Cibola Burn

Lucia and Jacek stood with him, waiting for the Rocinante to land. Jacek stood in front of him, back pressed to his father’s stomach and Basia’s cuffed hands on his shoulders. His wife’s hand, gripping his own, rested on his son’s shoulder. All three of them touching. He tried to draw strength from it. Tried to lock the sensation of having his wife and his son close to hand into his memory. He had the terrible sense that it was the last time he’d ever feel her touch. He felt both relief and sadness that Felcia was already gone. Bad enough that his son, too young to really understand what it all meant, had to see him in chains. He could not have stood his bright, beautiful girl seeing him that way.

The other townspeople – men and women he had lived with sharing air and water and sorrow and rage – avoided the spectacle of his departure as if his guilt were an illness they might catch. He’d become a stranger to them. He might almost have preferred to have them condemn him.

All I wanted was my freedom. All I wanted was my family with me, and not to lose another child to them. He was amazed and sick at heart that that had been too much to ask of the universe.

Amos, his nominal guard, stood a respectful distance away, arms crossed and staring up at the sky. Giving the family the space to say goodbye. Holden stood with Murtry and Carol, the triumvirate of power on Ilus. They weren’t looking at each other. They were there to take the sting off of Murtry exerting his control by pretending they were part of the decision. His life was a pawn in their political games. Nothing more.

“Just a couple more minutes, chief,” Amos said. A moment later came a high-altitude thunderclap. The Rocinante, dropping through the atmosphere faster than sound, descending on them all like the angel of judgment.

It seemed unreal.

“I’m happy having you two here with me right now,” he told Lucia. It wasn’t even a lie.

“Find a way to come back to us,” she said.

“I don’t know what I can do.”

“Find a way,” she repeated, making each word its own sentence. “You do that, Basia. Don’t make me grow old on this world alone.”

Basia felt something thick blocking his throat, and he had trouble breathing around the pain in his stomach. “If you need to find someone…”

“I did,” Lucia said. “I found someone. Now he needs to find a way to come back to me.”

Basia didn’t trust himself to speak. Worried that if he opened his mouth it would turn into a sob. He didn’t want Murtry to see that. So instead he put his cuffed arms around Lucia and pulled her tight and squeezed until neither of them could breathe.

“Come back,” she whispered one last time. Anything she might have said after that was drowned out by the roar of the Rocinante landing. A wall of dust blew past, stinging the bare skin on Basia’s neck. Lucia pressed her face into his chest, and Jacek clung to his back.

“Time to go,” Amos shouted.

Basia let go of Lucia, hugged his boy to his chest one last time, the last time maybe, and turned away from them both to board his prison.

“Welcome aboard, Mister Merton,” a tall, pretty woman said when the inner airlock door opened. She wore a simple jumpsuit of gray and black with the name Nagata stenciled over the breast pocket. Naomi Nagata, the executive officer of the Rocinante. She had long black hair pulled into a ponytail, the same way Felcia had worn hers when she was a young girl. On Naomi it looked more like a functional choice than an aesthetic one. She didn’t appear to be armed, and Basia felt himself relax a degree.

He handed her the key to his restraints and she unlocked them. “Basia, please,” he said as she worked. “I’m just a welder. No one has ever called me Mister Merton.”

“Welder?” Naomi asked. It didn’t sound like she was making pleasantries. She took the restraints, rolled them into a ball, and secured them in a locker. Shipboard discipline, where any free object became a projectile during maneuvers. “Because we always have a repair list.”

The compartment they stood in looked like a storage room laid on its side. The lockers ran parallel to the ground, rather than vertically, and there was a small hatch on either wall, with what looked like a ladder running across the floor. Naomi tapped on a panel on one wall and said, “Strapping in down here, Alex, get us off this dustball before my knees start leaking.”

A disembodied voice with a Martian Mariner Valley twang said, “Roger that, boss. Up in thirty ticks, so get belted in.”

Naomi pulled on a strap on the floor and a seat folded out. It was designed so a person would have to lie on the floor on their back to put their butt on the seat. A variety of restraining belts folded out with it. She pointed at another strap in the floor and said, “Better get with it. We lift in thirty seconds.”