars know that no answer will ever come, but the reflex triggers the reflex triggers the reflex and it reaches out.

  It has solved a billion small puzzles already in cascades of reflex. It has no memory of having done so, except in its scars. There is only reaching out, delivering the message that its task is complete. Nothing answers, and so it cannot end. It reaches out. It is a complex mechanism for solving puzzles using what there is to be used.

  Those are pearls that were his eyes.

  And so it has the investigator.

  Of all the scars, there is one that came last. That is most intact. It is useful and so it is used. It builds the investigator from that template, unaware that it is doing so, and tries another way of reaching out. And something answers. Something wrong and foreign and aboriginal, but there is an answer, so over the course of years it builds the investigator again and reaches out. The investigator becomes more complex.

  It will not stop until it makes that final connection, and it will never make that final connection. It stretches, tries new combinations, different ways to reach out, unaware that it is doing so. Unaware that it exists. Empty, except in the insignificant parts.

  The insectile leg will twitch forever. The scar that wails for death will wail forever. The investigator will search forever. The low voice will mutter forever.

  Nothing of him doth fade but suffers a sea change

  Into something rich and strange.

  It reaches out.

  Chapter Four: Holden

  M

  CRN Sally Ride, this is independent vessel Rocinante, requesting permission to pass through the Ring with one ship. OPA heavy freighter Callisto’s Dream.”

  “Transmit authorization code now, Rocinante.”

  “Transmitting.” Holden tapped the screen to send the codes and stretched out his arms and legs, letting the motion pull him out of his chair in the microgravity. Several abused joints at various places on his skeleton responded with popping sounds.

  “You’re getting old,” Miller said. The detective stood in a rumpled gray suit and porkpie hat a few meters away, his feet on the deck as though there were gravity. The smarter the Miller simulation had gotten – and over the last two years it had become damned near coherent – the less it seemed to care about matching the reality around it.

  “You’re not.”

  “Of my bones are coral made,” the ghost said as if in agreement. “It’s all about the trade-offs.”

  When the Sally Ride sent the go-ahead code, Alex took them through the Ring nice and slow, the Callisto matching speed and course. The stars vanished as the ship moved into the black nothingness of the hub. Miller flickered as they passed through the gate, started to resolidify, and vanished in a puff of blue fireflies as the deck hatch banged open and Amos pulled himself through.

  “We landing?” the mechanic asked without preamble.

  “No need on this trip,” Holden said, and opened a channel to Alex up in the cockpit. “Keep us here until we see the Callisto dock, then take us back out.”

  “Sure could use a few days station-side, chief,” Amos said, pulling himself over to one of the ops stations and belting in. His gray coverall had a scorch mark on the sleeve, and he had a bandage covering half of his left hand. Holden pointed at it. Amos shrugged.

  “We’ve got a pair of soil ships waiting at Tycho Station,” Holden said.

  “No one’s had the balls to try and rip off any of the ships on this route. This many navy ships hanging around? It’d be suicide.”

  “And yet Fred pays us very well to escort his ships out to Medina Station, and I like taking his money.” Holden panned the ship’s telescopes around, zooming in on the rings. “And I don’t like being in here any longer than necessary.”

  Miller’s ghost was an artifact of the alien technology that had created the gates and a dead man. It had been following Holden around for the two years since they’d deactivated the Ring Station. It spent its time demanding, asking, and cajoling Holden to go through the newly opened gates to begin its investigation on the planets beyond them. The fact that Miller could only appear to Holden when he was alone – and on a ship the size of the Rocinante he was almost never alone – had kept him sane.

  Alex floated down from the cockpit, his thinning black hair sticking out in every direction from his brown scalp. There were dark circles under his eyes. “We’re not landin’? Could really use a couple days station-side.”

  “See?” Amos said.

  Before Holden could reply, Naomi came up through the deck hatch. “Aren’t we going to dock?”

  “Captain wants to rush back for those soil transports at Tycho,” Amos said, his voice somehow managing to be neutral and mocking at the same time.

  “I could really use a few days —” Naomi started.

  “I promise we’ll take a week on Tycho when we get back. I just don’t want to spend my vacation time, you know” – he pointed at the viewscreens around them displaying the dead sphere of the Ring Station and the glittering gates – “here.”

  “Chicken,” Naomi said.

  “Yep.”

  The comm station flashed an incoming tightbeam alert at them. Amos, who was closest, tapped the screen.

  “Rocinante here,” he said.

  “Rocinante,” a familiar voice replied. “Medina Station here.”

  “Fred,” Holden said with a sigh. “Problem?”

  “You guys aren’t landing? I’m betting you could use a few —”

  “Can I help you with something?” Holden said over the top of him.

  “Yeah, you can. Call me after you’ve docked. I have business to discuss.”

  “Dammit,” Holden said after he’d killed the connection. “You ever get the sense that the universe is out to get you?”

  “Sometimes I get the sense that the universe is out to get you,” Amos said with a grin. “It’s fun to watch.”

  “They changed the name again,” Alex said, zooming in on the spinning station that had until recently been called Behemoth. “Medina Station. Good name for it.”

  “Doesn’t that mean ‘fortress’?” Naomi said with a frown. “Too martial, maybe.”

  “Naw,” Alex said. “Well, sort of. It was the walled part of a city. But it sort of became the social center too. Narrow streets designed to keep invaders out also kept motorized traffic or horse-drawn carts out. So you could only get around by walkin’. So the street vendors gathered there. It turned into the place to shop and congregate and drink tea. It’s a safe place where people gather. Good name for the station.”

  “You’ve put a lot of thought into this,” Holden said.

  Alex shrugged. “It’s interestin’, the evolution of that ship and its names. Started out as the Nauvoo. A place of refuge, right? Big city in space. Became the Behemoth, the biggest baddest warship in the system. Now it’s Medina Station. A gathering place. Same ship, three different names, three different things.”

  “Same ship,” Holden said, feeling a little surly as he instructed the Rocinante to begin the docking approach.

  “Names matter, boss,” Amos said after a moment, a strange look on his big face. “Names change everything.”

  The interior of Medina Station was a work in progress. Large sections of the central rotating drum had been covered with transplanted soil in preparation for food production, but in many places the metal and ceramic of the drum was still visible. Most of the damage the former colony ship had sustained during her battles had been cleaned up and repaired. The office and storage space in the walls of the drum was becoming the hub of efforts to explore the thousand new worlds that had opened up to humanity. If Fred Johnson, former Earth colonel and now head of the respectable wing of the OPA, was positioning Medina Station as the logical location for a fledgling League of Planets–type government, he at
least had the good sense not to say it out loud.

  Holden had watched too many people dying there to ever see it as anything but a graveyard. Which made it pretty much the same as any other government he could think of.

  Fred had set up his new office in what had once been the colonial administration building back when Medina Station was still called the Nauvoo. They’d also been used as the offices of Radio Free Slow Zone. Now they were patched up, repainted, and decorated with atmosphere-renewing plants and video screens of the Ring space around the ship. To Holden it made for an odd juxtaposition. Sure, humans had invaded an extra-dimensional space with wormholes to points scattered across the galaxy, but they’d remembered to bring ferns.

  Fred puttered around the office making coffee.

  “Black, right?”

  “Yep,” Holden said, and accepted the steaming cup from him. “I don’t like coming here.”

  “I understand. I appreciate you doing it anyway,” Fred said and collapsed into his chair with a sigh that seemed excessive in the one-third g of the station’s spin. But then the pressures pushing down on Fred had little to do with gravity. The five years since Holden had met him hadn’t treated the man kindly. His formerly salt-and-pepper hair had gone entirely gray, and his dark skin was lined with tiny wrinkles.

  “No sign it’s waking up?” Holden said, pointing his coffee cup toward a wall screen that was displaying a blown-up image of the spherical Ring Station.

  “I need to show you something,” Fred said, as though Holden hadn’t asked the question. At Holden’s nod, Fred tapped on his desk and the video screen behind him came to life. On it, Chrisjen Avasarala’s face was frozen mid-word. The undersecretary of executive administration had her eyes at half-mast and her lips in a sneer. “This is the part that concerns you.”

  “— eally just an excuse to wave their cocks at each other,” Avasarala said when the video started. “So I’m thinking we send Holden.”

  “Send Holden?” Holden said, but the video kept playing and Fred didn’t answer him. “Send Holden where? Where are we sending Holden?”

  “He’s close when he’s out at Medina, and everybody hates him equally, so we can argue he’s impartial. He’s got ties to you, Mars, me. He’s a fucking awful choice for a diplomatic mission, so it makes him perfect. Brief him, tell him the UN will pay for his time at double the usual rates, and get him on New Terra as fast as possible before this thing gets fucked up any worse than it already is.”

  The old lady leaned in toward the camera, her face swelling on the screen until Holden could see the fine detail of every wrinkle and blemish.

  “If Fred is showing this to you, Holden, know that your home planet appreciates your service. Also try not to put your dick in this. It’s fucked enough already.”

  Fred stopped the recording and leaned back in his chair. “So…”

  “What the hell is she talking about?” Holden said. “What’s New Terra?”

  “New Terra is the unimaginative name they gave to the first of the explored worlds in the gate network.”

  “No, I thought that was Ilus.”

  “Ilus,” Fred said with a sigh, “is the name the Belters who landed there gave it. Royal Charter Energy, the corporation with the contract to do the initial exploration, call it New Terra.”

  “Can they do that? People already live there. Everyone calls it Ilus.”

  “Everyone here calls it Ilus. You see the problem,” Fred said. He took a long sip of his coffee, buying himself time to think. “No one was ready for this. A shipful of Ganymede refugees commandeered a Mao-Kwik heavy freighter and blew through the Ring at high speed as soon as the first probe results came out. Before we’d had time to pick up the pieces from our initial incursion. Before the military blockade. Before Medina was ready to enforce a safe speed limit in the Ring space. They came through so fast we didn’t even have time to hail them.”

  “Let me guess,” Holden said. “The Ilus Gate is on the opposite side from the Sol Gate.”

  “Not quite. They were smart enough to come in at an angle to avoid slamming into the Ring Station at three hundred thousand kph.”

  “So they’ve been living on Ilus for a year, and suddenly RCE shows up and tells them that, oops, it’s really their planet?”

  “RCE has the UN charter for scientific exploration on Ilus, New Terra, whatever you want to call it. And they’re there because the Ganymede refugees landed there first. The plan was to study these worlds for years before anyone lived on them.”

  Something in Fred’s tone of voice tickled at Holden’s mind for a second, and he said, “Wait. UN charter? When did the UN get to be in charge of the thousand worlds?”

  Fred smiled without humor. “The situation is complex. We have the UN making a power grab to administrate all these new worlds. We have OPA citizens settling one without permission. We have an energy company getting the exploration contract on a world that also just happens to have the richest lithium deposits we’ve ever seen.”

  “And we have you,” Holden said, “setting up to run the turnpike everyone has to take to get there.”

  “I think it’s safe to say the OPA has fundamental disagreements with the idea that the UN is unilaterally in charge of handing out those contracts.”

  “So you and Avasarala are back-channeling this to keep it from turning into something bigger.”

  “There are about five more variables than that, but as a start, yes. Which is where you come in,” Fred said, pointing at Holden with his coffee mug. Printed on the side of the mug were the words THE BOSS. Holden stifled a laugh. “Nobody owns you, but Avasarala and I have both worked with you, and think we can do it again.”

  “That’s a really stupid reason.”

  Fred’s smile gave away nothing. “It doesn’t hurt that you have an atmosphere-rated ship.”

  “You know we’ve never actually used it, though, right? I’m not keen on the first in-atmosphere maneuver happening a million kilometers from the closest repair bay.”

  “The Rocinante is also a military design, and —”

  “Forget it. No matter what your coffee cup says, I’m not going to be the boot on the colonists’ neck. I won’t do that.”

  Fred sighed, sitting forward. When he spoke, his voice was soft and warm as flannel. But it didn’t hide the steel underneath it.

  “The rules governing how a thousand planets are run are about to be made. This is the test case. You’ll be going in as an impartial observer and mediator.”

  “Me? As a mediator?”

  “The irony’s not lost on me. But things have already started to go bad there, and we need someone keeping it from getting worse while three governments decide how the next one will work.”

  “You mean you want me to make it look like you’re doing something while you figure out what to do,” Holden said. “And going bad how?”

  “The colonists blew up an RCE heavy lift shuttle. The provisional governor was on it. He’s dead, along with a few scientists and RCE employees. It won’t help our negotiations if Ilus turns into a full-blown war between Belters and a UN corporation.”

  “So I keep the peace?”

  “You get them talking, and you keep them talking. And you do what you always do, you maintain absolute transparency. This is one time secrets won’t help anyone. Should be right up your alley.”

  “I thought I was the galaxy’s biggest loose cannon to you guys. Is Avasarala sending the match in to meet the powder keg because she wants this to fail?”

  Fred shrugged. “I care less what she wants you for than what I do. Maybe the old lady likes you. Don’t ask me to explain it.”

  Miller was waiting for Holden outside Fred’s office.

  “There are three thousand people on Medina Station right now,” Holden said. “How is it that not one of them is here to keep you from bugging me?”

  “You going to take the job?” Miller said.

  “I haven’t decided,” Holden said. “Which, sin
ce you are running a simulation of my brain, you already know. So you asking is really you telling me to take it. Stop me when I’m wrong.”

  Holden headed off down the corridor, hoping to run into another human and make the Miller ghost go away. Miller followed, his footsteps echoing on the ceramic floor. The fact that those echoes existed only inside Holden’s mind made the whole thing even creepier.