Cibola Burn

Zeb stopped bleeding. That was almost me, Basia thought, but the thought had no emotional content yet. No weight. It was like a puff of acrid smoke passing through his mind, and then gone again.

“Help us drag these bodies out back, primo,” Coop said, patting him on the back. “Zadie’s washing the place down with corrosives and digestive enzymes, kill the evidence, but they ain’t gonna eat the big chunks, eh?”

Basia helped. It took them several hours to bury the corpses of the five women and men in the hard-packed dirt behind the alien ruins. Coop assured them that the next dust storm would remove all signs that anyone had dug there. The RCE people would just disappear without a trace.

Scotty and Pete dragged the rest of their explosives out of the ruins and loaded them on the cart. Then they walked back to town with Cate and Ibrahim. Cate carried her duffel of guns over one shoulder. Basia’s pistol was in it again, never having been fired.

“We had to do this,” Coop said once they’d left. Basia didn’t know if he was telling Basia that or himself. Basia nodded anyway.

“You set this up. You knew you were going to kill them, and you made me part of it.”

Coop gave him a Belter shrug and a cruel smile. “You knew that coming out, coyo. You maybe pretended not to, but you knew.”

“Never again,” Basia said. “And if anyone in my family is hurt because of this, I will kill you myself.”

He drove back to the mine, then walked to his house. The sun was just coming up when he finally stumbled into his tiny bathroom. The man in the mirror didn’t look like a killer, but his hands were covered with blood. He started trying to wash them off.

Chapter Ten: Havelock

About five hours before – when Havelock had been halfway through his ten-hour shift – a man dressed in an orange-and-purple suit so ugly it approached violence sat down on a couch in a video studio on Mars. Havelock floated against his restraints, considering him. Strapping in was second nature now, even though it felt a little silly. The orbital space around New Terra was essentially empty, and the chance of a sudden acceleration was almost nil. It was just a habit. On the little monitor set into the cabin wall, the young man shook the feed host’s hand and smiled at the camera.

It’s been a while since you came by, Mister Curvelo,” the host said. “Thank you so much for coming back.”

“Good to be here, Monica,” the man said, nodding like he’d been caught at something. “Good to be back.”

“So I got a chance to play the new game, and I have to say it seems like a real departure from your previous work.”

“Yeah,” the man said shortly. His jaw was tight.

“There’s been a certain amount of controversy,” the host said. Her smile was a little sharper. “You want to talk about that?”

It was physically impossible for Havelock to sink back into his couch, but psychologically it was a snap.

“Monica, look,” the man in the ugly suit said, “what we’re exploring here are the consequences of violence. Everybody’s looking at that first section, and they don’t think about how everything comes after.”

Havelock’s hand terminal chimed. He muted the newsfeed and took the connection.

“Havelock,” Murtry said, “I have a call I need you to take.”

His voice was so calm and controlled, Havelock felt his breath go shallow. It was the sound of trouble, and his mind clutched at the first fear that came. The Rocinante and Jim Holden, the UN mediator, was about ten hours from the end of its deceleration burn. Almost here. If something had gone wrong with it…

“Something happened downstairs,” Murtry said. “I’ve got Cassie on the horn, and I need you to keep her from melting down while I talk to the captain.”

“Is it bad?”

“Yeah. Take the call. Be the calm one. You can do that?”

“Sure, boss,” Havelock said. “Cool as November, smooth as China silk.”

“Good man.”

The picture froze for a fraction of a second, and then Cassie was looking out at him. For a year and a half, they’d been on the ship together, part of the same team, familiar if not intimate. He’d been aware vaguely when she’d struck up a romance with Aragão and then when they’d broken it off. He thought of her as a friend because he didn’t think about her much at all.

In the image, her skin had an ashy color, and her eyes were lined with red.

“Cassie,” Havelock said, his voice falling into the comforting register he’d trained for in the hostage negotiation workshop he’d taken after the Ceres riots. “Hear things are a little rough down there.”

Cassie’s laugh shifted the camera, shaking her on the screen like an earthquake. She looked away, and then back.

“They’re gone,” she said. In the pause afterward, her gaze shifted like she was looking for something. More words to say, maybe. “They’re gone.”