Cibola Burn

Holden started a snarky reply, then stopped himself. Had anything ever gone the way he planned? “Okay, one rifle each, but disassembled and in a duffel. Nothing visible. And light torso armor only. Something we can hide under our clothes.”

“Captain,” Amos said with mock surprise. “Have you actually learned from your past? Is this a new thing you do now?”

“Why do I put up with your shit?”

“Because,” Amos said, starting to strip an assault rifle down to its component parts, “I’m the only one on the ship that can keep the coffee maker running.”

“I’m off to get underwear and a toothbrush.”

~

The Rocinante would have lit the night sky of Ilus during the final part of her deceleration burn. When she landed in a field outside of the colony’s ramshackle town, she’d kicked up a dust cloud a kilometer across, and the noise of her descent should have rattled windows twice that far away.

So Holden was a little surprised and disappointed when no one was there to greet them.

He was the joint OPA and Earth mediator, personally selected by Chrisjen Avasarala of the UN and Fred Johnson, leader of the OPA as much as the OPA could be led, to oversee the settlement talks. In other places, that would merit a formal greeting by the planetary governor and possibly a marching band. Holden would have settled for a ride into town.

He hefted his two heavy bags and started to trudge toward the settlement. Amos carried three. The third was the one he called his everything has gone to shit bag. Holden sincerely hoped they never had to open it.

When they were far enough away, Holden sent the signal to Alex and the Rocinante blasted off again, kicking up a massive dust storm for a few seconds.

“You know,” Amos said conversationally, “we landed so far from town to avoid blowing dust on the locals, and they couldn’t even be bothered to send out a cart to pick us up? Seems ungrateful.”

“Yeah. A little annoyed at that myself. Next time I have Alex land right in the damn town square.”

Amos gestured with his head at a massive alien structure rising in the distance. It looked like two thin towers of glass twisted together, like a pair of trees growing beside each other.

“So, there’s that,” he said.

Holden had no reply. It was one thing to read about “alien ruins” on the location report. It was another thing entirely to see a massive construct built by another species towering over the landscape. How old was it? A couple billion years, if Miller could be believed on how long the protomolecule masters had been gone. Had humans ever built anything that would last that long?

“According to the security wonks on the Israel, that’s where they think their people were massacred,” Holden said after they’d walked together for several minutes.

“Oh good,” Amos replied. “Somebody got killed there. That’s how we claim stuff, you know. This planet is officially ours now.”

Other than the admittedly hard-to-ignore alien tower, the rest of the landscape could have been the North American southwest. Hardpan dirt, with small shrublike plants. Small creatures scurried away at their approach. For a few moments they were surrounded by a cloud of biting insects, but after a number of them bit, drank their blood, and dropped dead, the rest seemed to pick up that humans weren’t food and lost interest.

The colony itself looked like a shantytown. A ramshackle mix of prefab buildings and lean-tos made out of scrap metal and brick. A few were made of mud, so someone had decided to try using adobe. Something about the idea of humans traveling fifty thousand light-years and then building houses using ten-thousand-year-old technology put a smile on Holden’s face. Humans were very strange creatures, but sometimes they were also charming.

A mob had gathered at the center of town. Or, more accurately, at the intersection of the only two dirt roads. Fifty or so colonists were facing off with a dozen people in RCE uniforms. They were shouting at each other, though Holden couldn’t make out the words.

Someone on the edge of the crowd noticed them walking into town and pointed. The arguing died down, and then the entire crowd surged toward Holden and Amos. Holden dropped his bags and waved, smiling. Amos smiled too, though he casually rested his hand on the butt of his pistol.

A tall, stocky woman a few years older than Holden rushed over to him and grabbed his hands. Holden was almost certain she was Carol Chiwewe, but if that were true, she’d changed a lot since the picture in his briefing files had been taken.

“Finally! Now you need to tell these goons —”

Before she could finish or Holden could respond, the rest of the crowd started shouting at him all at once. Holden could hear snatches of their demands: that he drive off RCE, that he give them food or medicine or money, that he let them sell their lithium, that he prove that the colony had nothing to do with the disappearance of the security officers.