Cibola Burn Read online

  “So now you’re going to tell us how we can shit?” a man’s voice said.

  Elvi felt the sudden heat of a blush in her neck and cheeks. Even Lucia’s expression had gone cold and distant, the woman’s gaze fixed on nothing.

  “I only meant that if we were doing this right, we’d have a protected, sterile environment and we wouldn’t be going out into the ruins or cultivating crop plants in the open air because —”

  “Because you think we did it wrong,” the man sitting at Lucia’s side said. He was a big man with a dusting of gray at his temples and in the stubble of beard and a permanently angry face. “Only you don’t get to decide that.”

  “I understand that we’re working with a complex situation here,” Elvi said, her voice getting rough with desperation. “But we’re all living in this massive Petri dish already, and I have a list of a few little sacrifices that we can all make that, from a scientific perspective —”

  The man beside Lucia Merton flushed, and he leaned forward, his fists on his thighs. His eyes fixed on her like a predator’s.

  “I’m done sacrificing things to science,” he said, and the buzz in his voice was a promise of violence. Lucia put a restraining hand on the man’s wrist, but others around the room had taken up the man’s disdain. The sounds of their bodies shifting in the seats, the murmur of voices in small conversations of their own filled the air. Whoever killed Trying is probably in this room, she thought. And then, immediately after that, What the hell am I doing here?

  Carol Chiwewe stood up, her expression pained. Embarrassed on Elvi’s behalf.

  “Maybe we better come back to that another time, Doctor Okoye,” she said. “It’s late and people are tired, ne?”

  “Yes,” Elvi muttered. “Yes, of course.”

  Her skin burning with shame, she walked back toward her seat, and then past it, out into the street and alone in the deepening night toward her hut. Her shoes scraped in the gravel and dirt. The air was cool and smelled like coming rain. She wasn’t more than halfway there, moving slowly in the near-black starlight, when a voice stopped her.

  “I’m sorry about my dad.”

  Elvi turned. The girl was little more than a deeper darkness in the night. A slightly more solid shadow. Elvi found herself thankful that the voice wasn’t a man’s.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t think I did that very well.”

  “No, it’s him,” the girl said, stepping closer. “You couldn’t have done right with him. My brother died, and now Dad’s not that kind of man anymore.”

  “Oh,” Elvi said. And then, “I’m sorry.”

  The girl nodded, shuffled with something, and a pale green light no brighter than a candle bloomed in her palm, casting shadows up over the girl’s face. She was pretty the way youth is always pretty, but when she got older, Elvi thought she might be beautiful the way her mother was.

  “You’re Doctor Merton’s daughter,” Elvi said.

  “Felcia,” the girl said.

  “Good to meet you, Felcia,” Elvi said.

  “I can walk you home. If you don’t have a light.”

  “I don’t,” Elvi said. “I should have brought one.”

  “Everyone forgets sometimes,” the girl said, setting off. Elvi trotted a little to catch up with her. For a dozen meters, they walked in silence. Elvi sensed that the girl was building up to something. A confession or a threat. Something dangerous. Elvi hoped that she was just being paranoid, and was certain that she wasn’t.

  When the girl spoke at last, her voice was tight with anxiety and longing, and her words were the last thing Elvi would have guessed.

  “What’s it like going to a real university?”

  Chapter Seven: Holden

  T

  here should be fanfare, Holden thought.

  Passing through a ring into another star system, halfway across the galaxy from Earth, should be a dramatic moment. Trumpets, or loud alarms, tense faces locked on viewscreens. Instead, there was nothing. No physical sign that the Rocinante had been yanked fifty thousand light-years across space. Just the eerie black of the hub replaced by the unfamiliar starfield of the new solar system. Somehow, the fact that it was so mundane made it stranger. A wormhole gate should be a massive swirling vortex of light and energy, not just a big ring of something sort of like metal with different stars on the other side.

  He resisted the urge to hit the general quarters alarm just to add tension to the moment.

  The new sun was a faint dot of yellow-white light, not all that different from Sol when viewed from the Ring sitting just outside Uranus’ orbit. It had five rocky inner planets, one massive gas giant, and a number of dwarf planets in orbits even farther out than the Ring. The fourth inner planet, sitting smack dab in the middle of the Goldilocks Zone, was Ilus. New Terra. Bering Survey Four. RCE charter 24771912-F23. Whatever you wanted to call it.

  All those names were too simple for what it really was. Mankind’s first home around an alien star. Humans kept finding ways to turn the astonishing events of the last few years mundane. A few decades from now, when all the planets had been explored and colonized, the hub and its rings would just be a freeway system. No one would think twice about them.

  “Wow,” Naomi said, staring at Ilus’ star on the display with wide-eyed awe. Holden felt a rush of affection for her.

  “I was just thinking that,” he said. “Glad I’m not the only one.” He opened a channel up to the cockpit.

  “Yo,” Alex said.

  “How fast can you get us there?”

  “Pretty damn fast, if you’re willin’ to be uncomfortable.”

  “Put us on a fast burn schedule and get some dirt under my feet,” Holden said with a grin.

  “High burn’ll get us on the ground in ’bout seventy-three days.”

  “Seventy-three days,” Holden said.

  “Well, seventy-two point eight.”

  “Space,” Holden said, trading his grin for a sigh, “is too damn big.”

  Five hours into their burn, the messages started to come in. Holden had Alex bring them down to one-third g for dinner, and played the first recording on the galley screen while he helped Amos make pasta.

  An older man, brown-skinned and gray-haired, stared out of the screen at him. He had the thin features and large cranium of a Belter, and just a hint of a Ceres accent.

  “Captain Holden,” he said once the recording started. “Fred Johnson notified us you were coming, and I wanted to thank you for your help. My name is Kasim Andrada, and I’m captain of the independent freighter Barbapiccola. Let me fill you in on the situation as it stands.”

  “This should be good,” Amos grunted, dumping steaming spaghetti noodles into a colander to drain them. Holden handed him the pot of red sauce he’d been stirring, then leaned against the counter to watch the rest of the broadcast.

  “The colony finally got a working mining operation running about four months ago. In that time, we’ve brought up several hundred tons of raw ore from our mine. At the purity levels we’re seeing, that should translate to almost a dozen tons of lithium after refining. It’s enough to buy equipment, medicine, soil and seeds, everything this colony needs to get a real toehold.”

  Naomi came into the galley, tapping away furiously at her hand terminal. “Smells good, I —” She stopped when she saw the video playing and sat down to watch.

  “The Edward Israel,” Captain Andrada continued, “has stated that they will not allow us to leave orbit until the arbitration is complete. Royal Charter’s position being that they own this lithium until someone says they don’t. One of your first priorities will be to get the Israel to lift the blockade and let us take this ore to the Pallas refineries, where we already have buyers lined up and waiting.”

  “Oh,” Amos said, dumping the pasta and sauce into a large bowl and putting it on the table. “Is that our priority?”

  Holden passed the playback. “Did come across as an order, didn’t it?”

&n
bsp; “He’s OPA,” Naomi said. “He thinks you’re here as Fred’s mouthpiece.”

  “This guy is going to give me indigestion,” Holden said, killing the recording. “I’ll watch the rest of this crap after we eat.”

  Five more broadcasts were queued up for viewing by the next day. The captain of the Edward Israel, an older Earthman named Marwick with flaming red hair and a British accent, demanded that Holden enforce the RCE charter by disabling the engines of the Barbapiccola if it tried to leave the system. Fred sent along encouragement and a reminder that Avasarala was shotgunning threats about the consequences for screwing the mission up. Three different news organizations asked for interviews, including a personal request from Monica Stuart for a live interview when he returned.

  Miller watched them over his shoulder until Naomi came into their room and the detective disappeared in a blue shower of sparks.

  “I think Monica likes you,” Naomi said with a grin, then flopped down onto the double-sized crash couch they used as a bed. “Alex is taking us back up to high burn in twelve minutes, and I want to die.”

  “Monica would flirt with a lizard if she thought it would get her a good interview, tell Alex to give us another half hour so I can send a few responses, and hold on I’ll get my gun.”

  Naomi pushed herself up with a groan. “I’ll get some coffee while you find your bullets.”

  “Don’t leave,” Holden said, reaching for her arm. “I don’t want to record these broadcasts with Miller standing behind me.”

  “He’s only in your head,” she said, but she sat back down anyway. “He won’t show up on the recording.”

  “Do you think that makes it less uncomfortable? Really?”

  Naomi crawled across the bed and curled up next to him, putting her head on his chest. He tugged on a lock of her hair and she let out a long contented sigh.

  “I like long flights when we aren’t doing these bone-crushing mad dashes,” she said. “Nothing to do but read, listen to music, stay in bed all day. You being famous sucks.”

  “It’s also the reason we’re sort of rich now.”

  “We could sell the ship, go get jobs at Pur’N’Kleen again. Do the Saturn ice run…”

  Holden stayed silent and played with her hair. It wasn’t a serious suggestion. They both knew there was no going back to the people they used to be. Him the XO and her the chief engineer on an ice hauler that no one in the universe cared about unless it was late for a delivery. Anonymous people living anonymous lives. Would anyone even need Pur’N’Kleen anymore, with a thousand new worlds full of water and air?

  “You going to be okay without me down there?” Naomi said.

  The Belter colonists from Ganymede had spent months on the Barbapiccola prepping for landing on Ilus. Loading up on bone and muscle growth hormones, working out under a full g until their bodies would be able to handle the slightly heavier-than-Earth gravity of the planet. Naomi didn’t have the time or inclination to radically alter her physiology for this one job. Holden had argued that she would have then been able to come to Earth with him after. She replied that she was never going to Earth, no matter what. They’d left it at that, but it was still a sore spot for him.

  “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.”