Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“Doctor van Altricht.”

“Call me Sudyam,” she said. “Everyone else does.”

“Sudyam, then,” he said, holding out his hand terminal. “I’ve got some paperwork for you.”

“Excellent,” she said, taking it. Her gaze flickered over the contract addendum too quickly for her to really be taking it all in. At the bottom, she signed her name with a fingernail and pressed the pads of her index and middle fingers to the screen. The hand terminal chimed, and she handed it back.

“Congratulations,” Havelock said. “You are now the official field lead for the RCE research team.”

“And a worse job, I can’t imagine,” she said, smiling. “Now that I’m official, can you tell me when we’re getting replacement equipment?”

“There’s an unmanned supply pod under heavy burn to Medina,” Havelock said. “Assuming the OPA doesn’t impound it or call it salvage, it should be here in six, maybe seven months.”

“And the chance of the OPA stopping it?”

“I wouldn’t make it better than three in ten,” Havelock said. “But honestly, don’t sniff that number. You don’t know where it’s been.”

The biochemist shook her head in mild disgust. “Well, it’ll have to do,” she said.

For almost a week after the power came back on, the Rocinante and the Israel had been in a very delicate political state. The Belters on the Israel had been taken in as a gesture when it was pretty certain that the thing was symbolic because they were all going to be dead anyway. Now that they weren’t going to die, the question of status – were the Belters refugees, prisoners, or paying passengers? – became a much more contentious issue. Marwick had to decide whether they were going to be on his ship for the full eighteen months back to Medina, or if he was going to try to place them all downstairs. It didn’t help matters that with all the shuttles slagged, the only ways down to the surface were on board the Rocinante or a really long, unpleasant jump.

In the end, the break was almost even. About half of the crew of the Barb elected to stay with the colonists and scientists on the ground. About half of the RCE staff still in orbit, having come this far and being profoundly uninterested in just looking at the promised land from the mountaintop, elected to stay on the planet. Of the science teams that had been on the ground from the start – Vaughn, Chappel, Okoye, Cordoba, Hutton, Li, Sarkis, and a dozen others – only Cordoba elected to come back up the well and go home, and that apparently had more to do with grief over a failed romantic relationship than the fact the entire planet had been doing its best to kill them. It wasn’t something Havelock understood, but it didn’t need to be.

The ship repairs were under way when night fell, the scaffolding and the hull of the ship flickering brightly and then going dark as the welding torches did their work. The sunset was a massive canvas of gold and orange, green and rose, gray and indigo and blue. It reminded him of beaches on the North American west coast, except there were no vendors clogging the place and no advertising drones muttering about the joys of commerce. It was beautiful, in its way. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see a bonfire burning, and a bunch of the colonists sitting around it playing guitars and getting high, except that there was nothing left in the aftermath of the flooding that would burn and if there was anything on the planet that would give you a safe buzz, they’d grown it on the Israel.

He hauled himself up into the Rocinante and limped back to the bunk Naomi had assigned him. It was the first time he’d been in the Roci when it had an up and down, and because the ship didn’t land along the thrust vector, he walked along walls for the most part. The shredded muscles in his thigh and calf were regrowing slowly, and his knee might need another round of repairs to swap out the cartilage. Considering everything else that had happened, it was a great set of problems to have.

In his bunk, he checked his personal messages. The message he’d been dreading was there. Williams’ family was filing criminal and civil charges against him for wrongful death. His union representative was already counterfiling and RCE was being strangely cooperative. By the time the Israel returned to her home port, he hoped everything would be cleared up. He wished there was a way to send a message to Williams’ people and apologize. Explain that he’d tried to just disable the suit, and that he was very, very sorry that it had happened the way it did. His union rep had made him promise not to, though. There would be a chance for that when the issue was settled.

There was also a message from Captain Marwick with the subject header of I BELIEVE I OWE YOU A DRINK and a pass-through to one of the major newsfeeds. Havelock followed it.

The screen filled with the banner insets of the feed, but the central image was weird to look at. As he watched, the Barbapiccola, tumbling slowly on its tether, bloomed and a puff of perfectly round plastic bubbles came out. It was like watching a flower releasing seeds to the wind. A man’s voice, gentle, deep, and reassuring, came under the image, speaking Belter-accented English.

“New footage today from the stunning rescue operations on New Terra. What you’re seeing now are images captured by the Royal Charter Energy ship Edward Israel of the mass evacuation of the disabled freighter Barbapiccola. For those of you new to this story, all three ships were reduced to working under battery power at the time this occurred, and while the Barbapiccola was lost to an uncontrolled atmospheric entry, all hands and passengers were transferred to the Israel for medical evaluation and aid under the supervision of acting security director Dimitri Havelock.”

The image shifted to an image of him from his official report back to RCE. His hair stood away from his head, making him look like he was trying to be a Belter, and his voice sounded weirdly high and whiny.

“The transfer was completed in under three hours. I would specifically like to commend Captain Toulouse Marwick for his prompt and professional aid, without which we could not have managed this without considerable loss of life.”

The feed ended, and Havelock laughed. He requested a connection to Marwick, and the red-haired man appeared almost immediately.

“So I guess they aren’t firing us,” Havelock said.

“They’d be giving us a ticker-tape parade when we got home if anyone still used ticker tape,” Marwick said. “This right now is when we should all be asking for raises.”

“Hazard pay,” Havelock said, propping his head up with his arm.