Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“Yes. Of course. I’ll take you.”

“No, I need you to stay right here. Not back to your hut. Not out to the ruins. I need you right here where it’s safe. You understand?”

“There was someone out there. I saw the light, and that’s why I went. What if they’d still been there?”

“We don’t have to worry about that, because it didn’t happen,” Reeve said in a carefully reassuring tone of voice that meant You’d be dead. Elvi dropped her head into her hands. “Can you give me directions?”

She did her best, her voice trembling. Reeve constructed a map on his hand terminal, and she was fairly sure it was accurate. Her mind seemed to be shifting on her a little, though.

“All right,” Reeve said. “I’m going to have you stay here for a little while.”

“But my work is all back at the hut.”

The security man put a reassuring hand on her shoulder, but his gaze was already focused inward, planning some next step that didn’t include her.

“We’re going to see you’re safe first,” he said. “Everything else will come after that.”

For the next hour, she sat in the little room or paced. The voices of Reeve and his security team filtered in through the wall, the tones serious and businesslike. And then there were fewer of them.

A young woman came to get her. Elvi had seen her before, but didn’t know her name. It seemed wrong that they could have spent almost two years traveling out here together, and Elvi still didn’t know her. It should mean something about populations and how they mixed. And how they didn’t.

“Do you need anything, Doctor Okoye?”

“I don’t know where to sleep,” Elvi said, and her words seemed thin. Fragile.

“I’ve got a bunk ready,” the girl said. “Please come with me.”

The rooms were empty. The others gone out into the alien darkness to face a terribly human threat. The girl leading her to the bunk had a sidearm strapped to her belt. Elvi glanced out the front window as they passed. The street was the same one she’d walked down the day before, and it was also wholly changed. A sense of threat hung over everything like the promise of a storm coming. Like the haze on the horizon. She saw Felcia’s brother walking down the street, not looking at her or anything else. Her fear was cold and deep.

Chapter Nine: Basia

Basia had volunteered for the night shift at the mine. Fewer people to hide from. Less open sky to make him jittery. The work, as backbreaking as it was, was a relief. The fabricator they’d brought down from the Barbapiccola was building tracks and carts as fast as they could load raw material into it. His team was trying to keep up with its output by assembling the rail system that would move ore from the pit to the sifters to the silos. There, it would wait for the Barbapiccola’s shuttle to take it up into orbit. Everything they’d mined so far had been moved with wheelbarrows by hand. A motorized cart system would increase production by an order of magnitude.

So Basia and his team worked the metal rails, pulling them out of the fabricator gleaming and new in the harsh white lights. They loaded them on handcarts and dragged them into the mining pit. Then unloaded them by hand and welded them into the growing railway system. It was the kind of physical labor people had mostly stopped doing in their mechanized age. And the process of welding inside an atmosphere was totally unlike welding in vacuum, so he had a new skill set to develop. The combination of mental challenge and physical toil left him exhausted. His world narrowed to the next task, the ache in his hands, and the distant promise of sleep. There was no time to dwell on other things.

Like being a murderer. Like the corporate security forces sniffing around for him and Coop and the others. Like the guilt he felt every time Lucia lied to them and said she didn’t know anything that would help.

Later, when he sat in the crew hut with his muscles twitching and cramping with fatigue, trying to sleep with the daylight streaming in through the windows, then he could revisit the death of the shuttle over and over again. Think about what he could have done to disable the explosives faster than he did. How he could have tackled Coop, taken the radio away from him. If his mood was especially bad, he would think about how if he’d just listened to his wife, none of it would have happened in the first place. On those days he felt such shame that he hated her a little for it. Then hated himself for blaming her. The pillow he pressed to his eyes kept the sunlight out, but not the images of the shuttle exploding over and over again, screaming like a dying beast as it went down.

But during the night, while he worked, he had some measure of peace.

So when Coop appeared at the work site, sauntering into the pit like he didn’t have a care in the world, Basia almost hit him in the face.

“Hey, mate,” Coop said. Basia dropped his hammer, shoulders slumping.

“Hey,” he said.

“So we got a thing,” Coop continued, throwing one companionable arm around Basia’s shoulders. “Need mi primero on it.”

That couldn’t be good. “What thing?”

Coop guided him away from the work site, smiling and nodding at the few other night-shift crew they passed. Just two chums out for a walk and a conversation. When they were out of earshot of everyone, he said, “Seen that RCE girl going up to the ruins. Sent Jacek to check on it.”

“Sent Jacek,” Basia echoed. Coop nodded.

“Good kid. Reliable.”

Basia stopped, pulling his arm away. “Don’t —” Involve my son in this. Before he could get the words out, Coop waved it off and kept talking.

“Está important.” Coop stepped close, voice lowering. “She went up to the ruins, then went straight to the RCE goons. Jacek says they’re planning to wait for us up there. Catch the resistance red-handed.”

“Then we don’t go back,” Basia said. It seemed so simple. No reason to panic.

“You crazy, primo? Toda alles been up there. Trace evidence up the ass. They wait long enough, they get bored and bring a real crime scene team down, we all done. All of us, y veh unless you stopped shedding skin when you were there.”

“Then what?”

“We go up first. A flare on that blasting powder, boom. No more evidence.”

“When?”

Coop laughed. “What you think? Next week some time? Now, coyo. Got to go now. Mediator’s landing in hours-not-days. Don’t want this to be what he sees when he steps off the ship, do you? You a team lead, you can take one of the carts. We got to get that shit and get gone.” Coop snapped his fingers impatiently. “Jetzt.”