Cibola Burn

Chapter Fifty-Three: Holden

When Murtry pulled himself through a gap in the machinery and walked across the ledge to the narrow bridge, Holden was waiting for him on the other side. His hand was draped casually on the butt of his gun. The RCE security chief gave Holden a vague nod, then carefully examined his surroundings. He looked down into the hundred-meter chasm, and tapped the narrow tonguelike bridge with the tip of one boot. He spun once slowly, peering carefully into the crevices created by the cramped machines. When he was through, he looked at Holden again and gave him a flat, meaningless smile. Holden noticed his hand wasn’t far from his own weapon.

“You came by yourself,” Murtry said. “The better plan is to put one person in the open with a second hidden behind the target.”

“That the one you use?” Holden asked. He tried to match Murtry’s casual nonchalance and felt like he mostly succeeded.

“It works,” Murtry replied with a nod. “So how does this go down?”

“I’ve been wondering that myself.”

“Well,” Murtry said with an almost imperceptible shrug, “I need to get over there and stop whatever you people are cooking up. Doctor Okoye seems to think you are going to break the defense network down.”

“Yeah,” Holden replied. “Pretty much am. Call it saving people.”

Murtry nodded but didn’t speak for a moment. Holden waited for him to reach for his gun. The distance between them, the width of the chasm, was just over five meters. An easy shot at the range. Harder when you were rushing because the other guy was shooting back. The lighting was good and Murtry wasn’t wearing a helmet. Risk the head shot? The RCE man’s armor looked pretty chewed up. The blast patterns on it made Holden suspect that was the work of Amos’ autoshotgun. The chest shot was easier, but it was possible the damage to the armor was mostly cosmetic, in which case his sidearm wasn’t going to do much.

Murtry winked at him, and Holden suddenly felt like the man was reading his mind as he calculated the best way to kill him. “I can’t let that happen,” Murtry said. His shrug was almost apologetic. “By charter, this all belongs to RCE. You don’t get to break it.”

Holden shook his head in disbelief. “You really are crazy. If I don’t break it, our ships fall out of the sky and we all die.”

“Maybe. Maybe we die. Maybe we find some other way to stay alive. Either way, the RCE claim remains in force.” Murtry waved one hand, not his gun hand, around the room. “All this is worth trillions intact. We’ve made incredible advances in materials science just by looking at the rings. How much will working technology do for us? This is what we came here for, Captain. You don’t get to decide what we do with it.”

“Trillions,” Holden said, unable to keep the disbelief out of his voice. “I’ve never seen a dead person spend money.”

“Sure you have. They call it a foundation or a bequest. Happens all the time.”

“This is all so you can make a bequest?”

Murtry’s smile widened a millimeter.

“No,” he said. “I came to conquer a new world. This is how you do that. I understand what I’m doing seems cruel and inflexible to you, but it’s what this situation requires. The tools you’re using here are the ones that let you get along once civilization takes over. They’re the wrong shape for this work. I have no illusions about what it will take to carve out a place in this new frontier. It will take sacrifices, and it will take blood, and things we wouldn’t do back where everything’s regulated and controlled will have to happen here. You think we can do it with committee meetings and press releases.”

“I wonder if this will sound like a compelling argument to the people dying in orbit right now.”

“I’m sorry for them. I truly am. But they knew the risks when they got on board. And their deaths will have meaning,” Murtry said.

“Meaning?”

“They are the sign that we didn’t give up a centimeter. What we came for, we held to the last gasp. This isn’t something humanity can do halfway, Captain. It never has been. Even Cortez burned his ships.”

Holden’s laugh was half disbelief and half contempt. “What is it with you guys and worshiping mass murderers?”

Murtry frowned. A swirl of bright blue lights rose and fell between them like dust blowing down a desert street.

“How do you mean?” Murtry asked.

“A guy I once knew tried to justify his life choices to me by comparing himself to Genghis Khan.”

“I take it you didn’t find his argument compelling?” Murtry asked with a smirk.

“No,” Holden said. “And then a friend of mine shot him in the face.”

“An ironic rebuttal to an argument about necessary violence.”

“I thought so too, at the time.”

Murtry reached up and scratched his head with his left hand, his short greasy hair shifting into a configuration vaguely resembling Miller’s carapace. A sculpture of curves and spikes. He looked at his fingertips in disgust and wiped them on his armor. Holden waited. Somewhere far behind them, a strange chittering sound rose like cicadas on a summer afternoon.

“So,” Murtry finally said. “I’m going to need to come over there.” He gestured at Holden’s side of the chasm with his chin. His right hand still hovered over his gun.

“Nope,” Holden replied.

Murtry nodded, as if expecting this. “You going to arrest me, Sheriff?”

“Actually, I was kind of thinking I’d shoot you.”

“In the face, no doubt.”

“If that’s what I can hit.”

“Seems like a radical shift,” Murtry said, “for a man who wants to tame the frontier with mediation and committee meetings.”

“Oh, no, this isn’t about that. Elvi says you killed Amos. I wouldn’t kill a single person for your fucking frontier, but for my crew? Yeah, I’ll kill you for that.”

“They say revenge is empty.”

“This is my first try at it,” Holden said. “Forgive me if my opinions on it are fairly unformed.”

“Will it change things if your boy isn’t dead? He was still shooting when I left him.”

The wave of relief that hit Holden at this almost doubled him over. If Murtry had pulled his pistol and shot at that moment the fight would have been over. But he managed to keep his face blank and his knees from buckling.

“Is he hurt?”

“Oh my, yes. Pretty badly. He killed one of mine before he went down. For a guy who wants to solve problems without violence, you travel in dangerous company.”

“Yeah,” Holden said, unable to keep the smile off his face. “But he’s a great mechanic. What about the other one? Fayez?”

“Down, not dead. I didn’t get to finish him before your boy started blazing away. Neither one was walking, so I just left.”

The matter-of-fact discussion of why Murtry hadn’t just killed Fayez chilled Holden’s blood.

“So here’s a deal,” Murtry said. “I let you cross to this side and you can go check on your man Amos. Save the egghead from bleeding out, too. You have my word I won’t interfere.”

“But,” Holden replied, “you head over to my side and stop Elvi from doing what I need her to do.”

“Seems a fair trade.”

Holden stopped just resting his hand on the butt of his pistol and wrapped it around the grip. He turned his body, getting his feet in position. Murtry gave him just the hint of a frown.

“No,” Holden said, and waited for the shooting to start.

“So,” Murtry said, not moving at all. “You know what people always forget about the new world?”

Holden didn’t answer.

“Civilization has a built-in lag time. Just like light delay. We fly out here to this new place, and because we’re civilized, we think civilization comes with us. It doesn’t. We build it. And while we’re building it, a whole lot of people die. You think the American west came with railroads and post offices and jails? Those things were built, and at the cost of thousands of lives. They were built on the corpses of everyone who was there before the Spanish came. You don’t get one without the other. And it’s people like me that do it. People like you come later. All of this?” Murtry waved his left hand at himself and Holden. “This is because you showed up too early. Come back after I’ve built a post office and we’ll talk.”

“You done?” Holden asked.

“So this is our day, I take it,” Murtry said. “No way but this way? Even if I didn’t kill your man?”

“Maybe you killed Amos and Fayez and maybe you didn’t. Maybe you’re right about the frontier and I’m just a naïve idiot. Maybe every single person you killed on this world had it coming and you were always in the right.”

“But you have people in orbit and saving them is all that counts?”

“I was going to say, ‘But you’re a flaming asshole,’” Holden said. “But the other works too. You don’t cross this bridge.”

“Well then,” Murtry said. He shifted his stance and his eyes narrowed. The chittering grew louder. Below them, the protomolecule fireflies swirled and shuddered. “Well then.”

Holden smiled at him. Mimicking Alex’s drawl he said, “Come on, Black Bart, you always knew it would end this way.”

Murtry laughed. “You’re a funny—”

Holden shot him.

Murtry staggered, clutching at his chest and fumbling for his gun. Holden put his second shot into the man’s right arm. He tried for the elbow and only managed to get the bicep. Just as good. Murtry dropped the gun onto the bridge in front of him. When the RCE man went to one knee to try and pick it up with his left hand, Holden shot him in the leg. Murtry pitched forward onto the bridge, sending the gun tumbling away into the abyss. Murtry slid to the side, going over the edge, but managed to throw his left arm onto the metal mesh and stop his fall.

The whole thing had taken about three seconds.

As the last echoing report of the gunshot faded, Holden walked out onto the bridge. The uncanny musculature pressed at the soles of his feet. Murtry clung to the mesh with his one good hand, his face tight with pain, but still managing a mocking grin.

“You got the balls to finish this, boy?” he said. “Or are you going to let gravity do it?”

“Oh, no,” Holden said, then knelt down to grab Murtry’s left wrist and haul him toward the ledge. “I’m not killing you. At least not until I’m sure about Amos.”

Holden stepped off the bridge onto Murtry’s side of the chasm and pulled the RCE man until his torso was up over the edge. Murtry scrabbled the rest of the way up with his one good arm.

“Then what?” he gasped out, lying on his back next to the pit and trying to catch his breath. A small pool of blood was forming under his right arm and left leg.

“I take you back,” Holden said, sitting down next to Murtry and patting him companionably on the head. “And I burn you down in public, with news coverage of the entire thing. Then we throw you in a hole so deep everyone forgets you ever existed. No fame and glory for you, Cortez. Montezuma wasn’t impressed by your fire stick this time.”

“Everything I did was within the bounds of the UN charter,” Murtry said. “I acted responsibly to protect the employees and investments of Royal Charter Energy.”

“Okay,” Holden said, then pulled out his medkit and sprayed bandages onto Murtry’s two bleeding injuries. “So you’ve got your defense strategy mapped out. That’s proactive thinking. Lawyers’ll be happy to hear it. Wanna hear mine?”

“Sure,” Murtry said, and probed at the wound on his arm. He grimaced, but no blood squirted out.

“The most powerful person on earth owes me a favor, and I’m going to tell her you’re an asshole who tried his best to make her look bad. It’s just a sketch of a plan at this point, but I think it has potential.”

“That’s what passes for justice with you?”

“Apparently so.”

Murtry opened his mouth, but whatever he was about to say was lost when the factory exploded into chaos. A wall of blue fireflies shot up from the chasm next to them, and then streaked across the cavernous factory space to disappear into small vents in the walls. All around, the cacophony of massive machines coming to life filled the air. Something flew out of the shadows by the ceiling and swooped low over Holden’s head. He threw himself across Murtry, not unaware of the irony in using his own body to shield a man he’d just shot three times.

“What is it?” Murtry said.

“Elvi,” Holden replied. “It’s Elvi.”