Murtry’s expression was empty as stone.
“I was wondering if you could take her a sandwich, sir.”
“Might could manage,” Murtry said, and Havelock couldn’t tell if the man was amused or annoyed. Maybe both.
~
Havelock floated at his desk. The cells of the brig were all empty. His skeleton crew – the four most junior security staff and a technician they’d borrowed from the ship’s maintenance crew – were quietly modifying the one remaining light shuttle. Making the bomb. On his monitors, the shuttle drop and the Rocinante’s final deceleration burn, and the internal monitors of the station with Cassie and Doctor Okoye, each had their own window. Havelock watched them all, waiting for the next thing to go wrong. Every minute seemed to stretch. The air recycler hummed and clicked. He chewed his thumbnail.
When the incoming message chime sounded, he started and had to put his hands to the console to keep from drifting off. He shifted to his message queue. The new one came from the RCE corporate offices on Luna, and the subject was listed as POSSIBLE STRATEGIES FOR DEESCALATING CONFLICT ON NEW TERRA: CALL FOR INPUT. The timestamp was five hours ago.
Somewhere out near the ring gates, the radio signals had passed each other, waves of electromagnetism passing through the void with human meanings coded into them. The distance it had taken a year and a half to travel in person, the message had managed in five hours.
Five hours, and still too goddamn slow.
Chapter Eleven: Holden
The Rocinante did the last of its deceleration burn on a tail of white fire and dropped into a high orbit around Ilus. Below, the planet looked enough like Earth that the fact that it didn’t look like Earth was unsettling. Holden had looked down on alien worlds before. The rust red and white of Mars, the swirls and eddies of Saturn and Jupiter. They were totally unlike Earth’s blue and brown and white. But Ilus had open sea and sky with puffs of cloud, all the markers that Holden’s brain connected with his home world.
Except that there was only one large continent, and thousands of islands strung across its one giant ocean like brown beads on a necklace. The mix of alien and familiar made his head hurt.
“Rocinante,” the Edward Israel broadcast at them. “Why are you target locking us?”
“Uh…” Holden slapped at the comm panel until he opened a channel to them. “No, that’s just standard range finding, Israel. Nothing to worry about.”
“Roger that,” a not quite convinced voice replied from the other ship.
“Alex,” Holden said, switching to the internal channel. “Please stop poking the bear.”
“Roger that, Cap,” Alex said, exaggerating his drawl and stifling a laugh. “Just lettin’ the locals know there’s a new sheriff in town.”
“Stop it. Give us an hour for the final check and get us dirtside.”
“Okey dokey,” Alex said. “Long time since I landed one of these.”
“Is it going to be a problem?”
“Nope.”
Holden climbed out of the ops chair and floated to the crew ladder. A few minutes later he was on the airlock deck with Amos. The mechanic had laid out two suits of their Martian-made light combat armor, a number of rifles and shotguns, and stacks of ammunition and explosives.
“What,” Holden said, “is all this?”
“You said to gear up for the drop.”
“I meant, like, underwear and toothbrushes.”
“Captain,” Amos said, almost hiding his impatience. “They’re killing each other down there. Half a dozen RCE security vanished into thin air, and a heavy lift shuttle got blown up.”
“Yes, and our job is not to escalate that. Put all this shit away. Sidearms only. Bring clothes and sundries for us, any spare medical supplies for the colony. But that’s it.”
“Later,” Amos said, “when you’re wishing we had this stuff, I am going to be merciless in my mockery. And then we’ll die.”
Holden started a snarky reply, then stopped himself. Had anything ever gone the way he planned? “Okay, one rifle each, but disassembled and in a duffel. Nothing visible. And light torso armor only. Something we can hide under our clothes.”
“Captain,” Amos said with mock surprise. “Have you actually learned from your past? Is this a new thing you do now?”
“Why do I put up with your shit?”
“Because,” Amos said, starting to strip an assault rifle down to its component parts, “I’m the only one on the ship that can keep the coffee maker running.”
“I’m off to get underwear and a toothbrush.”
~
The Rocinante would have lit the night sky of Ilus during the final part of her deceleration burn. When she landed in a field outside of the colony’s ramshackle town, she’d kicked up a dust cloud a kilometer across, and the noise of her descent should have rattled windows twice that far away.
So Holden was a little surprised and disappointed when no one was there to greet them.
He was the joint OPA and Earth mediator, personally selected by Chrisjen Avasarala of the UN and Fred Johnson, leader of the OPA as much as the OPA could be led, to oversee the settlement talks. In other places, that would merit a formal greeting by the planetary governor and possibly a marching band. Holden would have settled for a ride into town.
He hefted his two heavy bags and started to trudge toward the settlement. Amos carried three. The third was the one he called his everything has gone to shit bag. Holden sincerely hoped they never had to open it.
When they were far enough away, Holden sent the signal to Alex and the Rocinante blasted off again, kicking up a massive dust storm for a few seconds.
“You know,” Amos said conversationally, “we landed so far from town to avoid blowing dust on the locals, and they couldn’t even be bothered to send out a cart to pick us up? Seems ungrateful.”
“Yeah. A little annoyed at that myself. Next time I have Alex land right in the damn town square.”
Amos gestured with his head at a massive alien structure rising in the distance. It looked like two thin towers of glass twisted together, like a pair of trees growing beside each other.
“So, there’s that,” he said.
Holden had no reply. It was one thing to read about “alien ruins” on the location report. It was another thing entirely to see a massive construct built by another species towering over the landscape. How old was it? A couple billion years, if Miller could be believed on how long the protomolecule masters had been gone. Had humans ever built anything that would last that long?