Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (28 page)

He had underestimated them.

The first dark thread rose out toward the intruder and missed, but once the whole team had seen the grapnel fire, the idea was out there. A half dozen grapnels fired, their propellant flaring blue and orange as they flew like tiny missiles toward the fleeing welder. Then one made contact. The enemy and the man who’d fired the grapnel both jerked, and the engineer’s suit started an emergency burn, trying to compensate. With the enemy encumbered and slowed, two more grapnels connected. Soon five of his people had lines attached to the saboteur, their collected thrusters holding the red suit’s EVA pack in check. Havelock took control of his suit back from the
Israel
and dropped down toward the planet and the prisoner.

The red suit was twisting now, trying to bring its welding torch to bear on the lines. Havelock raised his gun, and the enemy paused. He was close enough now that he could see the face behind the helmet. A Belter woman, dark-skinned, with wavy dark hair clinging to her sweaty forehead. Her expression was pure chagrin.

He opened the general channel again.

“Hi,” he said. “Don’t panic. My name’s Havelock. I’m acting security chief for the
Edward Israel
, and you have to come with me now.”

— it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out —

One hundred and thirteen times a second, it reaches out, and the things it finds are not the signal that would let it end, but they are tools, and it explores then without knowing it is exploring them. Like water finding its mindless way through a bed of pebbles, it reaches out. What it can move, it moves, what it can open, it opens. What it can close, it closes. A vast network, ancient and dead, begins to appear, and it reaches into it. The parts of it that can think, struggle to make sense of it. Parts of it dream of a mummified body, its dry heart pumping dust through petrified veins.

Not everything responds, but it reaches out, presses,
moves
. And some things move back. Old artifacts awaken or don’t. None of them are what it seeks. None ever will be. It experiments without awareness of experimenting, and a landscape begins to form. It is not a physical landscape, but a logical one – this connects to this connects to this. It builds a model and adds it to the model it already has, and does not know it has done so. It reaches out. One hundred thirteen times a second, it reaches out.

Something that worked once, stops working. It reaches out and what answered before answers less now. Something burns or fails or tries to rise up and breaks. Part of the map goes dark, dies, and it reaches out to the silent dead. Part of it feels frustration, but it is not aware of that part, and it reaches out. Part of it wants to scream, wants to die, wants to vomit though a mouth it imagines has been transformed into something else for years now. It does not experience these things, though parts of it do. It reaches out.

And it pulls back.

It is unaware of pulling back, but one time out of every seventeen million attempts, it touches something and will not touch it again. It is not aware of pulling back, because it is not aware of anything, but the failures accrue. A blank place forms, an emptiness. A void. Avoid. Jesus, an old woman thinks, now with the puns.

The map is not physical, but it has a shape. It is a model of part of the universe. It becomes more detailed, more concrete. Some things come alive and then die. Some do not answer ever. Some become tools, and it uses the tools to reach out, except not
there
.

The emptiness gains definition too. With every failed connection, with every pulling back its liminal borders become better defined. It struggles to make sense of the shape of the nothing that defies it. The structures of the minds that never died within it struggle with it. It is a cyst. It is a negative space. A taboo. It is a question that must not be asked. It is not aware that it thinks these things. It is not aware that the space exists, that when it reaches into that place, it dies.

It does not need to be aware of the problem. It has a tool for this. A thing that finds what is missing. A tool for asking questions that shouldn’t be asked. For going too far. The investigator considers the cyst, the shadow, the space where nothing is.

That right there? The investigator thinks. Yeah, where I come from, we’d call that a
clue
.

“C
ome on,” Holden said to the empty desert and the man who wasn’t there. “You show up every time I don’t want you around. But I get something I want to talk to you about, and nothing.”

The thing that had been Miller didn’t answer. Holden sighed, hoped, and waited.

Ilus had lost some of its strangeness. The moonless sky still felt too dark, but no darker than a new moon on earth. His nose had become accustomed to the planet’s strange scents. Now it just smelled like night and the aftermath of rain. His growing familiarity was both comforting and sad. Humans would go out to the thousand worlds of the gate network. They would settle down in little towns like First Landing, then spread out and build farms and cities and factories, because that’s what humans did. And in a few centuries, most of those worlds would be very similar to Earth. The frontier would give way to the civilizations that followed it. Remaking it in the image of their original home.

Holden had grown up in the Montana district of North America. A region filled with nostalgia for lost frontiers. It had held out against urban creep longer than most places in the former United States. The people there clung to their farms and ranches even when those things stopped making economic sense. And because of that, Holden couldn’t help but feel the allure of the untamed place. The romantic notion of sights no one else had seen. Ground no one else had walked.

This new frontier would last throughout Holden’s lifetime. Conquering and taming a thousand-plus planets was the work of generations, no matter how much of a head start the protomolecule’s masters had given them. But in his heart, Holden knew that conquered and tamed they would be. And then there would be a thousand Earths with steel-and-glass cities covering them. Holden felt a shadow of that distant future’s loss of mystery as though it were his own.

In the moonless black sky, a star moved too quickly. One of the ships. The
Israel
or the
Barbapiccola
. The
Rocinante
was too small and too black to reflect the light. Did the people up there think about how momentous what they were all doing was? Holden worried that they didn’t. That the strangeness had already become normal, like the night scents of Ilus. That all they saw now was the conflict to be won and the treasure to be harvested.

With a sigh, Holden turned back toward the town and started walking. Amos would be wondering where he was. Carol, the town administrator, had asked for an after-dinner meeting so he needed to track her down too. A fat, dog-shaped thing with a bullfrog’s head walked in front of him and made a sound like boots crunching on gravel. Mimic lizards, the locals called them. They were sort of scaled like a lizard, but to Holden the limbs looked all wrong. Holden took out his hand terminal and used it to shine a faint light on the creature. It blinked up at him and made the gravel noise again.

“You’d be a good pet if you didn’t vomit your stomach up periodically,” Holden said, crouching down to get a better look at the creature. It croaked back at him. Nothing like the words he’d used, but a surprisingly good imitation of his voice and tones. He wondered if the animals could be taught to speak words like a parrot.

The terminal in his hand buzzed. The lizard skittered away, buzzing back at him over its shoulder.

“Holden here.”

“Yeah, Cap,” Alex said. “I got some bad news.”

“Bad like the zero-g toilet on the
Roci
is out of order, or bad like I should be looking at the sky for incoming missile trails?”

“Well…” Alex started, and then took a long breath. Holden looked up at the sky. Just stars.

“You’ve scared me now. Spit it out.”

“Naomi,” Alex started, and Holden felt his heart drop. “She was out installing the remote cutout on the shuttle, and they were doin’ some kind of group exercise on the outside of the
Israel
and they spotted her. Just dumb luck, really.”

“What happened? Is she okay?” Please be okay.

“They got her, Cap,” Alex said. Holden felt his chest go empty.

“Got her. Like,
shot
her?”

“Oh! No. Captured. She’s not hurt. The security guy on the
Israel
called to make sure I knew she was unharmed. But they’re callin’ it sabotage, and they locked her up.”

“Fuck,” Holden said, able to breathe again. He knew who’d have authorized that. Murtry. And now that the RCE security chief had a big bargaining chip he’d go all-in. “Does anyone else know?”

“Well, Amos called up looking for her a minute ago —”

Holden didn’t hear the rest of what Alex said, because he was already running toward town. The longer he ran without hearing gunfire, the more hopeful he became that Amos had realized the sensitivity of the situation, had decided to wait and consult with his captain before taking any action. He hoped Amos wasn’t already on the radio with the
Israel
and a pistol held to Murtry’s head demanding Naomi’s safe return.

He was half right.

When he burst into Murtry’s security office he found the RCE security chief pressed to one wall with Amos’ left hand around his throat and a pistol against his forehead. At least no one had called the
Israel
with demands. Likely because Amos didn’t have a free hand to dial.

In addition to Murtry and Amos, four RCE security personnel stood around the room with drawn sidearms pointed at Amos’ back. One of them, a raven-haired woman named Wei, said, “Drop the gun or we’ll shoot.”

“Okay,” Amos said with a shrug. “Blast away, sweetie. I guarantee I take this piece of shit with me. I’m good. You good?” He leaned closer to Murtry, punctuating the question with a jab of the pistol against his forehead. A little trickle of blood had started to run down Murtry’s face from the force of the barrel pressed against it.

Murtry smiled. “Keep barking, dog. We both know there’s no bite coming. You shoot me, she’s dead.”

“You won’t know,” Amos said.

“Don’t, Amos,” Holden ordered.

“Oh, do,” Murtry said, the words almost a whisper.

Holden held his breath, sure the next thing they heard would be a gunshot. Amos surprised him by not firing. Instead he leaned in even farther until his nose was touching Murtry’s and said, “I’m gonna
kill
you.”

“When?” Murtry replied.

“That is exactly the question that should stay on your mind,” Amos said and let the man go.

Holden started breathing again with a gasp. “I’ve got this, Amos.”

The big mechanic holstered his gun, to Holden’s relief, but made no move to leave.

“Seriously. I’ve got it. I need you to go back to the rooms and get on the line with Alex. Get me a full report. I’ll be back there in a minute.”

For a moment, Holden thought Amos would argue with him. The mechanic stared back, face flushed with rage, his jaw clenched hard enough to crack his teeth. “Okay,” he finally said and then left. The other four security people kept their guns trained on him the entire time.

“That was smart,” Murtry said. He pulled a tissue out of a box on his desk and wiped the blood from his forehead. He had an ugly bruise forming around the cut Amos’ pistol had left. “Your boy almost didn’t make it out of this room,
mediator
.”

Holden surprised himself by laughing. “I’ve never seen Amos pick a fight he didn’t plan to win. I’m not sure what he had in mind, but even at five to one my money would be on him.”

“Everyone loses eventually,” Murtry said.

“Words to live by.”

“That’s quite the killer you have working for you, as critical as you are of my methods.”

“There’s a difference. Amos is willing to lose face to protect something he loves. He doesn’t need to win more than he needs to keep his friends alive. And that’s why you’re nothing alike.”

Murtry agreed with a nod and a shrug. “So if you weren’t here to save your man, then what?”

“We keep escalating,” Holden said. “Some of that is my fault.
I
asked Naomi to deal with the shuttle.”

“Sabotage —” Murtry started.

“But I did that in response to finding out you’d weaponized it. We keep reacting to what the person before us did, justifying ourselves like kids on a playground. ‘He started it.’ ”

“So you’ll be the first to break the cycle?”

“If I can,” Holden said. “You’ve gone too far, Murtry. Disable the shuttle, give me Naomi back. Let’s see if we can find a way to stop the escalation.”

Murtry’s vague smile shifted into an equally vague frown. The man leaned back on his desk and touched another tissue to the cut on his forehead. It came away with a single crimson spot. Then he folded his arms, casual but immovable. Holden knew that it was a deliberate affectation intended to look natural. He was both impressed and worried by anyone who had that level of self-awareness and control.

“I’ve acted entirely within the purview of my assignment here,” Murtry said. “I’ve protected RCE assets and personnel.”

“You’ve killed a bunch of colonists and kidnapped my XO,” Holden replied, trying to keep the anger out of his voice and failing.

“I’ve killed fewer squatters than they’ve killed of us, all of which were actively engaged in plotting and carrying out attacks on RCE assets and personnel. Which, as I said, is my job.”

“And Naomi —”

“And I captured a saboteur and am holding her pending an investigation. ‘Kidnapping’ is not only a provocative term, it’s inaccurate.”

“You want this to blow up.” Holden sighed. “You can’t wait for the next chance to make things worse, can you?”

The frown shifted back to the smile. Neither meant anything. Just different masks. Holden wondered what it looked like inside Murtry’s head and shuddered.