Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

Murtry began walking toward town, his people trailing out behind him, and the crowd moving in a loose cloud around them. Carol kept talking, but her words had no effect. Murtry just smiled and nodded and didn’t break stride. The ship that had landed on the other side of town blasted off on a column of white vapor and vanished from sight. The roar of its engines filled the world.

When they reached the center of town, Basia saw Jacek hanging around at the edge of the crowd. He grabbed his son by the arm, pulling him harder than he intended, and the boy gave a frightened squeak.

“Papa,” he said as Basia dragged him away, “am I in trouble?”

“Yes,” Basia shouted, then when he saw tears welling up in the boy’s eyes stopped and dropped to his knees next to him. “No. No, son. You’re not. But I need you to go home.”

“But —” Jacek started.

“No buts, boy,” Basia gave him a gentle shove toward their house. “Go home.”

“Is that man going to kill us?” Jacek asked.

“What man?” Basia asked, but it was a delaying tactic. He knew what man. Even his little boy could smell the death coming off of Murtry and his people. “No one’s going to kill us. Go home.”

Basia watched Jacek walk home, waiting until he saw the boy go inside and close the door. Basia was just starting to walk back toward the crowd when the shot rang out.

His first thought was, Jacek was right. They are killing us.

Not us, though, once he got back to the crowd. Just Coop, lying in the dust with a red hole where his eye should be, blood pooling under his head.

And Holden, jaw clenched and eyes wide.

Too late, Basia thought. Too late again.

~

People with machine guns walked the streets of First Landing.

Basia and Lucia sat on their tiny front porch and watched them pass by in the fading sunlight of early evening. A man and a woman, both in body armor with the red-and-blue RCE company logo on it. Both carrying automatic weapons. Both with hard expressions on their faces.

“I did this,” Basia said.

Lucia squeezed his hand. “Drink your tea, Baz.”

Basia looked down at the cup of tea cooling on his lap. All the tea the little colony might ever have had come down on the shuttles with them. To waste such a luxury was unthinkable. He sipped at the lukewarm cup and didn’t taste it.

“They’ll kill me, next.”

“Maybe.”

“Or put me in jail forever, take me away from my family.”

“You,” Lucia said, “took yourself away when you joined with those stupid violent people who blew up the shuttle. You drove them out to the ruins when they killed the RCE people. You made every choice that took you to this place. I love you, Basia Merton. I love you till my chest aches. But you are a stupid, stupid man. And when they take you away from me, I will not forgive you for it.”

“You’re a harsh woman.”

“I’m a doctor,” Lucia said. “I’m used to giving people bad news.”

Basia drank off the rest of his tea before it could finish getting cold. “I could get some rope or chain from the dig site. Maybe hang a bench here. Then we could rock while we sit.”

“That might be nice,” Lucia said. The pair of RCE guards reached the end of the street and turned around to come back. With the sun about to dip below the horizon, their shadows were almost as long as the town itself.

“We’ve been focusing on lithium mining to get money,” Basia continued. “But we need to start thinking about our own energy needs.”

“This is true.”

“We can’t have the Barb bringing us power cells forever. And someday the ship will fly back to Pallas to sell the ore. So we won’t have her for a couple years.”

“Also true,” Lucia said. She swirled the last of her tea and stared up at the stars. “I miss having Jupiter in the sky.”

“It was beautiful,” Basia agreed. “I have to go meet with Cate and the others tonight, after it gets dark.”

“Baz,” Lucia started, then just stopped with sad sigh.

“They’ll want revenge for Coop. It will only make it worse.”

“What,” Lucia said, “does worse look like, I wonder?”

Basia sat quietly, thinking of the rocker he could build on their porch. Of adding a bigger water heater for hot baths. Of building a larger kitchen and dining area on the back of the house. Of all the things he wouldn’t get to do now.

The guards were at the end of the town’s long street, almost invisible in their dark armor and the fading light. Basia got up to leave.

“Can you stop them from killing anyone else?” Lucia asked, as though she were asking if he wanted more tea.

“Yes,” Basia replied. It felt like a lie.

“Then go.”

~

They met at Cate’s house. Pete and Scotty and Ibrahim. Even Zadie came, her wife Amanda staying home to look after their boy and his infected eye. That wasn’t a good sign. Of all of them, Zadie was the angriest. The one with the hottest head. Basia had worked with her on Ganymede, and more than once she’d shown up in the morning with a black eye or a busted lip from some bar fight she’d picked the night before. They were all upset, all standing on the ledge about to jump, but Zadie would be the hardest to talk off of it.

“They shot Coop,” Cate said when Scotty, the last of them to arrive, finally came in. It wasn’t a statement of fact. They’d all been there. They’d all seen it. No, it was the beginning of a justification.

“In cold blood,” Zadie said, and punctuated it with a fist to her palm. “We all saw it. Just shot him in the face in front of God and everyone.”

“So I have a plan,” Cate continued. “The RCE people are holed up in —”

“Who put you in charge?” Zadie asked.

“Murtry did.”

Zadie narrowed her eyes, but let it drop. Basia fidgeted on one end of Cate’s couch. It was a handmade frame, covered with padding stripped from the ship and badly stitched remnants of the cloth they had the fabricator crank out once a month for clothing and other needs. Cate had made a small table out of the local wood analog to sit next to it. It wasn’t quite level, and Basia’s glass of water was at a noticeable tilt. Pictures of Cate’s family, two sisters who still lived back in the Belt and their kids, hung on the walls. There was a pottery vase on the floor with sticks and branches in it that Basia thought was meant as decoration, not kindling.