Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

Seventeen hundred kilometers below, his world spun. Beneath his feet, a spaceship capable of flying across the solar system hummed to itself with barely restrained power.

Maybe not just like a nineteenth-century primitive.

“You ready to come back in?” Alex said, breaking into his reverie.

“In a minute,” Basia replied. “Can you find First Landing and point it out?”

“Sure. It’s moving away, but you can still see it.”

Another tiny green dot appeared on his HUD over a spot just north of Ilus’ great southern desert. Knowing where to look, Basia thought he could detect the open bowl of the mining operations north of the village, but that might just have been wishful thinking.

Lucia would be down there, seeing patients, looking after Jacek. It was daylight in the village, so Lucia would definitely still be working. Basia tried to imagine what she was doing at that moment. The temptation to have Alex call down to the village so he could talk to her was almost overpowering. But he’d been selfish enough already, calling Felcia. He was a source of pain to his family now. The only comfort to be had came at their expense.

So instead he began packing up his tools and the damaged actuator.

If he never came back, would Lucia find someone else? He tried to tell himself that he was the sort of man who’d want that for her. That her happiness was more important than his fears about losing her. He tried the idea on like a new outfit. Seeing if he could find a way to make it fit.

It didn’t. He saw with clarity as perfect as if Alex were zooming his HUD in on the idea that he was not that sort of man. It was hard to tell if that was a flattering testament to his commitment to his marriage, or a scathing commentary on his own insecurities and selfishness. Like almost everything else that had happened to him over the last months, it was murky and difficult to navigate.

He would go back with Holden, probably to the UN complex on Luna. The OPA would claim he was their citizen, but Ganymede had originally been a UN colony. The legality of which people were citizens of which government was still being worked out, and would be for decades. Plenty of time to try him as a UN citizen for crimes against a UN-based company and throw him in prison for all eternity.

Years of trials, probably.

Basia began slowly walking across the hull of the Rocinante, dragging his webbed-together bundle of tools and spare parts behind. At the stern of the ship he stopped and planted both feet, waiting for the bundle to float past him and stop at the end of its line. The weight pulled his arms out painfully for a moment as he killed its momentum.

“Open the cargo bay hatch,” he said.

“Roger,” Alex replied, and the ship started to vibrate under Basia’s feet. The two heavy doors of the cargo bay slowly slid open. When they were about halfway, he yanked down on the line and the bundle of tools swung around the edge of the ship and into the cargo bay. He let go of the line and let them sail inside without yanking him off the edge after them.

In the corner of his vision, there was a bright burst of light, like the flash of a distant camera. Basia turned to look, expecting to see one of the other two ships moving into the sunlight. Instead, there was a growing point of white light centered over Ilus’ largest island. It was bright enough to overpower the faint green luminescence of its beaches, and rapidly expanding.

In seconds, the dark side of the planet was lit up as brightly as if a second sun had risen. The other islands in the chain suddenly visible in stark black and white, casting long shadows across the ocean as the white spot grew. He felt his heart start to race.

“Alex?” he said.

The ocean around the big island heaved up, bulging out beyond the curve of the planet in what must have been a tsunami miles high. But before Basia could grasp the enormity of the forces involved in such an uprising, it was gone. The island, the massive upwelling of the ocean, the smaller nearby islands, they all disappeared in a column of white fire and a rapidly rising mushroom cloud.

Basia’s visor darkened dramatically, and he had a sense that if it hadn’t the light coming from the planet below might have blinded him. But even through the welder’s shield darkness of the helmet, he could see the column of fire growing, hurling white vapor up until it broke free of the planet’s atmosphere and became glittering crystals of ice speeding away from the gravity well like a shower of glass from a bullet-shattered window.

A massive ripple, like wind across a field of grass, sped away from the growing pillar of fire through the surrounding ocean. Intellectually, Basia knew the ripples had to be waves, hundreds or thousands of feet high, rushing away from the blast. But the intellectual part of his brain was rapidly disappearing behind the screaming primitive who was relieving his bladder into the suit’s condom catheter in fear.

Basia had grown up in the Jupiter system. He’d seen video of Io up close more than once. Io was famous for having the most massive volcanoes ever seen by man. Gigantic geysers of sulfur blasting out of the surface of the moon until particles were flung into Jupiter’s plasma torus and faint ring system. They made Io an almost insanely inhospitable place.

The explosion Basia was looking at from orbit dwarfed those eruptions. It looked like half the planet was being flattened by the force of the blast.

His initial thought was that it was a very good thing First Landing was on the other side of the world. His second, that the shock wave was heading that direction, and not even traveling around the planet was going to slow it down much.

“Jesus Christ!” Alex yelled across the radio. “Are you seein’ that shit!”

“Call down,” Basia tried to yell back. It came out as a panicky whimper. “You have to warn them.”

“Warn them to do what?” Alex asked. He sounded dazed.

What do you do when the planet you’re standing on tries to kill you?

Basia didn’t know.

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Holden

Holden stood on a low hill overlooking First Landing trying to enjoy the beauty of the planet while his brain chewed on the half dozen insoluble problems that he was somehow supposed to solve. The usual dust had been tamped down by the recent run of gentle rains. It made the town look clean, well-tended. Peaceful. Above, the sky was a stunning indigo blue with just the faintest streamers of high-altitude clouds breaking it up. His hand terminal was reporting the temperature as 22 degrees Celsius with a gentle four-knot wind coming out of the northeast. The only thing that would have made it better was Naomi there with him, or at least back safe on the Roci. But that would have made it a lot better.