Cibola Burn (The Expanse) Read Free

gleaming metal monstrosity right over the top of their site. Worse, they’d hired the colonists to build it, and enough of them had thought it was a good idea that they’d actually done it.
    It felt like being erased from history.
    Scotty and Coop were waiting for him at the new landing pad when he arrived. Scotty was sitting on the edge of the metal platform, legs dangling over the side, smoking a pipe and spitting on the ground below his feet. A small electric lamp that sat beside him colored him with an eerie green light. Coop stood a little way off, looking up at the sky with bared teeth. Coop was an old-school Belter, and the agoraphobia treatments had been harder for him than others. The thin-faced man kept staring up at the void, fighting to get used to it like a kid pulling off scabs.
    Basia pulled the cart up to the edge of the pad and hopped out to undo the straps holding the barrel bombs down.
    “Give me a hand?” he said. Ilus was a large planet, slightly over one gravity. Even after six months of pharma to build his muscles and bones everything still felt too heavy. The thought of lifting the barrels back to the ground made the muscles in his shoulders twitch in anticipated exhaustion.
    Scotty slid off the landing pad and dropped a meter and a half to the ground. He pushed his oily black hair out of his eyes and took another long puff on his pipe. Basia caught the pungent, skunky smell of Scotty’s bathtub-grown cannabis mixed with freeze-dried tobacco leaves. Coop looked over, his eyes fighting for focus for a moment, and then the thin, cruel smile. The plan had been Coop’s from the start.
    “Mmm,” Coop said. “Pretty.”
    “Don’t get attached,” Basia said. “They won’t be around long.”
    Coop made a booming sound and grinned. Together they pulled the four heavy barrels off the cart and stood them in a row next to the pad. By the last one, they were all panting with effort. Basia leaned against the cart for a moment in silence while Scotty smoked off the last of his pipe and Coop set the blasting caps on the barrels. The detonators sat in the back of the cart like sleeping rattlesnakes, the red LEDs dormant for now.
    In the darkness, the township sparkled. The houses they’d all built for themselves and one another glittered like stars brought down from the sky. Beyond them, there were the ruins. A long, low alien structure with two massive towers rising up above the landscape like a termite hill writ large. All of it was run through with passageways and chambers that no human had designed. In daylight, the ruins shone with the eerie colors of mother-of-pearl. In the night, they were only a deeper darkness. The mining pits were off past them, invisible as all but the dimmest glow of the work lights on the belly of the clouds. Truth was Basia didn’t like the mines. The ruins were strange relics of the empty planet’s past, and like anything that was uncanny without posing a threat, they faded from his awareness after the first few months. The mines carried history and expectations. He’d spent half a lifetime in tunnels of ice, and tunnels that ran through alien soil smelled wrong.
    Coop made a sharp noise and shook his hand, cursing. Nothing blew up, so it couldn’t be that bad.
    “You think they’ll pay us to rebuild it?” Scotty asked.
    Basia cursed and spat on the ground.
    “We wouldn’t have to do this if it wasn’t for people wanting to suck on RCE’s tit,” he said as he rolled the last barrel into place. “They can’t land without this. All we had to do was not build it.”
    Scotty laughed out a cloud of smoke. “They were coming anyway. Might as well take their money. That’s what people said.”
    “People are idiots,” Basia said.
    Scotty nodded, then smacked a mimic lizard off the passenger seat of the cart with one hand and sat down. He put his feet up on the dash and took another long puff on his pipe. “We gonna have to get gone, if we blow this. That blasting