Cibola Burn

Chapter Thirty-Four: Holden

“Affirmative. You take care of my ship. Holden out.”

Holden killed the connection to the Rocinante and leaned back against the alien tower with a sigh. It was a mistake. The rainfall had been incessant since the planetary explosion, and even though it had slowed to a drizzle over the last day, the water still sheeted down the outside of the tower. And, unfortunately, down his back and into his pants.

“Bad news?” Amos asked. He stood a few feet away holding his poncho up with one arm to keep the rain out of his face.

“If it weren’t for bad news,” Holden replied, “we’d have no news at all.”

“The latest?”

“The shuttle with the relief supplies was shot down by the planetary defenses,” Holden said. “Which seem to have activated when the planet blew up. And they’re running their usual ‘high energy is a threat’ program.”

“So like the gate station did back when we were in the slow zone and Medina Station was still a battleship,” Amos said.

“You mean the good old days?” Holden asked bitterly. “Yes. Like that.”

“So we just need to get everyone to shut their reactors down like last time?”

“Seems this defense network has a new trick. They took care of that problem for us. Made fusion stop working.”

“You’re fucking kidding me,” Amos said, then barked out a laugh. “They know how to do that?”

“On the upside, if we can’t figure out how to get relief supplies from orbit, I’ll die of hunger long before the cancers get me.”

“Yeah,” Amos agreed with a nod, “that’ll be a plus.”

“The people in orbit don’t even have that long. Alex thinks we might see the Israel or the Barb come down in about ten days. We’ll be hungry enough by that point that we won’t be able to see all the food in the solar system falling out of the sky on fire with a detached sense of irony.”

“And,” Amos added with a shrug, “all our friends will be on those ships.”

“Yeah. That too.” Holden squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose hard enough to hurt, hoping the pain would help clear his head. It didn’t. All he could think of was Naomi riding the Edward Israel on its fiery descent.

He and Amos stood quietly outside the alien tower for several minutes, gentle rain washing over them. Holden hadn’t stood in the rain in years. If everything else weren’t falling apart around him, it might almost have been pleasant. Amos let his poncho fall down around his neck and rubbed the rainwater across his prickly scalp.

“All right,” Holden finally said. “I’m heading around to the back of the tower.”

“Nobody’s back there,” Amos said, then closed his eyes and washed his face with a double handful of rain.

“Miller is.”

“Right, then you won’t need company.” Amos shook his head, spraying rain around him like a dog, then trotted off toward the entrance to the alien tower. Holden walked the other direction, carefully avoiding the death-slugs.

“Hey,” Miller said as he appeared next to Holden in a flash of blue.

“We need to talk,” Holden replied, ignoring the apparent non sequitur. Holden kicked away a death-slug that got too close to his boot. Another was crawling toward Miller’s foot, but the detective ignored it. “The planetary defenses seem to have come online. They just shot down a supply shuttle and they’ve created some sort of field in orbit that’s damping nuclear fusion.”

“You sure it’s just in orbit?” Miller asked and raised one eyebrow.

“Well, the sun hasn’t gone out. Should I be expecting that? Miller, is the sun going to go out?”

“Probably not,” Miller said with a Belter shrug of his hands.

“Okay, assuming the sun stays on, we’re still going to be in a lot of trouble. The ships can’t drop us supplies, and without reactors, they’ll start to fall out of orbit in the near future.”

“All right,” Miller said.

“Fix it,” Holden replied, taking an aggressive step toward him.

Miller just laughed.

“If not for us, then do it for yourself,” Holden said. “That thing linking you to me is a bit of goo on the Roci. That burns up too. Fix it because of that if you have to. I don’t care why, just do it.”

Miller took off his hat and looked up at the sky, humming a tune that Holden didn’t recognize. Holden could see the rain falling on his head, beading, and rolling down his face. He could also see the rain falling straight through him. It made a spike of pain shoot through his brain, so he looked away.

“What do you think I can do?” Miller asked. It wasn’t a no.

“You got us off lockdown when we were in the slow zone.”

“Kid, I keep telling you. I’m a wrench. The defense network problem in the gate hub just happened to be a hex nut. I’ve got no control here. Not much anyway. And this system is falling apart. Half the planet blowing up might not be the end of that.”

“More stuff might explode? What else is left?”

“You’re asking me?” Miller laughed again.

“But you’re part of this! All this, this protomolecule masters bullshit. If you can’t control it, who can?”

“There’s an answer to that, but you won’t like it.”

“Nobody,” Holden said. “You’re telling me nobody.”

“The thing that’s turning all this crap on? It just does stuff. If the Rocinante arms and fires a torpedo at someone, what are the odds a wrench in her machine shop can bring the torpedo back? That’s who you’re talking to.”

“God damn it, Miller,” Holden said, then ran out of energy mid-sentence. It was less fun being the chosen one and prophet when the gods were violent and capricious and their spokesman was insane and powerless. The rain under his clothes had started to warm up, leaving him feeling covered in slime.

The detective lowered his head, frowning. Thinking.

“You might be able to sneak past them,” Miller said.

“How?”

“Well, the defenses are keying on threats. So don’t be threatening. You know the network gets itchy with high-energy sources.”

“No power sources,” Holden said. “Yeah, the shuttle had reactors. Don’t get much higher as energy sources go.”

“Slow is good too. Not sure if the defenses here key on kinetic energy, but safer to assume they do.”

“Okay,” Holden said, feeling a brief moment of relief and hope. “Okay, I can work with that. Food, filters, meds, we should be able to bring all those down without pissing it off. Slow drops with airfoils and parachutes. They can rig that from orbit.”

“Worth a try, anyway,” Miller said without enthusiasm. “So, about this dead spot I need to go north for. You won’t like this either, but there’s a way to—” He vanished.

“Cap,” Amos said, coming around the corner of the tower. “Sorry to interrupt, but that cute scientist is looking for you.”

It took Holden a moment. “The biologist?”

“Well, the geologist ain’t bad, I guess, but he’s not my preferred flavor.”

“What does she want?”

“To make more puppy dog eyes at you?” Amos said. “How the fuck should I know?”

“Don’t be an asshole.”

“Go ask her yourself, then.”

“All right,” Holden said. “But I need Murtry first. Seen him?”

“Directing traffic by the front door last I saw,” Amos replied. “Need me for that?”

Holden noticed that Amos’ hand fell to the butt of his pistol when he asked. “What else have you been working on?”

“Death-slug patrol.”

“Go do that. I’ll chat with Murtry.”

Amos gave a mock salute and trotted off toward the tower entrance. Holden pulled out his hand terminal and left a message for Alex filling him in on the supply drop plan. As Amos had said, Holden found Murtry talking to a few members of his security team near the tower’s entrance.

“We’ve found some buried foundations,” Wei was saying, pointing over her shoulder in the direction First Landing had once been. “But unless these people had basements, there’s nothing left attached to them.”

“What about the mines?” Murtry asked her.

“What isn’t filled with mud is submerged,” Wei replied.

“Well,” Murtry said, cocking his head to one side and giving her a humorless smile. “Do we have people who know how to hold their breath?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then send them down to see if anything we can use is under that water, soldier.”

“Sir,” Wei replied and snapped off a salute. She and two other security people ran off, leaving Murtry and Holden alone.

“Captain Holden,” Murtry said, keeping his empty smile.

“Mister Murtry.”

“How can I help you today?”

“I think I might have a solution to our resupply problem,” Holden said. “If you’re willing to work with me on it.”

Murtry’s humorless grin relaxed a bit. “That’s pretty high on my to-do list. Fill me in.”

Holden summed it all up—the hypothesis of the alien systems tracking high-energy sources, the possibility of slow air drops. He couched it in terms of what they’d seen in the slow zone the first time humanity had gone through the gates and left Miller out. Murtry stood utterly still as he spoke, his expression not changing so much as a millimeter. When Holden finished, Murtry nodded once.

“I’ll call up to the Israel and start having them put packages together,” Murtry said.

Holden breathed a sigh of relief. “I have to admit, I kind of expected you to fight me on this.”

“Why? I’m not a monster, Captain. I will kill if it’s necessary to do my job, but your Mister Burton’s much the same. All of these people dying down here helps my cause not at all. I just want the squatters to go away as soon as we figure out the power problem.”

“Great,” Holden said, and then a moment later, “You don’t actually care about them, do you? All this time you were fighting against them. Now you’re willing to help, but it’s only because it’s helping them leave. You’d be just as happy if they all died.”

“That would also solve my problems, yes,” Murtry said.

“Just wanted to make sure you knew I knew,” Holden said, biting back the asshole that tried to follow.

He found Amos working with the locals on death-slug defense. They were using the wadded ponchos and plastic water jugs split into squares to block off the smaller entrances to the alien ruins. They put sheeting over the windows, stuffed shirts and torn pant legs into the smaller holes, and dug trenches in front of the large openings. The trenches filled with muddy rainwater like tiny moats, and the slugs avoided them.

Without a word, Holden pitched in with the trench digging. It was unpleasant work, with rain and muck getting under his clothes and chafing his skin as he moved. They dug with makeshift tools made out of tent poles and flat pieces of plastic that fell apart periodically and had to be put back together. The soil was stony and heavy with moisture and the occasional slug corpse. It was the sort of miserable physical labor that drove all other thoughts from Holden’s mind while he worked. He didn’t think about starving to death or Naomi trapped in a prison cell drifting slowly toward a fiery death or his own inability to make anything on the planet safe or sane or better.

It was perfect.

Carol Chiwewe asked him to check around to the back of the tower for a tarp they had left behind, and Miller ruined it all by reappearing the second he rounded the corner away from other eyes.

“—get into the material transfer network,” he said as if he’d never stopped talking. “I think we can use it to move north to the spot we’re looking for, or at least get pretty close.”

“Dammit, Miller, I was this close to not thinking about you.”

Miller looked him over with a critical eye, taking in his soggy muck-covered exterior. “You look like hell, kid.”

“See the lengths I’m willing to go for a moment’s peace?”

“Impressive. So when can we head out?”

“You don’t quit,” Holden said. He walked across the muddy ground to the tarp he’d been looking for. It was covered with the deadly slugs. He grabbed it by one corner and slowly lifted, trying to get all the slugs to slide off away from him. Miller followed, hands in pockets, watching him work.

“Watch out for that one,” he said, pointing at a slug close to Holden’s fingers.

“I see it.”

“You’re no good to me if you drop dead.”

“I said I see it.”

“So, about going north,” Miller continued. “Not sure how much of the material transfer network is actually functioning, so it won’t necessarily be an easy trip. We should start as soon as we can.”

“Material transfer network?”

“Big underground transport system. Faster than walking. Ready to go?”

The slug slid a few centimeters closer to his fingers, and Holden dropped the tarp with a curse. “Miller,” he said, rounding on him suddenly. “I am so far from giving a shit about your needs I can’t even see it from here.”

The old detective had the grace to look chagrined before he gave a tired shrug. “It might help.”

“What,” Holden said, “might help?”

“Going north. Whatever’s up there seems to damp out the network. Maybe we can use it to kill the defenses and get your ship off lockdown.”

“If you’re lying to me to get me to do what you want, I swear I will have Alex tear the Roci apart looking for whatever clump of goo you’re connected to and take a flamethrower to it.”

The ghost grimaced, but didn’t back down. “I’m not lying because I’m not making any assertions here. This dead spot is exactly what I’m saying it is. A dead spot. Everything else? That’s guesswork. But it’s more than you’ve got now, right? Help me, and if there’s a way for me to do it, I’ll help you. That’s the only way this works.”

Holden kicked the slug off of his corner of the tarp and waited for the rain to wash its slime trail away, then picked it back up and resumed sliding the rest of the creatures off.

“Even if I wanted to, I can’t yet,” he said. “Not until I’m sure the colonists aren’t going to die here. Let me get some supply drops safely down, get everyone in a decent shelter away from the death-slugs, and then we’ll talk about it.”

“Deal,” Miller said, then disappeared in a puff of blue fireflies. One of the men from the colony, a tall skinny Belter with dark skin and an amazing shock of white hair, rounded the corner.

“What you doin’? Kenned babosa malo got you.”

“Sorry,” Holden said, giving the tarp a sharp snap to flick the rest of the slugs off it. He helped the Belter fold it up.

Only he’d have to stop thinking of them as Belters, wouldn’t he? These people lived on a planet, in a solar system across the galaxy from Sol. Belter was no longer a word with any meaning for them. They called themselves colonists now. And someday, if they were able to stay on Ilus and actually make a home of it, what? Ilusites?

“Médico buscarte,” the Ilusian said.

“Lucia?”

“Laa laa, RCE puta.”

“Oh, right, Amos told me,” Holden said. “Guess I better go find out what she wants.”

The Belter, the Ilusite, whatever he was, muttered “puta” again and spat to one side. Holden walked through the miserable warm rain past the trenches full of water and dead slugs and the plastic glued over the walls and the cracks stuffed with muddy rags. He hopped over the last trench to get inside the tower, then scraped the mud off his boots and followed the passageways to the structure’s large central chamber. Lucia was there working with the chemical analysis team on the water purifying project. She shot him a tight smile as he entered, and he started walking toward her simply because she seemed like the only one happy to see him.

“Holden. I mean, um, Jim,” Elvi said, stepping in front of him. “We have a problem?”

“Several,” Holden said.

“No, I mean a new one. In about four days everyone in the colony is going to be blind.”