Cibola Burn

That couldn’t be good. “What thing?”

Coop guided him away from the work site, smiling and nodding at the few other night-shift crew they passed. Just two chums out for a walk and a conversation. When they were out of earshot of everyone, he said, “Seen that RCE girl going up to the ruins. Sent Jacek to check on it.”

“Sent Jacek,” Basia echoed. Coop nodded.

“Good kid. Reliable.”

Basia stopped, pulling his arm away. “Don’t —” Involve my son in this. Before he could get the words out, Coop waved it off and kept talking.

“Está important.” Coop stepped close, voice lowering. “She went up to the ruins, then went straight to the RCE goons. Jacek says they’re planning to wait for us up there. Catch the resistance red-handed.”

“Then we don’t go back,” Basia said. It seemed so simple. No reason to panic.

“You crazy, primo? Toda alles been up there. Trace evidence up the ass. They wait long enough, they get bored and bring a real crime scene team down, we all done. All of us, y veh unless you stopped shedding skin when you were there.”

“Then what?”

“We go up first. A flare on that blasting powder, boom. No more evidence.”

“When?”

Coop laughed. “What you think? Next week some time? Now, coyo. Got to go now. Mediator’s landing in hours-not-days. Don’t want this to be what he sees when he steps off the ship, do you? You a team lead, you can take one of the carts. We got to get that shit and get gone.” Coop snapped his fingers impatiently. “Jetzt.”

Coop spoke about insanity like blowing up their stash of mining explosives with such an air of self-assurance and certainty, Basia found it hard to argue. Sure, blowing up the alien ruins was crazy. But Coop was right. If they found the explosives and traced them back to Basia, they’d know. He didn’t want to, but he had to. So he would.

“Okay,” he said and walked toward the cart charging station. Only one was left, and because the universe was a cruel and mocking place, it was the same one he’d been driving the night of the bombing. It still had the dents and scorch marks it had picked up that night. The scorch marks everyone in the colony was careful not to ask about.

Coop waited impatiently for him to unlock it and back it out of the stall, then hopped in and started tapping out a fast drumbeat on the plastic dashboard. “Let’s go let’s go let’s go.”

Basia went.

Halfway to the alien ruins, they came across four more of Coop’s inner circle. Pete and Scotty and Cate and Ibrahim. No Zadie. Her little boy had come down with a nasty eye infection, and she wasn’t around much lately. Cate had a duffel bag she threw into the back of the cart with a metallic thump, then the four of them climbed in after it.

“That the stuff?” Coop asked, and Cate nodded and slapped the side of the cart to let Basia know he could drive. Basia didn’t ask what the stuff was. Too late to start questioning.

The ruins looked as dark and deserted as they ever did, but Coop made Basia drive the long way round to come at the site from the side opposite the town. “Just to be safe,” he said.

When Cate pulled open the duffel, Basia wasn’t surprised to see it filled with guns. The Barbapiccola hadn’t been a warship. They hadn’t left Ganymede with a great store of weapons, but what there was had come down to the surface when First Landing was begun. This looked like most of them. Cate pulled out a shotgun and started loading fat plastic shells into it. She was a tall, rawboned woman with a wide jaw and a permanent frown line between her eyes. She looked natural holding a gun. Like a soldier. When Basia picked one up, a short-barreled automatic pistol of some kind, he felt like a child playing dress-up.

“You’ll need this, killer,” Ibrahim said and tossed him a narrow metallic object. It took Basia several seconds to realize it was the magazine for his pistol. It only took two tries to slide it in the correct way. Blow the explosives. Clear the site. Destroy the evidence. That had never really been the plan, and somewhere in his gut, he’d known.

While the rest of the group finished readying their weapons, Basia stood a few meters from the cart, staring up at the night sky. One of the points of light was the drive tail of the Rocinante, the ship Jim Holden was flying in on. The mediator. The one who was supposed to keep the colonists and RCE people from killing each other. He wondered how far out Holden was. He wondered if the man knew he was already too late. Too late for the second time. Holden had been too late on Ganymede too.

Basia’s son Katoa hadn’t been the only one who was sick. Whose immune system had faltered and failed under the thousand different stressors of life outside a gravity well. There had been a group of them who’d come to Doctor Strickland. The man who was supposed to know the answers. Katoa, Tobias, Annamarie, Mei. Mei, who had lived. Who James Holden had rescued from the labs on Io.