Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“I spent a lot of time in the West African Shared Interest Zone when I was growing up. Northern Nigeria. I went back there for university.”

“Really?” Holden said, his voice bright. “One of my fathers had family in Nigeria.”

“One of them?”

“I have several,” he said. “Extended parental group.”

“Oh. I’ve heard of those.”

“Makes for a big nuclear family, and a huge extended one. We might be cousins.”

“I hope not,” Elvi said, laughing, and then wished she could suck the words back. The silence was terrible. She couldn’t see his face clearly, but she could imagine it. The surprise. The embarrassment. She pulled her hand back and put it in her lap.

“I —” he said.

“If you’d like, I’ll take the rest of the watch,” Elvi said. The lightness in her voice sounded forced, even to herself. “I don’t think I’ll be sleeping much tonight anyway.”

“That would be… great,” Holden said. “Thank you.”

“Just be careful of Fayez. He steals the blankets.”

James Holden slid off the loader. She heard his footsteps tracking back to the tent, heard the rustle of the plastic as he bedded down. She hunched over, arms around her belly. The thing from the desert was nothing more than embers, glowing dull orange in the night but illuminating nothing. The humiliation sat with her, bright and painful as a paper cut.

“Stupid,” she said softly. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

The alien darkness didn’t disagree.

Chapter Seventeen: Basia

Coop and Cate had been old-school OPA, back when the Outer Planets Alliance was just a shared opinion with guns. They’d come up the ranks together when even wearing the OPA’s split circle on your sleeve was an arrestable offense. They’d learned their craft sneaking past armed Earth-Mars Coalition checkpoints, planting bombs, smuggling guns, and generally acting like the terrorists the inner planets had accused them of being. The only reason they hadn’t both gone to prison camps forever was because by some standards, the OPA had won. After Eros, the inner planets had begun treating the OPA like an actual government, and many of the OPA warriors had received the de facto amnesty that non-enforcement brought.

Cate was just a miner now, like the rest of them, but she could use words like tactical advantage and actually sound like she knew what she was talking about.

“The terrain and numerical superiority are our tactical advantages,” Cate said to the small group assembled in her house. “But we’re outgunned. No way around that. We have maybe a dozen firearms total. We can still get explosives, but the deal Holden struck with RCE makes it much riskier.”

“Fucking Holden,” Zadie said.

“We’ll deal with him soon enough,” Cate replied.

Her audience was made up of the usual gang. Zadie’s son had taken a turn for the worse with his eye infection, and her wife was staying home with him full-time now. Basia had the impression that Zadie was looking for someone to punish for her family’s pain. Pete, Scotty, and Ibrahim were there as well, the veterans of their one skirmish with the RCE security people. It gave them a degree of status in the group that they’d latched on to. But there were a few new people as well. Other members of the colony who might have been on the fence before about the best way to deal with RCE, but had been pushed into the revolutionary camp by Murtry’s brutal tactics. By the martyring of Coop.

“How?” Scotty asked. “How do we deal with Holden?”

“I think we remove all of our problems in one multi-front operation,” Cate said. “Murtry and his team, Holden and his thug, everyone at once. The key to this kind of war is money.”

“Make us too expensive to occupy.” Ibrahim nodded. He’d been OPA too.

“Exactly. That’s how we got the inners off our asses in the Belt. If it’s not economically viable to occupy us, they won’t. Every one of them that goes home in a body bag is one more nail in the corporate coffin.” Cate punched one large fist into her other hand to punctuate.

“I don’t follow. How does killing them help us with that?” Basia asked. He’d agreed to come in the hope he might be able to help cooler heads prevail. That was looking less and less likely the longer the meeting went on.

“It’s an eighteen-month trip to send new troops to the front,” Cate answered. “That’s a long-flight freighter tied up for over three years. That’s expensive. And for the year and a half they’re flying out here, we’re fortifying our position. Making camps in the hills. Branching out. In order to win, they’ll need to do a full military program. Medina Station won’t support that, even if they get pissed at us for pushing the issue.”

“Coercive alliance,” Ibrahim added, nodding.

“By the book,” Cate said.

The room was quiet for a moment as everyone there mulled over her words. The metal roof rattled and scraped as the wind outside blew sand across it. The windows creaked, cooling with the night. A dozen people breathed the alien air.

“They’re here already,” Basia said, clearing his throat to break the silence. “Isn’t that exactly what they’ll do?”

“What who will do?” Scotty asked.

“The Rocinante,” Basia replied. “They’re in orbit right now. A warship, with guns and missiles and who knows what else. If we kill Holden, can’t they just bomb us?”

“Let’s hope they do!” Cate thundered at him. “By God let’s hope so. A few videos of dead colonists, murdered by UN ships in orbit, and the public opinion war is over.”

Basia nodded as though he were agreeing, while what he was really thinking was, I’m on the wrong team.

“So, we move on both groups at once,” Cate said. Her voice had taken on the same cadences Coop used to have. It was as if the man were still in the room, haunting the place. “They keep two people on roving patrol at all times, so we’ll need a team shadowing them until the signal goes out. We’ll put a second team on the security building where Murtry and the rest of his people will be. The third team will go to the commissary where Holden and his crewman are holed up at night. I’m thinking Scotty and Ibrahim for team one. I’ll lead…”

Cate rattled on, laying out the insanity of multiple murder like a puzzle to be solved or a game to be won. Coordinating the attacks so all three happened at once, so no one could raise the alarm. Using phrases like fields of fire and maximum aggression as if they meant anything other than gunning down a dozen women and men while most of them slept. The little group nodded and followed along. Basia was astonished by how easily the unthinkable became the routine.