Cibola Burn (Expanse 4) - Page 84/152

He closed his eyes again, but they opened as soon as he stopped consciously willing them shut. After three hours, he gave up, took off his straps, and went to the gym instead. His float-atrophied muscled complained with every set, and he put the feed of the planet below on the screen. The contours of New Terra were gone. The whole planet had become a flat and uniform gray, clouds obscuring whatever violence was happening beneath them. After the exercise round, he bathed, changed into a fresh uniform, and went to his office. His incoming message queue was filled with requests for comments from every news organization there was, and several he doubted were real. He forwarded them all to the RCE corporate headquarters on Luna. Let them answer if they wanted to. At this point, they knew as much as he did.

He checked on comms from the planet, but the signal wasn’t getting through. So he checked again. And again. The gray planet was silent.

“Any word?” the prisoner asked.

“Nothing,” Havelock replied. And then, a moment later, “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” she said. “They’ll be all right.”

“I hope so.”

“Are you all right?”

Havelock looked over at her. For a detained saboteur who’d been in the box for days now, she looked calm. Almost amused. He found himself smiling back at her.

“Might be a little stressed,” he said.

“Yeah. Sorry about that.”

“Not your fault,” Havelock said. “You aren’t the one calling the shots around here.”

“There’s someone calling the shots around here?” Naomi asked, and a man cleared his throat behind him. Havelock shifted his couch, the bearing hissing, to look back at the hatch. The chief engineer floated there. He wore the militia armband over his uniform sleeve.

“Hey there, chief,” he said, pulling himself into the room. “Wondering if we could have a talk. Alone, maybe.”

“You can put up the privacy shield if you want,” Naomi said. “I’ll still hear everything.”

Havelock undid his straps and pushed off. “I’ll be back,” he said over his shoulder.

“You shall always find me at home,” Naomi said.

The commissary was between rushes. The chief engineer grabbed a bulb of coffee for himself and another for Havelock. They floated together near a table bolted to the deck. Force of habit.

“So we’ve been talking,” Chief Engineer Koenen said. “About the event.”

“Yeah, it’s been pretty much the only thing on my mind too.”

“How sure are we that it’s… well… natural?”

“I’d have gone pretty much a hundred percent it wasn’t,” Havelock said with a grim laugh. The chief engineer’s expression seemed to close, and Havelock pressed on. “But maybe that depends on what you mean by natural. Is there something bothering you?”

“I don’t want to sound paranoid. It’s just that the timing on this seems pretty convenient. You and me and the boys catch the UN mediator red-handed. Throw the bitch in the brig. And then this big disaster comes out of nowhere, takes everyone’s attention off her.”

Havelock sipped at the coffee.

“What are you thinking, chief? That it was rigged?”

“Those squatters got here before we did. We don’t know what they found and just never told us about. And Holden worked for the OPA. He worked for Fred fucking Johnson, right? Hell, everything I heard says he’s been sleeping with that Belter girl we brought in. His loyalty isn’t to Earth. And he was the one who went on the alien whatever-the-hell-it-is that Medina Station’s floating around and came back out. I’ve been following some independent casts. The Martian marines that went there after him? There’s some pretty weird shit that’s gone on with all of them since then.”

“Weird shit like what?”

The chief engineer’s eyes brightened and he hunched forward, a posture of intimacy and complicity that was a habit of gravity. For the next half hour, he ran down half a dozen strange occurrences. One of the marines had died of an embolism during a heavy-g burn just before she’d been scheduled to talk with her cousin who ran a popular newsfeed. Another had quit the military and wasn’t talking about anything that had happened. There had been rumors of a secret report that suggested – strongly suggested – that James Holden had been killed on the station, and a doppelgänger put in his place. It stood to reason with all the other changes the protomolecule could make to a human body that recreating one wouldn’t be hard for it. Only the report had never been made public, and the people who had read it had been targets of whisper campaigns to discredit them.

Havelock drank his coffee and listened, nodding and asking the occasional question – usually for the sources of the information the chief engineer was reporting. When they were done, Havelock promised to look into the issue, then hauled himself back to his desk. On the readout, the planet was still covered in clouds.

“Everything okay?” Naomi asked.

“Fine,” he said. And then a moment later, “Just scared people trying to find a version of events where someone has control over everything.”

She chuckled. “Yeah. I’m doing the same.”

“You are? How?”

“Chewing down my fingernails and praying,” she said. “Mostly praying.”

“You’re religious?”

“No.”

“Are you and Holden secretly alien spies that blew up the planet as part of a Belter conspiracy to distract the media?”

Naomi’s laughter was deep. “Oh, was that what it was? I’m so sorry.”

Havelock chuckled too, feeling a little guilty as he did. Koenen was one of his people. Naomi Nagata was a saboteur and the enemy. And still, it was a little funny, and there wasn’t anyone else to talk with.

“It’s not that bad. Conspiracy theories come up whenever people feel like the universe is too random. Absurd. If it’s all an enemy plot, at least there’s someone calling the shots.”

“Belters.”

“This time, yeah.”

“Are they going to break in here and throw me out the airlock?”

“No, they’re not like that,” Havelock said. “They’re good guys.”

“Good guys who think I destroyed a planet.”

“No, that your alien doppelgänger boyfriend did to keep people from thinking about you. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. No one’s really thinking you’re in league with the protomolecule. They’re just scared.”