Cibola Burn

“Wait,” he said. Coop answered by standing up, pointing his pistol into the next room, and firing.

Basia’s mind stuttered. Time skipped.

Coop, yelling obscenities and firing his pistol over and over into the next room. Basia is lying on his back on the floor looking up as shell casings tumble out of Coop’s gun and bounce across the ground next to him. They appear to be moving so slow that Basia can read the manufacturer’s stamp. TruFire 7.5mm they say.

Skip.

He is standing next to Cate. He has no memory of getting up. She is firing her shotgun, and the sound of it going off in the tight space is deafening. He wonders if he will suffer permanent hearing loss. In the next room, three men and two women in RCE security uniforms are scrambling to take cover, or draw weapons, or return fire. They have looks of panic on their faces. They shout to each other as they move. He doesn’t recognize any of the words. One of them fires a pistol, and a bullet slams into the wall near Cate. A piece of the bullet or a piece of the wall punches a small hole in her cheek. She continues to fire as if the injury is beneath notice.

Skip.

An RCE security woman clutches at her chest as blood fountains out of it. Her face is pale and terrified. He is just a meter away from her, standing next to Scotty. Scotty shoots her again, this time in the neck. She falls backward in slow motion, hands reaching up to the wound but going limp and lifeless halfway there, and she just looks like she’s shrugging.

Skip.

He stands by himself in a corridor. He doesn’t know where it is or how he got there. He hears gunfire behind him, and screams. An RCE security man is a few meters ahead of him, holding a stun gun. The man has dark skin and bright green eyes, wide with fear. Basia suddenly remembers that the man’s name is Zeb, though he can’t remember why he knows that. Zeb throws the stun gun at him and reaches for the pistol he still has in a holster on his hip. The stun gun bounces off Basia’s head, opening up a three-centimeter gash that begins bleeding heavily, but he doesn’t feel it. He sees Zeb pulling his pistol, and without thinking about it he points his own gun at him. He’s surprised to see that he’s holding it correctly, by the handle, with his finger on the trigger. He doesn’t remember doing that. He pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. He’s about to pull it a second time when there is a loud bang from behind him, and Zeb begins to fall, blood gushing from his forehead. He waits for the blackout.

There was no skipping. No respite. No escape.

“Good job,” Coop said behind him. “That one almost got away.”

Basia turned slowly, still in a dream. A fugue. A dissociative state. The impulse to lift his hand one more time, to let the violence carry him just one step farther and shoot Coop almost lifted his arm. Almost, but not quite. Zeb bled out on the floor. The sounds of gunfire stopped.

Behind him, the rest of his group whooped and hollered in happy and excited voices. Basia looked at his gun, remembering how they work in action videos. You put the magazine with the bullets in it in the gun, and then you have to put a bullet in the chamber. He remembered Cate pulling back the breech on her shotgun. Coop pulling back the slide on his automatic. Basia’s gun wouldn’t have fired no matter how many times he pulled the trigger.

Zeb stopped bleeding. That was almost me, Basia thought, but the thought had no emotional content yet. No weight. It was like a puff of acrid smoke passing through his mind, and then gone again.

“Help us drag these bodies out back, primo,” Coop said, patting him on the back. “Zadie’s washing the place down with corrosives and digestive enzymes, kill the evidence, but they ain’t gonna eat the big chunks, eh?”

Basia helped. It took them several hours to bury the corpses of the five women and men in the hard-packed dirt behind the alien ruins. Coop assured them that the next dust storm would remove all signs that anyone had dug there. The RCE people would just disappear without a trace.

Scotty and Pete dragged the rest of their explosives out of the ruins and loaded them on the cart. Then they walked back to town with Cate and Ibrahim. Cate carried her duffel of guns over one shoulder. Basia’s pistol was in it again, never having been fired.

“We had to do this,” Coop said once they’d left. Basia didn’t know if he was telling Basia that or himself. Basia nodded anyway.

“You set this up. You knew you were going to kill them, and you made me part of it.”

Coop gave him a Belter shrug and a cruel smile. “You knew that coming out, coyo. You maybe pretended not to, but you knew.”

“Never again,” Basia said. “And if anyone in my family is hurt because of this, I will kill you myself.”

He drove back to the mine, then walked to his house. The sun was just coming up when he finally stumbled into his tiny bathroom. The man in the mirror didn’t look like a killer, but his hands were covered with blood. He started trying to wash them off.

Chapter Ten: Havelock

About five hours before – when Havelock had been halfway through his ten-hour shift – a man dressed in an orange-and-purple suit so ugly it approached violence sat down on a couch in a video studio on Mars. Havelock floated against his restraints, considering him. Strapping in was second nature now, even though it felt a little silly. The orbital space around New Terra was essentially empty, and the chance of a sudden acceleration was almost nil. It was just a habit. On the little monitor set into the cabin wall, the young man shook the feed host’s hand and smiled at the camera.

It’s been a while since you came by, Mister Curvelo,” the host said. “Thank you so much for coming back.”

“Good to be here, Monica,” the man said, nodding like he’d been caught at something. “Good to be back.”

“So I got a chance to play the new game, and I have to say it seems like a real departure from your previous work.”

“Yeah,” the man said shortly. His jaw was tight.

“There’s been a certain amount of controversy,” the host said. Her smile was a little sharper. “You want to talk about that?”

It was physically impossible for Havelock to sink back into his couch, but psychologically it was a snap.

“Monica, look,” the man in the ugly suit said, “what we’re exploring here are the consequences of violence. Everybody’s looking at that first section, and they don’t think about how everything comes after.”

Havelock’s hand terminal chimed. He muted the newsfeed and took the connection.