Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (30 page)

Or maybe they were seeing it as an omen. The burning eye looking down on them all, judging them and preparing for war. She’d heard a folktale like that once, but she didn’t remember where.

Wei and one of the other RCE security men were walking down the main street, rifles at the ready. Elvi nodded to them, and they nodded back, but no one spoke. Probably someone had told Holden. But she’d come all this way. She should at least be sure.

In the street outside the commissary where Holden was living, Jacek Merton was pacing. The boy’s body leaned into the motion, his hands at his sides clenched in fists. His gaze was fixed about three feet in front of him like someone looking at a screen, and his shoulders were hunched in like he was protecting something. She was about to say hello, when a small warning bell chimed in her head.

Between one heartbeat and the next, she wasn’t Elvi Okoye going in the middle of the night to see Captain Holden on pretenses that even she could see were pretty damned flimsy. That wasn’t the son of Lucia and Basia Merton, brother of Felcia, in front of her. This wasn’t even a town. She was a biologist in the field seeing a primate. And in that frame of reference, some things were perfectly clear. The boy was working himself up to violence.

She hesitated and started to turn back. Wei was only a few dozen meters and a corner or two away. If Elvi shouted, the security people would probably come at a run. Her pulse was quick. She could feel it in her throat. The long hours after Reeve’s death came back to her like a recurring nightmare. She should scream. She should call for help.

Except the boy wasn’t just a primate. Wasn’t just an animal. He was Felcia’s brother. And if she called for help, they might kill him. She swallowed, caught between fear and courage. Uncertain. What would Fayez do? she wondered. Offer the kid a beer?

He stopped and looked up at her. His eyes were empty. He wore a light jacket that pulled down a little on one side, like he had something heavy in his pocket.

“Hi,” she said, smiling.

A moment later, Jacek said, “Hi.”

“Weird, isn’t it?” She pointed up at the red dot. It seemed more portentous than ever. Jacek glanced up at the sky, but didn’t seem to react to it.

“Weird,” he agreed.

They stood in front of each other, the silence rich and tense. The light spilling from the commissary windows left the boy half in light, half in shadow. Elvi struggled, trying to find something to say. Some way to defuse everything and make it all okay. Fayez would have made a joke, something that the boy could laugh at and that would put them both on the same side of the laughter, and Elvi didn’t know what it was.

“I’m scared,” she said instead, her voice breaking a little. It surprised the boy as much as it did her. “I’m just so scared.”

“It’s okay,” Jacek said. “It’s just some kind of reaction up there. It’s not like it’s doing anything but melting up in orbit.”

“Still scared, though.”

Jacek scowled at his feet, torn between the errand he’d been steeling himself for and the impulse to say something kind and reassuring to this obviously unstable, vulnerable, strange woman.

“It’ll be okay?” he tried.

“You’re right,” she said, nodding. “It’s just. You know. I mean, you do know, don’t you?”

“I guess.”

“I was coming to see Captain Holden,” she said, and Jacek’s eyes flickered like she’d said something insulting. “Were you too?”

She could see in his face as he tried to bring back the blankness he’d had before, the tightness and anger and emptiness. He wasn’t someone for whom violence came naturally. He’d had to put effort into it. It was that effort she’d seen in him.

“He took my father away,” Jacek said. “Mom worries we’ll never see him again.”

“Is that why you came? To ask?”

Jacek looked confused.

“Ask… what?”

“To talk to your father.”

The boy blinked, and he took an unconscious step toward her. “He won’t let me talk to him. He took him prisoner.”

“People talk to prisoners all the time. Did someone tell you that you couldn’t talk to your dad?”

Jacek was silent. He put his hand into his jacket pocket – the heavy one – and then took it out again. “No.”

“Come on, then,” Elvi said, moving toward him. “Let’s go ask him.”

Inside the commissary, Holden was pacing from the front of the room to the back to the front again. The big man – Amos – sat at a table with a pack of cards, playing solitaire with an unnerving focus. Holden’s face was paler than usual, and the sense of barely restrained emotion gave his body a tension that she didn’t picture him with. Amos looked up as she walked in, her hand on Jacek’s shoulder. His eyes were flat and empty as marbles, and his voice was just as cheerful as ever.

“Hey there, doc. What’s up?”

“Couple things,” Elvi said.

Holden stopped. It seemed to take him a second to focus. Something was bothering him. His gaze locked on her and he tried to smile. An unexpected tightness came to her throat. She coughed.

“Jacek was wondering if there was any way he could talk with his father,” Elvi said. There didn’t seem to be much air in the room, she was having a hard time catching her breath. Maybe she was developing allergies.

“Sure,” Holden said, then looked over his shoulder at Amos. “That’s not a problem, is it?”

“Radios still work,” Amos said. “Might want to give Alex the heads-up to expect it. His hands are kind of full right now.”

“Good point,” Holden said, nodding to himself as much as any of them. “I’ll set that up. Do you have a hand terminal?”

It took Jacek a moment to realize the question was directed at him. “It doesn’t work. We don’t have a hub. It’s all just line-of-sight.”

“Bring it over when you can, and I’ll see if I can’t put it on our network. That’ll be easier than setting up times for you to use mine. Will that work?”

“I… Yeah. Sure.” She could feel the boy’s shoulder trembling. Jacek turned and walked out without meeting anybody’s gaze, but especially avoiding hers. The door closed behind him.

“Kid was packing, boss,” Amos said.

“I know,” Holden replied. “What did you want me to do about it?”

“Know. That’s all.”

“Okay, I know. But I really don’t have time to get shot right now.” He turned his attention to her. A lock of hair was dropping down over his forehead, and he looked tired. Like he was carrying the whole planet on his back. Still, he managed a little smile. “Is there anything else? Because we’re a little…”

“Is this a bad time? Because I can —”

“Our XO got arrested by Murtry,” Amos said, and the flatness of his eyes had gotten into his voice now. “May be a while before there’s a really good time.”

“Oh,” Elvi said, her heart suddenly picking up its pace.
The XO is Holden’s lover
and
Holden has a lover
and
Holden may not have a lover anymore
and
Jesus, what am I doing here
all collided somewhere in her neocortex. Elvi found she was very unsure what to do with her hands. She tried putting them in her pockets, but that felt wrong so she took them out again.

“I’d been thinking?” she said, her voice rising at the end of the word even though it wasn’t a question. “About the thing. In the desert. And now with the moon?”

“Which moon?”

“The one that’s melting down, Cap,” Amos said.

“Right, that one. I’m sorry. I’ve got a lot of things going on right now. If it’s not something I can actually do something about, it’s not sinking in the way it probably ought to,” Holden said. And then, “I’m not supposed to do anything about the moon thing, am I?”

“We can let the scientists tell us if we’re supposed to freak out,” Amos said. “It’s all right.”

“I’ve been thinking about hibernation failure rates, and that maybe what we were seeing was analogous.”

Holden lifted his hands. “I couldn’t tell you.”

“It’s just that hibernation is a really very risky strategy? We only see it when conditions are so bad that the usual kinds of survival strategy would fail. Bears, for instance? They’re top predators. The food web in wintertime couldn’t sustain them. Or spadefoot toads in the deserts? In the dry periods, their eggs would just desiccate, so the adults go dormant until there’s rain, and then they come back awake and go out to the puddles and mate furiously, just this mad kind of puddle orgy and… um, anyway, and then they, they lay their eggs in the water before they can dry out again.”

“Ok-ay,” Holden said.

“My point is,” Elvi said, “not all of them wake up. They don’t have to. As long as enough of the organisms reactivate when the time comes, enough that the population survives, even if individuals don’t. It’s never a hundred percent. And shutting down and coming back up is a complicated, dangerous process.”

Holden took a deep breath and ran his hands through his hair. He had thick, dark hair. It looked like he hadn’t washed it in a while. Amos lost his game, scooped up the cards, and started shuffling them with slow, deliberate movements.

“So,” Holden said, “you think that these… things we’re seeing are artifacts or organisms or something trying to wake up?”

“And failing. At least sometimes,” she said. “I mean, the moon melted. And that thing in the desert was clearly broken. Or anyway, that’s what it was looking like to me.”

“Me too,” Holden said. “But just because it was moving, we kind of knew things were waking up.”

“No, that’s not the point,” Elvi said. “There are always a small percentage of organisms that don’t wake up, or wake up wrong. These things? If that’s the model, they’re the ones waking up
wrong
.”

“Following you so far,” Holden said.

“Failure rates are usually low. So why aren’t we seeing a bunch of things waking up
right
?”

Holden went over to the table and sat on its edge. He looked frightened. Vulnerable. It was strange seeing a man who’d done so much, who’d made himself known across all civilization by his words and deeds, look so fragile.

“So you think there are more of these things – maybe a lot more – that are activating, and we’re just not seeing it?”

“It would fit the model,” she murmured.

“All right,” he said. And a moment later, “This isn’t making my day better.”

B
asia sat alone on the operations deck of the
Rocinante
. He was belted into a crash couch next to what he’d been told was the comm station. The controls were quiet, waiting for someone to request a connection, occasionally flashing a system status message across its screen. The messages were incomprehensible mixtures of acronyms, system names, and numbers. The text was in a gentle green font that made Basia think they weren’t particularly urgent.

Alex was in the cockpit, the hatch closed. That didn’t mean anything. The hatches closed automatically to seal each deck from the others in case of atmosphere loss. It was a safety measure, nothing more.

It still felt like being locked out.

The panel startled him with a burst of static followed by a voice. The volume was just loud enough that Basia could tell it was a conversation between two men without understanding any of the words. A red RECORDING status blinked in one corner of the screen. The
Rocinante
, monitoring and recording all of the radio transmissions around Ilus. Maybe Holden was doing that on purpose to have a record of his mission when he returned to Earth. Or maybe warships did it by default. It wasn’t something that a welder had to worry about. Or a miner. Or whatever he’d been with Coop and Cate.

Basia was looking for a way to turn up the volume and listen in when Alex’s voice blared from the panel. “Got a call comin’ in.”

“Okay,” Basia said, not sure if the pilot could hear him. He didn’t know if he needed to press a button to respond.

The message on the comm panel changed, and a male voice said, “You don’t need to do anything.”

For a moment, Basia had the irrational feeling that the person speaking had read his mind. He was about to reply when another voice, younger, male, said, “Just talk?” Jacek. The second voice was Jacek. And now Basia recognized the older voice as Amos Burton. The man who’d guarded him at the landing field. “Yeah,” Amos said. “I’ve opened a connection to the
Roci
.”

“Hello?” Jacek said.

“Hey, son,” Basia replied around the lump in his throat.

“They made our hand terminal work again,” Jacek said. By
they
Basia guessed he meant Holden and Amos.

“Oh yeah?” Basia said. “That’s real good.”

“It only talks to the ship,” Jacek said, his young boy’s voice bright with excitement. “It doesn’t play videos or anything like it used to.”

“Well, maybe they can make it do that too, later.”

“They said someday we’ll be on the network, like everyplace in Sol system. Then we can do whatever.”

“That’s true,” Basia said. Water was building up in his eyes, making it hard to see the little messages flashing by on the screen. “We’ll get a relay and a hub and then we can send data back and forth through the gates. We’ll have everything on the network then. There’s still going to be a lot of lag.”

“Yeah,” Jacek said, then stopped. There was a long silence. “What’s the ship like?”

“Oh, it’s pretty great,” Basia said with forced enthusiasm. “I have my own room and everything. I met Alex Kamal. He’s a pretty famous pilot.”

“Are you in jail?” Jacek asked.

“No, no, I get to go anywhere I want on the ship. They’re real nice. Good people.”
I love you. I am so sorry. Please,
please
be all right.

“Does he let you fly it?”

“I never asked,” Basia said with a laugh. “I’d be scared to, though. It’s big and fast. Lots of guns on it.”

There was another long silence, then Jacek said, “You should fly it and blow up the RCE ship.”

“I can’t do that,” Basia said, putting as much smile in his voice as he could. Making it a joke.

“But you should.”

“How’s your mom?”

“Okay,” Jacek said. Basia could almost hear the shrug in his voice. “Sad. I started playing soccer more. We have enough for two teams, but we trade players a lot.”