Cibola Burn

“Except,” Miller said, ignoring him. “The people who vanished here? Not dumbass Europeans in way over their heads. The things that lived here modified planets like we remodel a kitchen. They had a defense network in orbit that could have vaporized Ceres if it wandered too close.”

“Wait, what defense network?”

Miller ignored him. “An empty apartment, a missing family, that’s creepy. But this is like finding a military base with no one on it. Fighters and tanks idling on the runway with no drivers. This is bad juju. Something wrong happened here. What you should do is tell everyone to leave.”

“Yeah,” Holden said, “sure, I’ll get right on that. This argument about who gets to live here really needed a third party both sides could hate.”

“No one lives here,” Miller said, “but we’re sure as shit going to play with the corpses.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Miller tipped his hat back, looking up at the stars.

“I never stopped looking for her. Julie? Even when she was dead, even when I’d seen her body, I never stopped.”

“True. Still creepy, but true.”

“This is like that too. I don’t like it, but unless something happens, we’re going to keep reaching and reaching and reaching until we find what did all this.”

“And then what?”

“And then we’ll have found it,” he said.

~

A man Holden didn’t recognize was waiting for him at the edge of town. Belter tall, stocky and thick-necked. Big meaty hands he was rubbing together nervously. Holden consciously forced himself not to drop his hand to the butt of his gun.

“Thought you got lost out there,” the man said.

“Nope, all good.” Holden held out his right hand. “Jim Holden. Have we met?”

“Basia. Basia Merton. From Ganymede.”

“Yeah, all of you are from Ganymede, right?”

“Pretty much.”

Holden waited for the man to speak. Basia stared back, wringing his hands again.

“So,” Holden finally said. “Mister Merton. How can I help you?”

“You found my son. Back… back there. You found Katoa,” Basia said.

It took Holden a moment to make the connection. “The little boy on Ganymede. You’re Prax’s friend.”

Basia nodded, his head moving too fast, like a nervous bird. “We’d left. Me and my wife and my two other kids. We got a chance to get out on the Barbapiccola and I thought Katoa was dead. He was sick, you know.”

“Same thing Prax’s daughter had. No immune system.”

“Yeah. Only he wasn’t dead when we left. He was still alive in that lab where you found him. I left my son behind.”

“Maybe,” Holden said. “There’s no way to know that.”

“I know that. I know it. But I brought my family here. So I could keep them safe.”

Holden nodded. He didn’t say, This is an alien world filled with dangers you couldn’t possibly anticipate, on top of which you didn’t actually own it, and you came here to be safe? It didn’t seem helpful.

“No one can make us leave,” the man finished.

“Well —”

“No one can make us leave,” Basia repeated. “You should remember that.”

Holden nodded again, and after a moment Basia turned and walked away. If that’s not a member of the resistance, he at least knows who they are, he thought. Someone to keep an eye on.

His hand terminal chimed an incoming connection request at him.

“Jim?” Naomi said. There was a nervous edge to her voice.

“Here.”

“Something’s happening down there. Massive energy spike in your location, and, uh —”

“Uh?”

“Movement.”

Chapter Fifteen: Havelock

Slowly, New Terra was taking on a sense of familiarity. The planet’s one big continent and long strings of islands turned under the Edward Israel every ninety-eight minutes, orbital period and the rotation of the planet conspiring to make a slightly different image every time Havelock looked. The features of the planet had started developing names for him, even though they would never be the ones that the official records showed. The largest southern island was Big Manhattan, because the outline reminded him of the North American island. The Dog’s Head islands were scattered in the middle of the planet’s one enormous ocean, and looked like a collie’s face if he squinted. What he thought of as the Worm Fields were actually a massive network of rivers on the big continent, any one of them longer than the Amazon or the Nile. In the north was Crescent City, a massive network of alien ruins that sort of looked like a cartoon moon.

And there, in the flat beige sweep of what he thought of as the Plate, was the black dot of First Landing, like the first lesion of a rash. It was tiny, but when the ship passed over it at night, it was the only spot of light. There were more places and ecosystems down there, more discoveries to make and resources to use, than there had ever been on Earth. It seemed bizarre that they were fighting and dying over that one tiny piece of high desert. And it also seemed inevitable.