Cibola Burn

Chapter Fifty-Six: Holden

The Rocinante had really taken a beating.

The ship had a variety of puncture wounds in the outer hull all along her port side. Holden could see the bright spots where Basia and Naomi had replaced damaged thruster ports, but they hadn’t had the time or materials to patch all the holes. It was a testament to Alex’s skill as a pilot that he’d been able to bring them down at all without burning up. At least one PDC housing was riddled with damage, and the weapon inside was probably unsafe to use. And there was a long scar across the top of the ship where, according to Naomi, an improvised missile had hit.

Holden cheerfully noted each future repair on his itemized bill for Avasarala.

The Rocinante sat on a wide stretch of nothing half a kilometer from where First Landing had once stood. The frames of new construction were starting to appear. People, building on the ruins of what had come before, just like they always did. So many things had been lost, but it was the missing people that hurt the most.

Just like they always did.

Holden noted a spot of minor damage on the drive cone, then came around the stern of the ship to find a pair of Belters throwing up a temporary shelter a dozen yards away. A man in his early thirties was running cable while an older woman hammered spikes into the muddy ground. A second woman stood by with a long pole to flick away any slugs that might get too close.

“You can’t put that there,” Holden said, walking toward them and making a shooing gesture. “Ask Administrator Chiwewe where to put your tent.”

“This spot hasn’t been claimed by anyone,” the man said. “We have just as much right—”

“Yes, yes. I’m not telling you where you can and can’t build. But in a few hours this ship is going to lift off, and it will flatten your little tent.”

“Oh,” the man said, sheepish. “Right. We’ll just wait for you to go.”

“Thank you. You folks have a good afternoon.” Holden gave them a wave and a smile and headed off toward New First Landing. These people were still the same ones who had been willing to fight RCE to the death to hang on to their claim. They weren’t going to put up with being bossed around by outsiders. But the catastrophe had at least taught them to respect high-speed winds.

When he returned to the rectangle of six partially built structures that would eventually become New First Landing’s town square, Carol was in a heated discussion with someone in an RCE engineering uniform and Naomi. Amos stood nearby, staring at nothing, a faint smile on his broad face. The medical apparatus on his leg and hand made him look like a cyborg. The bandage on his neck made him look like a pirate. Amos wore serious injury better than anyone else Holden knew. Fayez, by comparison, was still walking with a limp. Or maybe he was just making excuses to keep his arm around Elvi Okoye’s shoulder.

Basia, Lucia, and Jacek were clumped up a respectful distance away from the argument, gripping each other like their lives depended on unbroken contact.

“I don’t care what it says in the book,” Carol was saying. “I want all six of these structures on one generator. We only have two. I need the other for the rest of the town.”

“These are your highest-use buildings,” the engineer replied. “The loads will be at the limit of—”

“They build a little slack in there,” Naomi said over the top of him. “And that’s what the administrator wants, so give it to her.”

The engineer rolled his eyes and shrugged. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Everyone getting along?” Holden asked as he approached.

“Land of milk and honey, Cap’n,” Amos said. “Peaceful as a sleeping kitten.”

“How’s she looking?” Naomi asked, stepping away from the group as their argument relaunched behind her.

“Pretty beat up.”

“We did our best.”

“You guys were amazing,” Holden said, taking her hand. “But next time don’t let the bad guys capture you.”

“Hey,” Naomi said with mock outrage, “I rescued myself.”

“Been meaning to ask about that. How exactly did you persuade your jailer to come over to our side?”

Naomi moved a step closer and grinned down at him. “It was prison. People do all sorts of things they wouldn’t normally do in extreme circumstances like that. You sure you want to know?”

“I don’t care even a little,” Holden said, then pulled her into a hug. She almost collapsed against him.

“God, don’t let go,” she whispered in his ear. “My knees are killing me. Another hour of walking around in this gravity and I’m going to need ligament replacements.”

“Then let’s get the hell out of here.”

Holden leaned around Naomi enough to catch Amos’ eye, then jerked his head toward the ship. The mechanic nodded and smiled and began hobbling around the square loading up the last of their gear.

“Is our prisoner on board?”

“Amos locked him in medical a couple hours ago,” Naomi said, then let her entire skeleton relax with a long groan.

“Can you walk back to the ship?” Holden asked her.

“Yep. Say your goodbyes.”

Holden let her go, watching her stagger off on unsteady legs for a few moments before he turned back to shake hands with Carol Chiwewe. She and the RCE man had moved their argument to sewage systems and water treatment. After a brief goodbye and good luck to them both, he walked over to Basia and his family.

“Doctor,” he said to Lucia, shaking her hand. “Could not have survived this without you. None of us could.” Next he shook Jacek’s hand. Finally, he shook Basia’s. “Basia. Thanks for your help with the ship. And thank you for trying to help Naomi. You’re a brave man. Farewell and fair weather.” The roiling storm clouds and gentle drizzle of rain made a joke of it, and he grinned at them.

“What?” Basia said. “But I thought you had to take me to—”

Holden was already walking away, but he stopped and said, “Work hard. Next time I come to this planet, I want to be able to get a decent cup of coffee.”

“We will,” Lucia replied. Holden could hear her tears in her voice, but the rain hid them on her face.

He wouldn’t miss the planet, but he would miss the people. Just like always.

On the Rocinante, liftoff pressed Holden into his crash couch like the ship was welcoming him back with a hug. As soon as they hit low orbit, he floated out of his chair and down the crew ladder to the galley. Thirty-five seconds later, the coffee pot was gurgling to itself and the rich aroma of brewing filled the air. It made him feel giddy.

Naomi floated in. “The first step is admitting that you have a problem.”

“I do,” he replied. “But I’ve just spent a couple months down on a planet that spent the entire time trying to kill me. And I have a shitty job I have to go do, so I’m going to take a moment and make a cup of coffee first.”

“Make me one too,” she said, then pulled herself over to the wall panel and started paging through status reports.

“Make it three,” Amos said, dragging himself into the room. “I got a ton of shit to fix because you guys let someone use my girl for target practice.”

“Hey, we did our best—” Naomi started, but was cut off by the comm panel squawking.

“You guys makin’ coffee down there?” Alex said from the cockpit. “Have someone bring me up a bulb.”

While Amos and Naomi began putting together a list of the repair work they could do during the long transit back to Medina Station, Holden prepared four large bulbs of coffee. He didn’t mind. It was very comforting doing something simple and domestic to make other people happy. Black for himself. Two whiteners, two sweeteners for Amos. One whitener for Alex. One sweetener for Naomi. He handed the finished bulbs out.

“Can you take this up to Alex?” he asked, handing a second bulb to Naomi. Something in his voice or his face made her frown with worry.

“Are you okay?” she said, taking the bulb but not leaving. Behind her, Amos took his coffee awkwardly in his mangled hand and headed aft with it toward his machine shop, looking at the task list on his terminal and muttering about how much work he had to do.

“Like I said, shitty job needs doing.”

“Can I help?”

“I’d like to do this one alone, if that’s okay.”

“Of course it is,” she said, then kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I’ll look you up later.”

Holden went up to the airlock and storage deck and found a self-sealing vacuum package, a trowel, and an EVA suit for doing external repairs with a portable blowtorch. He climbed into the suit, then clumped through the ship to the cargo bay.

To what he was pretty sure was Miller’s final resting place.

He waited in the cargo bay airlock while the outer doors cycled open, putting the compartment into total vacuum, then went in. If something went wrong, if what was left of the protomolecule on his ship decided to defend itself, he’d be in vacuum with an airlock blocking entry into his ship. He sealed the airlock behind him, and told Alex to lock out local control on the door until he called and asked him to open it. Alex agreed without asking why.

And then Holden began methodically tearing the cargo bay apart.

Five hours later, and one air recharge for the suit, he found it. A small blob of flesh no larger than the tip of Holden’s finger, attached to the underside of a power conduit behind a detachable panel in the cargo bay’s bulkhead. When they’d first spotted the protomolecule monster that had hitchhiked onto the Roci from Ganymede, it had been less than half a meter from where he found the polyp. It made his skin crawl to realize how long they’d been lugging this last remnant of that monster around on his ship.

Using the trowel, he scraped the polyp off the conduit, then put both it and the tool into the vacuum bag and activated the charge to seal it. He blowtorched the conduit for several minutes, heating the metal red to kill any residue left by the scraping. Then he dug through the supplies in the cargo area until he found a reload for the ship’s probe launcher, opened the probe up, and stuffed the bag inside the casing.

He linked his suit radio to the Roci’s general shipwide channel. “Naomi, you around?”

“Here,” she said after a moment. “In ops. What do you need?”

“Can you grab manual control on probe, uh, 117A43?”

“Sure, what do you want me to do with it?”

“I’m going to chuck it out the cargo bay door. Can you give it about five minutes, then send it into Ilus’ sun?”

“Okay,” she replied, not asking the question he could hear in her voice she wanted to. He killed the radio.

The probe was a small electromagnetic and infrared sensor with a rudimentary drive system. The kind naval vessels used to see what might be hiding on the other side of a planet. It wasn’t much bigger than an old Earth fire hydrant. It had heft, though. When Holden pushed it over to the cargo bay door, it was difficult to stop it again.

Outside, Ilus spun by, the angry brown of her cloud layer starting to show some spots of white, and even the occasional flash of blue from the ocean underneath. It’d be a while, but the planet would bounce back. Mimic lizards would return and start competing for space with human children and those annoying little bugs that bit and then fell over dead. Two alien biologies fighting for space. Or three. Or four. Nothing that Ilus hadn’t already experienced a few billion years before. New fight, same as the old fight.

Holden put a gloved hand on the probe floating next to him, and pointed the other at the planet.

“That’s you, man. That’s the second world you’ve saved. And once again, we have nothing to offer you in return. I kind of wish I’d been nicer to you.”

He laughed at himself, because he could almost hear the old detective in his head saying, You could also have my Viking funeral not be all about how you feel.

“Right. See you on the other side,” Holden didn’t really believe in another side. Nothing after death but infinite black. Or, he hadn’t, anyway. Sure, out-of-control alien technology might be involved, but maybe, just maybe, sometimes there was something else. “Goodbye, my friend.”

He gave the probe a hard push, and it drifted slowly away from the ship. Holden watched it dwindle until it was just a tiny point of light reflected from Ilus’ star. Then it lit up for a few seconds with a short drive flare and streaked away from the planet. Holden waited until he couldn’t see it anymore, then shut the cargo bay doors.

He stripped the vacuum suit off in the airlock after it cycled. Naomi was waiting for him when the inner airlock door opened.

“Hey,” he said.

“Is it done?”

“Yeah, I’m all done down here.”

“Then come to my room, sailor,” she said. “There’s something there I want to show you.”

Holden floated half a meter above his bed, his body soaked with sweat. Naomi drifted next to him, long and lean, hair wild from their lovemaking. He touched his own scalp, feeling the weird sweaty points his own hair had become.

“I must look a fright,” he said.

“Hedgehogs are cute. You’re fine.” Naomi tapped one long toe against the bulkhead and drifted a few centimeters closer to the atmospheric controls. She aimed the airflow vent at them both, and Holden’s skin tingled as the cool air dried him.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to take enough showers to wash Ilus off of me,” he added after a moment.

“I was in a brig for a couple of weeks. Trade you.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Not your fault. Just bad luck. Did you know that the security guy Havelock was Miller’s partner on Ceres?”

Holden touched the bed so he could rotate his body and look at her. “You’re shitting me.”

“Nope. Before we met him, of course.”

“Wish I’d known.”

“You think you do, but it would have been weird.”

“Probably right,” Holden said, then sighed and stretched until his joints popped. “I’m never doing that again.”

“Which that?”

“Leaving you. When I thought I was going to die down on Ilus and you were going to die in orbit and we wouldn’t even be able to hold each other when it happened, it was the worst thing I could possibly think of.”

“Yeah,” she agreed with a nod. “I understand.”

“I promise it won’t happen again.”

“Okay. Why’d you let Basia go?”

Holden frowned. The truth was, he wasn’t really sure why he had. And it was something he’d been trying hard not to think about too much.

“Because… I like him. And I like Lucia. And breaking up their family wouldn’t solve anything. I bought his story about blowing the landing pad early to try and save people. Plus, he’s not going to be setting any more bombs. And the one thing Murtry told me that made me really think is that we’re beyond the borders of civilization right now. Black-and-white legal arguments don’t make a lot of sense here. Someday, maybe.”

“The frontier doesn’t have laws, it has cops?” Naomi said, but she smiled when she said it.

“Ouch,” Holden replied and she laughed.

They drifted together in companionable silence for a few minutes. “Speaking of which, I should probably go see our prisoner,” Holden finally said.

“To gloat?” Naomi said, poking him in the ribs. “You love that thing at the end where you gloat.”

“It’s what makes this all worth doing.”

“Go,” she said, putting her feet against the bulkhead and then pushing him toward the closet with her hands. “Get dressed. And comb your hair.”

“I’ll be back soon,” he agreed, pulling clothes out of the drawers. “I have another thing I want you to show me.”

“Making up for lost time.”

“Damn straight.”

Holden stopped off at the head to brush his teeth and wash his face before visiting Murtry in the med bay. While he worked to get the knots and tangles out of his hair, Amos drifted in and then just waited.

“Am I in the way or something?” Holden asked. “Do you need privacy?” Amos had never been shy with his toilet usage before.

“Naomi says you’re going to see Murtry,” Amos said, keeping his tone carefully neutral.

“Yep.”

“You told me I wasn’t allowed to go see him.”

“Nope.”

“Can I go with you, then?” Amos asked.

Holden almost said no, then thought about it for a minute and shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”

Murtry’s leg wound hadn’t been particularly serious, but Holden’s bullet had shattered his right humerus, so they were keeping him locked up in the medical bay while the expert system tracked the bone regrowth. The RCE security chief had his left arm handcuffed to the crash couch. When the arm was better healed, they’d move him to one of the crew cabins where Amos had added exterior locks.

“Captain Holden,” Murtry said when they entered. “Mister Burton.”

“So,” Holden said as though picking up a conversation they’d started earlier. Which, in a way, they had. “Got a message from my pal at the UN a few hours ago. She can’t wait to meet you. We’ll be dropping you at the UN complex in Lovell city on Luna. I took another prisoner there once, and that person has since ceased to exist as far as the rest of the solar system knows. Hey, maybe they can get you two adjoining cells.”

“You keep talking like I’ve broken the law. I haven’t,” Murtry said.

“There’s a really smart legal team on Earth right now trying to think of some. They have almost two years to work it out. Enjoy the trip back.”

“And I,” Amos said, “am here to tell you why you won’t.”

“I can’t hear this,” Holden said. “He’s my prisoner.”

“Maybe you should leave, then,” Amos said.

Holden stared at Murtry, and the man stared back. “Okay, Amos. Meet me in the galley in a minute.”

“Roger that, Cap,” Amos said, smiling at the prisoner as he said it.

Worried that he might have just killed the man, Holden waited around the corner outside the med bay door.

“Going to beat a helpless man in his hospital bed just because I got the better of you?” Murtry asked, trying to hide his unease with contempt.

“Oh, goodness no,” Amos said, mock hurt in his tone. “That’s all good. Smart move taking me from behind. I don’t hate the game. I appreciate a good player.”

“Then—” Murtry started, but Amos kept speaking.

“But you made me kill Wei. I liked Wei.”

The silence between the two men stretched, and Holden almost went back into the room, expecting to find Amos choking the man to death. Then Amos spoke again.

“And when I do finally beat you, you won’t be helpless. Think that’ll matter?”

Holden didn’t wait to hear the rest of what was said.