Cibola Burn (Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  “Does seem kind of pointless,” Naomi said. “I mean, if we’re all going to die.”

  “I know,” Havelock said, surprised at the tightness in his chest. “But it’s what we’ve got. So I’ll take it.”

  He unstrapped himself and floated over to the restraints locker, punching in his code. The locker dispensed an anklet, and he tossed it across the space. Naomi caught it with her fingertips and drew it gently through. She fixed it around her left ankle and fed the two ends together. The anklet hissed, and the diagnostic light went green. Havelock checked his hand terminal. The anklet read as ready. No anomalies, no errors. He opened the cell, and Naomi floated out, stretching. Her paper jumpsuit crackled with every motion.

  “Shall we?” Havelock asked.

  “I’ve been looking forward to it all day,” Naomi said.

  The gymnasium was fuller than usual. The uncertainty – the fear – drove some people toward exercise. Havelock didn’t know if it was the sense of action that brought them or the need for exhaustion, the drive to wear themselves down so far that even the fact that they were flying dead over an empty planet and the nearest help was over a year away. Or maybe it was just a way to self-medicate. Endorphins could be wonderful things. He escorted Naomi to a resistance gel box, then took the weight trainer next to her.

  The crew at the other machines pretended not to watch them. Most of their expressions were the careful blank of poker faces, but a few were angry. Of the angry people most were focused on her, but a few – Belters mostly – shot accusing glances at him. Havelock pretended to ignore them as he worked the major muscle groups in his back and legs. Any fast movements, and he’d have his weapon drawn, though. Keeping her alive and himself whole was the job. That and trying to hold everyone together until the ship burned up.

  Sweat adhered to his skin, tiny dots spreading, touching, pooling. If he worked long enough, he could wind up in a cocoon of his own sweat. He stopped between sets to wick his face dry, and then also Naomi’s. She nodded her thanks, but didn’t speak.

  When they were done, he opened the gel box and let her out. One of the environmental techs – a Belter with pale hair and a pug nose named Orson Kalk – floated over to claim it next.

  “Tu carry caba a oksel, schwist,” he said, and Naomi laughed.

  “Shikata ga fucking nai, sa sa?” she said.

  “Come on,” Havelock said. “Let’s get moving.”

  The Belter technician put himself in the gel, and Naomi launched across the room back toward the hall that led to his office and her cell. Havelock looked over his shoulder the whole way back. He didn’t feel comfortable until she was back in her cell with the grate closed and locked. He pulled a fresh uniform and some wipes from the locker and fed them through to her before he turned on the privacy shield. He pulled himself back to his crash couch, listening to the soft sounds as she stripped off her old uniform, bathed, and put on the fresh. She was right. The privacy shields on the cells didn’t stop sound for shit. He checked his queue. Fifty-seven more requests for comment, and none of them anyone he wanted to speak with. He sent them the canned answer again.

  He closed his eyes, trying to judge by how comfortable it was to keep them closed whether he’d be able to sleep. He thought so now, but ever since the reactors had shut down, it was easier to fantasize about resting than to rest.

  His monitor chirped. Murtry was on the line. He accepted the connection.

  The man on the screen was the one Havelock knew, and he wasn’t. Murtry’s face had never had much padding to it, but he looked gaunt now. The steely focus Havelock was used to seeing wasn’t there, and it took a few seconds to realize it was because Murtry wasn’t making the effort to see him.

  “You there, Havelock?”

  “Yes, sir. How’s it going down there, sir?”

  “It could be better,” Murtry said. “I need a status update on the drop.”

  “Oh. It’s progressing well. We should have it packed and ready for drop in… ah. Looks like six hours and change.”

  “All right.”

  “Are you not getting the security group alerts, sir? Should I run diagnostics on them?”

  “I’m getting them, but I can’t read ’em,” Murtry said. His tone was as calm and conversational as if he hadn’t just admitted he was losing his sight. “So once this drop is done, I want a new priority for the next drop.”

  “Of course.”

  “We need to construct a semi-permanent shelter down here. Simple enough design that we can put it together even if we can’t see what we’re doing all that well. Sturdy enough to last… well, shit, two to four years, I suppose. See what you can find in the specs. If there’s nothing on board that fits the bill, you can query the databases back home, but I’d rather not miss too many drop windows. I’m not sure how much longer the people down here are going to be up for working.”

  “What dimensions do you need?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Whatever’s fast and sturdy.”

  Havelock frowned. The sounds from the prisoner’s cell were gone. He didn’t know if she was listening. Probably she was. He couldn’t see how it mattered. “Is there anything functional I should be looking for?”

  Murtry shook his head. His gaze caught the camera for a moment, then let it go. “If this expedition doesn’t leave survivors, I want to make damned sure that when the next wave shows up, there’s something with a roof on it waiting for them, and that it has RCE printed on it.”

  “Planting a flag, sir?”

  “I think of it as a minimum fallback position,” Murtry said. “Can you do it?”

  “I can.”

  “Good man. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Is there anything else you need down there?”

  “Nah,” Murtry said. “Plenty of things I’d want, but get me that shelter fast enough we can put it up, and we’ll have what we need.”

  The connection went dead. Havelock whistled low between his teeth. The privacy shield on Naomi’s cell dropped.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Your boss’s plan is to build a shed strong enough to be a headstone when the next group of idiots comes out here to die. I can’t decide if that man’s a nihilist or the second most idealistic man I’ve ever met.”

  “Might be room for both.”

  “Might be,” Naomi said. And then a moment later, “Are you all right?”

  “Me? I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure? Because you’re in a ship in decaying orbit, and the man you look up to like a father just told you he was getting ready to die.”

  “I don’t look up to him like a father,” Havelock said.

  “All right.”

  “He has a plan. I’m sure he has a plan.”

  “His plan is that we all die,” Naomi said.

  In null g, tears didn’t fall so much as build up, sheeting over his eyes until everything looked like it was underwater. Drowned. He wiped them away with his sleeve, but there was still too much moisture running across his lenses, tiny waves that shook the walls. It took almost a minute to bring his breath back under control.

  “Well, that must have been amusing for you,” he said bitterly.

  “No,” she said. “But if you’ve got a spare tissue, I’d take it. This uniform doesn’t absorb for crap.”

  When he looked over, she also had a sheen of tears filling her eye sockets. Havelock hesitated, then unstrapped himself, grabbed the tiny, hard puck of a hand towel, and slid over to her. He passed the puck through the grating, and she pressed it to her eyes, letting the water from them darken the cloth and letting it expand and unfold on its own.

  “I’m scared as hell,” Havelock said.

  “Me too.”

  “I don’t want to die.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “Murtry doesn’t care.”

  “No,” Naomi said. “He doesn’t.”

  Words rose in his throat, clogging it. For a moment, he thought he might start weeping again. He wa
s too tired. He’d been working too long under too much stress. He was getting emotionally labile. Maudlin. The knot in his throat didn’t fade.

  “I think,” he said, struggling with each syllable, “that I took the wrong contract.”

  “Know better next time,” she said.

  “Next time.”

  She put her fingers through the grate and he pinched her fingertip gently between his thumb and forefinger. For a long moment, they floated there together: prisoner and guard, Belter and Earther, corporate employee and government saboteur. None of it seemed to matter as much as it used to.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Elvi

  T

  he data and analysis came back in a disorganized lump, some from the expert systems on the Israel, some from the RCE workgroups back on Luna, Earth, and Ganymede. There was no synthesis, no easily digested summary of the findings. Instead it was opinion and speculation, suggested tests – only some of which were remotely possible with the equipment she had – and data analysis. Between Lucia’s medical reports of the early cases among the squatters and Elvi’s observations from after the deluge, there was just enough information to fuel a thousand theories and not enough to draw any real conclusions. And Elvi was the head of the local workgroup, and the only person in the universe with access to test subjects and new information.

  The death-slugs were relatively simple. The toxic compound was a complex carbon ring with a nitrogenous sheet coming off it that looked superficially related to tetrodotoxin, and appeared to be part of the slug’s motility system rather than an anti-predation adaptation. How exactly it crossed into the blood was still mysterious, but the slime had a half dozen r-chiral elements that no one had yet bothered to examine extensively. Whatever new knowledge arose from later study, for Elvi’s purposes the answers were all there: neurotoxin, no antidote, try not to touch them. Done.

  The eye flora, on the other hand, was more complex. The labs on Luna and Ganymede were working with algal models, treating the growth as if it were an invasive species that had entered a naïve tide pool. The Earth workgroup was arguing that the better model was actually a photosensitive mineral structure. Working from what little medical data had survived the storm, the Israel’s expert system suggested that the blindness was less from the foreign mass in the vitreous humor and more from the way that the living organism scattered light. That was very good news because it suggested that killing the organism and breaking down the optically active structures would lead to a fairly rapid return of function. There would be floaters in all their eyes, but most people had those, and the brain was decent at compensating for them.

  How to go about killing them, though, was obscure. And time was at a premium. There was a decided spike in white blood cells, so their bodies were trying to clean the invaders out. It just wasn’t working.

  For her, the symptoms had started with just a little scratchiness around her eyelids no worse than seasonal allergies back at home. Then there was a little whitish discharge and mild headache. And then, seven hours after she first noticed it, the world began to blur a little and take on a greenish hue. That was when she knew for certain that she was going to be blinded by it too.

  Fear and practicality were changing the shape of the refugee camp even within the physical constraints of the ruins. People who had gone to the farther parts of the structure were pulling back in now. The need for space and privacy were giving way to the fear of the slugs and the weather and the dread of their growing impairment. The increased density mostly showed itself to Elvi as a change in the ambient sound. Louder voices in conversation that ran together until she felt like she was doing research in the back of a train station. Sometimes it was comforting to have all those human sounds around her, sometimes it was annoying. For the most part, she ignored it.

  “Are you doing all right, Doctor?”

  Elvi turned from the chemistry deck. Carol Chiwewe stood in the arch that passed for a doorway. She looked tired. And blurry. And vaguely green. Elvi rubbed her eyes to clear them, even though she knew intellectually it wouldn’t make any difference. Rain pattered softly against the plastic sheeting. Elvi almost didn’t notice it anymore.

  “Fine,” she said. “You have the new count?”

  “We caught forty-one of the little fuckers today,” Carol said. “That’s an uptick, isn’t it? I thought if things dried out a little, they’d start going away.”

  “Is it drying out?”

  “No. It’s raining less, though. I hoped.”

  “Too early to call it significant,” Elvi said, entering the data in its field. Tracking the number of death-slugs was just one more of a dozen studies she was juggling now. “The overall trend is still down, and there may be a cycle within the next few days.”

  “It would be good if they slept at night. Probably too much to hope for, though.”

  “Probably,” Elvi said. “They’re normally subterranean. They’re not likely to be diurnal.”

  “We’re running out of food,” Carol said. Her voice didn’t change its inflections.

  “The drops are helping,” Elvi said.

  “The drops won’t last forever. There has to be something on this planet we can eat.”

  “There isn’t,” Elvi said.

  Carol said something obscene under her breath, and it sounded like despair. She sighed. “All right. See you again next hour.”

  “Thank you.”

  Behind her, Fayez yawned and stretched. She’d meant to nap with him, but she hadn’t quite gotten away from the deck. She squinted, checking the time. Fayez had been asleep for three hours.

  “Did I miss anything?” he asked.

  “Science,” she said. “You missed science.”

  “Well, damn. Can I borrow your notes?”

  “Nope, you’ll just have to hire a tutor.”

  He chuckled. “Did you remember to eat?”

  “No.”

  “At last. A way I can be useful. Stay here, and I’ll come back with a bar of undifferentiated foodlike product and some filtered water.”

  We’re running out of food.

  “Thank you,” she said. “And while you’re out there, see if you can find Yma and Lucia. They were going to be doing ocular assessments of everyone.”

  “The blind studying the blind,” Fayez said. “It’s like graduate school all over again. I’ll track them down. You should take a break. Rest your eyes.”

  “I will,” Elvi lied. Her eyes – all their eyes – would soon be getting plenty of rest. Growing up, Elvi’s aunt had been blind and still perfectly functional, but she’d been living in a farming arcology in Trento. Elvi was on a planet with no sustainable agriculture, an inedible ecosystem, and where touching the wrong thing would kill her on the spot. Context was everything. Her hand terminal chimed. A new batch of reports and letters from the Ganymede group. She opened them with a sigh. If she took time to read all the suggestions they were coming up with, she wouldn’t have time for anything else. She picked one at random and opened it. She had to increase the font to read it, but switching to bright red lettering on a black background helped a little. If the invading organism followed the same growth curve as yeast…

  “Success!” Fayez said. “I have returned with sustenance and Lucia. And you aren’t even pretending to have taken a break.”

  “Nope,” Elvi said, taking the hard, palm-sized cake of emergency rations from him and turning to the doctor. “What have we found?”

  “Good news and bad. Almost a hundred percent infection rate,” Lucia said, sinking to the floor beside her. “The progression is slower in children than adults, it seems, but only slightly.”

  “What about RCE versus First Landers?”

  “I haven’t seen all the data Yma collected. She was working with your people mostly. My impression is that there’s no difference. Also in the bad news column, it appears to be much more aggressive than the earlier, isolated cases.”

  Elvi took a bite of the bar. It tasted like unsweete
ned fruitcake and smelled like potting soil and it sucked up all the saliva in her mouth like a sponge.

  “Higher initial load?” Elvi said around the puck of food in her mouth. “It was so arid before, there might not have been as many infectious particles.”

  “Few enough that our immune systems could identify them as foreign and kick them out,” Lucia said.

  “Can they do that?” Fayez asked. “I thought these things were a completely different biology. Do our immune systems even work on them?”