Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (54 page)

“How did you know these blankets were here?”

“We laid this out as a sleeping location for you three days ago,” Elvi said with a smile and patted his cheek. “You were just too stubborn to use it.”

“Thank you.”

“We have a small privacy tent too,” she replied, pulling on something by his feet. A thin sleeve of material sprang up and along the length of his body, completely covering him.

“Thank you,” Holden said again, his eyes closing against his will. He could already feel the impending sleep as a tingling in his extremities. “Wake me up in about a year. Oh, and make sure Murtry doesn’t kill me until then.”

“Why would he do that?” Elvi asked.

“We’re kind of at war,” Holden said. Unconsciousness washed into him, sleep pulling him down into the endless void.

“So,” a voice said right next to his ear, “we really need to get a move on.”

“Miller,” Holden said, not opening his eyes, “if you make me get up, I swear I will find a way to murder you.”

“You did your bit here,” Miller continued, undeterred. “Now you need to come with me and do the other thing. And I’m not sure how much time we’ve got. So, upsy daisy.”

Holden forced his eyes open and looked to his side. Miller was inside the tent with him, but also too large to be in the tent with him. The overlapping images sent a spike of pain through his head so he closed them again. “Where are we going?”

“Got a train to catch. Find the back room with the weird pillar in the middle. You guys are using the space for storage. I’ll meet you there.”

“I hate you so,
so
much,” Holden said, but there was no reply. He risked opening one eye, and saw Miller was gone. When he opened the tent, Elvi was sitting next to it looking worried.

“Who were you talking to?”

“Ghost of Christmas past,” Holden said, forcing himself to sit up. “Where’s Amos?”

“He’s been spending a lot of time with Wei. I think they’re both in the next room.”

“Help me up,” Holden said, holding out one arm. Elvi climbed to her feet and pulled on it, and he somehow managed to stand without falling over. “My heart is racing. It’s not supposed to do that.”

“You’re full of fatigue toxins and amphetamines. I’m not surprised you’re having hallucinations.”

“My hallucinations are of the alien mind control variety,” Holden said, and took a few unsteady steps toward the next room.

“Can you hear what you’re saying?” Elvi asked, coming with him and keeping one hand under his elbow. “You’re really starting to worry me.”

Holden turned, straightened up, and took one long breath. Then he removed Elvi’s hand from his arm and said in as steady a voice as he could manage, “I need to go somewhere and turn off the defense network so our friends don’t fall out of space and die. I need you to go back to work on the sight problem. Thank you for your help.”

Elvi looked unconvinced, but Holden waited her out and she eventually headed off toward the area of the tower given over to lab work.

In the next room, Amos and Wei were sitting next to a low plastic table, eating ration bars and drinking distilled water out of an old whiskey bottle.

“Got a minute?” Holden asked him, and when Amos nodded he added, “Alone?”

Wei said nothing, but hopped to her feet and left the room, hands in the air in front of her to keep from running into a wall.

“What’s the word, Cap?” Amos asked. He took another bite of the protein bar and grimaced. It smelled like oil and paper.

“We got Naomi back,” Holden said in a whisper, not sure how far away Wei might have gone. “She’s on the
Roci
.”

“Yeah, I heard,” Amos said with a grin. “Chandra was telling me.”

“Chandra?”

“Wei,” Amos said. “She’s working for the wrong people, but she’s all right.”

“Okay. Murtry’s pissed about the rescue.”

“Yeah, but fuck him.”

“I also,” Holden continued, “may have shoved him down and stolen his hand terminal.”

“Stop making me fall in love with you, Cap, we both know it can’t go anywhere.”

“The point,” Holden said, “is that he might try to take it out on people here. I need you looking after everyone. Especially Lucia and Elvi. They’ve been the two most helpful to us, so he may try to punish us through them.”

“Not so afraid of the blind guy,” Amos said. “Even when I’m one too.”

“That’s about to end. Elvi says the drugs are working. People will be getting their sight back in hours or days.”

“Cap, is this a problem you’d like me to
solve
?” Amos asked, cocking thumb and forefinger like a gun. “Because that can just happen.”

“No. No escalations. I already did enough damage knocking Murtry around. I’ll pay for that when the time comes, but you only do what you have to in order to protect these people when I’m gone.”

“Okay,” Amos said. “You got it. And what do you mean, when you’re gone?”

Holden sat down on the plastic table with a thump and rubbed at eyes that were as dry as steel bearings. The planet was one big ball of humidity, yet he somehow managed to have dry itchy eyes. “I have to go with Miller. He says there’s a thing that might turn off the alien artifacts, which would get the
Roci
flying again and pretty much solve all of our problems.”

Amos frowned. Holden could see the big mechanic’s face twitching as he formulated questions and then abandoned them without speaking. Finally he just said, “Okay. I’ll keep an eye out here.”

“Be here when I get back, big man,” Holden said and clapped Amos on the shoulder.

“Last man standing,” Amos replied with another grin. “It’s in my job description.”

It took Holden a few minutes to find the storage room with the oddly shaped pillar in the middle, but when he did the only person in it was Miller. The detective frowned out a what-took-you-so-long look and Holden flipped him off.

Miller turned away and walked toward the pillar, disappearing into it like a ghost walking through a wall. A few seconds later, the pillar split down the middle without a sound and opened up into a steep ramp heading down into darkness.

“Was this always here?” Holden asked. “Because if it was, and you’d told us about it, it might have saved a few lives when the storm came.”

“If you’d been where I could talk to you, I might have,” Miller said with a Belter shrug of the hands. “You did pretty well without me. Now get down the ramp. We’re late as it is.”

The ramp dropped nearly fifty meters into the ground and ended at a metallic wall. Miller touched it and the wall, in spite of having no visible seams or joints, irised open.

“All aboard,” Miller said. “This is our ride.”

Holden crouched to enter through the small round opening, and found himself in a metallic cube two meters to a side. He sat on the floor, then slid down the wall until he was lying on his back.

“This is a part of the old material transfer system,” Miller was saying, but Holden was already asleep.

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

One hundred and thirteen times a second, it reaches out, and the investigator reaches with it. Follows. Watches. It reaches for a signal it will never find. It is not frustrated, it is not angry. It reaches out because it reaches out. What it finds, it uses to reach out, and so finds more, and reaches farther. It will never be far enough. It is unaware of this fact.

The investigator knows, and knows that it knows. An awareness in an unaware context. Consciousness within an unconscious system. So, nothing particularly new there. The investigator sighs, wishes it had a beer, knows that these are artifacts of the template. Once there was a seed crystal that had a name. It had loved and despaired. It had fought and failed and won at great sacrifice. None of that mattered. It had looked for things that were missing. For people that were missing. Everything about it is drawn along by that fact. Something is supposed to be here, and isn’t.

And instead, there is a dead place. A place where nothing is. Where everything pulls back. The investigator reaches out, and what reaches out dies. The investigator ceases to reach out. It waits. It considers.

Something was here once. Something built all this, and left its meal half eaten on the table. The designers and engineers that spanned a thousand worlds had lived here and died here and left behind the everyday wonders like bones in the desert. The investigator knows this. The world is a crime scene, and the one thing that stands out – the one thing that doesn’t belong – is the place that nothing goes. It’s an artifact in a world of artifacts, but it doesn’t fit. What would they put in a place they couldn’t reach? Is it a prison, a treasure chest, a question that isn’t supposed to be asked?

A bullet. A bomb still ticking under the kitchen table after the blitz was over.

Did He who made the lamb make thee? Or was there someone else? Whoever killed you fuckers left something behind. Something made for your death, and it’s right there.

One hundred thirteen times a second, it reaches out, unaware of the investigator, unaware of the scars and artifacts, the echoes of the dead, the consciousness bound within it. It reaches out because it reaches out. It knows that people are dying in some more physical place, but it is not aware that it knows. It knows that it is constructed from the death of thousands, but it is not aware that it knows. The investigator knows and is aware that it knows.

The investigator reaches out, but not at random. It looks for a path, and doesn’t find one. It looks for a path, and doesn’t find one. It looks for a path and finds one. Not there, not quite, but close. Two points define a line. One point is alive, and one point is death. Neither came from here. Bang those rocks together and see what sparks. See what burns.

The investigator is the tool for finding what is missing, and so it exists. All the rest is artifact. The craving for beer. The hat. The memory, and the humor, and the weird half-fondness half-contempt for something named James Holden. The love for a woman who is dead. The longing for a home that will never be. Extraneous. Meaningless.

The investigator reaches out, finds Holden. It smiles. There was a man once, and his name was Miller. And he found things, but he doesn’t anymore. He saved people if he could. He avenged them if he couldn’t. He sacrificed when he had to. He found the things that were missing. He knew who’d done it, and he did the obvious things because they were obvious. The investigator had grown through his bones, repopulated his eyes with new and unfamiliar life, taken his shape.

It found the murder weapon. It knew what happened, at least in broad strokes. The fine work was for the prosecutors anyway, assuming it went to trial. But it wouldn’t. There were other things the tool was good for. The investigator knew how to kill when it needed to.

More than that, it knew how to die.

H
avelock still wasn’t convinced that Naomi Nagata was the best engineer in the system, but after watching her work, he had to concede there probably wasn’t a better one. If some of the people on the
Israel
had more degrees or specialties in which they outpaced her, Naomi could make it up in sheer, bloody-minded wildness.

Okay, we can’t wait any longer,” she said to the muscle-bound bald man on the screen. “If he shows back up, tell him where we stand up here.”

“Pretty sure the cap’n trusts your judgment,” Amos said. “But yeah. I’ll tell him. Anything else I should pass on?”

“Tell him he’s got about a billion messages from Fred and Avasarala.” Alex’s voice came across the comm and also through the hatchway to the cockpit. “They’re talkin’ about building a mass driver, sending us relief supplies.”

“Yeah?” Amos said. “How long’s that gonna take?”

“About seven months,” Naomi said. “But at the outside, we’ll only have been dead for three of them.”

Amos grinned. “Well, you kids don’t have too much fun without me.”

“No danger,” Naomi said and broke the connection.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Havelock asked.

“Nope,” Naomi replied. She pulled herself closer to the command console. “How’s it going out there, Basia?”

The comm channel clicked and the Belter’s voice hissed into the operations deck. The sound reverberated without giving any sense of spaciousness. A whisper in a coffin. “We’re getting close out here. This is a lot of ugly.”

“Good thing we’ve got a great welder,” she said. “Keep me in the loop.”

The screens on the ops deck showed the operation in all its stages: what they’d managed so far, what they still hoped. And the countdown timer that marked the hours that remained before the
Barbapiccola
started to scrape against Ilus’ exosphere and changed from a fast-moving complex of ceramic and metal into a firework.

Not days. Hours.

The tether itself looked like two webs connected by a single, hair-thin strand. All along the belly of the
Rocinante
, a dozen ceramic-and-steel foot supports made for a broad base, the black lines meeting at a hard ceramic juncture a few hundred meters out. The
Barbapiccola
underneath them almost had all of the answering structures in place. Once the Belter had the foot supports installed there too, it would be time for the Martian corvette to use its battery power to tug the Belter ship into a more stable orbit, along with its cargo of lithium ore. The complexity of the situation made Havelock a little lightheaded. As he watched, the display showing the surface of the
Barbapiccola
stuttered, and one of the red-flagged foot supports changed to green.

“Okay,” Naomi said over the open channel. “We’re reading solid on that one. Let’s move on.”

“Yeah, give me one more minute here,” Basia’s compressed voice said. “There’s a seam here I don’t like. I’m just going to…” The words trailed off. The readout stuttered red and then green again. “Okay. That’s got it. Moving on.”

“Be careful,” Alex broke in. “Keep the torch cold when you’re moving. These lines’ve got great tensile strength, but they’re crap for heat resistance.”