Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

Coop spoke about insanity like blowing up their stash of mining explosives with such an air of self-assurance and certainty, Basia found it hard to argue. Sure, blowing up the alien ruins was crazy. But Coop was right. If they found the explosives and traced them back to Basia, they’d know. He didn’t want to, but he had to. So he would.

“Okay,” he said and walked toward the cart charging station. Only one was left, and because the universe was a cruel and mocking place, it was the same one he’d been driving the night of the bombing. It still had the dents and scorch marks it had picked up that night. The scorch marks everyone in the colony was careful not to ask about.

Coop waited impatiently for him to unlock it and back it out of the stall, then hopped in and started tapping out a fast drumbeat on the plastic dashboard. “Let’s go let’s go let’s go.”

Basia went.

Halfway to the alien ruins, they came across four more of Coop’s inner circle. Pete and Scotty and Cate and Ibrahim. No Zadie. Her little boy had come down with a nasty eye infection, and she wasn’t around much lately. Cate had a duffel bag she threw into the back of the cart with a metallic thump, then the four of them climbed in after it.

“That the stuff?” Coop asked, and Cate nodded and slapped the side of the cart to let Basia know he could drive. Basia didn’t ask what the stuff was. Too late to start questioning.

The ruins looked as dark and deserted as they ever did, but Coop made Basia drive the long way round to come at the site from the side opposite the town. “Just to be safe,” he said.

When Cate pulled open the duffel, Basia wasn’t surprised to see it filled with guns. The Barbapiccola hadn’t been a warship. They hadn’t left Ganymede with a great store of weapons, but what there was had come down to the surface when First Landing was begun. This looked like most of them. Cate pulled out a shotgun and started loading fat plastic shells into it. She was a tall, rawboned woman with a wide jaw and a permanent frown line between her eyes. She looked natural holding a gun. Like a soldier. When Basia picked one up, a short-barreled automatic pistol of some kind, he felt like a child playing dress-up.

“You’ll need this, killer,” Ibrahim said and tossed him a narrow metallic object. It took Basia several seconds to realize it was the magazine for his pistol. It only took two tries to slide it in the correct way. Blow the explosives. Clear the site. Destroy the evidence. That had never really been the plan, and somewhere in his gut, he’d known.

While the rest of the group finished readying their weapons, Basia stood a few meters from the cart, staring up at the night sky. One of the points of light was the drive tail of the Rocinante, the ship Jim Holden was flying in on. The mediator. The one who was supposed to keep the colonists and RCE people from killing each other. He wondered how far out Holden was. He wondered if the man knew he was already too late. Too late for the second time. Holden had been too late on Ganymede too.

Basia’s son Katoa hadn’t been the only one who was sick. Whose immune system had faltered and failed under the thousand different stressors of life outside a gravity well. There had been a group of them who’d come to Doctor Strickland. The man who was supposed to know the answers. Katoa, Tobias, Annamarie, Mei. Mei, who had lived. Who James Holden had rescued from the labs on Io.

Holden had been there when they found Katoa too. Basia had never met the man. Had only ever seen him on news broadcasts. But Mei’s father had been a friend. He’d sent a message telling Basia what had happened, and that he’d been with Holden when they found the boy’s body.

Why one and not the other? Praxidike’s Mei, but not his Katoa. Why did some people die and others live? Where was the justice in it? The stars he looked up at didn’t have any answers for him.

Holden had been too late to stop what was happening on Ilus right now before anyone had ever set foot on it. Before the rings opened. Before Venus bloomed. If Katoa were still alive, Basia wouldn’t have come here, and if he had, he wouldn’t have stayed.

It was a strange thought. Surreal. Basia tried to picture the man he’d be in that other timeline, and couldn’t. He looked down at the ugly black gun in his hand. I wouldn’t be doing this.

“Game’s on,” someone said. Basia turned around. It was Coop. “Get back in it, coyo.”

“Dui,” Basia said, and took a deep breath. The night air was cold and crisp and tasted vaguely of dirt from that afternoon’s dust storm. “Dui.”

“Follow on,” Coop said, then headed off to the ruins at a slow trot. Cate and Ibrahim and Pete and Scotty followed, clutching their guns in what they probably thought was a military style. Basia carried his pistol by the barrel, worried about getting his fingers anywhere near the trigger.

They entered the massive alien structure through one of the many openings in its side. Windows? Doors? No aliens left to say. Inside, the light coming off their flashlights and work lamps reflected off the smooth, strangely angled walls. The material looked like stone, was smooth as glass, and turned from black to a rosy pink where the light hit it. Basia trailed his fingers along it.

Coop waved for them to stop, and then ducked down and crab-walked over to a windowlike opening in one wall. He peeked over and dropped back down, motioning for the group to join him. Basia hunkered down with the rest.

“See?” Coop whispered, pointing at the next room beyond the window. “Knew they’d set up there.”

Cate popped up for a second to look, then crouched down again with a nod. “I see five. Reeve, the boss, and four of his goons. Sidearms and stun guns. They’re all looking the wrong way.”

“Too easy, boss,” Scotty whispered with a grin, and clicked off the safety on his rifle. Cate slid open the breech on her shotgun just far enough to make sure there was a shell loaded. Coop held up his big automatic pistol in one hand and yanked back the slide. Then on his other hand he raised three fingers and started silently counting down.

Basia looked at each of them in turn. They looked flushed and excited. All except Pete, who stared back at Basia, his skin looking a sickly green in the pale light, and his head shaking back and forth in a silent negation. Basia could practically hear the man thinking, I don’t want to do this.

Something shifted in Basia’s mind, and the world seemed to snap into focus with an almost physical sensation. He’d been following Coop in a daze since the moment the man showed up at the work site. And now they were about to shoot a bunch of RCE security people.