Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

Murtry’s voice was calm and cool and viciously cutting. “Do I understand, Mister Havelock, that you’ve done such a poor job training these men that you feel we’d be safer repelling the attackers with paintballs?”

“No, sir,” Havelock said. And then, to his surprise, “But I am saying issuing live rounds at this point would be premature. I think we should find out a little more about what we’re looking at before we escalate that far.”

“That’s your professional opinion?” Murtry said.

“It is.”

“And if I ordered you to issue these men live rounds?”

Naomi was at her cage, her fingers clutching at the mesh. Her eyes were wide and serious. Havelock looked away from her. Murtry’s sigh was short and percussive.

“Well, I won’t put you in a position where you have to choose,” Murtry said. “Chief?”

“Yes, sir?” the chief engineer said.

“I’m transmitting you my personal security codes. You can take weapons and ammunition from the armory with it. Do you understand?”

“Hell yes, sir,” the chief engineer said. “We’ll poke those bastards so full of holes you can see stars through them.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Murtry said. “Now if you gentlemen will excuse me.”

The connection dropped.

“What’s going on?” Naomi asked. The warm tone was gone from her voice. Now she actually sounded scared. Or maybe angry. He couldn’t tell. Havelock didn’t answer. The armory was off the main security station, not the brig. Even if he hurried, he wouldn’t be able to get there before the others. And if he did, he didn’t know what he’d say to them.

He had a gun cabinet here. Maybe if he joined in, he could at least control the situation a little bit.

“Havelock, what’s going on?”

“We’re being boarded, and we’re going to resist.”

“Is it the Barbapiccola?”

“No. It’s the Rocinante.”

“They’re coming for me, then.”

“I assume so.”

Havelock took a shotgun out of the gun cabinet.

“If it’s Alex and you shoot him, I won’t help you,” Naomi said. “No matter what happens after this, if he’s hurt, we’re done. Even if I find a way to save you, I’ll let you burn.”

The monitor chimed. A connection request from the planet. Havelock accepted it immediately. Doctor Okoye’s face appeared on the screen, her forehead furrowed and her eyes shifting as if she was looking for something. There was actually a glint of green in her pupils that made Havelock’s skin crawl.

“Mister Havelock? Are you there?”

“I’m afraid it’s not a good time, Doctor.”

“You’re coordinating the drops? I need to see if we can get —”

“Is this something where people are going to die if I don’t fix it in the next five minutes?”

“Five minutes? No.”

“Then it’s going to have to wait,” Havelock said and dropped the connection. The midship maintenance airlock was the closest to the brig. There would be choke points at the locker room, the emergency decompression hatch, and the intersection with the maintenance corridor. He guessed the chief engineer would set up his men at the second two and let the locker room go. He might send a couple men to the brig too, as a last ditch. He’d get pushback on that. The whole team was going to want to be in on the kill. And they’d have live ammunition. He wondered what the enemy would have. Power armor? Maybe. Maybe…

“We don’t have to do this,” Naomi said.

“I don’t like it any more than you do, but it’s how it’s coming down.”

“You’re talking about it like this is physics. Like there’re no choices involved. That’s crazy. They’re here for me. Let me go, and they’ll go too.”

“There’s a way we do this,” Havelock said, loading bag rounds into the shotgun.

“He said that, didn’t he? That was him.”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Havelock said.

“Murtry. The big boss. Because you do that, you know? You listen to what he says and then say it like it was something you actually believe. This isn’t the time to do that. He’s wrong this time. He’s probably been wrong a few times before.”

“He’s not the one in lockup. I don’t know you’ve got a lot of right to brag.”

“That was dumb luck,” she said. “If you hadn’t happened to be out playing your war games, I’d have disabled your little bomb and been gone again before anyone knew it.”

“What good would it do if I let you go? It won’t make any difference. The ships are going down. There’s no one here who can help us. You can’t do anything to fix this.”

“Maybe not,” Naomi said. “I can die trying to help, though. Instead of trying to kill people or watching them die.”

Havelock’s jaw clenched. His finger pressed against the trigger guard and he closed his eyes. It would be so easy to turn the barrel on the cage. Fire a bag against the mesh and drive Naomi to the back of her cell.

Only he wasn’t going to do that. The release started in his chest and spread out to his fingers and toes in less than a heartbeat. He pushed himself over to her and thumbed his code into the keypad. The cage clicked open.

“Come on, then,” he said.

Chapter Forty-One: Elvi

Scientific nomenclature was always difficult. Naming a new organism on Earth and even in the greater Sol system had a lengthy, tedious process, and the sudden massive influx of samples from New Terra would probably clog the scientific literature for decades. It wasn’t just the mimic lizards or the insectlike fliers. Every bacterial analog would be new. Every single-celled organism would be unfamiliar. Earth alone had managed five kingdoms of life. Six, if you agreed with the Fityani hypothesis. She couldn’t imagine that the ecosphere of New Terra would turn out to be much simpler.

But in the meantime, the thing living in her eyes – in all their eyes, except Holden’s – wouldn’t even officially be a known organism for years. Maybe decades. It would be officially nameless until it was placed within the larger context of life.

Until then, she’d decided to call it Skippy. Somehow it seemed less frightening when it had a silly nickname. Not that she’d be any less dead if she bumbled into a death-slug, but at this point anything helped. And she was getting a little punchy.