Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“D’ye mind if I join you, Mister Havelock?”

“Not at all,” Havelock said, blinking back surprise.

The captain pulled himself to the table and strapped into a crash couch. Behind him, the wall screen shifted from the UN man to the woman interviewing him, but Havelock only registered the change as shifts of lighting and background. His attention was on Marwick.

“How’ve things been going on the surface?” the captain asked, cracking open the box containing his own dinner. He made the words seem like nothing more weighty than polite conversation. Between other people, it probably would have been.

“You’ve seen the reports,” Havelock said.

“Ah, reports, though. Written for posterity and the judge as often as not. Still, I was a bit surprised to see that our mutual friend Mister Murtry had taken quite such a firm hand just when the mediator arrived.”

“Situation called for it,” Havelock said. “We’ve lost a lot of good people down there by being restrained and patient.”

Marwick made a humming sound that could have meant anything and ate a bite of his meal. His gaze fixed somewhere over Havelock’s left shoulder.

“And of course we’re in a position of relative power here, aren’t we?” Marwick said. “I hope our friend on the ground is keeping in mind that won’t always be the case.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“Well, I am not, strictly speaking, a part of the expeditionary force, am I? The Israel is my domain. I use my rank as captain to make the demands and requests the home office prefers me to, though in truth I’m just the lorry driver. But I’ll be driving my lorry back through that gate at some point, and Fred Johnson and his well-armed base will be waiting on the other side of it. I’d rather he not think of me first and foremost as a target.”

Havelock chewed slowly, frowning. A dull anger tightened his jaw. “We’re the ones who followed the rules here. We came with science teams and a hard dome. We hired them to build our landing platform, and they killed us. We’re the good guys here.”

“And the moral high ground is a lovely place,” Marwick said, as if he were agreeing. “It won’t stop a missile, though. It won’t alter the trajectory of a gauss round. What our mutual friend does planetside has consequences that go a long way out from here. And there are those among us, myself included, who’d like to go home one day.”

Marwick took another bite of his dinner, smiled ruefully, and nodded as if Havelock had said something. He undid the crash couch straps.

“Keeps body and soul together, these little boxes, but they don’t really satisfy, do they? Give my left nut for a real steak. Well, it was a pleasure, Mister Havelock. As always.”

Havelock nodded, but the anger in his chest rode the ragged edge between annoyance and rage. He knew that it was at least in part because that was the reaction Murtry would have had in his place, but knowing that didn’t change the emotion. His hand terminal chimed. Chief Engineer Koenen had sent a message. He tapped it open.

we’ve got a full team. one of the boys is fabbing up a little logo for the club. just something to keep morale up.

Havelock considered the image. It was a stylized male form, squat and featureless, holding up a fist larger than its head. It was a cartoon of the Earther body type, and of violence. Havelock looked at it for a long time before he answered back.

looks great. make sure you get one for me.

Chapter Sixteen: Elvi

“What do you mean movement?” Elvi asked.

After we saw the power spike,” Holden said, “the Rocinante did a sweep of the location. Several of them, actually.”

He held out his hand terminal, and Elvi took it. She tried to look serious, not to seem impressed. She was a scientist, for God’s sake, facing a serious question, not a girl who’d get on her family’s shared feed and burble about how James Holden had been in her hut. She flipped the images back and forth. Human brains were wired to see movement, and so the shifting shadows were easy to spot when she went quickly.

“Something’s moving,” she agreed. “Can we see what it is?”

“Not a lot of imaging satellites up there yet,” Holden said. “The Roci’s built for ship-to-ship combat more than ground visualization.”

Anywhere in the solar system, it wouldn’t have been like this. There were so many cameras of such exquisite sensitivity, almost nothing could happen in the vast emptiness inside the orbit of Neptune that couldn’t be seen if someone wanted to look for it. It was another reminder of how far from home they were, and how many axioms of daily life didn’t apply here.

“What does the Israel see?” she asked.

“Nothing that’s a lot better,” Holden said. “That’s why we’re going out. It’s right at the range of the vehicles. It’s going to take the better part of the day to get out there.”

“Why?” she asked. “I mean, I see it’s decently large, but there are likely to be any number of large organisms in the ocean and colder environments.”

“Organisms don’t make power spikes,” Holden said. “All sorts of things are moving on this planet. All the time. This just started.”

Elvi touched the image, expanding it until the shadows blurred.

“You’re right. We should check it out,” she said. “Let me get my instruments.”

An hour later, she was in the back of an open loader, Fayez at her side. Holden sat in front of them, in the passenger’s seat, while Chandra Wei drove. A vicious-looking rifle jounced at Wei’s side, in easy reach if violence came on them unexpectedly. The loader’s engines whined, and the wheels ground against the stones of the wind-paved desert.

“Why didn’t Sudyam come?” Elvi asked, shouting to be heard over the loader and the wind.

Fayez leaned close to her shoulder. “Wei thought it would be good to have someone on the exobio workgroup still alive if this went poorly.”

Elvi’s felt her eyes go wide, and she glanced at the woman in the driver’s seat. “Really?”

“She phrased it more gently,” Fayez said.

There was no demarcation of the border, no fence or road to show that they had left First Landing. The stone-and-dirt hills rose and fell, organisms like grass or fungus clinging to the land and being crushed under the loader’s wheels. Slowly, the ruins that had become Elvi’s landmark on New Terra thinned and shrank and fell out of view. She leaned her head against the loader’s roll bar, letting the vibrations of the land translate themselves through her skull. Wei looked over her shoulder, and Elvi smiled at her. The memories of a hundred field excursions in graduate school left her body expecting beer and marijuana, and the anxiety of the actual errand tugged at her. Every day for weeks, she had found some new organism or fact that humanity had never seen before, and now she was going to something possibly even more alien. No one had said the word protomolecule, but the implication was thick as cement. Animals didn’t make a power surge. The aliens did.