Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“They sent us to the ass end of nowhere and let a bunch of squatters take their best shot at us,” Murtry said. “I don’t particularly care what they think. It doesn’t need to be official. Make it a club. Just a few folks enjoying a shared hobby for low-g tactics. Fabricate them a few paint guns. Just make sure they’re ready.”

“In case we need them.”

“Right,” Murtry said with his dragging, full-gravity smile. “In case.”

Technically, Havelock could have spent the time in the main security office, strapped into Murtry’s couch and using his desk. Instead, he tended to stick to his own familiar place beside the brig. He told himself it was because the system was already customized with his preferences and access codes, but he also knew it was more than that. Murtry had a way of claiming space even if he wasn’t occupying it, and Havelock wouldn’t have been comfortable. So when the second shift ended, the chief of the engineering workgroup came to him at the brig.

Chief Engineer Matthu Koenen was a thick man with short, bottle-brush white hair and a birthmark on his neck that he’d never bothered to have removed. He floated in the air by Havelock’s couch, arms folded across his chest and legs crossed at the ankles like a dour, angry ballet dancer.

“Thank you for coming by,” Havelock said.

“There trouble?” Koenen snapped.

“No,” Havelock said, his voice automatically taking on the gruff tone he used when he was on duty. “I wanted to ask you about putting together a team. A dozen people for small-group tactics exercises.”

The chief engineer’s brows furrowed and the lines around his mouth deepened. Havelock stared him down. He’d spent too many years as a cop on too many Belter stations to be intimidated by a scowl.

“Small-group tactics?”

“Null-g exercises,” Havelock said. “With the riot gear. Just to keep mind and body in condition.”

Koenen lifted his chin, his gaze still fixed on Havelock. It was the kind of thing a Belter never did. Havelock didn’t know why the gesture so clearly belonged to someone who’d lived planetside, but it did. He found it reassuring. “You’re talking about military action? Are we expecting something?”

Havelock shrugged against the couch restraints. The couch shifted a few millimeters on its gimbals. “I want the option,” he said, not realizing he was quoting Murtry until he’d already done it.

“Sure, then. I can find another eleven people. When do you want us?”

“How long will it take?”

Koenen tapped his hand terminal with two fingertips. I can call them right now. Havelock smiled.

“We’ll meet in the shuttle bay at oh seven hundred. I’ll go over the equipment. Then an hour drilling every day before shift for the foreseeable future.”

“I’ll put it on the schedule.”

They nodded to each other, and the chief engineer put out his foot, pressing it against the face of one of the cells to launch himself to the ladder. Havelock felt something uneasy shift in his mind. He was forgetting something. Something important.

When it came to him, he grunted. “Chief!”

The man looked over from the ladder. The plane of his body was orthogonal to the desk, and Havelock’s sense of balance shifted as his brain made one of its occasional panicked flailing attempts to determine up from down. He closed his eyes as a wave of nausea passed over him.

“Yes?”

“When you pick out your team,” Havelock said between clenched teeth. “No Belters.”

For the first time, Koenen smiled. It seemed genuine. “No shit,” he said.

~

As the acting head of security, he was expected to eat in the officers’ mess. It was one of those small gestures that gave the ship a sense of continuity, of rules and customs being followed. And there were some benefits for him. The lines were shorter, alcohol was available, and the wall screen was usually set to something interesting. Right now, a UN official in an uncomfortable-looking gray suit was folding his hands on a wide, glassy desk. The camera operator was framing it to be seen on hand terminals, and so the man’s face was so large on the wall that Havelock could see his pores and the streaks where the technicians on Earth had dabbed on makeup.

“We are at the beginning of a new golden age,” he said. “The scale of this is immense. Everything we have done, from the first stone tools to the domes on Ganymede, we have done in essence with the resources of one planet. Earth. Yes, the need for minerals and rare earths took us to Mars and Luna. And the Belt. And the need for infrastructure made the Jovian system much more than we had imagined. But we are looking at an expansion that is not one or two but three orders of magnitude more than we have had in the history of our species.”

Havelock peeled back the foil from the top of his meal. The beef and peppers had been designed for null g: hard nuggets of protein and vegetable that resisted breaking apart in the air, but turned soft and pleasant in his mouth. It wasn’t as sanitary as tubes of goo, but it was better eating. He popped the first cube into his mouth. It sponged up his saliva, clinging to his tongue. The camera on Earth flickered to a young, serious-faced woman.

“But the designers of the protomolecule,” she said. “The species who sent it here on Phoebe in the first place?”

“It has been billions of years since that happened,” the man in the suit said. “None of our probes have found any signs of advanced life still functioning. We have seen what appear to be ruins. We have seen what appear to be living biospheres. Honestly, there are mornings it takes my breath away.”

Havelock sipped at the bulb of water, and the food bloomed into a rich mouthful, almost like it had been cooked in a normal kitchen instead of an industrial processor.

“So what’s the catch?” the woman said.

The catch is that the first thing we did once we got here was let a bunch of Belter terrorists claim squatting rights and start shooting at us, Havelock thought as he plucked another cube from the pack. On the screen the UN man unfolded his hands.

“We are processing a bit over four thousand applications already for the rights to explore and develop these systems. We have to do this carefully if we are to get things done right. And it does not help that the OPA has used this to make what is essentially a power grab.”

“Bloody Belters,” a voice said. Havelock turned to see Captain Marwick floating in the air behind him. The man’s close-cropped red hair and beard had more gray in them than when they’d left Earth. Havelock nodded.