Cibola Burn

“You,” Lucia said, “took yourself away when you joined with those stupid violent people who blew up the shuttle. You drove them out to the ruins when they killed the RCE people. You made every choice that took you to this place. I love you, Basia Merton. I love you till my chest aches. But you are a stupid, stupid man. And when they take you away from me, I will not forgive you for it.”

“You’re a harsh woman.”

“I’m a doctor,” Lucia said. “I’m used to giving people bad news.”

Basia drank off the rest of his tea before it could finish getting cold. “I could get some rope or chain from the dig site. Maybe hang a bench here. Then we could rock while we sit.”

“That might be nice,” Lucia said. The pair of RCE guards reached the end of the street and turned around to come back. With the sun about to dip below the horizon, their shadows were almost as long as the town itself.

“We’ve been focusing on lithium mining to get money,” Basia continued. “But we need to start thinking about our own energy needs.”

“This is true.”

“We can’t have the Barb bringing us power cells forever. And someday the ship will fly back to Pallas to sell the ore. So we won’t have her for a couple years.”

“Also true,” Lucia said. She swirled the last of her tea and stared up at the stars. “I miss having Jupiter in the sky.”

“It was beautiful,” Basia agreed. “I have to go meet with Cate and the others tonight, after it gets dark.”

“Baz,” Lucia started, then just stopped with sad sigh.

“They’ll want revenge for Coop. It will only make it worse.”

“What,” Lucia said, “does worse look like, I wonder?”

Basia sat quietly, thinking of the rocker he could build on their porch. Of adding a bigger water heater for hot baths. Of building a larger kitchen and dining area on the back of the house. Of all the things he wouldn’t get to do now.

The guards were at the end of the town’s long street, almost invisible in their dark armor and the fading light. Basia got up to leave.

“Can you stop them from killing anyone else?” Lucia asked, as though she were asking if he wanted more tea.

“Yes,” Basia replied. It felt like a lie.

“Then go.”

~

They met at Cate’s house. Pete and Scotty and Ibrahim. Even Zadie came, her wife Amanda staying home to look after their boy and his infected eye. That wasn’t a good sign. Of all of them, Zadie was the angriest. The one with the hottest head. Basia had worked with her on Ganymede, and more than once she’d shown up in the morning with a black eye or a busted lip from some bar fight she’d picked the night before. They were all upset, all standing on the ledge about to jump, but Zadie would be the hardest to talk off of it.

“They shot Coop,” Cate said when Scotty, the last of them to arrive, finally came in. It wasn’t a statement of fact. They’d all been there. They’d all seen it. No, it was the beginning of a justification.

“In cold blood,” Zadie said, and punctuated it with a fist to her palm. “We all saw it. Just shot him in the face in front of God and everyone.”

“So I have a plan,” Cate continued. “The RCE people are holed up in —”

“Who put you in charge?” Zadie asked.

“Murtry did.”

Zadie narrowed her eyes, but let it drop. Basia fidgeted on one end of Cate’s couch. It was a handmade frame, covered with padding stripped from the ship and badly stitched remnants of the cloth they had the fabricator crank out once a month for clothing and other needs. Cate had made a small table out of the local wood analog to sit next to it. It wasn’t quite level, and Basia’s glass of water was at a noticeable tilt. Pictures of Cate’s family, two sisters who still lived back in the Belt and their kids, hung on the walls. There was a pottery vase on the floor with sticks and branches in it that Basia thought was meant as decoration, not kindling.

It was too domestic a location for the kind of meeting they were having. It all felt unreal, that he and five people he knew were discussing the murder of a dozen corporate security guards in Cate’s living room next to her vase full of sticks.

Scotty was talking, telling them to wait. Not the voice of reason, the voice of fear. Pete was on his side, arguing against escalating. Cate and Zadie shouted them down. Ibrahim said nothing, just pulled on his bottom lip and frowned at the floor.

“I think we wait for Holden,” Basia said when there was a pause in the conversation.

“Holden’s been here a day. What are we waiting for?” Cate asked, dripping angry sarcasm.

“He needs time to meet with us, get the lay of the land,” Basia said, the words sounding feeble even in his own ears. “But he’s the mediator. And he can talk directly to the OPA governing board and to the UN. His recommendations will have real weight. We need him on our side.”