Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (24 page)

Havelock let them talk for a while. It was funny, hearing the tactics of small-unit assault analyzed in terms of engineering, but those were his crew now. They were learning to solve violence like an equation: not to eliminate it, but to understand it fully.

“What I don’t understand,” Chief Engineer Koenen said, “is why we’re looking at the
Barbapiccola
at all.”

The eyes of the assembled team turned toward Havelock, looking for an answer. Or at least a response. A surprising nervousness crawled up his throat, and he chuckled.

“They’re the bad guys,” he said.

“The
Barbapiccola
is an unarmed freighter with a standing crew of maybe a hundred people that requires a shuttle to transfer from the surface,” the chief engineer said. “The
Rocinante
runs with less than a skeleton crew, half of which are already off the ship. It seems to me that we have a lower-risk, higher-value option here.”

A murmur of agreement passed through the room. Havelock shook his head.

“No,” he said. “First thing is just what you said. The
Barbapiccola
’s unarmed. If things don’t go well, the worst we can expect in retaliation is a strongly worded letter. The
Rocinante
was a state-of-the-art Martian warship before Holden took her to the OPA. God knows what modifications they’ve made since then. She’s got a full rack of torpedoes, PDCs, and a keel-mounted rail gun. If the crew on the
Rocinante
see us as a threat, they can end us, and there’s really nothing we can do about it.”

“But if we were the ones with that firepower —” Koenen began.

“We’d be fine as long as we stayed here,” Havelock said. “But as soon as we go back through the ring gate, there’s a whole mess of lawyers, treaties, and other ships with even bigger guns. If we have to commandeer the
Barbapiccola
, at least we have a legal argument to make.”

The engineers groaned and shook their heads. Legal arguments were another phrase for
bullshit
to them, but Havelock pressed on.

“For one thing, the ore they’re carrying is RCE property as long as the UN charter stands. For another, if they bring any of the colonists up from the surface, we can argue they’re aiding and abetting murder.”

“Argue?” one of the men in the back of the group said. The laughter that followed was bleak.

“Being true makes it a strong argument,” Havelock said. “Go after the
Rocinante
, and we look like everything they say we are. If we stand tough, we can protect ourselves and still win the long game.”

“Long game’s great if you’re around long enough to play it,” the man at the back said, but his tone of voice told Havelock that they’d seen the sense in what he said. For the time being, anyway.

~

Ivers Thorrsen was a geosensor analyst with advanced degrees from universities on Luna and Ganymede. He made more in a month than Havelock would in a year of working security. Also, he was a Belter. Growing up in microgravity hadn’t affected him as much as Havelock had seen in other people. Thorrsen’s head was maybe a little big for his body, his spine and legs maybe a little long and thin. With enough exercise and steroids, the man could almost have passed for an Earther. Not that it mattered. Everyone on the
Israel
knew what everyone else was. Back when they’d left home, the differences hadn’t mattered. Not much.

“In addition to the energy spikes, there are twenty heat upwellings that we’ve seen so far,” he said, pointing to the rendered sphere of New Terra on Havelock’s desk display. “They’ve all appeared in the last eighty hours, and so far we don’t have any idea what they are.”

Havelock scratched his head. The cells in the brig were empty, so there was no one to overhear them. No need to be polite.

“Were you expecting me to have a hypothesis? Because I was under the impression that we were here in order to find a bunch of stuff we didn’t know what it was. That you’ve seen something you don’t understand seems pretty much par for the course.”

The Belter’s lips pressed thin and pale.

“This could be important. It could be nothing. My point is that I have to find out. I’m busy with important work. I can’t spend all my time dealing with distractions.”

“All right,” Havelock said.

“This is the third day running that someone has sprayed urine in my locker. Three
times
, you understand? I’m trying to get my gear not to smell like piss instead of running the numbers.”

Havelock sighed and canceled out his display. New Terra and its mysterious hot spots vanished. “Look, I understand why you don’t like it. I’d be cheesed off too. But you have to cut them a little slack. People are bored and they’re under pressure. It’s natural to get a little rowdy. It’ll pass.”

Thorrsen folded his arms across his chest, his scowl deepening. “A little rowdy? That’s what you see? I am the only Belter on my team, and I am the
only
one getting —”

“No. Look, just no, all right? Things are tense already. If you want me to, I’ll put a monitor on the locker and let people know they need to cool it, but let’s not make this into a Belters against the inner planets thing.”

“I’m not making it into anything.”

“With all respect, I think you are,” Havelock said. “And the more you try to make this into a big deal, the more it’s going to come back and bite you on the ass.”

Thorrsen’s rage was palpable. Havelock shifted slightly, pushing himself higher in the direction that they’d temporarily chosen as up. It was an old trick he’d learned back when he’d worked with Star Helix. Humanity might have gone up out of the gravity wells, but the sense of being taller, of establishing dominance, was buried too deeply in the human animal for a little thing like null g to erase it. Thorrsen took a deep, shuddering breath, and for a moment Havelock wondered if he was going to take a swing at him. He didn’t want to lock the analyst in a cell for the night. But if it came to it, he wouldn’t mind.

“I’ll put a monitor on your locker, and I’ll send out a general announcement that people need to put a sock in it. No one’ll piss on your stuff again, and you can get back to work. That’s what you want, right?”

“When you write your announcement, is it going to say that they should stop pulling pranks, or that they should stop harassing Belters?”

“I think you know the answer to that.”

Thorrsen’s shoulders hunched, defeated. Havelock nodded. It struck him, not for the first time, that confrontations were like a dance. Certain moves required certain responses, and most of it happened in the lower parts of the brain that language might not even be aware of. Thorrsen’s hunch was an offer of submission, and his nod accepted it, and Thorrsen probably didn’t even know it had happened.

Certainly didn’t, in fact, because his rational mind kept on dieseling even though everything that needed talking about was already decided.

“If you were the only Earther and it was Belters doing this, you’d feel different about it.”

“Thank you for letting me know about the problem,” Havelock said. “I’ll see it’s addressed.”

Thorrsen pushed off from the desk and sailed gracefully through the air, vanishing into the corridor. Havelock sighed, opened his desk display again, and paged through the ship reports. The truth was that incidents were on the rise. Most of it was little things. Complaints of petty infractions of corporate policies. Accusations of hoarding or sexual misconduct. One of the organic chemists had been making euphorics. The ship psychiatric counselor was issuing increasingly strident warnings about something he called
internal stratification
, which just sounded like social politics as usual to Havelock. He signed off on all the reports.

If you were the only Earther.

The funny thing was that Havelock had been the only Earther in a Belter society, and more than once. When he’d been on a twenty-berth hauler from Luna to Ganymede for Stone & Sibbets, he’d been one of two Earthers, outnumbered and always subtly excluded. He’d worked for Star Helix on Ceres Station for the better part of a year, always getting the worst cases, the worst partner, the less-than-subtle reminders that he didn’t belong. He’d been dealt more than his fair share of shit by Belters for not having the right-shaped body or knowing the polyglot mess that passed for a kind of outer planets cant. They hadn’t pissed in his locker, mostly because it hadn’t occurred to them.

Havelock set a monitor specifically on Thorrsen’s locker, then pulled up a fresh security template. He looked at the empty field, asking him by its blankness what he wanted to say.

We’re eight billion klicks from home and a bunch of half-feral terrorists want to keep on killing us, so let’s stay calm.

Or maybe:

Damn near every Belter I’ve dealt with treated me like I was dipped in shit because of where I came from, but now that we’re in the majority, let’s all respect their tender little feelings.

He cracked his knuckles and started typing.

It has come to the attention of security that an increasing number of pranks have been played among the crew. While we all understand the need to keep things light in these stressful times, some of these have gone beyond the realm of good taste. As acting head of security

He paused.

Once, on Ceres, Havelock had been assigned to close down an illegal club up near the center of the station where the Coriolis had been vicious and the spin gravity at its least. When he’d gotten to the place, the combination of bright lights, shrieking dub, and his unaccustomed inner ear had left him vomiting in the carved corridors. An image of him had made its way onto the board back in the offices. He’d played along because objecting would have made it worse. He hadn’t thought about that case in years.

If you were the only Earther.

“Fuck,” Havelock said to the empty air. He cleared the screen.

It has come to my attention that some RCE employees and team members have been singled out for harassment because they are from the outer planets. It is critical under these stressful conditions that we not confuse our teammates with our enemies because of accidents of physiology and environments of origin. As such, I am taking the following actions:

“I’m gonna regret this,” Havelock said to the screen, but by the time he’d finished the announcement, checked it for grammar, and sent it out, he felt almost good.

S
itting outside her hut, her hand terminal resting on her knees, the now-familiar sunlight warming her neck and back, Elvi waited for the reports from Luna to buffer. The comm laser on the
Edward Israel
was the only conduit back to the worlds she’d known, and it was swamped with technical data flowing out from the workgroups on the planetary surface and the sensor data from the
Israel
. It was sobering to realize that for all the tragedies and fear and death that wracked New Terra, most of the raw data going back home was still technical. And her slow connection was more than the townspeople of First Landing had. The
Barbapiccola
didn’t even support a feed for them. Their hand terminals were strictly ad hoc, local, line-of-sight networks if they functioned at all.

A breeze lifted a whirl of sand, then set it gently down again. High above, the green clouds scattered apart and rejoined, lacing the blue sky like algae floating on the surface of a pond. The air smelled of heat and dust and the distant presentiment of rain. The reports finished loading and Elvi pulled them up and spent a long hour reading them, listening to the debates, putting together her perspective. It was harder than she liked. Her mind kept jumping around without her.

Everything was changing on the planet so quickly, everything was so different than she’d expected it to be, that just maintaining focus was hard. The voyage into the desert, seeing a two-billion-year-old mechanism actually still functioning, if only barely, had been revelatory. Then the exposure and destruction of the terrorists among the squatters, which should have been a relief, had left her oddly unsettled. And, though she hadn’t mentioned it to anyone and never would, she’d been suffering recurring and intrusive dreams about James Holden.

On the screen, the research coordinator’s report ended, and Elvi realized she hadn’t heard any of it. She sighed, restarted it, and stopped it again before the woman back at the RCE labs on Earth could say anything. Elvi looked up at the sky, wondering where the
Rocinante
and the
Barbapiccola
and the
Edward Israel
were, hidden by the atmosphere-scatter of blue. One of the plant analogs beside the path leading back to the town let out a volley of rising clicks. It was something she’d wanted to investigate, but she hadn’t had the time. Not yet. “Doctor Okoye,” the research coordinator said from sixty AU away, or half a galaxy depending on how you looked at it, “I’ve just come from a meeting with the stats team, and I wanted to bring you up to speed on the plan for how we’d like to proceed with the data collection in the next weeks. The Luna group especially was hoping to request additional sampling on several of your initial subjects so that we can narrow our error bars…”

Elvi listened, focused, pushed away all her other thoughts and feelings. This time, she ended the report with a list of action items, a clear sense of how her work was changing the resources and plans of the labs back at home, and a half dozen questions about mineral sequestration that she wanted to ask Fayez. Protocol said she should record a reply and send it out right away. The hours it would take to reach home meant it would arrive before the morning meetings. But instead, she switched to her organizer and began listing her obligations. Water samples and soil samples. Samples of three different plant analog species. A report on the alien artifact…

She’d been thinking about possible triggers to the artifact’s sudden activity, and since Holden had been there and was, after all, the mediator who was ultimately responsible for making the situation on New Terra better – sensible, sane – she thought maybe, if she could give a solid reason that the artifact in the desert wasn’t moving in reaction to their presence, it would take something off his plate. Just as a kindness, and to help support him in making peace.