Cibola Burn

“Make it three,” Amos said, dragging himself into the room. “I got a ton of shit to fix because you guys let someone use my girl for target practice.”

“Hey, we did our best —” Naomi started, but was cut off by the comm panel squawking.

“You guys makin’ coffee down there?” Alex said from the cockpit. “Have someone bring me up a bulb.”

While Amos and Naomi began putting together a list of the repair work they could do during the long transit back to Medina Station, Holden prepared four large bulbs of coffee. He didn’t mind. It was very comforting doing something simple and domestic to make other people happy. Black for himself. Two whiteners, two sweeteners for Amos. One whitener for Alex. One sweetener for Naomi. He handed the finished bulbs out.

“Can you take this up to Alex?” he asked, handing a second bulb to Naomi. Something in his voice or his face made her frown with worry.

“Are you okay?” she said, taking the bulb but not leaving. Behind her, Amos took his coffee awkwardly in his mangled hand and headed aft with it toward his machine shop, looking at the task list on his terminal and muttering about how much work he had to do.

“Like I said, shitty job needs doing.”

“Can I help?”

“I’d like to do this one alone, if that’s okay.”

“Of course it is,” she said, then kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I’ll look you up later.”

Holden went up to the airlock and storage deck and found a self-sealing vacuum package, a trowel, and an EVA suit for doing external repairs with a portable blowtorch. He climbed into the suit, then clumped through the ship to the cargo bay.

To what he was pretty sure was Miller’s final resting place.

He waited in the cargo bay airlock while the outer doors cycled open, putting the compartment into total vacuum, then went in. If something went wrong, if what was left of the protomolecule on his ship decided to defend itself, he’d be in vacuum with an airlock blocking entry into his ship. He sealed the airlock behind him, and told Alex to lock out local control on the door until he called and asked him to open it. Alex agreed without asking why.

And then Holden began methodically tearing the cargo bay apart.

Five hours later, and one air recharge for the suit, he found it. A small blob of flesh no larger than the tip of Holden’s finger, attached to the underside of a power conduit behind a detachable panel in the cargo bay’s bulkhead. When they’d first spotted the protomolecule monster that had hitchhiked onto the Roci from Ganymede, it had been less than half a meter from where he found the polyp. It made his skin crawl to realize how long they’d been lugging this last remnant of that monster around on his ship.

Using the trowel, he scraped the polyp off the conduit, then put both it and the tool into the vacuum bag and activated the charge to seal it. He blowtorched the conduit for several minutes, heating the metal red to kill any residue left by the scraping. Then he dug through the supplies in the cargo area until he found a reload for the ship’s probe launcher, opened the probe up, and stuffed the bag inside the casing.

He linked his suit radio to the Roci’s general shipwide channel. “Naomi, you around?”

“Here,” she said after a moment. “In ops. What do you need?”

“Can you grab manual control on probe, uh, 117A43?”

“Sure, what do you want me to do with it?”

“I’m going to chuck it out the cargo bay door. Can you give it about five minutes, then send it into Ilus’ sun?”

“Okay,” she replied, not asking the question he could hear in her voice she wanted to. He killed the radio.

The probe was a small electromagnetic and infrared sensor with a rudimentary drive system. The kind naval vessels used to see what might be hiding on the other side of a planet. It wasn’t much bigger than an old Earth fire hydrant. It had heft, though. When Holden pushed it over to the cargo bay door, it was difficult to stop it again.

Outside, Ilus spun by, the angry brown of her cloud layer starting to show some spots of white, and even the occasional flash of blue from the ocean underneath. It’d be a while, but the planet would bounce back. Mimic lizards would return and start competing for space with human children and those annoying little bugs that bit and then fell over dead. Two alien biologies fighting for space. Or three. Or four. Nothing that Ilus hadn’t already experienced a few billion years before. New fight, same as the old fight.

Holden put a gloved hand on the probe floating next to him, and pointed the other at the planet.

“That’s you, man. That’s the second world you’ve saved. And once again, we have nothing to offer you in return. I kind of wish I’d been nicer to you.”

He laughed at himself, because he could almost hear the old detective in his head saying, You could also have my Viking funeral not be all about how you feel.