Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

Holden was quiet for a moment, riding the Miller-bot through the material refining plant as it throbbed around him. “It’s too much,” he finally said. “That level of control over your environment is too much. I can’t get my brain around it. What could kill these guys?”

“Something worse.”

The Miller-bot ducked under what looked like a conveyor system made of metal mesh wrapped around a pulsing musculature. It was clicking and groaning as part of the mechanism tried to move while the rest of it remained frozen. Holden had a sudden, vivid memory of a goat he’d found as a child. It’d had one broken leg wrapped in a barbed-wire fence, the other three feebly pushing at the ground to free it.

“So there’s the thing,” the Miller-bot said, waiving its claws around at the machinery, “this right here was the point of this place. It’s why this planet exists. And right around here somewhere is a blank spot in the planetary network. A place we can’t touch.”

“So?”

“So, whatever’s in that blank spot, it’s not from around here. And if it’s a bullet, then whoever did this knew to shoot for the heart.”

Chapter Forty-Nine: Havelock

Havelock moved across the surface of the Rocinante, magnetic boots clicking to the exterior plating, then lifting free again. To his right, the sun – a sun, anyway – shone brighter than a welding torch. To his left, the great, clouded curve of New Terra filled his personal sky, the planet looming in. The upper boundary of the exosphere was invisible if he looked down, the gases too thin for an imperfect human eye to make out. The vast, sweeping curve of it before and behind the ship was hardly more then a grayness against the void. It felt too close. It was too close. He could already imagine the vicious friction tearing away his suit, the ship, the thin air burning him worse than a belt sander. The angry hot slag that had been one of the defense moons glowed high above, dull red against the pure white stars. His feet grabbed on to the plating, held, released.

“How’s it looking out there?” Naomi asked in his ear.

“As well as could be expected. Kind of wish that planet wasn’t quite so up in my face. I keep feeling like it’s trying to pick a fight.”

“Yeah, I was thinking that too.”

The point defense cannon was a single thick barrel on a hemispheric swivel joint, the metal smooth as a mirror. The hole at the end was a black dot small enough that Havelock could have blocked it with the tip of his ungloved pinky finger. The little tungsten slugs it spat out would have been small enough to hold in the palm of his hand, and the feed would have spat them out by the hundreds every second. It was a machine of inhuman power and sophistication, built to react faster than a human brain and with enough force to shoot down anything that threatened the ship.

Without power, he could use it to hide behind.

He lay flat against the decking, just the toes of the mag boots engaged. He took the rifle off his back, synced it to the suit’s HUD, and a handful of new stars appeared. Red for the militiamen, green for whatever the other things were they were hauling with them. The Rocinante bucked under him, the horizon of the ship shifting as the rail gun fired. A half dozen streaks of blue danced from the defense moons above, marking the path of the rail gun’s round with the instantaneous violence of lightning. He shifted a few centimeters, correcting for the movement of the ship, reacquired his targets, and opened the general frequency.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “This really isn’t something we need to be doing.”

He saw them respond. Their bodies stiffening, their heads craning while they tried to look for him. No one came on the channel. He zoomed in on them. Their faceplates were darkened against the sun, making them anonymous. But he knew all of them.

“Honestly, why? What’s this for? That ship down there and everyone on her is going to die. We’re doing everything we can to put that off, but you guys have done the math, right? You have the same numbers we do. You don’t gain anything from this. It’s just being mean. You don’t need to do that.”

One of the dots flinched. At a guess, the chief engineer was shouting on whatever frequency they were all using now. Drowning him out. Havelock let his sight drift to one of the other dots. The angle made it hard to parse exactly what he was seeing. A gas storage tube of some kind, with complications of wire and circuit board on either end. Some kind of improvised missile, he guessed. They would have been pointless if the PDC he was hiding behind had been working. He wondered whether the engineers knew the Roci’s defenses were down, or if they only guessed. Or if the prospect of their own deaths and their hatred of the Belters had taken them far enough that the risk of being killed in order to deny the Barbapiccola a little more life seemed worth it to them. No matter what, it was disappointing.

“Walters? Is this how you want to go down? Don’t listen to them for a second. Seriously, just turn off the radio. We don’t have to hurry here. Do you think you’re doing the right thing?”

They were visibly closer now than they had been. They weren’t accelerating toward him, but they weren’t braking either. Havelock’s HUD made the calculation. They’d be at the Roci or the Barb or the tether between them in about twenty minutes.

“You guys need to slow down now,” Havelock said. “You’re still my people, and I don’t want to hurt any of you.”

The radio clicked to life. The chief engineer’s voice was thick with anger and contempt. “Don’t try to play that on us, you traitorous bastard. Your little friend’s PDCs are powered down. We saw that before we dropped. Do you think we’re stupid? We have orders to bring you and the Belter bitch back to the Israel and put you both in the brig.”

“Orders?”

“Straight from Murtry.”

Because, Havelock figured, it was precedent. RCE would be able to assert that it had protected its claim down to the last minute. Murtry’s legacy would be that he hadn’t given up a centimeter. Not on the ground, not in space, not on the abstract legal battlefield. Nowhere.

There was a time not that long ago when Havelock would have thought there was a kind of hard purity in that. Now it just seemed weird and kind of pathetic.

“Okay,” he said. “You’re right. The PDCs are down, but you haven’t thought the rest of this through. I am outside the ship. I’m armored. I have an integrated HUD and a weapon that can reach any of you right now. None of you have any cover. The reason you guys are alive right now is because you’re my guys, and I don’t want any of you hurt.”