Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

It’s pretty, isn’t it?” the woman asked. Lucia, her name was. First Landing’s physician, Basia’s wife, Felcia and Jacek’s mother. “Makes you want to stay.”

“No,” he said. “Makes me want to be home already.”

“If you lived here…” she said.

“Not a chance,” he replied, and chuckled.

The Rocinante sat on the muddy ground behind him, more or less where the landing pad had been back when there had been a landing pad. All of that was gone now. The scientific huts, the buildings of First Landing, even most of the mining operation. Everything had been scraped flat and clean. Only the erosion ditches showed where the flood had been now that the waters had gone.

The Roci’s cargo bays were open. Men and women were hauling formed plastic boxes of supplies and equipment out and stacking them on the soft ground. He saw Naomi in a lift suit directing them, calling out information, coordinating the responses. Alex and Basia stood on a thin scaffold they’d erected against the side of the ship with the other one – Amos Burton, he thought the name was – surveying the damage and planning out what repairs they could manage in humanity’s most primitive and ill-equipped dry dock. The big bald man’s right hand was locked in a medical casing, and his frustration with it showed in the way he moved his arms and held his shoulders.

“Are you ready?” Lucia asked.

“If you’d like,” Havelock said. “Sure.”

They walked together to the first pile of crates. Havelock took out his hand terminal, and Lucia took out one of the ones they’d dropped before. It was hers now. They started marking off boxes from the lading bills, recording carefully what help was being delivered and being accepted.

~

He was supposed to have died three weeks before. His body should have been a stream of ionized atoms and complex molecules floating somewhere in Ilus’ upper atmosphere. The Israel should have been dead before him.

He’d been in the medical bay when it happened, doped by the autodoc and having half a liter of artificial blood shoved into his veins. He could still remember the feeling of the restraints holding him to the medical couch, the soft ticking of the expert system’s tool arm, the cold feeling of fluid coming into his body. His lips and tongue had felt cold and tingled, but Alex assured him that was normal. Basia had come in, eaten, and gone out again to clean up the last remnants of the tether that were still clinging to the Rocinante’s belly.

He’d said something about how it seemed kind of a pointless exercise.

“He’s that kind of guy, I guess,” Alex said. “Doesn’t like to leave things half done.”

“Belter.”

“Yeah,” Alex agreed. “They’re all kind of like that.”

Alex’s hand terminal chimed, and the pilot frowned at it. “Cap? That you?”

The voice that came from the speaker was recognizable James Holden, but he sounded rougher. Like he’d been shouting a lot. “Alex! Turn on the reactor.”

“Not sure I can do that, Cap,” Alex said.

“We killed the defense grid. I think we killed everything. See if you can get the reactor on.”

Alex’s expression went very still, very sober. The gallows humor was gone, the brave mask that had covered the fear of death vanished. Havelock understood, because he felt the same rush of hope and also of fear that the hope would be disappointed. Without a word, Alex pulled himself to one of the medical bay’s computers and shifted it to engine controls. Havelock squeezed his fists until they ached and fought not to interrupt Alex by asking if it was working.

“Is it working?”

“I think… it is,” Alex said, then turned to the hand terminal. “I’m getting power, Cap. The diagnostics are throwing some errors, but I’m pretty sure that’s just ’cause we got shook up a little. I’ll put Naomi and Basia on it, and I’ll bet we can get up to functional. It’d help a lot if we had Amos, though.”

“Amos is a little shook up too,” Holden said, and Havelock could hear the grin in his voice.

“He all right?”

“He’s gonna need to grow some new fingers.”

Alex shrugged. “We can do that. Um. Give me a couple days, I might be able to bring the Roci down to the surface. Get him into the med bay.”

“Don’t hurry,” Holden said. “Take your time, make sure everything’s working. We can’t take another crisis.”

“There’s always going to be another crisis, Cap. That’s just how it goes.”

“Let’s just put it off until we’ve recovered from the last one, all right? Can you get in touch with Barbapiccola and the Israel? I don’t want anyone dying because they don’t know to turn the engines back on. And we may need to use the Israel’s shuttle, if we can talk them out of it.”

“We may need to do a little debrief at some point here,” Alex said. “Things have been kind of dynamic. But let me go make sure everybody’s reactors are ticking over first, all right?”

“Okay,” Holden said. “And if you could drop us some food?”

“Soon as I get the galley powered up,” Alex said.

“Right. Good. And Naomi… she’s…?”

“Everybody’s all right,” Alex said. “We’re all going to be fine.”

~

By the time Havelock and Doctor Merton had finished the inventory, a team of builders were already fitting batteries into fabrication units and measuring out the places where walls would be going up. Real human shelters. A new First Landing. The self-selected construction crew was a mix. Some were squatters who’d come on the dead refugee ship. Some were people Havelock had shipped out with. The divide between them still existed in his mind, but didn’t seem to be playing out on the ground. The death of the heavy shuttle and the burning of the terrorist cell seemed like things that had happened in some other epoch. He supposed it was something about the storm, the blindness, the death-slugs, and the constant awareness of mortality just outside the door, clearing its throat. It wasn’t a model of community building that he’d recommend trying to scale up, but it had worked here. Temporarily. For now.

A dark-skinned woman with long black hair detached from the group. She looked familiar, but it still took Havelock a few seconds to place her. The time downstairs had taken all the padding out of her cheeks.